Starlight

  ‘Bores me stiff, the country, I must say. Give me town every time.’ Arnold’s dull blue eyes were fixed on her face.

  ‘He’s a naughty boy, isn’t he, doggies? He likes the bright lights,’ said Mrs Corbett cheerfully, touching the nearest plump back with the toe of her black velvet shoe, ‘a naughty, naughty, naughty boy.’ Bee, disturbed, moved pettishly away. ‘Well now,’ Mrs Corbett went on to Peggy, ‘I’m sure you’d like to see your room, wouldn’t you.’ She began to struggle from her chair. ‘Oh dear – can you give me an arm, please. I get so stiff.’

  Peggy complied, with considerable inward dislike of the contact with soft old fat, black georgette, and gilt jewellery.

  ‘I had it done over for you,’ Mrs Corbett confided, as all three slowly mounted the stairs. ‘The last companion I had stuck religious pictures all over the walls (I’m funny in that way, I cannot bear churchy people) and it used to depress me so much … when she left, I thought, aha, new wallpaper! No, boys,’ to the dogs, who had followed them, ‘not in Peggy’s room.’

  ‘I’ll say good-night, mother, if you’ll excuse me,’ said Arnold, pausing surrounded by dogs, on the threshold, ‘there’s something I want to watch on ITV – good-night, Miss Pearson,’ and, instructing the dogs to leave him alone, he went off down the corridor.

  ‘He has his own, in his den,’ Mrs Corbett said, opening a door on a perfect specimen of a hotel bedroom, characterless even to incredibility in brown and beige, ‘then if there’s something on BBC 2 or ITV he wants to watch, he can watch it while I have my little party with BBC 1 in the drawing-room. Are you a keen looker-in?’

  ‘I like the animal programmes,’ Peggy answered, this time without lying.

  ‘Oh – dear Michaela and Armand – so do I.’ Peggy did not think it necessary to add that this was not what she meant.

  ‘I hope you’ll like the pictures.’ Mrs Corbett moved with her waddling walk across the room. ‘I chose them myself when I had the room re-done. At Harrods. (They have a lovely picture gallery there, I expect you know it?) I’m afraid I’m not at all artistic. (My husband, bless him, used to say, “Cora’s a fool but she is good-tempered.”) But I flatter myself I do know what I like.’

  They had paused in front of a boat rushing along over a foaming summer sea. There was enough in the idealized scene to move Peggy’s heart with a sudden agony of desire: the overheated room’s walls seemed to fall apart, and all the splendour and smell of the ocean drove in.

  ‘I … that’s …’ She could not bring the words out, and stood in silence, trembling with longing, and with rage at herself.

  Mrs Corbett, as was usual with Mrs Corbett, had noticed nothing.

  ‘And this,’ she said, before some white Irish cottages under a violet mountain, ‘I love that, don’t you?’

  ‘I … don’t know which I like best. They’re both … I like this one, too.’ It was a path leading through autumn woods, hung with those leaves that suggest golden coins. Peggy would not let herself shut her eyes on a memory of Sussex downs.

  ‘There! they’ll remind you of the country.’ Mrs Corbett, after a last pleased glance round, retreated to the door. ‘It’s so nice to have you here, dear, and I’m sure we shall all get on well together … no, boys, you mustn’t stay here, come with Mother. Dee! Not on beddies, you know that’s not allowed.’

  ‘Let them stay, please, I don’t mind. If you like, I’ll come down when I’ve unpacked and take them for their run, shall I?’

  ‘Will you really? Aren’t you tired? But I don’t expect you are, you’re so young. One forgets … How old are you, my dear?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  ‘Are you really? Only twenty-two. Well, it’s a long time since I was twenty-two … I’ll leave them with you, then. The lead is hanging in the hall, by the front door.’ Mrs Corbett at last got herself out of the room. Peggy’s first action was to cross the room and jerk apart the curtains veiling the windows. She pushed the casements back and, gasping, leaned out into the night.

  A slight damp wind blew into her face, bringing the scent of dead leaves and wet bark. From the dark screen of trees, behind which the valley lights glittered, an owl hooted on a soft wavering note. She shuddered, shut the windows quickly and dragged the curtains across them. Then she turned to her unpacking.

  When she ran downstairs half an hour later, she wore a white raincoat, and on her head one of the scarves, usually made of cotton printed in some brilliant uncommon design, which she affected in the winter. Her suits and her greatcoat had been, for some years, of a dark tweed, flecked with violet or yellow. She gave out an impression of dark skies and winter starlight.

  She put her head round the door of the great drawing-room with a grand-daughterly air; Mrs Corbett was watching the television lackadaisically.

  ‘I’m going to take them for their run now,’ Peggy called, interrupting the noises and actions on the little blue screen that presumably were occupying her employer’s attention.

  ‘Oh all right, dear, thank you.’ Mrs Corbett glanced round and smiled and yawned, ‘Really, this isn’t very thrilling, I think I shall go to bed.’

  A man smashed his fist into another’s face, there was a brisk outbreak of screams from an ugly girl, and Peggy shut the door on the entertainment.

  The dogs ran joyfully along the road under the quiet trees. No footfall but her own, no droning rush of any car; the lamps burned like veiled crystals in the mist, drops fell heavily from the iron-coloured branches as if the trees wept for their brothers in the country’s menaced woodlands. It was not country, but it was better than shops and streets. Peggy thought that a few months at MacLeod House would ‘do’.

  8

  The ‘home’ to which Mrs Pearson had begged, rather than ordered, the driver to return was a tall, seedy old private hotel in the neighbourhood of Euston, whose back premises overlooked a vast area of demolition and rebuilding. It was kept by the man and his wife, acquaintances of Thomas Pearson’s in the secretive, hidden underworld of petty crime in which the latter had lived for years; the removal of the brick and mortar screens protecting the proprietors from the public eye had filled them with an uneasiness expressing itself in a surly manner, and they were talking of selling out and taking themselves off to a similar place in Brighton.

  Having parked the car, the man George stalked ahead of Mrs Pearson across the pavement to the hotel entrance, leaving her to push her way through the swing door unaided.

  ‘All right, are you, dear? You look all in,’ said Mrs George, a stout woman wearing a short black dress glittering with gilt threads, coming out of the reception desk as Mrs Pearson slowly approached.

  ‘I’m tired, Marie, and so cold. I nearly die every time I have to say good-bye to Peggy.’

  ‘Now don’t be like that, Nora, she’s only gone to Hampstead,’ Mrs George soothed.

  ‘It’s four or five miles away,’ Mrs Pearson said dolefully.

  ‘Well, what’s that! Really Nora, be your age … now come on upstairs, I’ve got a gorgeous fire for you and you need a drink.’

  She steered her friend’s drooping form up the stairs; carefully, but with a manner that suggested that of one who humours a mental case rather than affection.

  The room she led her into had a superb coal fire blazing illegally and royally in the bow-shaped grate, below a wide marble mantel-piece yellowed by smoke and marked by many deep stains from cigarette butts. Thick red curtains shut away the desolation outside, with its suggestion of lunar craters and civilization’s collapse.

  The man George was already seated by the fire, on a giant sofa. Beside him, but at its far end, sat another man; short, dark, leaning back and listening in silence to a stream of complaint the other was uttering. He gave the impression of being farther away from his companion than the few feet between them, and he was smiling.

  He sat up, as the two women entered, saying, ‘Nora, you’re late, and you look cold, you’re frozen, come here, sit down, warm yourself, for God?
??s sake.’ Rising, he bustled about, settling her nearest the fire and arranging cushions at her back. The Georges exchanged a sneering furtive smile.

  Mrs Pearson crouched forward to the blaze, holding out hands of a skeletal fragility, with nails painted rose colour, to the flames. She kept her eyes fixed dreamily on their red and yellow dance, what was going on in the room appearing to drift past her unheeded.

  ‘Christ!’ exclaimed George, who had been sipping from one of the glasses filled by his wife at a table in the corner, ‘what’s in this, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Something Tom here dreamed up,’ she said, ‘I don’t know … he mixed it just before you came in … what is in it, Tom?’ turning to the dark man.

  ‘Powder. A very strong powder. Not like you usually get. Special, from an Indian friend of mine who keeps a little shop,’ said Thomas Pearson, smiling.

  ‘One of your little shops, I s’pose.’ George was still sipping, with an expression of gross satisfaction growing on his face. ‘There’s a bit more than the old curry powder in this, I bet.’ He laughed, looking sideways at his tormentor and master. The hope of escaping, somehow, from the load of debt that bound him to Pearson and of in some way destroying the knowledge that Pearson had of his past life, grew fainter with every day that passed.

  ‘You do talk a lot of bloody rubbish, George,’ his wife put in uneasily, ‘here, Nora, do you good.’ She held out a steaming glass.

  Thomas Pearson caught his wife’s wrist gently before she could take it. ‘Not for you, Nora, too strong. I mix you a special.’ He went across to the table.

  He had begun to put on flesh young, and now his small features were sunk in fat and he carried a belly. But his eyes were beautiful, dark and almond-shaped like those of his daughter and having in them a sparkle resembling the reflection of a star in dark water. His nose and mouth were finely curved and hinted at voluptuousness and one could feel in him the strength of a rib of steel. But one also felt that this was a man who could be made weak, and destroyed, by one passion.

  ‘Here,’ he said, holding out a glass of the drink he had prepared, and, smiling, he added a word or two in another language than English, at which his wife smiled back as she took the glass.

  ‘That’s what you always say.’ Mrs George, emboldened by drink, put in curiously. ‘What’s it mean, anyhow?’

  ‘Between Nora and myself, that,’ Pearson said indifferently, without turning to look at the questioner.

  ‘Why’ve you still got that accent, too?’ Mrs George, who was becoming drunk, went on aggressively. ‘You been over here long enough. You talk like some foreigner.’

  ‘I suppose,’ he paused, then went on with a faint smile, ‘I remember I was born in the sloms of Tashkent. My mother was a “lady” there. She made me take her name, not my father’s. She was a priest’s daughter.’

  ‘Go on. Tell us something true for a change,’ Mrs George dared to sneer.

  ‘It is true. A Scottish priest. And there was a man in the old quarter – farther down, even, than we lived, who was Scottish too.’

  He paused again. Through her increasing drunkenness, Mrs George’s curiosity was alive and eager: her first impression of Thomas Pearson, when they had met him in Brighton a year or so ago, had been of what she called a nasty customer and she had long wanted to know more about him. Her curiosity even conquered her real fear of him.

  ‘He’d been a soldier. Fought at Egeram or one of those places in the First World War, perhaps, and I believe he had a still down there, where he lived. A deserter, I am sure. My mother used to get whisky from him and it kept me alive in the winters. They are – were – very cold, our winters. She made me …’ he broke off, turned quickly, looked across the room and saw two avid masks turned towards him, lit with the pure essence of curiosity and hardly drawing their breath. He smiled contemptuously.

  ‘So. Perhaps my blood remembers the sloms of Tashkent and that’s why I speak with a foreign accent,’ he ended, and turned back to his contemplation of the great fire.

  ‘You do talk a lot of bloody rot, Tom,’ Mrs George said stupidly, again, after a pause. ‘Like George. You men.’

  ‘Perhaps. Now come along, Nora, you’re tired,’ rousing himself.

  ‘Yes, you get her off to bed quick or she’ll have one of her turns, and I can’t stand that, it gives me the horrors. So get out, both of you,’ Mrs George almost shouted, with a distorted face.

  He turned and glanced at her once, and she drew in her breath on a renewed half-shout, and was instantly silent. Pearson put his arm about his wife and helped her from the room.

  There was an eiderdown that covered the entire expanse of their double bed, and slippers trimmed with fronds of feathers, a delicate nightgown, a rosy ribbon to band her heavy, magnificent hair; and he helped her to undress and at last lay down beside her. Their quiet talk about the house that was being prepared for her passed gradually into silence, then to tender kisses, and at last into passionate love-making. The god’s presence is not to be mistaken, and he was there.

  Every few days, Peggy would slip out of the house, usually in the late afternoon while Mrs Corbett was playing bridge with her three old friends – and make her way down, past trees and open water, to the hotel amidst the desolation lying around Warren Street.

  The dogs had become devoted to her. They would hear her step in the hall, scratch at the door of the room where the bridge game was going on, eager to follow.

  ‘No, no, Cee, it’s only Peggy. She’s going O-U-T,’ Mrs Corbett would explain to the three sagging, painted faces round the table, the six hands whose rings winked above the cards. ‘Be quiet, A., lie down.’

  ‘Working out all right, is she, Cora?’

  ‘Oh, very well.’ Mrs Corbett would study her cards. ‘She’s a sly little thing, though. I was surprised.’

  ‘Shy? I wouldn’t have said shy.’

  ‘I said SLY, Dorry, not shy. You really ought to wear your aid, dear, you’re getting worse and worse.’

  ‘I don’t notice it getting any worse. Cis, do you notice my hearing’s any worse? I hate that thing, it cost me seventy guineas and I’m always so conscious of it.’

  ‘I was saying only the other day to Madge, I thought it was worse. I think it’s worse since you had that thing.’

  ‘She doesn’t wear it half the time. Naughty.’ Mrs Corbett glanced at the crystal and gilt clock. ‘Nearly tea-time – shall we be devils, girls, and have crumpets today?’

  ‘You always tempt us. I put on six ounces last week. Oh well – perhaps just this once.’

  ‘Six ounces! You’ll have to “watch out”, as they say.’

  ‘I don’t know why you all bother about it, fussing over ounces. Harry likes me well-covered.’

  Three of the old women said nothing. The one they called Madge was the last of them whose husband was alive, and she was full of triumph because of the simple fact. Every incident, every detail concerned with her hair-dressing, her clothes, her shoes, her make-up, was referred to it.

  Two of her old friends confided to one another their contempt for her boasting: only Mrs Corbett, of the three, found in it a cause for wistful envy. ‘Ah … she’s lucky,’ she would sigh, ‘she doesn’t realize how lucky. Poor Madge – she’s got it all to go through – but she has got those lovely grandchildren.’ A heavier sigh.

  The front door would shut on the overheated rooms, the forced flowers, the harmless stuffy silence. Peggy would move forward into the open air, with the light step that years of riding had made no clumsier, under the great trees now stripped and iron-coloured against the soft bloom of the winter sunset; she would drift like one of their blowing leaves down the dim road.

  Sometimes, Arnold Corbett’s car would draw up as she left the house, bringing him back from his afternoon’s golf.

  ‘Hullo’ – he would quickly let the window down and lean out – ‘getting away from it all for a few hours?’

  Peggy would smile, or perhaps, let the effect of
a smile come through the mask of her face, but she would barely stop.

  ‘Care for me to run you down?’

  ‘No, thanks all the same.’

  ‘You surely don’t want to hang round waiting for that bloody bus?’

  ‘I’m walking.’

  ‘Walking?’

  ‘Over the Heath.’ She would drift away from him, with a backward, faintly-smiling valedictory glance.

  ‘You’re a glutton for punishment, aren’t you?’

  He would smile after her, not troubling, in those early days, to watch her disappear in the dusk. He took it for granted that she was going to meet a man in these damp, gloomy, hemmed-in meadows lying at the end of the avenue, beyond the great soot-marred beeches.

  Women were always meeting men, and even he, sometimes, was one of the men a woman met.

  He would drive the car in and put it away, and go up to his own sitting-room, his ‘den’ as his mother called it, and there pass the time until six o’clock with the evening paper and recalling the afternoon’s game: at six, he would loaf downstairs to join his mother for their first drink. The old women were gone by then, each one gliding in her car a few hundred yards down the road to another comfortable great house. The Corbett house would begin to smell faintly of the coming dinner, and there would be a faint anticipatory stir within Arnold because of this, and because of the promise of relief from boredom in the voices from the television.

  Peggy usually covered the miles between MacLeod House and the hotel in just under an hour; almost sixty minutes spent with moist grass under her feet, and untainted air moving coolly past, and the indistinct shapes of trees above her in the dusk; the tiny barbed or mailed insects in their winter sleep around her in their millions; the warm birds sweeping silently, or with a last lonely chirrup, over her head.

  But during the hour she was never out of sight of London’s lights on the valley, and though, by comparison with life in MacLeod House, this was freedom, to her it was only a wider cage.