Deck With Flowers Read online

  He followed her up the two stone steps and found himself in a large hall. The stairs were of oak—neglected, but still stout English oak; these houses must have been built, he thought, when they were building ships for Charles the Second not far away. Upstairs, there were three small rooms and one large one; there was also a dingy bathroom, and a kitchen which Mrs. Major told him had been put in for her mother, who had lived the last ten of her ninety-two years up here.

  Rodney moved in. The largest room became his living room; one of the three smaller rooms was his bedroom. A space behind the bathroom he made into a lumber room in which he stored the more hideous pieces of Mrs. Major’s furniture, replacing them from sales or second-hand shops.

  When his arrangements and improvements were completed, he acknowledged that the rooms looked not at all like the expensive bachelor apartments seen in advertisements, but they fulfilled his two prime needs: space, and a view of the river. The river view was obtained through the small square of bathroom window, but however narrow the visible stretch of water, however muddy and crane-bordered, it was still the Thames.

  He was barely installed when a house at the Greenwich end of the street was bought by an enterprising young naval officer and in no time at all transformed into a spruce bijou residence. Soon the house next to it and the one opposite had been bought by his friends and their friends: River Street had been discovered. Prices soared and continued to soar. When two more houses in the street had been bought and converted, Rodney waited daily to be told by Mrs. Major that she had decided to sell.

  But Mrs. Major, he found, had no intention of selling. For forty years she had reigned as undisputed queen of River Street. For forty years she had supervised her neighbours’ births and deaths, arranged their marriages, directed their affairs, propped up the meek and abused the erring. In the Stuart Arms, at the end of the street, she had held court. Now she was dethroned. Her old friends and neighbours had sold their houses and were moving away, and the newcomers’ interest in her was confined to the hope of getting her to do daily cleaning work for them. The Stuart Arms, in which she had spent so many convivial evenings, had become the meeting-place of bright young naval couples. Her bitterness and loneliness had hardened into a resolve to get her revenge in the only way that lay open to her: by refusing to sell her house, and staying to become the scourge of her new neighbours. Money, Rodney realised, could not bring her half the pleasure she got from bundling persistent house agents unceremoniously over the doorstep, or placing her overflowing dustbin outside Number 9, or hanging her undergarments to dry out of her front windows, or pretending to wash the front steps and sending streams of soapy water along the pavement. Money could not buy her the triumph she experienced when hammering on the doors of houses at which smart cocktail parties were being held, and in lurid language ordering the owners of cars parked outside her house to remove them. Her dust-streaked windows and unwashed curtains were a blot on the surrounding smartness, and she was the terror of the street, and she was happy.

  After living alone for a year and a half, Rodney had answered an unwritten appeal from his sister, and invited her to come up to London to keep house for him. Before her arrival, he and Mrs. Major between them had kept the rooms in reasonable order. Now he opened the door of the living room, dropped his suitcase on the floor and stood looking at a scene which, familiar as it had become, still filled him with rage. Hair-drying equipment was spread over the carpet. An open work-basket on the floor spilled a colourful assortment of material. On a chair was a tray with the remains of tea. Along the mantelpiece stood bottles of cream, powder, nail varnish and hair spray. A vase of flowers, beautifully- arranged but long dead, stood on a corner table. In the centre of the crumb-covered carpet sat Angela, her hair falling over her eyes, her mouth full of pins, working on an outspread length of material.

  This was home, he reflected, and he had seen it look worse. Somewhere between the starkness of Oliver’s surroundings and the disorder of these rooms there was, he presumed, a middle course—a happy, happy medium. Some men came home, not to this mess, but to routine and order and a good meal.

  His eyes went to his sister, still unaware of his presence, and for a few moments he studied her with detachment. Pretty; more than pretty. Lovely long lines, a deceptively delicate look, straight-falling fair hair. Attractive by most standards, he thought—but not by Oliver’s. Since her schooldays, Oliver had been her ideal, but he had never looked at her. His lack of interest had not mattered down in Cornwall, but his total neglect of her after she came to London had hurt her. She was not a girl to pine, but she showed very little interest in other men.

  She looked up and saw Rodney, and he thought she was going to swallow the pins. He was about to speak when a strong smell of burning took him swiftly across the room to the kitchen. She came in on his heels.

  “Rodney, how wonderful to ... Oh Rodney, your dinner!”

  He was lifting a smoking saucepan off the stove.

  “What was it, when it was dinner?” he asked mildly.

  “It was the most tender, the most expensive veal, done the way you said you liked it.”

  “Not this way.” He put the saucepan into the sink. “Any eggs in the house?”

  Before leaving Cornwall, she had taken a course of cookery lessons, and for weeks after her arrival, his nose had twitched expectantly when he came back from the office, hoping to identify the savoury smell of roast beef. But there had been no savoury smell and no roast beef. They had sat down nightly to shredded lettuce leaves and grated nuts and other raw foods which she bought in ready-to-serve packets from the local health stores. When he staged a one-man revolution, demanding sustenance in the form of meat, he got charred chops, scorched steak and at the end of the week a butcher’s bill that made him blench.

  He had a bath, and then they ate, as they had so often eaten before, an omelette cooked by himself. And as always, her remorse was genuine, but not lasting; soon she was asking for details of his trip to America.

  “What were you sewing?” he inquired over bread and cheese. “And why not cut out on the table in your bedroom instead of on the floor in here?”

  “My bedroom’s icy. What I’m sewing is pyjamas for you—real silk, like the ones you said Oliver had. I’m cutting them out beautifully, from your old grey-and-blue striped ones. I tried a paper pattern, but it wouldn’t work, so I had a good idea and unpicked your old ones and—”

  “You what?”

  “Oh Rodney, don’t start getting excited! All I have to do is sew them up again and—”

  “The way you sewed my shirt up again, with the sleeves back to front? The way you sewed—”

  “Stop shouting, Rodney. What’s a pair of pyjamas?”

  “Something to sleep in, that’s all. If you had to slash up a pair, why choose the only wearable warm pair I possess? You know damned well they’ll never be put together again, and all you’ve left me is the pair with the ruddy great slit in the leg and the collar hanging half off.”

  “You’ve got the ones you took to America.”

  “They’re for wearing in boiling hot bedrooms. If I wore them here, I’d wake up a solid block of ice. Why can’t you leave well alone, for God’s sake?”

  And why, he asked himself, digging his knife viciously into the cheese and fighting for self-control, why hadn’t he left her at home, to cut up his father’s pyjamas and burn his mother’s saucepans? Why should he expect a man as fastidious as Oliver Tallent to look at a girl who turned her surroundings into disposal dumps?

  She was watching him across the table.

  “You’re sorry you brought me here, aren’t you?” she asked slowly.

  “Yes and no. What worries me is the sort of shambles your house is going to look if and when you get married. Take a look round this room. What man, what husband would stand it for more than a week?”

  “I wish you’d decide exactly what you do want, Rodney,” she said. “When I did more cleaning-up, you used to tell m
e I wasn’t going out enough.”

  “You were turning down invitations.” He was on the edge of saying that she was waiting for one from Oliver, but restrained himself. “You can’t coop yourself up.”

  “Well, I’m not cooping any more. I’m more out than in. I go out with lots of men, and if you ask me, every one of them is more dreary than the last—that Osgood man and his Welsh cousin, and James Paynton and that awful Austin Bates, who’s always playing practical jokes, and Ed Rogers, who’s really a case; the only way I can hold him off is by dropping tranquillisers into his drinks.”

  “By—?”

  “Don’t worry; it works. But now that we’ve got on to the subject of what I do with my time, I’ll tell you something I was going to keep as a surprise.”

  “Well?”

  “I’ve got a job.”

  He stared at her uncomprehendingly.

  “Job? What job? And why?”

  “Because I want one. I think if I’m out of this place all day, I’ll come home from work, like you, and realise how ghastly it is, and start keeping it tidier.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “Travel agency.”

  “My God, Angela, you don’t know one single thing about—”

  “I don’t have to know anything. All I have to do is sit there with people’s tickets and meal tickets and seat reservations and bang on that little machine that clamps them together, and make them into a nice, neat booklet. Nine-thirty to five, not much money, but enough to pay for Mrs. Major to come up and clean, as she used to before I came.”

  “How did you hear of the job?”

  “I didn’t. I just thought I’d like to have one, and the nicest- looking place when I went shopping was this travel agency, so I went in and offered myself. I told them I was inexperienced, but willing to learn.”

  “And they took you on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then God help them.”

  “There’s no need to—”

  “—anticipate? I suppose not. Have you told them at home?”

  “Yes. I rang up the other evening. Mother was quite pleased.”

  “What did the old man say?”

  “He tried to be funny—like you. How was Oliver?”

  “Just the same.”

  “I suppose there was a woman with him, as usual?”

  “Not with him—she came in later. With flowers.”

  “I know. Henrietta Gould. She makes a thing about flowers. She says she doesn’t only like them, she needs them.”

  “She said she’d met you.”

  “She did, and went to a lot of trouble rubbing in the fact that she was moving in with Oliver. I hope she comes unstuck even faster than her predecessors. I do think he might have asked me to go and look at his new house, don’t you?”

  “Why does he have to invite you? You’ve known him all your life—why can’t you ring up and ask him to show you round?”

  “He’d think I was after something—and he’d be right.”

  He had begun to clear away the plates, but something in her voice made him pause and study her.

  “Why don’t you give up?” he asked.

  “I will. I practically have. Last time I ran into him, I thought, honestly I did, that he was getting dull. Not pompous, exactly, but sort of middle-aged.”

  “It’s time he married.”

  “It won’t be long now; everybody knows that Henrietta Gould’s out to get him. She doesn’t want to be ditched again—her last two affairs have made her feel she’s beginning to skid.”

  “She’s not the marrying type. She runs a successful business and makes a lot of money.”

  “She has to have a man around, and you wait and see: it’ll be Oliver.”

  “Maybe. Bring out the rest of those things, will you? I’ll wash, you dry.”

  “Will we ever be able to afford a machine to do it for us?”

  “No. Did you look out for references to the Landini memoirs in any of the papers?”

  “Yes. And cut them out for you. Everybody I meet seems to know about them.”

  He nodded. Certainly everybody who was anybody in the literary world knew that D. S. Claud was going to publish them and that Oliver Tallent’s agency was handling them. No longer need people crease their brows trying to identify Tallent or Laird.

  “Where are you going?” Angela asked in surprise, as he went towards his room. “Not bed so early?”

  “Not to sleep. To read the Landini memoirs, as far as they’ve gone. If you’re staying up, try not to make a clatter when you turn in, and don’t leave all the lights on.”

  “I forgot to tell you that the couple next door—Number 9—come in to use our phone sometimes. They haven’t got theirs yet.”

  “I hope they pay for the calls.”

  “Yes, they do. If you’re interested, their name’s Grelby. He’s called Peter and she’s called Priss, and he’s naval and she’s pregnant.”

  “Then you’d better warn her not to slip on Mrs. Major’s soap traps.”

  “They asked if you could do anything to keep her in order. You’re the only one she’ll listen to, they said, so couldn’t you talk to her and get her to—”

  “No. It’s no use. She hates the whole bag of newcomers, and you can’t blame her. When she was young, people like them only came to districts like this when they went slumming. Now they’ve moved in and taken over. She’s only trying to get some of her own back.”

  He put on his tattered pyjamas and settled himself in bed with the Landini manuscript. He read for hours, and woke late the next morning to hear the wind howling and dashing spatters of rain against his window. He put on a dressing-gown and slippers and went into the living room. Angela was out, but she had tidied up, according to her lights: the work- basket and the snippets of material had been pushed under a chair and his cut-up pyjamas and a length of silk were spread on the sofa. She had left his breakfast ready: a coffee pot on a heater whose flame had been turned up too high, a loaf of bread, an electric toaster and a jar of the glutinous lumps of orange peel she called home-made marmalade. He fetched milk and butter from the refrigerator, wondering, as he left the ice-cold kitchen, why they needed one.

  He sat down to eat, the morning paper propped in front of him. The coffee was little more than dregs, but nothing could take from him the feeling of being at home, at peace. He was grateful for a long, lazy morning during which he could recall the interest and enjoyment with which he had read the memoirs the night before. He wanted to pick up the telephone and discuss them with Oliver, but there would be time enough when he went to the office after lunch. In the meantime, he scanned the headlines and decided that life wasn’t at all bad. The Landini memoirs had revived the moribund firm of D. S. Claud. Business was looking up, though the fact would probably not have much effect on his salary. On the personal side, he was grateful for a healthy body and a face that could not be called worse than plain, grateful to Mrs. Major for refusing to sell the house. Life was good, and Madame Landini’s memoirs were magnificent.

  He heard Angela’s footsteps on the stairs; she came in carrying a string bag swollen with purchases. Her mackintosh dripped as she crossed to the kitchen.

  He got up and made more coffee, and she sat down to have a second breakfast.

  “Filthy day, and I had to put petrol in your car,” she told him. “You owe me a pound and eighty pence. I didn’t know whether you’d be going into the office today, so I put it back in the garage.” She cut more bread. “This is nice, having you for breakfast. Like Sunday. Are you going to take the day off?”

  “No. I want to talk to Oliver. And I want to start on some of the work that Claudius has undoubtedly been piling up on my desk while I’ve been away.”

  “Your light was on for hours. Did you finish the memoirs?”

  “As far as they go, yes.”

  “How far’s that?”

  “About halfway. She’s just finished the account of her husband’s disappearance.
”

  “Landini disappeared?”

  “Not Landini. Her first husband, who was also her accompanist. Name of Anton Veitch.”

  “Where did he disappear to?”

  “Overboard. Oddly enough, Father, then a sub-lieutenant, was on one of the ships that searched for him.”

  “Father? My father?”

  “And mine. Funny assignment for the Royal Navy, cruising round looking for an accompanist. But he was rather a special accompanist.”

  “Did they find him?”

  “No.”

  “Did he fall overboard, or did someone push him?”

  “Who’d push him? He was a nice fellow, from all accounts. He started off as a concert pianist—brilliant, they said—but gave it up to marry her.”

  “How long had they been married before he fell overboard?”

  “Eight years.”

  “Long enough for her to get tired of him.”

  “She wasn’t tired of him. They—”

  He stopped at the sound of the telephone, and went across the room and lifted the receiver. He heard Oliver’s voice; seconds later, his mood of contentment was shattered.

  “Rodney? Can you meet me at your office? Something’s come up.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “She’s called it off.”

  “She’s … she’s what?”

  “The memoirs. She’s not going on with them.”

  “She can’t. I mean, she must. She’s got to. My God, she can’t—”

  “She has. I rang your office to find out if you were there, and got Claudius, and he gave me the news. He’s waiting for us. I’m going there now.”

  “Have you—” Rodney began, and stopped; the line was dead. He replaced the receiver with a crash and made for his room.

  “Bad news?” Angela asked anxiously as he passed her.

  “Madame Landini.”

  “Dead?”

  “Worse. Halted in midstream.” He was in his room. “Go and bring the car round, will you? That’ll save a bit of time.”

  Chapter 2