Fortune's Lead (3 page)

He started an anecdote which soon had me laughing—as much in response to the twinkle in his eyes as to what he said. Then he began another—about some neighbours of his in Suffolk this time, who were mad keen on hunting. He was an amusing talker—and he definitely was, in the lightest possible way, flirting with me. But, whether it was ethical or not to be flirting with a middle-aged man I’d picked up in a train, I was enjoying myself very much; and I was also hearing quite a lot about Henry’s home in Suffolk. It sounded like some kind of manor house: he mentioned the park, and the stables, all in a casual way, and certainly he had the air of a man who owned a lot of things without being particularly conscious of it. I began to add him up as wealthy, a country gentleman though not a farmer, and he had obviously travelled widely—the conversation turned more than once to places he’d visited abroad. Whatever else he was, he was certainly good company.

It was amazing how easy he was to talk to—or be talked to by: he was doing most of it, occasionally appealing to me to agree with him, or asking for my opinion. At one point he demanded a piece of paper from me on which to play noughts and crosses, to make me bet on the outcome of each game just to see (he said) if I was really an unlucky gambler. Then he started drawing strange shapes on the other corner of the envelope (it was an old one I’d found in my bag for us to write on) and told me to say what they reminded me of: influenced by the fact that he had been making me laugh, I made as many unlikely suggestions as I could, until he rapped me lightly over the knuckles with the gold pencil in his hand.

‘No, be serious! Tell me what you think these are.’

‘Just shapes! Oh, all right. That’s ... a box with something coming out of it. That’s a—a buckle. That’s a star—or a face, this way round. That’s a piece of rubber tubing. That’s a man standing up—oh, it’s not fair, you keep on drawing more.’

‘Go on. The answers are interesting.’

‘Why?’ I asked suspiciously.

‘I’m psychoanalysing you. What’s this?’

‘You’re
what
?’

‘It’s your own fault.’ He twinkled at me. ‘You
will
be such a mystery! I’m learning a lot about your character. What’s this one?’

‘I—I’m not really a mystery at all. I’m a—’

‘Ssh! I’m going to guess! Now come on—tell me what this is.’

‘The sun,’ I said, feeling suddenly as if this wasn’t a game any more. ‘But you don’t—’

‘It can’t be the sun. It’s black. Guess again.’

‘A black sun.’ I was coming abruptly back to a consciousness of who I was and where I was going—and about time too. A quick glance at my watch and another out of the window showed me where we were, and I jumped up quickly. ‘We’re nearly into London. I must go and get my luggage. I’m sorry—’

‘I’ll come and help you.’ Henry came to his feet in a quick neat movement, flipped the envelope over on the table, and put it away in his pocket. ‘What a pity we have to part so soon. I’ve enjoyed your company, Shah.’

‘Oh, yes—I—’Now we were standing up, I found myself looking down at him, which made me feel large and awkward. I smiled at him doubtfully, and said, ‘Please don’t bother—I’ve only got one suitcase, and you’ve got your own things to collect up—’

‘Nonsense, of course I must. Show me where you were sitting. There’s always plenty of time—the train doesn’t go on anywhere. I wouldn’t dream of leaving you to manage on your own.’

With him standing waiting, smiling at me, I could only lead the way along the corridor to my carriage, and let him get my suitcase off the rack for me. I was suddenly miserably conscious of everything: the way I had been chattering and laughing with a perfect stranger, and letting him call me a silly short nickname which no one else would have dreamed of using; the need to decide on a new job; the future; Robert; everything. Most particularly I was feeling agonizingly shy of Henry Thurlanger as the train drew into the station—supposing he asked to see me again? Supposing he thought I always picked people up on trains? Supposing he thought I was really somebody quite different—as he must ... I opened the carriage door quickly, and jumped out, holding out my hand for my suitcase, and looking up into a pair of smiling, quizzical grey eyes above me.

‘Th—thank you very much, Mr. Thurlanger. I’ve enjoyed meeting you very much. And as—as a matter of fact I’m not a mystery at all, and I’m not an actress either, I’m a nurse! Goodbye!’

I turned and fled quickly, and as I made for the platform barrier I was mentally kicking myself. I couldn’t, I thought bitterly, have made a more undignified exit. In fact I couldn’t have behaved with less dignity altogether. But he was nice, I thought stubbornly, and why shouldn’t I have talked to him, when there was absolutely no harm in it? After all, he had a daughter of—what had he said she was? Seventeen? And he hadn’t shown the least sign of thinking I was disreputable, nor was he in the least disreputable himself, quite the reverse in fact—if you discounted that amused, faintly wicked look he wore. He must have thought me idiotic, saying I was one thing and then another, and then running away like that with the barest of goodbyes—if he bothered to think about me at all.

The trouble was, Old Charlotte was back—she was closing in on me. I almost reached up to pat my hair into its usual neat bun, and I could feel my mouth primming into a straight line. Staff Nurse Armitage, quiet, efficient, dull, and very much a vicar’s daughter, was taking me over, with all Robert’s cautious attitudes behind her.

With a last kick of rebellion, as I walked decorously down to the Underground, I told myself bitterly that Henry Thurlanger would be shocked if he knew he had been talking to anyone so
serious.

Not, of course, that I was ever likely to see him again.

CHAPTER II

I arrived home to find everyone busy organizing a jumble sale. My mother said, a little dubiously, that I looked very nice, but I’d better change into something old to help. My father (whose mind was rarely on externals) patted me unnoticingly on the shoulder and said it was lovely to have me home. My elder sister Jill, who was pretty and smart and might have appreciated the difference in me, was away on holiday with her husband and two children; and my younger sister Cleo was round at a friend’s house practising life-drawing (she was an art student) and avoiding the Jumble. After odd looks from one or two parishioners, I decided to wash my hair back to its usual nondescript blonde in the morning. By the time Cleo finally came home it was screwed back in a bunch, anyway, and streaked with dust from the effort of putting up stalls, so my sudden attack of smartness was already a thing of the past.

It seemed to have been decided that Robert’s name shouldn’t be mentioned, but the family was noticeably extra nice to me. Cleo even roused herself to the extent of bringing me breakfast in bed, which was very unlike her, and made me feel as if she was expecting me to go into a Victorian decline. (I had put my new clothes away without showing them to her, because, with a touch of New Charlotte stirring, I was unwilling to find her appropriating the lot.) It was generally taken that I was going to have a holiday while I looked round for another job, and I found myself steadily slipping further and further into what people expected me to be. I had been the quiet, sensible middle sister for years, and the family and the parishioners were too used to the image to expect anything different.

I had to decide on the future, even though both my parents kept telling me kindly that there was no hurry, and that they were enjoying having me at home. I looked through the nursing papers; I even sent up for leaflets on being an Army nurse (and a Naval nurse, and an Air Force nurse) and studied them dispiritedly in between helping my mother with the Girl Guides, the Mothers’ Union, the Ladies’ Sewing Circle, and the Old People’s Welfare Committee. My leaflets showed me prospects of overseas travel, leisure, allowances, social activities—it was all painted in glowing colours, but somehow I couldn’t feel enthusiastic. On the other hand, I couldn’t go on being simply the Vicar’s useful, serious-minded daughter indefinitely; but taking any definite step, in any direction, seemed to be beyond me. I reflected again that I had been letting Robert make up my mind for years—and I even had to put up with a tearful session from Robert’s mother, who didn’t like his new wife at all. Finally, with the feeling that I had better do
something
constructive, I rang up a nursing friend with a flat in London and asked if I could go and stay with her while I surveyed the prospects. She was delighted, she said, and it would be splendid to catch up on each other’s careers and talk shop in the evenings. Resolutely, I refused to acknowledge that my heart promptly sank at the prospect, and arranged to stay with her for a week. Julia Ames would probably be good for me, anyway. She was a girl with very definite ideas.

Julia had also, I discovered by the time I had stayed with her for a few days, increased her passion for abdominal surgery. When she came in on the third evening of my stay, I prepared myself for a description of someone’s mangled intestines across the lamb chops we were having for supper, and tried to remind myself that I, like her, was a dedicated daughter of the nursing profession. However, tonight she had something else on her mind: the frivolity of the probationers working under her at the hospital, a gaunt building a few minutes’ walk from her flat, whose appearance reminded me discouragingly of the similarly gaunt edifice at Grimsbridge.

‘Giggling in corners instead of getting on with their work!’ she said explosively. ‘All because there’s a fair going up on the waste ground round the corner! Staff Nurse, have you ever had your palm read! No, I most certainly have not had my palm read, I told them, and if you like to waste your money the more fools you!’

‘Really?’ I said idly. ‘I wouldn’t mind having mine read,’ and looked up to see Julia’s eyes rounding with indignant surprise.

‘You wouldn’t really encourage that kind of superstitious nonsense, would you? No, of course you wouldn’t.’ She swept my opinions out of the way without more ado. ‘The woman’s no more a gypsy than you or I, of course, and the sooner Matron puts the fair out of bounds to the juniors the better. It happens every year. They go over there, pick up with the most undesirable boys, eat yards of candyfloss, make themselves sick on the big dipper, and end up in sick bay to recover! And this time it’s fortune-telling! Tall, dark strangers and journeys across the sea, I ask you! And ten shillings—
ten shillings,
my dear, to be told a lot of nonsense by some creature who says the same to everybody! It’s scandalous.’

‘But reasonably harmless,’ I said mildly—mainly because
I
was growing tired of Julia’s always assuming I agreed with her.

‘Oh, nonsense, Charlotte! I can’t imagine what your father would think if he could hear you!’

My father, whom Julia had never met, had been known to say in his gentle way that palmistry was an interesting subject. I didn’t comment. I didn’t need to: Julia was going on, along her own tracks. She was busy complaining that the standard of girls accepted for nursing training had definitely gone down since our day.

I sat back and let her words wash over me and tried not to feel old. After a while I stopped listening, lacking the energy to argue a case for the young girls who did at least sign on for nursing training, or to point out that raising the entrance age and educational requirements would simply increase the staff shortage and cut out several girls who ended up as very good nurses indeed. It wasn’t until there was a long enough pause for me to realize that some answer was expected that I came out of my coma and looked across the table to meet a disapproving gaze.

‘Sorry—what did you say?’ I asked guiltily.

‘There’s a meeting of the Staff Committee tomorrow, so I shan’t be in until quite late. I hope you’ll be able to amuse yourself all right.’

‘Oh—yes, thank you. I can always read. Or I might go to the cinema.’

‘There’s never anything on round here of any value at all. And the West End prices are atrocious.’ Julia looked at me critically. ‘You’ve gone very dreamy these days, Charlotte. You really will have to pull yourself together. When you start going for interviews you don’t want to give the wrong impression.’

Since it was very kind of her to have me to stay I accepted the criticism, and let her lecture me on the type of job I should be looking for. Later, while I was washing up, I turned my hand over and looked at the palm, wondering whether it would be amusing to have it read—even though to do so would make Julia disapprove of me still further. Then I forgot the idea as I tried to be constructive and follow Julia’s instructions to think about the future in suitably solemn terms. She was quite right—I really
must
pull myself together...

The following evening, I discovered that if I opened the windows of the flat I could hear tinny music from not far away, broken by traffic noise but very definitely there. I realized that I hadn’t been to anything so frivolous as a fair for years—if one didn’t count parish garden fetes—and it seemed an appealing alternative to going through the advertisements in the
Nursing Times
with a pin. It occurred to me that a gypsy, however pseudo, would without doubt be better at foretelling my future than I was. Of course, I was a great deal too sensible to
believe
in all that kind of thing... Rebelling against being sensible, I went and got my coat. (Robert had frequently described me as sensible.) After a second’s thought, I slipped on a ring of my grandmother’s, putting it on my engagement finger in a fit of caution:
if
I visited the gypsy, and if she produced a story about love and imminent marriage, I would know how little I could believe in her. But if she knew she was being tested... the thought gave me a little shiver of superstition.

The shiver was still running down my spine, together with a slight wish that I hadn’t been foolish enough to come, when I went in through the fairground gates. It was noisy, and garish, and bright, and I felt done and conspicuous as I picked my way between the stalls. Tomorrow, Saturday, the fair would do even better business, but tonight it was crowded enough. Groups of youths lounged, whistling, swopping caustic remarks with passing pairs of girls. A stallholder shouted to me to come and win a coconut, and on impulse I stopped at the next booth and paid a shilling to fire three shots with a rifle at a row of targets. To my surprise, I hit two of them, which was something, even if it didn’t make me a winner; but I resisted the temptation to have another try. I paused in front of the candyfloss stall where the owner stood twisting his sticks in the fine-spun mixture. The results of his labours stood like fluffy clouds in beautiful colours, but I could remember from childhood that they tasted like sweet cotton-wool, so I wandered on. The big dipper didn’t tempt me, and nor did the roundabout whose swings hurtled outwards on their chains at a terrifying angle as the speed increased. I had told myself I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but somehow after a few minutes I was strolling in the direction of a booth displaying the legend, ‘GYPSY ROSE—Your Future Revealed’. After all, since I was here...

There was a queue outside the booth—girls mostly, but with one or two boys with them, looking superior and disbelieving. I tried to look as casual as they did. It didn’t seem to take many minutes for the mysteries of the future to be discovered: we were moving up in the queue quite fast. Then two girls in front of me broke away, giggling, saying they couldn’t, it was ‘too scary I found I was next, and pushed my way past the flap of the tent into a surprisingly prosaic-looking interior. A bright naked light-bulb on a long flex from the back somewhere dangled overhead, and a few tattered pieces of paper tacked roughly to the tent-sides told how authentic Gypsy Rose was. There was a small green baize card-table with a worn top, and a hard chair each side of it. Gypsy Rose herself, a youngish, ordinary faced woman with hennaed hair, sat on one of them and beckoned me to take my place on the other, beginning her patter in a soft whine.

‘Sit down, dear. Gypsy Rose has the true sight, dear, she can tell you what you want to know. I’m a true-born gypsy dear, give me your hands, first the right and then the left. Let the gypsy feel your hands, dear. I’m going to read what they say, because the gypsies have the true sight, dear, and Gypsy Rose can see. When I’ve read your hands, dear—you’re a working girl, aren’t you, dear? Yes, I thought you were. When I’ve read your hands I’ll give you four wishes, and they’ll be four true wishes, but this is very important, dear, now you must listen to this.’ She paused, the sing-song of her voice broken for a moment, and looked into my face without much interest. ‘When I’ve given you your wishes, dear, four wishes, you can keep them secret to yourself, but you must give Gypsy Rose the money for them, or I can’t hold them for you, dear, and your wishes will be broken. Do you understand, dear?’

‘Yes,’ I said breathlessly, wondering why I had ever come.

‘You have very interesting hands, dear. I can see a good future for you, dear.’ She hadn’t looked at my hands at all as far as I could see. Her voice went on, in a hypnotic sing-song chant. ‘You’ve been unhappy, dear, you’ve been through a trouble, but there’s a different time coming, I can see a change in your life. There’s a whole new life opening up for you, dear.’ She looked briefly into my face. ‘Have you had a loss? Someone close to you?’

I shook my head.

‘I can see a loss, dear. But you’re going to make a journey, you’re not going to cross water, it’s not a long journey, but you’ll find your heart at the end of it. I can see a man, an older man, and he’s going to bring you your heart’s desire. He’s going to have a great influence on your life, dear. Are you interested in animals, dear?’

The question was a surprise: it took me a moment to find my voice. I said, ‘N—not very.’

‘You’re going to have something to do with animals, dear. It’s not the same as what you do now, it’s something quite different. I can see marriage for you, dear, and many years of happiness. You have a lot of happiness ahead of you. This man, this older man, he’s going to have a lot of influence over you. I see him in the future for you very clearly.’

‘Have I met him yet?’ I asked quickly as she paused for breath, and I thought a shade of annoyance crossed her face.

‘He’s in your future, dear, some time near, that’s all I can tell you.’ She might just as well have told me not to interrupt. ‘You’ve been working in a big building, haven’t you, dear? There’s a lot of people round you. You work hard, but you’re not happy. You’ll find your happiness ahead, but it won’t be for a little while. There’s someone who’ll upset you, but you’ll be comforted. There’s a change in your life coming soon.’ She glanced down at my hands again, very perfunctorily. ‘I see rich people round you. You’ll have an easy life, but there’s a dark man crossing your path, and you shouldn’t trust him. It’s the other one you should trust, dear, or things won’t come out right for you.’

It was all so standard, with its dark men, and journeys, and money coming to me, that this time when she paused I made to pull my hands away. Gypsy Rose tightened her grip. She said, as if automatically, ‘You must hold the gypsy’s hands while you make your wishes, dear.’ and then, abruptly, ‘You’ve a doubting nature, dear. This ring you wear—it wasn’t given you by a man, it’s a family ring. There’s the letter H. in your life, but the ring’s from someone in the past. Now make your wishes dear. Make them faithfully and I’ll hold them for you. Three wishes first, dear, and then one, and make them with Gypsy Rose now.’

I was gasping at what she’d said about the ring, and for a second I couldn’t think of anything to wish. The superstitious shiver was crawling up my spine again, and I started trying to remember everything she’d said, in case it all came true. Then I remembered I was supposed to be wishing: hastily, I wished for a new job, that my father would reach his target for the Rebuilding Fund, and that Cleo would pass her next lot of exams. (They were the only things I could think of offhand, and Cleo always passed her exams anyway.) I needed a fourth wish, but my mind went blank. I heard Gypsy Rose telling me again that I must give her the money I owed her, or my wishes would be broken. Half of me told me sceptically that that was a clever trick—a way to frighten people into parting with their money whether they were satisfied with her reading or not—but my other half was busy trying not to believe old stories of gypsies cursing people, and having uncanny powers. Finally, as Gypsy Rose’s hands began to slide away from mine, I made a weak wish to be happy. It was a childish thing to wish, but I was too flustered to think of anything else. I groped quickly in my handbag for my purse as I stood up. The money I handed over went into Gypsy Rose’s apron pocket, and then I was outside the tent, and the next candidate for ten shillings’ worth of fortune was going in.