not being unusually unusual,” she said, with a gesture of impatience. “And he’s not pining away after your aunt. Who would? He seems to me to be—well, I know you will just scoff—frightened.”
“Athol? Nonsense!”
She gave a little shiver. “Haunted!”
“That’s even greater rubbish. I was speaking to him on the phone only this morning. He sounded just the same.”
“Yes, haunted is about the right word,” Margot nodded in agreement with herself. “We were talking about ghosts too.”
“Ghosts? Oh, now, look here—”
“It was after he came back from the telephone. But I’d already noticed how changed he was. We were having claret with our lunch, and do you know it was the first wine the waiter offered? Athol, who likes to make a thing about tasting and sending waiters scurrying! Now, do you understand, Chas?”
“What about the phone call?” asked Charles stolidly.
“Someone called him—just as they were making our Suzettes. Aren’t people inconsiderate? But Athol went at once, which is odd too when one comes to think of it. When he came back he ordered a whisky and soda. After all that claret and he never drinks spirits before evening as a rule. Of course, I could see that he was most frightfully shaken about something.”
Charles frowned. He could think of only one reason for Athol’s alleged change in demeanour—financial anxiety; though it had never seemed to worry him before this. Culture and Critic had never been inaugurated as a money-spinning venture. An astringent influence in an uncultured society was the way Athol always referred to it. With its limited circulation and meagre advertisements, it just paid for itself, any lapses from monetary grace being covered by Athol’s small private resources and his wife’s larger ones. Perhaps the terms of the late Mrs Sefton’s will contained some hindrance to this admirable scheme which she had been persuaded against carrying out in life. She had been a semi-invalid for as long as Charles could remember and Athol was capable of making even the strongest woman do what he wanted.
“It was then,” Margot was saying in a trilling voice, “that he asked—half-jokingly, of course—if I believed in ghosts. So you understand why I said haunted, Chas?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t. However, Athol is coming down in a day or so. I’ll probably learn what the trouble is then—if there is anything and you haven’t made all this up, Margot. He wants me to go bush with him—shooting ducks.”
“Are you really, darling? How odd! So am I. See that perfectly sweet boy over there? His father runs a hotel at some damn-awful place called Dunbavin. That wouldn’t be where you and Athol are going?”
“None other. The Duck and Dog.”
“How marvellous to think I won’t be leaving civilisation behind altogether. I must go back to Jerry—he gets so jealous, poor pet! If that man ever comes back with my drink, you have it to fortify yourself for Athol. He spoke about you quite savagely after the ghosts.”
He watched her rejoin the glowering young man in the velvet trousers. He felt a touch of pity for him. Margot could be quite ruthless.
III
‘With a tender smile, Lawrence took Estella in his arms. Her lovely face, framed in a cloudy mist of tulle, looked up at him trustingly. “My darling,” he whispered adoringly. “Mine at last”.’
Heaving a sigh, Adelaide drew a bold line under the final words of her story and moved her dreamy gaze to the window. The view was not a prepossessing one; a blank brick wall of the next house of the terrace and a flutter of washing hanging on an improvised clothes-line. A slit of sky between the two roofs of rotting slates was the only possible redeeming feature, but Adelaide’s vision was turned inwards on the white satin of Estella’s wedding gown and Lawrence’s handsome face and athletic figure.
The boarding house where the Dougalls resided was perhaps the most sordid and depressing of all they had endured over the past few years. They had been there for six months now, economizing in preparation for their annual migration to the Duck and Dog.
Retirement and the end of the British Raj in India had coincided for Major Dougall. Instead of returning to England, he had decided to settle in Australia, bringing with him his wife and daughter. The army had been the only life he had ever known, and while he had enjoyed every moment of it, his career had been but a modest one. It was not to be expected then that his civilian career would be in any way brilliant. Gullible and short-sighted in investing his small capital, it soon became a failure, and the Dougalls found themselves moving from hotel to flat and on down the scale to a succession of dingy boarding houses as the Major’s income shrank.
Years of easy living and the rigid social code of Anglo-Indians had left Mrs Dougall incapable of adjusting herself to a new and cruder life. She clung to the old standards by building a protecting wall of memories of the halcyon Indian years between herself and the sordid realities of the present, behaving, speaking, thinking and even dressing precisely as she had done then. Being a strong-minded woman, she succeeded in bolstering up the Major’s flagging morale, so that he almost completely joined her in the happy self-deception. Without her, no doubt, he would have long since pressed his old service revolver to his highly coloured forehead.
Their daughter, Adelaide, however, floated half-way between fast-fading memories of life in Simla and the present. At first, she had made an effort to help the family finances. Against her parents’ wishes, who could not realise the need to earn a living, she had tried a commercial course of typing and shorthand. But, unable to master either art and helped on by her mother’s disapproval, she had soon given up. In the intervening years, she had picked up a little money by baby-sitting or taking a surreptitious job in a shop during the sales. She was still as immature and diffident as the eager, shy girl who had dispensed tea to the subalterns of her father’s regiment on her mother’s At Home day. She, too, lived on memories. These included a short-lived, barely developed romance with a junior officer, which had been squashed by Mrs Dougall on the discovery that the young man’s father was in trade.
Since then, Adelaide had fallen in love hopelessly numerous times. There was the doctor who had attended her when she had jaundice, a total stranger who had travelled regularly on the same train with her during the summer sales week. She enjoyed the hopeless loves, luxuriating in her nightly wet pillow, but when a fellow-boarder at one of their places of abode showed signs of reciprocation to the extent of trying to enter her room one night, she was immeasurably shocked.
The short stories she wrote in secret, but never submitted for publication for fear of rejection, were sweetly romantic tales invariably ending at the engagement of the handsome hero and heroine—or at the most with the wedding reception and a detailed description of the wedding gown. Sex was some dark, secret thing that she kept on the other side of the wall, like her mother and father kept the harsh world at bay. She always skipped the frank passages in books and averted her eyes carefully whenever she saw a pregnant woman. Such things had nothing to do with Adelaide’s ideas of love, and even if they did come to her mind in hot unguarded moments, they were still not to be connected with—with Him.
Her new love, which she had nursed for eighteen months now, was more hopeless than any she had ever cherished before. Her masochism was heightened by the fact that the man was married. She had based a story on her plight, in which an accomplished and charming girl (which was how Adelaide sometimes dreamed herself to be instead of plain, spinsterish and inarticulate) falls in love with a distinguished and learned man some years her senior (which was how
