Deck With Flowers Page 5

  To his surprise, he was admitted, but his initial feeling of relief drained slowly away as he followed a footman down corridors far narrower, far less luxuriously carpeted than those which on his first visit had led to the drawing room. He was ushered into a small ground-floor room and left to wait; looking round him, he saw a desk on which stood a typewriter and files, while nearby were neat shelves of reference books and a filing cabinet. He realised that this was the room in which Miss Baird of Brighton had worked.

  The door opened, and he turned, half expecting to be told that nobody, after all, could see him. But it was not a servant who entered.

  Rodney could not afterwards assess how many seconds passed before he regained his wits. The figure standing before him needed no identification. From the top of his beautifully-shaped head, down his large, powerful body to his elegantly-shod feet, a prince. A prince—whether ruling or dispossessed made no matter. He felt pleasure and admiration, and also gratitude to Nature, who made so many lamentable mistakes, but who this time had achieved a perfect piece of casting. Immense, but every ounce carried with ease and grace. Clear olive skin, a strong jaw, large, long-lashed dark eyes that looked in lazy amusement at the world. If a man of—what? sixty-five?—could be called beautiful, then here, Rodney thought, was the man.

  He was wearing a coat of natural-coloured brocade which fitted closely round his neck and ended in a flare at the knees. His trousers were of heavy silk, cut in jodhpur pattern, tight at knee and ankle. His feet were thrust into soft brown calf slippers. He glanced round the room, and the gleam of amusement in his eyes died and gave place to a look which suggested that scimitars were flashing through the air.

  “Mr. Laird, please accept my apology on Madame’s behalf. You should not have been shown into this room. You must forgive us; the household is rather disorganised.”

  If you closed your eyes, Rodney thought, an Englishman was speaking. He pulled himself together.

  “Your Highness, I came to—”

  “You have come to make inquiries about Madame; of course. Be seated, please. I arrived last night, to find that Madame had been ordered to rest. The doctor will allow her to see me, but nobody else. Perhaps she has told you that I am one of her oldest and closest friends?”

  “Yes, sir; she did. Do you think that writing her memoirs has exhausted, has been too much for her?”

  “Emotionally, yes. I’ll confess something: when she showed me what she’d written, I was … amazed is too mild a term; I was astounded. Since the death of her first husband, Anton Veitch, she has hardly mentioned his name—and those of us who know her well have seldom ventured to speak of him. So when I read the details she had given of his end … I found it incredible. I’ve absolutely no doubt that writing about him is what brought on this breakdown. I can’t be too thankful that I chose this moment to arrive.”

  “Speaking professionally, sir, I suppose I can derive comfort from the fact that the painful account is now behind her, and not ahead?”

  “You mean that the worst is over, and she’ll now recover and go on with her memoirs?”

  “I hope so.”

  “For your sake, I hope so too. But nobody is going to be allowed to mention the word memoirs to her until the doctor lifts his ban. My own feeling, if you won’t mind my telling you this, is that she should never have been persuaded to embark on the project.”

  “The proposal didn’t come from us, sir; it came from Madame,” Rodney said, and saw an instant’s surprise on the Maharajah’s face.

  “But Madame told me—” he began, and stopped. “All I know, Mr. Laird, is that the doctor says she must be kept quite quiet. I promise to tell you if there’s any change.” He went to the desk. “Would you write down your telephone number? Your office number is here, but I’d like to have your private number, so that I can send you a message if the doctor says that Madame can see you.”

  Rodney wrote down the number and straightened to find the Maharajah regarding him with amusement.

  “You, of course, are the hero of the Alsatian encounter,” he said. “I’ve only just made the connection. She wrote and told me about it at the time, but I didn’t picture you as you are.”

  Rodney smiled. “A rather homely hero, sir?”

  “A hero who seems to know how to handle Madame. Isn’t this the very first crisis since she embarked on the memoirs?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re fortunate. I’m sure there’ll be others. Madame doesn’t create situations—they simply build up round her. Her visit to me with her first husband brought the fact home to me. You’ll probably grow to admire her as much as I do, but no association with her can be crisis-free.”

  “Will you be staying long, sir?”

  “I shall certainly stay until Madame has recovered. I may have to do one or two business trips, but they’ll be brief. I hope we shall meet again.”

  Rodney took his leave. The bow which practice had made perfect seemed to him inadequate on this occasion; he thought it would be more fitting if he folded up in front of the brown calf slippers, and buried a respectful nose in the rug. The Maharajah did not ring to have him shown out; he accompanied him—perhaps, Rodney thought, to see that he didn’t make a sudden leap towards the stairs and Madame’s bedroom. His manner was relaxed and friendly; strolling along the corridors, they discussed Geneva, where the Maharajah was living, and Venice, to which he would move when his arrangements for the purchase of Madame Landini’s palace were completed.

  “There is one more angle to consider, Mr. Laird,” he said, pausing as they neared the entrance hall. “Don’t imagine for a moment that these business negotiations have exhausted Madame.” He threw back his head and gave a deep bark of amusement. “Madame and I both have a method by which we avoid fatigue over financial matters. The method is called Guido Piozzi. All we are required to do is sign our names on the place to which he points.”

  Several functionaries had gathered to show Rodney out, but the Maharajah came to the door before halting to make his apologies.

  “I shall leave you here, Mr. Laird. These clothes”—he made a gesture that took in the long brocade coat and silk trousers—“are purely for indoor wear. When I go out, I look like everybody else.”

  Rodney met the dark, amused eyes.

  “A pity, sir,” he commented, and walked down the steps and to his car. Park Lane looked new and strange; when had buses superseded richly-caparisoned elephants? And now that he was hobnobbing with Maharajahs, shouldn’t a dark form have sprung out of the ground to hold a golden umbrella over him?

  Well, that was that. From the personal angle, he summed up, a rich and rewarding experience. Professionally, a pure waste of time, except for the item that Madame Landini was telling people she had been persuaded to write her memoirs. The opinion poll showed Claudius and the Maharajah in conflict over the cause of Madame’s breakdown; Claudius, who didn’t know her but thought he knew the facts, thought that writing about her first husband hadn’t upset her. The Maharajah—oldest friend, dearest friend, closest friend—held it to be the reason for her sudden halt. Perhaps the secretary down at Brighton could give a casting vote.

  He set out after breakfast the next morning, irritated by the knowledge that although he had only fifty miles to cover, the first five would be a nose-to-tail procession making mileage meaningless. Sleet was beginning to fall, which would further delay his progress. He thought he might reach Brighton in time for a late lunch.

  It was twelve-thirty when he arrived. He drove slowly along the familiar sea front—familiar because three years ago, when he came up from Cornwall to join the firm of D. S. Claud, he had made the experiment of living in rooms at Brighton and commuting; brought up on the very fringe of the Atlantic, he felt that he needed the sound and the smell of the sea. But commuting had proved a mistake; he had loathed the daily train journey, detested his fellow-commuters and the arrival at the noisy London terminus and the subsequent scramble on bus or Underground. After thr
ee months, he had moved to London.

  He leaned forward at a traffic light, drew the paper with the secretary’s address from the glove compartment of the car, and glanced at it. This girl, he thought, had a troublesome habit of settling herself in confusing districts: was this to be Yarrow Road or Street or Square?

  It was none of these, he discovered. It was Yarrow Lane.

  He drove along it, looking at the numbers. Baird, like Laird, he noted, had been forced to forego the elegant residential districts; this was a long way from the mansions and the sea. But perhaps she, too, had a view from a bathroom window? Number 6, 8, 10, 12—this was it.

  He stopped and looked at it in perplexity; it was a shop. Outside it hung a sign: Patisserie. Through the sleet and the steam of the window, he could discern large trays filled with pastries of a kind he had not seen since he was on holiday in France. Hunger, sharp and saliva-producing, gripped him— why not go in and buy a dozen of those things and drive to the sea front and keep the car heater on and eat them, and to hell with waistline? This girl should be not Miss Baird but Miss Bun, the baker’s daughter.

  Then something made him glance once more at the paper on which the address was written. Not 12, but 12A. A pity, because 12 was that wonderful shop window, whereas 12A was an uninteresting door beyond it. This, he saw, was a street of shops, all of the same design, with living quarters on the floor above, but somebody had robbed a slice from Number 12 and built a separate entrance to the upper floor.

  He got out of the car, shrugged hurriedly into his coat and turned up the collar, not before a gust of wind had blown an icy trickle down his neck. He walked to the door, pressed a bell and stood huddled, waiting for someone to answer the summons. After a pause which he thought far too long, he heard footsteps descending, and the door opened a little way. He saw a middle-aged woman with a face that still retained much of what must once have been considerable beauty. She had greying hair drawn neatly into a knot; she wore a white overall, its sleeves pushed up over shapely, floury forearms. When she spoke, it was in a friendly tone and with a slight foreign intonation.

  “Please come in.” She opened the door wide and drew him inside. “We cannot talk in the cold—and you will get wet.”

  She closed the door and faced him on the small square of carpet at the foot of a steep flight of stairs. “Yes? What is it that you want?”

  “May I see Miss Baird, please? She lives here, doesn’t she?”

  “She is out. I am her mother.” Was he imagining it, Rodney wondered, or had the friendly look given place to one of wariness? “She did not say that anyone was coming to see her.”

  “I’ve just driven down from London.”

  “From London? To see her?”

  “To talk to her about the job she was doing there. Will she be long?”

  “Yes, very long.” There was no mistake about the withdrawal of cordiality; she was looking at him with a cold, hard stare. “And to talk of the job,” she continued in a tone that matched the look, “this is of no use. She has now got another position, so she will not be interested. There is nothing more to be said. Goodbye.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but surprise and rage kept him silent. She had opened the door, seized his sleeve and swung him round to face the street; then she put a hand on his back, and if he had not braced himself, the force of the push she gave him would have sent him staggering on to the pavement. Behind him, the door banged. He turned with a vague idea of kicking it down, and then regained control of himself and got into the car and drove away. Come in, she had said, smiling. What had he said? Nothing. He had merely asked how long the girl would be out. It couldn’t have been his appearance that upset her; if she hadn’t liked the look of him, she wouldn’t have invited him inside.

  He found that he had stopped the car on the sea front and was sitting staring at the waves breaking on the shore. Snow had begun to fall. A fine day to choose, he thought bitterly, and all for nothing.

  Well, not for nothing, he decided. He had an uncle living here; he would call on him. He was an anti-social old gentleman and he threw jugs of water over callers, but a kind of truce had been established three years ago, and this might be a good time to test it. He would fill in time by paying a call on his Uncle Julian, and then he would have beer and sandwiches at a pub, and after that he would drive back to Number 12A Yarrow Lane and hammer on the door until Miss Baird let him in, or he was given a good reason why he could not see her.

  He drove to a wide street which in summer was tree-shaded. The few houses along each side of it were large, and each stood in spacious grounds. All but one had been converted to apartments or maisonettes; the exception was his uncle’s, which remained unchanged, still handsome, still imposing—a house that had outlived its era.

  He left the car at the gate, went in and used the heavy knocker on the front door—the bell, he knew, had long been disconnected. He waited, heard no sounds, and did not knock again; in or out, his uncle wasn’t receiving, and this was no day to be doused with cold water.

  He drove away, and at the end of the street turned in the direction of a well-remembered pub. The thought of food made him increase speed, and he did his best to beat the traffic light, stopping irritably as it turned to red. And what happened next he never, then or at any future time, tried to understand. You could only account for these things, he decided, if you dabbled in the occult. If, like himself, you merely believed in coincidence, you took what was offered and gave thanks. Especially when it was something as welcome and as wonderful as the picture reflected in his rear mirror.

  Behind his car, a small van had drawn up. On its side was painted the word Patisserie in exact imitation of the sign above the shop door. It was driven by a girl wearing a scarlet- and-white woollen cap surmounted by a pompon. And one glance at the face below the cap, a younger edition of the face he had seen at Number 12A Yarrow Lane, left him in no doubt that he was looking at Nicola Baird.

  Chapter 3

  There was no time to act; the traffic lights changed to green and Rodney was forced to move on. He drew his car to one side, let the van pass, and followed it. She knew her Brighton, he noted, driving in her wake in and out of side streets. Twice the van stopped, but before he could reach it, the girl had sounded the horn to alert a client, handed out a white- wrapped parcel, and driven on again. She drove fast, and snow was falling so fast that at times he feared he would lose her.

  At last, in a wide street near the sea front, she stopped outside an apartment block. He brought his car alongside, got out and addressed her as she was taking a parcel from the back of the van.

  “I’d like to talk to you, if you—”

  She barely glanced at him. “Busy,” she said, and banged the van door decisively.

  He called after her rapidly-retreating back. “Wait a minute, will you? My name’s Laird, Rodney Laird. I came down to see you.”

  She had stopped and turned, and was looking at him with a frown.

  “From D. S. Claud?”

  “Yes. Where can we talk?”

  “How did you know who I was?”

  “Do I have to stand in a blizzard and explain?”

  She gave the matter a moment’s consideration.

  “Wait in your car,” she instructed. “I’ll join you in a minute.”

  He waited anxiously, peering out and wondering whether she would leap into the van and drive away, or perhaps turn inexplicably hostile, as her mother had done. But when she emerged from the building, she directed her steps towards the car. He got out and opened the door for her, experiencing as she neared him a feeling of surprise that Oliver had not mentioned her looks. But Oliver liked well-dressed women, and this one might not have qualified. If not smart, she was certainly picturesque, Rodney decided. She was wearing green woollen slacks with the ends tucked into short boots. Round her neck was a woollen scarf. Like himself, she wore an anorak, but hers had seen long and hard service.

  She settled herself in the car besid
e him and put a calm question.

  “Madame Landini wants to make friends?”

  “No. I was sent down to talk to you, to try and get a few more details about what happened.”

  “Isn’t she doing any talking?”

  “No. She announced that she’d stopped writing her memoirs. Her doctor has ordered complete rest. What happened?”

  “I gave Mr. Armstrong all the details there were. How did you know who I was?”

  “By your resemblance to your mother. I went to your house and—”

  “—and she told you I was out making deliveries?”

  “She told me nothing. She threw me out.”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “It’s the truth. I went to Number 12A and she came to the door and asked me to step inside. One minute later, she threw or more accurately pushed me out. I drove away. I drew up at the traffic lights, and a van drew up behind me, and on it was the Patisserie sign, and driving it was a girl sufficiently like her mother to make me try to establish contact.”

  “Pushed you out? I don’t believe it, but if it’s true, you must have said something, done something—”

  “I rang the bell. She came downstairs. She saw how hard it was sleeting, so she smiled and very kindly drew me into shelter and closed the door. We stood at the foot of the stairs and I said I wanted to see you in connection with some work you’d been doing for us. Whereupon she opened the door again, got hold of my sleeve and when I was past her, put a hand in the middle of my back and shoved. Is that being thrown out?”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s being thrown out.” She had been frowning; now her face cleared. “That must have made her feel a lot better.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She was just letting off steam.”

  “Oh, is that all? I’m sorry she picked me to—”

  “She’s the gentlest, kindest, nicest person you could meet.”

  “When she’s not shoving strangers into the sleet.”

  “Something upset her.”