who was the apple of her eye and who knew, only too well, how to wring the maternal heartstrings to his own financial advantage.
‘Can you send me two hundred pounds. Desperate. Life or death. Victor.’
‘Victor is so honourable. He knows how straitened my circumstances are and he’d never apply to me except in the last resource. He never has. I’m always so afraid he’ll shoot himself.’
‘Not he,’ said George Barton unfeelingly.
‘You don’t know him. I’m his mother and naturally I know what my own son is like. I should never forgive myself if I didn’t do what he asked. I could manage by selling out those shares.’
George sighed.
‘Look here, Lucilla. I’ll get full information by cable from one of my correspondents out there. We’ll find out just exactly what sort of a jam Victor’s in. But my advice to you is to let him stew in his own juice. He’ll never make good until you do.’
‘You’re so hard, George. The poor boy has always been unlucky—’
George repressed his opinions on that point. Never any good arguing with women.
He merely said:
‘I’ll get Ruth on to it at once. We should hear by tomorrow.’
Lucilla was partially appeased. The two hundred was eventually cut down to fifty, but that amount Lucilla firmly insisted on sending.
George, Iris knew, provided the amount himself though pretending to Lucilla that he was selling her shares. Iris admired George very much for his generosity and said so. His answer was simple.
‘Way I look at it—always some black sheep in the family. Always someone who’s got to be kept. Someone or other will have to fork out for Victor until he dies.’
‘But it needn’t be you. He’s not your family.’
‘Rosemary’s family’s mine.’
‘You’re a darling, George. But couldn’t I do it? You’re always telling me I’m rolling.’
He grinned at her.
‘Can’t do anything of that kind until you’re twenty-one, young woman. And if you’re wise you won’t do it then. But I’ll give you one tip. When a fellow wires that he’ll end everything unless he gets a couple of hundred by return, you’ll usually find that twenty pounds will be ample … I daresay a tenner would do! You can’t stop a mother coughing up, but you can reduce the amount—remember that. Of course Victor Drake would never do away with himself, not he! These people who threaten suicide never do it.’
Never? Iris thought of Rosemary. Then she pushed the thought away. George wasn’t thinking of Rosemary. He was thinking of an unscrupulous, plausible young man in Rio de Janeiro.
The net gain from Iris’s point of view was that Lucilla’s maternal preoccupations kept her from paying full attention to Iris’s friendship with Anthony Browne.
So—on to the ‘next thing, Madam.’ The change in George! Iris couldn’t put it off any longer. When had that begun? What was the cause of it?
Even now, thinking back, Iris could not put her finger definitely on the moment when it began. Ever since Rosemary’s death George had been abstracted, had had fits of inattention and brooding. He had seemed older, heavier. That was all natural enough. But when exactly had his abstraction become something more than natural?
It was, she thought, after their clash over Anthony Browne, that she had first noticed him staring at her in a bemused, perplexed manner. Then he formed a new habit of coming home early from business and shutting himself up in his study. He didn’t seem to be doing anything there. She had gone in once and found him sitting at his desk staring straight ahead of him. He looked at her when she came in with dull lack-lustre eyes. He behaved like a man who has had a shock, but to her question as to what was the matter, he replied briefly, ‘Nothing.’
As the days went on, he went about with the care-worn look of a man who has some definite worry upon his mind.
Nobody had paid very much attention. Iris certainly hadn’t. Worries were always conveniently ‘Business’.
Then, at odd intervals, and with no seeming reason, he began to ask questions. It was then that she began to put his manner down as definitely ‘queer’.
‘Look here, Iris, did Rosemary ever talk to you much?’
Iris stared at him.
‘Why, of course, George. At least—well, about what?’
‘Oh, herself—her friends—how things were going with her. Whether she was happy or unhappy. That sort of thing.’
She thought she saw what was in his mind. He must have got wind of Rosemary’s unhappy love affair.
She said slowly:
‘She never said much. I mean—she was always busy—doing things.’
‘And you were only a kid, of course. Yes, I know. All the same, I thought she might have said something.’
He looked at her inquiringly—rather like a hopeful dog.
She didn’t want George to be hurt. And anyway Rosemary never had said anything. She shook her head.
George sighed. He said heavily:
‘Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.’
Another day he asked her suddenly who Rosemary’s best women friends had been.
Iris reflected.
‘Gloria King. Mrs Atwell—Maisie Atwell. Jean Raymond.’
‘How intimate was she with them?’
‘Well, I don’t know exactly.’
‘I mean, do you think she might have confided in any of them?’
‘I don’t really know … I don’t think it’s awfully likely … What sort of confidence do you mean?’
Immediately she wished she hadn’t asked that last question, but George’s response to it surprised her.
‘Did Rosemary ever say she was afraid of anybody?’
‘Afraid?’ Iris stared.
‘What I’m trying to get at is, did Rosemary have any enemies?’
‘Amongst other women?’
‘No, no, not that kind of thing. Real enemies. There wasn’t anyone—that you knew of—who—who might have had it in for her?’
Iris’s frank stare seemed to upset him. He reddened, muttered:
‘Sounds silly, I know. Melodramatic, but I just wondered.’
It
