‘Do you think he might have some job in mind for me?’
But all she got was another ‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure, dear,’ and Nurse Brown turned away to order breakfast.
For the first time since Mr Rowley’s death Clare enjoyed her food. Her lethargy was replaced by pleasurable excitement; the telephone became her friend, though she resented the fact that at two-thirty it still had not rung. By then lunch was over and Nurse Brown was ready to go out.
‘Get your outdoor things and wait here for your call,’ she told Clare. ‘I’ve got to go somewhere else after taking Mr Rowley’s clothes so I want to be off.’
Clare got back to the suite as Nurse Brown was tipping porters for taking down Mr Rowley’s trunks. ‘That’s almost cleared the Beggars’ Bowl,’ she said, ‘and I’m nearly spent out. Mr Charles is posting me a cheque. Have you any money to spare, dear?’
Clare produced her still unchanged five-pound note.
‘Thanks, dear. I’ll get it changed downstairs, take a couple of pounds, and have the rest sent up to you. Put some of it in the Beggars’ Bowl, will you? I’ll straighten it all out when I get Mr Charles’s cheque. Bye-bye, dear.’
Once more Clare was left staring at a silent telephone.
Just before three the door bell buzzed. She opened the door expecting the change from her five-pound note, but the page who stood outside only handed her a letter.
‘For you, miss, and the car’s waiting.’
It was the page who had first shown her to the suite, just a week ago. She remembered he had hoped she would get the job and that she hadn’t been able to tip him. Now she gave him the last coin in the Beggars’ Bowl before opening her letter.
‘The envelope contained two keys, one large, one small, and a note written in a heavy, black, strongly characterized writing which seemed to her particularly representative of Mr Charles.
My dear Clare,
I have sent my car for you. The driver knows where to go. Please don’t ask him questions.
The two keys will, I think, speak for themselves. Use them. Look around. Do a little quiet considering. Wait until I join you.
Charles Rowley.
She read the letter twice, then dashed after the departing page, calling that he was to hold the lift for her. As they went down she remembered she hadn’t had the change from her five-pound note; but no matter, as she would be meeting Mr Charles. Indeed, she rather liked the idea of venturing into the unknown without any money at all.
Bewildered, she was also enchanted; and the bewilderment was part of the enchantment. Getting into the large black car she smiled to think Mr Charles had imagined she might question the chauffeur. Not for worlds would she have known where she was going and she made no attempt to guess what was ahead of her. She merely gazed out at the sunny autumn afternoon and journeyed on in a haze of hope.
But she did wonder why those completely silent keys were supposed to speak for themselves.
The car took her up Bond Street; she recognized with pleasure the chocolate shop she had visited with Mr Charles. (Hardly any of her chocolates were eaten but her lovely roses had now begun to fall.) Was that the jeweller’s where they had window-shopped? From then on, there were no more landmarks for her and she could not have said if she was being driven north, south, east or west. Vaguely she noticed wide, busy streets, then the entrance to a park and then a pleasant white church. Soon after this, they turned off the main road into a quiet residential district of old, well-kept houses; and here, in a narrow tree-lined street, the car drew up.
The chauffeur helped her out and she found herself facing a high garden wall with a green wooden door in it. And at last the keys spoke.
She took them from her handbag and fitted the largest into the keyhole of the green door. ‘The chauffeur stood by until she had opened the door, then saluted and went back to the car. Soon after she passed through the doorway and closed the door she heard him drive away.
She stood quite still, looking around her. The moment she had seen the door in the wall she had remembered Mr Rowley’s walled garden. So it was here in London, not outside some continental capital city. There was the lily pond, drained now, and two large bushes still retaining some shrivelled heads of lilac. Except for a scatter of recently fallen leaves the little enclosed garden was perfectly tidy, with the arid, minimum tidiness of a grave when its upkeep is paid for.
Ahead of her was the shuttered house. Walking towards it, she tried to remember what Mr Rowley had said about the interior … something about a room seen across a lighted hall. She had a quick expectation of cobwebbed chandeliers, a setting for the Sleeping Beauty without any occupants – or would everything be shrouded in dust-sheets? She turned the small key in the lock and opened the door.
The little hall was as tidy as the little garden. Here were no dust-sheets, no cobwebs – and no glass chandelier; the brass light-fitting hanging from the ceiling had three thick white globes and was a gaselier.
The doors opening onto the hall were festooned with maroon velvet draperies edged with a fringe of black, silk-covered balls. An empty brass jardiniere stood by a carved black oak hatstand of staggering ugliness. ‘Well, at least it’s a bearable floor,’ she thought, looking down at the black and white tiles. ‘I wonder they didn’t cover it with lino.’
Opening the door nearest to her she peered into a room from which shutters excluded the daylight; but she had left the front door open and enough light came in from the hall to show her this was the dining-room. She noticed a yellow oak sideboard inlayed with copper panels, an elaborately draped mantel border of peacock blue wool which clashed with the blue china above it, and a copper gaselier with pink globes over the table. The idea of champagne and caviar consumed under gaslight struck her as ludicrous.
She closed the door on the setting of Mr Rowley’s romantic suppers and opened the door opposite the front door. ‘The room she now entered was shuttered like the dining-room and much larger; the daylight she let in only made a bright path down its length, leaving much of it dim. But she could see it was a drawing-room, beflounced in silk and satin, with chiffon and lace on the many cushions and the ruched shades of the wrought-iron standard lamps. Colours were even uglier than in the hall and dining-room; the upholstery was of embossed tobacco velvet, the draperies a dark yellow. There was too much detail to take in quickly but one problem was instantly solved for her: this was where Mr Rowley had kept his photographs – dozens of them, mainly in heavy silver frames of tortured design. She would look at them when she had explored the rest of the house.
The only other door from the hall opened into a passage leading to the kitchen. She disliked kitchens even when they were pleasant, and one quick glance into this highly unpleasant one’s dim dankness sent her hurrying back to the daylight in the hall.
Now for the bedrooms – if she could see them. She was thankful to find, as she turned the bend of the little staircase, that there was a skylight above the square landing.
One bedroom door stood open. Through it could be seen a large double bed, canopied and side-curtained in some drab material suggestive of tapestry. Staring with distaste she had a vivid mental picture of Mr Rowley sitting up in his bed at the hotel, smilingly remembering this most depressing house. Her thoughts of Mr Rowley young and Mr Rowley old were a confusion of repulsion and pity, and it was, she vaguely knew, the thought of the young Mr Rowley which she found repulsive.
She would explore no further. On the landing was a circular red ottoman, buttoned and heavily fringed. She sat down on it under the skylight and tried to think clearly.
Why had Mr Charles sent her here? Obviously Mr Rowley must have told him of the talk about the house with the walled garden – which must have impressed the old gentleman far more than she’d realized; though she did remember his pleasure. But why had she to see the house? And why had Mr Charles told her to do a little quiet considering?
It then occurred to her he might mean to offer her the job of l
ooking after the place. Certainly someone was looking after it now; it was scrupulously clean. She thought the cleanliness increased the ugliness; cobwebs might have been kinder, might have spun a merciful veil of romance. But nothing could have made that drably-curtained bed romantic. She looked at it again – and hastily looked away.
Should she go down and study the photographs? She found she had no desire to – nor, indeed, to do anything, even to move; though she did not at all care for being where she was, so close to that sinister bed. She no longer felt pleasurably enchanted but was weighed down, rendered inert, by depression which had in it an element of fear.
Her heart gave a leap. Surely that was the door in the garden wall opening – and closing? Footsteps now, on the flagged path …
Then, from the hall, Mr Charles called: ‘Clare, where are you?’
‘Here!’ Springing up, she answered him gladly, instantly released from inertia, depression and fear.
7
Charles
She saw him as she reached the bend of the stairs and stopped dead, looking down on him. He was standing under the brass gaselier, wearing a long dark coat which made him seem even taller than usual. For days she had been steadily improving his looks. Now she had again to accept his true ugliness. It didn’t make her any less glad to see him.
He was saying, ‘I’m sorry you’ve had to find your way around in this gloom. The woman who looks after this place should have opened the shutters. She always used to, when I wrote to say I was coming.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Clare. She came down the last stairs slowly, noting that he was not smiling. Her own smile faded.
‘We’ll have some more light.’ He went into the drawing-room and tried to open a shutter. Its small knob came off in his hand.
Clare, following him, told him not to bother. ‘I’m used to the gloom now. And this house would be even sadder by the full light of day. Why did you send me here?’
‘I’ll explain later. Sit down. How are you?’ He was smiling now but his tone lacked warmth. ‘I trust Nurse Brown has been kind to you?’
‘Perfectly kind but very unforthcoming. Did you tell her not to talk to me? I mean about you and Mr Rowley?’
He returned her direct gaze. ‘I did. She probably overheard part of my quarrel with him. I don’t think she’d have told you but it seemed wiser to give her a general warning. I hardly fancied your hearing the details from her.’
Clare nodded understandingly. ‘You mean you’d rather tell me yourself you were going to, that night, only you couldn’t come and see me. Will you tell me now?’
‘Not yet, anyway.’ He was silent for a few seconds, then spoke as if determined to be businesslike. ‘Well, now: you do realize what this house was? My grandfather told you about it.’
‘Hardly that,’ said Clare. ‘Though … yes, I did guess he was remembering some real house. But I thought it was somewhere abroad – not here in London. How long is it since he lived here?’
‘I doubt if he ever actually lived here.’
‘Well, visited.’
‘His last visit was three years ago. Up till then, over a very long period, he paid a yearly visit, and after his sight began to fail I always accompanied him. But I first came here long before that, when I was sixteen and considered old enough to know the details of his highly disreputable life. I felt something of a dog, particularly as he more or less told me, “Go thou and do likewise,” and shortly provided the occasion. Of course, the heyday of his visits here was in the eighteen-nineties. I suspect that was the kind of visit you were inquiring about.’
‘It was, really. Tell me about his lady.’
‘Her name was legion. She was usually an actress.’
Clare looked around. ‘I suppose there are photographs?’
‘Not dating from the nineties. He destroyed them all when the last lady was installed, in 1900. There are plenty of her – this was his favourite. That extremely ugly frame is solid gold and the stones set in it are rubies.’
Sitting in the shaft of daylight from the open front door, she had no difficulty in seeing the photograph he handed to her. It was of a young woman with a fair, frizzy fringe, a longish face with a heavy jaw, and a cruelly treated figure; a large bust was pushed up nearly to her shoulders and massive hips sprang out below a pinched waist.
‘Well?’ said Mr Charles. ‘Do you see the resemblance to yourself?’
She looked at him in surprise. ‘But I couldn’t be less like her, surely?’
‘Don’t be too anxious to disclaim the likeness; she was considered a beauty.’ His tone hardened. ‘My dear Clare, you have fair hair and blue eyes as she had. That was enough for an almost blind old man – anyway, it was after you told him you wished to be a king’s mistress. She, too, had that laudable ambition.’
‘How extraordinary,’ said Clare. “Though it’s not so very, really. Several girls at school with me fancied the idea; we used to pick our kings. But it must have seemed a great coincidence to Mr Rowley. No wonder he was amused.’
‘Not amused. Enchanted – and completely deceived. He believed you meant what you said and of course he had no idea you knew all about him. I was a fraction suspicious from the … and so ashamed of myself for it.’
She was obviously being accused of something – but what? ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,’ she said with hauteur.
‘Please stop pretending, Clare. You knew perfectly well that my grandfather had been a king.’
Indignation almost swamped her astonishment. ‘I did not know! How could I? Nurse Brown didn’t tell me.’
‘Nurse Brown doesn’t know. But the woman who sent you for the job does; her mother supplied my grandfather with servants when he first came to London. I called on Miss Gifford this morning and she admitted she’d told Miss … the woman you speak of as Jane.’
‘That may be, but Jane didn’t mention it to me. As if I would have said what I did if I’d known he’d been a king! You must think me crude!’
‘That’s not a word I should ever apply to you. I thought you a very clever little schemer, just trying to ingratiate yourself. Do you swear—?’ He broke off. ‘But I’ve no right to ask that. I can see you’re telling the truth. My dear, I apologize most abjectly.’
Her indignation melted. ‘You don’t have to, really. I can understand why you thought what you did. But you might have asked me, instead of going to Miss Gifford.’ She looked at him with mild reproach.
‘Again I apologize. Owing to… certain circumstances connected with my grandfather’s death I’ve been mentally confused these last days. And forgive me if I don’t talk about that – for the moment.’
She nodded sympathetically and chose questions he could hardly mind answering. ‘When was he a king? And of what country?’
‘It no longer exists as a separate entity and I doubt if its old name would mean anything to you …’
It didn’t, nor did what he said about its location. Geography was one of her many weak subjects and she was always apt to confuse the Balkans with the Baltic. But she was fascinated to hear that he had once visited his grandfather’s palace as an ordinary tourist. ‘The architecture’s delightful but the furniture and decorations are beyond belief, not unlike what you see here but on a mammoth scale. Everything had been brought over from England. He’d been educated here and always spent much time here, particularly after his wife died. He was in London when he got slung off his throne – that was in 1903. He’d anticipated it and transferred vast sums of money; also brought my eight-year-old father with him. They both became British subjects.’
‘Then “Rowley” was just an incognito?’
‘Chosen to please the lady of that photograph. She said it was a nickname given to a great favourite of hers, Charles II.’
‘Old Rowley,’ said Clare, knowledgeably. ‘After a stallion in the royal stables.’
‘Good God, did they teach you that at school?’
She lau
ghed. ‘No, I picked it up from a novel. Oh dear, I actually mentioned Charles to Mr Rowley.’
‘So he told me. And you can imagine how it pleased him as he liked to believe he had Stuart blood. I have my doubts about that but he did, when young, have a look of Charles II.’
He handed her a photograph of a dark young man in full Coronation regalia, then took from a cabinet a miniature of Charles II. ‘There’s a grim, dissolute face,’ he said as he handed her the miniature.
Again she laughed. ‘But he’s absolutely sweet. I’ve always adored him. This is like the portrait I have in my bedroom – oh, just a postcard.’ She found the young Mr Rowley disappointing. His crown was on at a very comic angle and he had a bristling moustache. Still, the resemblance was there; and it now occurred to her that— She took a quick look at Mr Charles and visualized his heavy features framed by the wig in the miniature. Delighted with the result, she opened her mouth to say his own resemblance was far stronger; then, remembering he had called the miniatured face grim and dissolute, said instead: ‘What happened to the lady? I suppose she’s dead now?’
‘She died only a couple of years after my grandfather settled in England. She was, by the way, a well-educated girl of good family, quite unlike most of his lady friends. He cared for her very deeply.’
‘And always remained faithful to her memory?’
‘In his fashion. He kept this house as a shrine. No other woman was ever installed here.’
‘But there were other women?’
‘My dear Clare! He was only in his early thirties. There were dozens of other women, right up to the time when his health and his sight began to fail. That was when I first joined him at the hotel. I can’t remember a time when he didn’t live there, except during the war years when I got him to go into the country.’
‘Was there no one but you to look after him?’
‘Not since he needed looking after,’ said Mr Charles. He had been moving about restlessly; now he sat, and turned to her as if asking for understanding. ‘I can’t tell you what a problem it’s been, Clare. When I was a boy he was my idol. There was something magnificent about him, a sort of aura of kingship. And he was immensely generous to me – and to everyone else he had any dealings with. He just poured money out, especially on his ladies – their flats, allowances, settlements; even his fortune couldn’t stand up to it for ever. Luckily I’d money of my own, left to me by my mother, and was able to go into business soon after the war was over. I’ve been fortunate. So he never needed to know the true state of his finances.’