Chapter Six

It was a perfect jewel of a morning; a Sunday in the early spring of 1905. The sun was shining as if it had never heard of winter. The church bells were ringing. The birds were singing their little hearts out; and in the tree-lined squares and all the city gardens, the forsythia was in brilliant saffron bloom.

Meriel Llewellen was thrilled to the marrow with it all, with everything! With London in the sunshine. With England in the spring. But most of all with her new walking costume, which was so absolutely perfect for them both.

Practically everything which had happened in the past months had thrilled Meriel to the marrow, starting with the quay at Penco and their reunion with Da – as dashing and adorable as ever, despite his new responsibilities. In Chile he was El Administador; and as his daughter, Meriel enjoyed the flattering respect of any number of attractive Chileans. She began to learn Spanish and rode daily down the long sand beaches of Coronel – until December, when on the orders of the government-controlled Coal Company of Santiago, Da was offered two thousand pounds and the family’s fare home to resign his appointment to a native-born Chilean. Which from Meriel’s point of view had been another kind of thrill; for now she was eighteen and a woman of the world, she found that she felt differently about England – and now the prospect of a stay in London with money to burn seemed very nearly too good to be true!

Da had accepted the Coal Company’s offer, as she’d known he would, with a shrug of unconcern. ‘There are more fish in the sea,’ he said prosaically, ‘than ever came out of it.’ While the Mater had been beside herself with joy, until the steamer had actually cast off into deep water.

As for the voyage itself, it had been splendid. In the Straits of Magellan they’d seen two canoes of Fuegian Indians; primitive, ferocious, and fascinatingly stark naked. In Monte Video they’d been forced to stay aboard to avoid involvement in a revolution. In Rio Meriel seconded the world’s opinion of the harbour as the loveliest anywhere, whilst purchasing a scarlet Macaw parrot to fill her uncle’s house in Pimlico with Portuguese obscenities. And now London!

While Da scoured the City for funds to finance his next overseas adventure, she and Vicky had beseeched Aunt Alice to find them a good dressmaker. On the Atlantic crossing to the port of Lisbon, Vicky had drawn the eye of an exceedingly well-heeled young man called Reggie Baxter; and although Gareth pegged him as a ‘drongo’ and Meriel thought him chinless, the possibilities of the connection were obvious. With the right dress on her back, Meriel could be the match of any insipid English debutante, of that she was quite sure. And who could tell but that her handsome Carstairs might not be lurking amongst Reggie’s chinless friends, just waiting for the chance to meet her and be fascinated?

The smart walking rig-out, her very first, had been a huge success. It was a fetching shade of Violette de Parme – a shade that was all the rage just now, the dressmaker assured her – and was frightfully well suited, Meriel thought, to her strong colouring. It had a high wired collar and belled sleeves. The bodice was blouse shaped, dipped in the front with two rows of swinging violet fringes. There was a wide belt with a silver buckle, an elegant silk parasol, and a huge hat trimmed with masses of artificial violets and pleated silk bows. It was absolutely all the go. Everybody said so; an outfit to startle and amaze; and Meriel simply couldn’t wait to launch it on the world. That morning she and Garry had ridden the length of Oxford Street in splendid prominence on the top of an open bus, alighting at Coptic Street at Meriel’s insistence to step up to the entrance of the British Museum.

‘Just to make sure it will be open when we come on Sunday,’ she explained, hopping niftily off the tailboard in her new elastic-sided boots. ‘No good dragging all the way back if it isn’t!’

Not that she imagined for a moment that Da could be wrong about such a thing. It was just that she could not sit still a moment longer, and had already reduced Garry to fits of laughter with her imitation of a fashionable English lady on esplanade; pushing out her bottom and wielding her parasol to exaggerated effect. For Meriel confidence was mostly a matter of jumping in – and then proving to herself and everyone who watched her do it, that she could swim; and she intended to be noticed by as many people as possible en route to Harpur Street and to Miss Sims! A brass band was playing in Southampton Row, and she kicked up the violet flounces of her skirt in time to its familiar tune.

‘Such a stylish girl you see,

Just out in Society,

Everything I ought to be –

Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!’

‘What do you think she’ll look like, Garry, Grandmère’s companion?’ she shouted through the music. ‘Fat and jolly? Or skinny, with pince-nez and a flat chest?’

‘Never forward, never bold,

Just the very thing I’m told

That in your arms you’d like to hold –

Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!’

Ned was sitting in the little lime-washed yard at the back of Simmie’s house. Later in the summer it would become a kind of garden, when she moved her pelargoniums out and the jasmine on the trellis filled the downstairs hall with perfume. But for the present it was just the place for sitting out to read your newspaper in the spring sunshine.

Ned stretched lazily to rest his feet on the bench opposite. It was such a lovely day. ‘Blackthorn hatchin’ weather’; that’s what they’d call it down in Sussex. Gladys had propped the street door open to give the house an airing, and from somewhere outside he caught the brassy echoes of a German band. Otherwise all was tranquility and peace. Matthew Starnes was home for the weekend, and the other lodger, Andy, was upstairs still sleeping off the excesses of a jolly Saturday night. The women were at Matins. Gussie was snoring in his basket by the range. So Ned had the sunny yard all to himself. He closed his eyes to give himself up to its warmth. In a little while the church bells would start up again. Then his peace would be broken, beautifully. He would hear Gladys thudding down the outside stairs and Gussie sounding the alarm. There’d be a breath of lavender perfume, and he’d look up into Simmie’s gentle, smiling face – to feel himself in one way back in childhood with Cook in the big kitchen at The Bury, and in another somewhere else entirely!

‘This is it then, number nineteen!’

‘But look here, Meri, we can’t just waltz in,’ Gareth protested, as his sister’s purposeful violet rear switched through the open door.

‘Of course we can. We came as a surprise, so let’s surprise her! Besides, impromptu calls are quite the coming thing,’ said Meriel from halfway up the hall. ‘Everybody says so.’

A pair of substantial grey flannel legs were visible through a doorway at the end, and Meriel bore down on them like Nemesis. Their owner was asleep apparently beneath an open copy of the Sunday Times; so she cleared her throat. A dog began to bark from somewhere in the house. But the newspaper stayed where it was.

‘Lazy beast!’ she thought, crossing the yard on a final flourish of the distant band music to twitch the paper from the young man’s face.

Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!

The sun gleamed triumphantly on golden hair – well flaxen, next best thing to gold – on a large nose, a shaven upper lip and the raised angle of a gloriously strong, square chin. It was the face of every Girls’ Realm romance that Meriel had ever read – the hero of her dreams! The young man was smiling broadly too, as if it was expecting her; and when his eyes flicked open they were blue.

‘My godfathers, it’s him! It’s Carstairs!’ Meriel was at first speechless with astonishment. But then hard on the heels of recognition had come a novel kind of fear. ‘Careful now, Meri,’ she warned herself. ‘Don’t ruin it for Lord’s sake!’

Ned felt confused and somewhat foolish. Squinting as he was into the sun, it had taken him a moment too long to realise that there were strangers in the house. He’d been expecting Simmie, but was faced instead with an overdressed young woman in bright mauve.

‘Ah… can I help you?’ he said belatedly, struggling to his feet and wondering as he did so why the devil people had to bother you at weekends.

‘Er… did you want to see Miss Sims?’

There was another awkwardly long silence, while the girl continued to stare rudely at him from beneath her dreadful hat.

Then the freckled beanpole of a boy behind her said, ‘Rather!’ in a cheerful kind of voice. ‘Is she at home?’

‘She’s still out at church, I am afraid. But if you’d care to wait in the front parlour, I shouldn’t think she’ll be too long.’

His newspaper had somehow managed to contract itself into a crumpled parcel; so he thrust it hastily behind his chair. The way the girl was staring at him made him feel uncomfortable and clumsy. As he led the back down the hall he felt stupidly as if his hands had grown to twice their normal size, and noticed that his shoes squeaked in a way they’d never done before.

‘Well, she won’t be long,’ he told them as soon as they were through the parlour door. ‘I’ll tell her that you’re here when she gets in.’

‘But you’re not going?’ The girl’s voice was surprisingly conclusive. ‘I mean, won’t you at least introduce yourself?’ she amended, looking down demurely at the carpet.

‘Oh yes I’m sorry. My name is Edwin Ashby. I’m, er… one of Miss Sims’ boarders from University College.’

‘Ed-win Ash-by,’ Meriel repeated to herself slowly. ‘Ashby. Mrs Edwin Ashby, Meriel Ashby. It sounded really rather good!

‘How do you do; I’m Gareth Llewellen,’ Garry was saying as if nothing unusual had occurred. ‘And this is my sister Meriel. Our grandmother used to live here in this house, you know, when Miss Sims was her companion.’

Meriel felt almost nervous as she stepped up to take the young man’s hand. It was very large, and she cursed gloves for getting in the way. But then when she looked at him, there was a stunned expression in his gorgeous face that she found reassuring.

‘But I thought you were in Australia.’ His voice was gorgeous too – rather husky, very English. ‘Or was it South America?’

And Meriel was back on solid ground. Why of course – she’d tell him all about her childhood in Queensland; about the droughts and the tarantulas, and sleeping rough beneath the stars. She’d amaze him with her voyage across the Pacific under sail – and when he’d heard it all, he’d have to see her differently. Of course he would! And then he’d smile the wide and lazy smile again that so enchanted her when she’d removed the newspaper to take a look.

But just as Meriel was about to speak, an uninvited memory of Captain Mclntyre’s teasing laughter popped into her head to catch her in the bare nick of time.

‘Why yes,’ she declared as formally as she knew how, reluctantly releasing his big hand. ‘How very clever of you to remember, Mr Ashby. Indeed we have resided for some years in Australia, in the State of Queensland, and have but recently returned from the Republic of Chile. My father held the post of Senior Administrator, you understand, to a very large coal mining enterprise out there.’ She twirled her parasol handle as she spoke, as languidly as any languid debutante.

Simmie had returned from church to find poor Ned caught in a web of relentlessly polite conversation. The change in Meriel Llewellen from the little girl in the park with the third birthday and the tam o’ shanter hat had quite took her breath away – and Gareth was of course was a dear.

How lovely, she told herself, how splendid to find them here so unexpectedly in her own parlour! Yet all the time that she was fussing round them – telling them about their grandmother, trying to draw Ned in, working to set everyone at their ease – another insistent thought was running through her mind: ‘He’s back, he’s back at last! Robert’s back in town!’

She insisted that they both should stay to lunch. Meriel had come prepared with an absurd alfresco picnic for them in a paper bag. But Simmie refused to entertain the idea of the girl’s beautiful new ensemble on a grubby park bench. Besides, she said, she wanted to hear all about the family.

Gladys had complained of course. But despite her observations on the subject of Sunday visitors, had been prevailed upon to stretch the mutton roast with extra onion sauce. And at one o’clock they’d all sat down to a luncheon laid with a clean cloth and mitred napkins. Andy had emerged by then, refreshed and affable, and patently attracted to Robert’s younger daughter. The meal progressed into a voluble affair in which he and young Garry competed to talk loudest, while Meriel monopolised poor Ned with a relentless line in cross-talk.

‘Are your people in London, Mr Ashby?

‘Might I trouble you for the salt if you please, Ashby?

‘Shall you be going to Ascot this season do you think?

‘Now tell me, Ashby, what is your opinion of the aeroplane?’

It entertained Simmie to watch them, these young people, flexing their social muscles; and by the time Gladys crashed the coffee down onto the chiffonier, she’d managed to extract from them most of the information that she needed. The Llewellens were putting up at Robert’s brother’s house in Pimlico, it seemed, at least for the time being. Today Robert had taken his wife and elder daughter on the underground railway to see relatives in Kew; entirely unaware, she gathered, of his younger children’s plan to visit her in Harpur Street.

And tomorrow when he heard where they had been, would Robert be the next member of the family to come knocking on her door? It was a question better left unasked. But Simmie couldn’t do that – any more than she’d been able to when he was last in London following his mother’s death three years ago, before he’d sailed for Chile.

So from the Sunday of her lunch with his Meriel and Gareth, she’d asked her dressing glass, monotonously each morning while she did her hair, if today would be the day he called? And if he did, what would she do? How would she feel about it all, now that there was Ned? Simmie’s moral compass had been smashed beyond repair at the hotel at Richmond, and few of the ideas of sin and virtue that her nurse had taught her could serve to guide her now. But she could still admit that her affair with Ned meant less to her than it had done to him. She could be honest and admit that she had never really wanted him for what he was himself – not that first time when he’d come home inebriated from his rugby celebration, nor later when he came straight from college, still smelling of formaline with that familiar pleading look in his blue eyes. For all his sweetness, Ned had never stirred her as Robert had in Richmond. He’d touched the mother in her, released her from her loneliness, made her feel young again. But that was all. And now with the news that Robert was right here in London, no more than two miles from her own front door, she knew without a doubt that she’d been wrong to do what she had done with Ned when she was still in love with someone else.

WRONG, SIMMIE! WRONG; she saw her sin in capitals. Worse still, she had betrayed the trust placed in her by his university, and by Ned’s family – a further aspect of the case which had emerged the day his grandmother announced that she’d be calling on his landlady in Harpur Street.

Margaret Ashby would be coming up to town as usual to collect her grand-daughter from boarding school in Ealing; to shop, to pay a call or two and visit her accountant. But this time a detour was in order, she’d decided, to view her grandson’s new lodgings. Her letter to him on the subject was specific, and had enclosed a personal note for his landlady in an uncompromising hand.

‘My dear Miss Sims,

I have heard a great deal about you from Edwin. Assuredly we must meet.

If it is convenient, my granddaughter and I will be pleased to call on you at 4 p.m. this Friday. If not, you may contact me on Thursday night at Brown’s Hotel, Albemarle Street.

Sincerely,

M. L. Ashby

Mrs Ashby hadn’t added that she’d be expecting Miss Sims’ furnishings, linen and silver all to be in immaculate and pristine order. But Simmie acted as if she had done, working herself to a standstill and Gladys to within an inch of formal notice in an orgy of conscience-stricken panic. It was a little late, ridiculous, she realised, to feel so guilty now. But there’d been a note of offended respectability in Mrs Ashby’s letter that made her feel distinctly nervous.

‘My Grannie doesn’t know – you can’t think I would tell her.’

But Simmie wasn’t to be reassured. ‘My dear, she’d only have to look at you to know,’ she cried. ‘And now no doubt she’s all agog to see what kind of a loose-living household you have landed in!’

Ned hated all of it; Simmie in a tizwuz, Gladys in a stamping rage, the parlour smothered in antimacassars and reeking of furniture polish – all so that Gran could breeze in like Dr Livingstone to bring enlightenment to Harpur Street, and spoil everything completely!

‘Females complicate things, sure as fate.’ Danny Goodworth had imparted that little bit of wisdom years ago, one night during lambing. And Dan should know because Ned heard that he had fathered more than one child on the gypsy girls of Lullington – whilst, despite the closeness of their ages, he’d done nothing worse himself by then than squint at photographs of Gaiety Girls in his school dormitory at Lancing.

They would be lambing now, Bat and Dan and Jemmy Vine, quietly moving through the litter of the dig-yard, getting on with the work in hand. In all their faces, even in young Jem’s, there’d be a gentle kind of patience that you never saw in London. It was to do with livestock and regeneration and the smooth maternal scarps of the South Downs; an age-old business of ramming, lambing, shearing and sheep sales that took no reckoning of human complications.

Ned stood at Simmie’s parlour window looking down into the street, waiting for the growler that would trundle Gran and Helen and their luggage to the front steps. He could hear a piano-organ in Theobald’s Road, and from the corner of Harpur Street, a flower seller’s strident voice: ‘Flahs! Real flahs, all fresh an’ bloomin’!’

Behind him Simmie was humming to herself – a high tuneless little hum of bravado while she polished the piano – and Ned swiftly wished himself to the world’s end. Or better still, away to the important and uncomplicated work of The Bury lambing folds.