It was very faint, because Rosalie Tamplin was used to her daughter’s outspokenness and to what she called Lenox’s uncomfortable way of putting things.
“I was wondering,” said Lady Tamplin, again drawing her artistically pencilled brows together, “whether—oh, good morning, Chubby darling: are you going to play tennis? How nice!”
Chubby, thus addressed, smiled kindly at her, remarked perfunctorily, “How topping you look in that peach-coloured thing,” and drifted past them and down the steps.
“The dear thing,” said Lady Tamplin, looking affectionately after her husband. “Let me see, what was I saying? Ah!” She switched her mind back to business once more. “I was wondering—”
“Oh, for God’s sake get on with it. That is the third time you have said that.”
“Well, dear,” said Lady Tamplin, “I was thinking that it would be very nice if I wrote to dear Katherine and suggested that she should pay us a little visit out here. Naturally, she is quite out of touch with Society. It would be nicer for her to be launched by one of her own people. An advantage for her and an advantage for us.”
“How much do you think you would get her to cough up?” asked Lenox.
Her mother looked at her reproachfully and murmured:
“We should have to come to some financial arrangement, of course. What with one thing and another—the War—your poor father—”
“And Chubby now,” said Lenox. “He is an expensive luxury if you like.”
“She was a nice girl as I remember her,” murmured Lady Tamplin, pursuing her own line of thought—“quiet, never wanted to shove herself forward, not a beauty, and never a manhunter.”
“She will leave Chubby alone, then?” said Lenox.
Lady Tamplin looked at her in protest. “Chubby would never—” she began.
“No,” said Lenox, “I don’t believe he would; he knows a jolly sight too well which way his bread is buttered.”
“Darling,” said Lady Tamplin, “you have such a coarse way of putting things.”
“Sorry,” said Lenox.
Lady Tamplin gathered up the Daily Mail and her négligé, a vanity bag, and various odd letters.
“I shall write to dear Katherine at once,” she said, “and remind her of the dear old days at Edgeworth.”
She went into the house, a light of purpose shining in her eyes.
Unlike Mrs. Samuel Harfield, correspondence flowed easily from her pen. She covered four sheets without pause or effort, and on rereading it found no occasion to alter a word.
Katherine received it on the morning of her arrival in London. Whether she read between the lines of it or not is another matter. She put it in her handbag and started out to keep the appointment she had made with Mrs. Harfield’s lawyers.
The firm was an old established one in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and after a few minutes’ delay Katherine was shown into the presence of the senior partner, a kindly, elderly man with shrewd blue eyes and a fatherly manner.
They discussed Mrs. Harfield’s will and various legal matters for some twenty minutes, then Katherine handed the lawyer Mrs. Samuel’s letter.
“I had better show you this, I suppose,” she said, “though it is really rather ridiculous.”
He read it with a slight smile.
“Rather a crude attempt, Miss Grey. I need hardly tell you, I suppose, that these people have no claim of any kind upon the estate, and if they endeavour to contest the will no court will uphold them.”
“I thought as much.”
“Human nature is not always very wise. In Mrs. Samuel Harfield’s place, I should have been more inclined to make an appeal to your generosity.”
“That is one of the things I want to speak to you about. I should like a certain sum to go to these people.”
“There is no obligation.”
“I know that.”
“And they will not take it in the spirit it is meant. They will probably regard it as an attempt to pay them off, though they will not refuse it on that account.”
“I can see that, and it can’t be helped.”
“I should advise you, Miss Grey, to put that idea out of your mind.”
Katherine shook her head. “You are quite right, I know, but I should like it done all the same.”
“They will grab at the money and abuse you all the more afterwards.”
“Well,” said Katherine, “let them if they like. We all have our own ways of enjoying ourselves. They were, after all, Mrs. Harfield’s only relatives, and though they despised her as a poor relation and paid no attention to her when she was alive, it seems to me unfair that they should be cut off with nothing.”
She carried her point, though the lawyer was still unwilling, and she presently went out into the streets of London with a comfortable assurance that she could spend money freely and make what plans she liked for the future. Her first action was to visit the establishment of a famous dressmaker.
A slim, elderly Frenchwoman, rather like a dreaming duchess, received her, and Katherine spoke with a certain näveté.
“I want, if I may, to put myself in your hands. I have been very poor all my life and know nothing about clothes, but now I have come into some money and want to look really well-dressed.”
The Frenchwoman was charmed. She had an artist’s temperament, which had been soured earlier in the morning by a visit from an Argentine meat queen, who had insisted on having those models least suited to her flamboyant type of beauty. She scrutinized Katherine with keen, clever eyes. “Yes—yes, it will be a pleasure. Mademoiselle has a very good figure; for her the simple lines will be best. She is also très anglaise. Some people it would offend them if I said that, but Mademoiselle no. Une belle Anglaise, there is no style more delightful.”
The demeanour of a dreaming duchess was suddenly put off. She screamed out directions to various mannequins. “Clothilde, Virginie, quickly, my little ones, the little tailleur gris clair and the robe de soirée ‘soupir d’automne.’ Marcelle, my child, the little mimosa suit of crêpe de chine.”
It was a charming morning. Marcelle, Clothilde, Virginie, bored and scornful, passed slowly round, squirming and wriggling in the time-honoured fashion of mannequins. The Duchess stood by Katherine and made entries in a small notebook.
“An excellent choice, Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle has great goût. Yes, indeed. Mademoiselle cannot do better than those little suits if she is going to the Riviera, as I suppose, this winter.”
“Let me see that evening dress once more,” said Katherine—“the pinky mauve one.”
Virginie appeared, circling slowly.
“That is the prettiest of all,” said Katherine, as she surveyed the exquisite draperies of mauve and grey and blue. “What do you call it?”
“Soupir d’automne; yes, yes, that is truly the dress of Mademoiselle.”
What was there in these words that came back to Katherine with a faint feeling of sadness after she had left the dressmaking establishment?
“ ‘Soupir d’automne; that is truly the dress of Mademoiselle.’ ” Autumn, yes, it was autumn for her. She who had never known spring or summer, and would never know them now. Something she had lost never could be given to her again. These years of servitude in St. Mary Mead—and all the while life passing by.
“I am an idiot,” said Katherine. “I am an idiot. What do I want? Why, I was more contented a month ago than I am now.”
She drew out from her handbag the letter she had received that morning from Lady Tamplin. Katherine was no fool. She understood the nuances of that letter as well as anybody and the reason of Lady Tamplin’s sudden show of affection towards a long-forgotten cousin was not lost upon her. It was for profit and not for pleasure that Lady Tamplin was so anxious for the company of her dear cousin. Well, why not? There would be profit on both sides.
“I will go,” said Katherine.
She was walking down Piccadilly at the moment, and turned into Cook’s to clinch the matter then and there. She had to wait for a few minutes. The man with whom the clerk was engaged was also going to the Riviera. Everyone, she felt, was going. Well, for the first time in her life, she, too, would be doing what “everybody” did.
The man in front of her turned abruptly, and she stepped into his place. She made her demand to the clerk, but at the same time half of her mind was busy with something else. That man’s face—in some vague way it was familiar to her. Where had she seen him before? Suddenly she remembered. It was in the Savoy outside her room that morning. She had collided with him in the passage. Rather an odd coincidence that she should run into him twice in a day. She glanced over her shoulder, rendered uneasy by something, she knew not what. The man was standing in the doorway looking back at her. A cold shiver passed over Katherine; she had a haunting sense of tragedy, of doom impending. . . .
Then she shook the impression from her with her usual good sense and turned her whole attention to what the clerk was saying.
Nine
AN OFFER REFUSED
It was rarely that Derek Kettering allowed his temper to get the better of him. An easygoing insouciance was his chief characteristic, and it had stood him in good stead in more than one tight corner. Even now, by the time he had left Mirelle’s flat, he had cooled down. He had need of coolness. The corner he was in now was a tighter one than he had ever been in before, and unforeseen factors had arisen with which, for the moment, he did not know how to deal.