Ice in the Bedroom Page 8

  'Won't her publishers let out a holler?'

  'I should imagine a fortissimo one. And poor old Oofy's going to suffer fifty-seven pangs. He put a lot of money in the business, and losing money always cuts him to the quick.’

  'Oofy?'

  'Nobody you know. Fellow clubman of mine. Chap called Prosser.'

  'Prosser? That name seems to ring a bell. Didn't a Mrs. Prosser have a lot of jewellery snitched not long ago?'

  'That's right. Oofy's wife. She turned her back for a moment, and when she looked round the sparklers were gone.'

  'I read about it in the papers. They think the maid did it, don't they?'

  'That's the general idea. When the hue and cry was raised, she had vanished.

  'And I must vanish, too, or I'll be late for lunch, and Soapy hates waiting for his eats.'

  'I'll put you in a taxi,' said Freddie, greatly relieved that no more champagne cocktails were going to flow like water.

  He put her in a taxi, and she drove off, waving a slender hand. Freddie waved his in courteous return, and was thinking what a delightful woman Mrs. Molloy was and wishing he had seen more of her during her stay at Castlewood, when his meditations were interrupted by a voice at his elbow, a soprano voice with a nasty tinkle in it.

  'Mr. Brigham Young, I believe?' it said, and he jumped perhaps six inches. Sally was standing beside him, and he was quick to note that in her eyes was that unmistakable look which creeps into the eyes of idealistic girls when they see their betrothed helping blondes into taxis and waving after them with, it seems to them, far too much warmheartedness.

  'Good Lord, Sally!' he said. 'You gave me a start.'

  'I'm not surprised.'

  'What on earth are you doing here?'

  ‘I’ve been seeing Leila Yorke's publishers about her change of plans regarding the next book. Their offices are just round the corner. Didn't you hear them screaming? Well?'

  'How do you mean, well?'

  'You would prefer I made myself clearer? All right, then, put it this way. Who was that lady I saw you coming down the street with?'

  'Oh, the beazel who was here just now?'

  'That is the beazel to whom I refer.'

  There is probably nothing so stimulating to a young fiancé in circumstances such as these as the knowledge that he has got his story ready and that it will be impossible for the most captious critic to punch holes in it. Where a young man less happily situated would have shuffled his feet and stammered sentences beginning with 'Er---', Freddie stood firm and four-square, and his voice, when he spoke, came out as clear and unhesitating as that of Mr. Cornelius when reciting his favourite passage from Sir Walter Scott's 'Lady Of The Lake'.

  'That was Mrs. Molloy.'

  'Ah, a new one.'

  Freddie's manner became cold and dignified.

  'If you mean by that what I think you mean, you're missing your pitch and are very much off on your downbeat. Correct this tendency of yours to allow a diseased imagination to run away with you and make you say things which can only lead to bitter remorse. Ever seen driven snow?'

  'I know the sort of snow you mean.'

  'Well, that's what I'm as pure as. That, I was saying, was Mrs. Molloy, and I was about to add, when you interrupted me, that she is the wife of Thomas G. Molloy, who resided at Castlewood before Miss Yorke took over. She twisted her ankle as she was walking along the street.'

  'Lucky she had you at her side.'

  'She didn't have me at her ruddy side, not the way you mean. If you will be good enough to keep your trap shut for just half a minute, I will explain the circumstances and explain them fully. She was not walking along the street with me, but far otherwise, I was walking along the street, as it might be here, and she was walking along the street, as it might be there, quite distinct and separate, and suddenly she tw7isted this ankle of which I spoke. I saw her stumble - she was just in front of me - and very naturally grabbed her.'

  'Ah!'

  'Ah does not enter into it. If you see a female, and one to whom you have been formally introduced by her husband, about to take a toss, there is no course open to you but to lend her a hand. Chivalry demands it. So when you accuse me of licentious behaviour in the middle of Bond Street, you are, as you will readily appreciate, talking through the back of your foolish little neck.'

  'I didn't accuse you of licentious behaviour.'

  'You were going to when you got around to it. Weil, having grabbed her, I thought she might be feeling faint after her unpleasant experience, so I took her into the Bollinger for a quick tissue-restorer. And,' said Freddie with feeling, 'the prices they charge in that thieves' kitchen are enough to whiten your hair from the roots up. I was the one who was feeling faint when the waiter brought the bad news. I thought for a moment he must have added in the date.'

  'But it was worth the expense?'

  'What do you mean by that?'

  'Oh, nothing.'

  'I should hope not. It's no pleasure to me to pay out large sums, which I can ill afford, for champagne for women who are comparative strangers.'

  'Then why did you do it?'

  Something that was almost a pang shot through Freddie as he thought how silly this girl was going to look in about fifty seconds or so. No man of fine sensibilities can ever really enjoy bathing the woman he loves in confusion and bringing home to her with a wallop what a priceless ass she has been making of herself with her baseless suspicions and cracks about Brigham Young and 'new ones', but sometimes it has to be done. One must have discipline. He crushed pity down, and spoke.

  'I'll tell you why I did it. Because I was under a great obligation to her husband, Thomas G. Molloy, who recently out of pure goodness of heart let me have some oil stock which I shall be selling shortly for a matter of ten thousand quid.'

  'Freddie!'

  'You may well say "Freddie!" If anything, the word understates it. Yes, those are the facts, and I took the view that as Molloy had done the square thing by me in so stupendous a fashion, the least I could do in return was to lead his stricken wife into the Bollinger and tell the man behind the bar to fill her up, even with champagne cocktails costing a king's ransom, and she knocked back two of them and there was a moment when I thought she was going to order a third.'

  He had been right in supposing that his revelation of the inside story would have a powerful effect on the party of the second part.

  'Oo!' said Sally.

  'Ten thousand pounds!' said Sally.

  'Oh, Freddie!' said Sally.

  He pressed his advantage like a good general.

  'Now perhaps you understand why I mentioned driven snow.'

  'Of course.'

  'No more baseless suspicions?'

  'Not one.'

  'In short, sweethearts still?'

  'You take the words out of my mouth.'

  'Then come along to some fairly cheap hostelry, and I'll give you lunch. And while we revel I'll tell you about Kenya and the bit of luck that's shortly going to happen to the coffee industry out there.'

  The operative word in Freddie's concluding remarks had been the adjective 'cheap', so it was not to Barribault's that he escorted Sally for the mid-day meal. Had he done so, they might have observed Mr. and Mrs. Molloy seated at a table against the wall, in which event the animation of the latter would not have escaped their notice. Dolly, who had depressed her husband over the smoked salmon with a description of her misadventures in Valley Fields, was now, with the chicken in aspic, about to bring the sunshine into his life again.

  'It's all right. Soapy,' she was saying. 'We aren't licked yet.' 'Who says so?' enquired Mr. Molloy morosely. The tale to which he had been listening had turned the smoked salmon to ashes in his mouth, and he was not expecting better things of the chicken in aspic.

  'Me, that's who, and I'll tell you why. On my way here I ran into young Widgeon in Bond Street, and he told me something that gave me an idea that's going to fix everything. You know the Yorke dame.'

&nbs
p; Soapy quivered a little.

  'We've met,' he said in a hushed voice.

  'I mean, you know the sort of junk she writes?'

  'No, I don't. What do you think I am? A bookworm?'

  'Well, it's that mushy stuff that sells like hot dogs at Coney Island, and she's got a million fans over here and in America, too, but I guess she's got fed up with dishing out the marsh-mallow and chocolate sauce, because her next book's going to be one of those strong, stark things, so Widgeon tells me, quite different from her ordinary boloney.'

  'So what?' said Mr. Molloy, still morose.

  'Well, that's news, isn't it? That's the sort of thing that's going to interest a whole lot of people, isn't it? So what'll seem more natural to her than having Time or Newsweek or someone, I mean some American magazine that's got a London office, call her up and say can they send along one of their dames to get the low-down and find out why she's making the switch. So this dame goes down to Castlewood and asks her what the hell and all that, and then she says she needs some photographs of the house, including the bedroom, on account of their readers are always interested in bedrooms, and there you are, we're in.'

  Mr. Molloy, as has been indicated, was not a very quick-thinking man except when engaged in his professional activities, but even he could see that there was much in what she said. He had been raising a segment of chicken to his lips, and he paused spellbound with the fork in mid-air. He was no longer morose.

  'Honey,' he said. ‘I believe you've got it.'

  ‘You can say that again. Can't slip up, far as I can see. I'll call her after lunch and make the date.'

  A flaw in the set-up occurred to Mr. Molloy. 'But you haven't got a camera.'

  That's all right,' said Dolly. 'I'll pick one up at Selfridge's this afternoon.'

  12

  WHILE entertaining Sally to lunch (shepherd's pie and an apple dumpling) at a pub he knew round the corner, Freddie had enjoined strict secrecy upon her in the matter of the Silver River Oil and Refinery Corporation, just as Mr. Molloy when letting him have that stock had enjoined it on him. Mr. Molloy, he explained, was planning to buy. up all the outstanding shares and very naturally wanted to secure them at a low price, which he would not be able to do if people went around shooting their heads off about what a terrific thing it was. The principle, he said, was the same as when someone gives you a tip on a fifty-to-one outsider straight from the mouth of the stable cat and tells you to keep it under your hat so as not to shorten the odds. He was conscious as he spoke of a slight feeling of guilt as he remembered that he had not pursued this sealed lips policy when chatting with Mr. Cornelius a few days ago, but too late to worry about that now, and anyway Mr. Cornelius, immersed as he was in house agenting and rabbits, was not likely to spread the news.

  So when Sally rejoined Leila Yorke and started homewards with her in the car, it was not of the coming ten thousand pounds that she spoke, but of the Pen and Ink Club luncheon and Miss Yorke's speech.

  'How did it go?' she asked. 'Were you in good voice?'

  'Oh, yes.'

  'What did you say?'

  'The usual applesauce.'

  'How many gargoyles were there?'

  'About a million.'

  'What were their hats like?'

  'Nothing on earth,' said Leila Yorke.

  Her manner was not responsive, but Sally persevered.

  'I saw Mr. Saxby.'

  'Oh?'

  'He took it big, as anticipated. So did Popgood and Grooly. At least, Grooly. I didn't see Popgood. Grooly turned ashy pale, and said you ought to have your head examined.'

  'Oh?'

  'I left him ringing up Mr. Prosser, to tell him the bad news.'

  'Oh, yes?' said Leila Yorke, and relapsed into a silence that lasted till the end of the journey.

  Sally, as she put the car away, felt concerned. Taciturnity on this scale was quite foreign to her usually exuberant employer. It might, of course, be merely the normal let-down which results from sitting through a women's luncheon, but she felt it went deeper than that. Even after two hours of looking at members of the Pen and Ink Club Leila Yorke ought to be cheerier than this.

  It seemed to her that what was needed here was a nice cup of tea. She had never herself attended one of these literary luncheons, but she knew people who had and had gathered from them that all the material, as opposed to intellectual, food you got at them was half a tepid grapefruit with a cherry in it, some sort of hashed chicken embedded in soggy pastry and a stewed pear. No doubt Leila Yorke's despondency was due to malnutrition, and this could be corrected with tea and plenty of buttered toast. She prepared these life-saving ingredients and put them on a tray and took them out into the garden, where Miss Yorke was sitting gazing before her with what in her books she liked to describe as unseeing eyes.

  The listlessness with which she accepted the refreshment emboldened Sally to speak. In the months which she had spent at Claines Hall she had become very fond of Leila Yorke, and she hated to see her in this mood of depression.

  'What's the trouble?' she asked abruptly.

  She was aware that she was exposing herself to a snub. It would have been quite open to the other, thus addressed by a humble secretary, to raise a cold eyebrow and reply that she failed to understand her meaning. But the question had come at a moment when the novelist needed to unburden her mind. There is something about grapefruit with a cherry in it, hashed chicken in pastry and stewed pears that breaks down reserve and inspires confidences. She did not raise her eyebrows. She said, quite simply, as if she was glad Sally had asked her that:

  Tm worried about Joe.'

  Sally knew who Joe was: Leila Yorke's mystery husband, who had passed into the discard some years previously. There had been occasional references to him during her tenure of office, the latest only yesterday, and she had often wondered what manner of man he had been. She always pictured him as a large, dominant character with keen eyes and a military moustache, for she could not imagine anything less hardy entering into matrimony with so formidable a woman. Yes, big and keen-eyed and strong and, of course, silent. He would have had to be that, married to someone as voluble as Miss Yorke.

  'Oh, yes?' was all she found herself able to say. It was not the best of observations, but it seemed to encourage her companion to proceed.

  'I saw him this afternoon.'

  This time Sally's response was even briefer. She said 'Oh?'

  'Yes,' said Leila Yorke, 'there he was. He looked just the same as he always did. Except,' she added, 'for a bald spot. I always told him his hair would go, if he didn't do daily hair-drill.'

  Sally had no comment to make on the bald spot. She merely held her breath.

  'Gave me a shock, seeing him suddenly like that.'

  On the point of saying she didn't wonder, Sally checked herself. Silence, she felt, was best. There was something in all this a little reminiscent of a death-bed confession, and one does not interrupt death-bed confessions.

  'Hadn't seen him for three years. He was still living with his mother then.'

  Sally's interest deepened. So Joe had gone back to his mother, had he. This was, she knew, a common procedure with wives, but rarer with husbands. She found herself revising the mental picture she had made. A man like the Joe she had imagined would have taken his gun and gone off to the Rocky Mountains to shoot grizzly bears.

  'That mother of his! Snakes!' said Miss Yorke unexpectedly.

  'Snakes?' said Sally, surprised. She felt that a monosyllable would not break the spell, and she wanted to have this theme developed. She was convinced that the word had not been a mere exclamation. A strongly moved woman might ejaculate 'Great Snakes!' but surely - not 'Snakes!' alone.

  'She kept them,' explained Miss Yorke. 'She was in vaudeville - Herpina, the Snake Queen - and she used them in her act. When,' she added with some bitterness, 'she could get bookings, which wasn't often.' She sighed. 'Did I ever tell you about my married life, Sally?'

  'No, never.
I knew you had been married, of course.'

  'You'd have liked Joe. Everybody did. I loved him. His trouble was, he was so weak. Just a rabbit who couldn't say "Bo!" to a goose.'

  Sally knew that the number of rabbits capable of saying 'Bo!' to geese is very limited, but she did not point this out. She was too busy making further revisions in the mental portrait.

  'So when his mother, one of the times when she was "resting", suggested that she should come and live with us, he hadn't the nerve to tell her she wasn't wanted and that the little woman would throw a fit if she set foot across the threshold. He just said, "Fine!" And as he hadn't the nerve to tell me what he'd done, the first inkling I got of what was happening was when I came home all tired out from a heavy day at the office - I was a sob sister then on one of the evening papers - and found her in my favourite chair, swigging tea and fondling her snakes. A nice homecoming that was, and so I told Joe when I got him alone. He had the gall to say that he had thought she would be such nice company for me when he was away on tour.'

  'Was he an actor?'

  'Of a sort. He never got a part in the West End, but he did all right in the provinces, and he was always going off to play juvenile leads in Wolverhampton and Peebles and places of that kind. So Mother and snakes dug themselves into the woodwork, and that,' said Miss Yorke, again unexpectedly, 'was how I got my start.'

  Sally blinked.

  'How do you mean?'

  'Perfectly simple. Everyone who's on a paper is always going to do a novel when he gets time, and I had often thought of having a bash at one, because if you're a sob sister, you accumulate a whole lot of material. This was where I saw my opportunity of buckling down to it. Instead of spending my evenings listening to Mother saying how big she had gone at the Royal, Wigan, and how it was only jealousy in high places that had kept her from working her act in London, I shut myself up in my room and wrote my first novel. It was Heather d the Hills. Ever read it?'

  'Of course.'

  'Pure slush, but it was taken by Popgood and Grooly, and didn't do too badly, and they sent the sheets over to Singleton Brothers in New York, who turn out books like sausages and don't care how bad they are, so long as they run to eighty thousand words. They chucked it into the sausage machine and twiddled the handle and darned if it wasn't one of the biggest sellers they had that season. What's known as a sleeper. And they asked me to come to New York and lend a hand with the publicity, autograph copies in Department stores and all that. Well, Joe was still on tour with half a dozen more towns to play, and I thought I'd only be over there a few weeks, so I went. And of course the damned book was bought for pictures and I had to go out to Hollywood to work on it, and when I'd been there a couple of months I sent Joe five thousand dollars and told him this looked like being a long operation so he must come and join me. And what do you think?'