No Time For Love (Bantam Series No. 40) (5 page)

A sudden thought struck him.

“What are we going to tell Mama?”

“Oh, God!” Harvey ejaculated, then quickly he added: “We will just have to pretend that you have had an urgent message from one of your lady-friends.”

“She is not going to be pleased about that!” Wynstan said. “And she particularly wants me here now when she is so upset about Elvin.”

“Mama will always accept that affairs of the heart—yours at any rate—come first!” Harvey said with an almost spiteful note in his voice.

“And I think,” Gary interrupted, “she is secretly rather proud of your success. She thinks you are a chip off the old Hamilton block, who from what Mama tells us behaved in a very reprehensible manner with the lassies in the heather before they were told to get out of Scotland!”

“I will think of something to tell her,” Wynstan said in a weary voice, “but if I find that you, Harvey, have been decrying me behind my back or saying any unpleasant things such as you have said in the past, I swear I will tell her the truth.”

“I promise you I will support you in every possible way,” Harvey replied. “And another reason why it is so important for you not to go to London is that Tracy might ask questions. We do not want that supercilious Duke of hers looking down his aristocratic nose and saying that the English do not get into this sort of jam!”

“Personally, I like Osmund,” Wynstan said. “He is not supercilious to me. At the same time it is important that Tracy should not learn about this, if indeed there is anything to learn.”

He walked towards the door.

“Personally, I think I shall find that the whole drama is a figment of Harvey’s fertile imagination.”

“Where are you going?” Harvey asked hastily. “We have to compile a cablegram.”

“You can do that without me,” Wynstan answered. “If I
have to sail across the Atlantic, which let me say is the last thing I want to do at this moment, I might as well do it in comfort. The
‘
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse
’
sails tomorrow morning, and I will be on her.”

He left the room and closed the door behind him.

Gary and Harvey looked at each other.

“I congratulate you, Harvey,” Gary said. “I never thought for one moment that Wynstan would agree to what you suggested.”

“Frankly neither did I,” Harvey replied.

Wynstan boarded the
‘
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse
’ just before she was ready to leave New York harbour on the morning tide. She was noted as being fitted out with every comfort and also providing the maximum amount of entertainment with which to while away the passage across the ocean.

Wynstan was however more interested in the passenger
-
list of which he had taken a copy from the Purser’s office.

Although his booking had been made at the last moment, the magic name of Vanderfeld had secured for him one of the best suites and only the Purser was aware of how difficult it had been to re-allot the other passengers without causing offence.

However as an experienced traveller, Wynstan approved his cabins, tipped his stewards, which he always did at the beginning of the voyage, and left his valet to arrange things in the manner he found most comfortable.

He settled himself down in an arm-chair, ordered a drink, and studied the passenger-list.

There had been no-one to wave him good-bye on the Quay, a custom he always detested. It suited him that Harvey had been insistent that he should creep out of America as quietly as possible, so that no-one, except his immediate family should be aware that he was leaving.

“For God’s sake, Wynstan, do not get involved with the Press,” he said. “You know what they are like if they suspect that anything unusual is occurring.”

Wynstan however had been concerned less about the Press than about his mother.

“I thought you would stay with me, darling,” Mrs. Vanderfeld said tearfully when he told her he had to sail to Europe immediately.

“I know, Mama, and I wished to be with you now,” Wynstan replied, “but I have unfortunately promised to help this friend of mine if he was ever in trouble, and now he is keeping me to my promise.”

“He?” Mrs. Vanderfeld asked suspiciously. “You do not expect me to believe, Wynstan, that there is not a woman at the bottom of it?”

“Your mind invariably works in the same direction, Mama,” Wynstan replied with a smile. “There must be some French blood in you because your maxim is always
‘
cherchez la femme
’!”

“With reason!” Mrs. Vanderfeld replied. “I thought you had finished your affair with that French actress, what was her name?”

“Gaby Deslys,” Wynstan answered. “How did you know about her?”

“I hear about everything,” Mrs. Vanderfeld said with satisfaction, “and although you are determined not to tell me the truth about this hasty journey of yours, you can be sure I will learn every detail about it sooner or later!”

“I am sure you will, Mama,” Wynstan agreed.

His mother looked at him as he sat on the end of her enormous bed, an imitation of the elaborate blue and silver one used by King Ludwig of Bavaria.

The curtains, dressing-table cover, pillow cases and the edges of the sheets were all edged with real Venetian lace, and there was a balustrade separating the bed from the rest of the room as in most Royal State bed-rooms in France and Bavaria.

“I suppose,” Wynstan had said when he first saw it, “that only princes of the blood are allowed behind the balustrade.”

“Really, Wynstan, you are not to say such things!” his mother had replied.

At the same time she loved it when he teased her, especially about her admirers of whom she had quite a number even in her old age.

“You know, Wynstan,” she said now looking at his handsome face appreciatively. “I think you are a throw-back to one of my forbears who was a pirate and buccaneer at the time of Queen Elizabeth. He had a way with women. Otherwise, the Queen would have had little use for him.”

“And yet she remained a virgin,” Wynstan said.

“I have often had my doubts about that!” Mrs. Vanderfeld remarked, and her son laughed.

“If you talk like that in front of Harvey, Mama, he will have a stroke! He is running his whole campaign on purity and insists that we must all be Puritans!”

“It is the last thing I have ever wanted to be,” Mrs. Vanderfeld said sharply. “Harvey is an old woman—he always has been! At the same time I would like to see him at the White House.”

“And so would I,” Wynstan said. “It would make him so happy, and at least he is a great deal better-looking than Theodore Roosevelt!”

“That would not be difficult!” Mrs. Vanderfeld snapped, “but I am not certain you would not make a more effective President!”

Wynstan put up his hands in horror.

“Have you forgotten I am the play-boy of the family?”

“Is it not time you began to think about settling down?” Mrs. Vanderfeld asked. “You have had a great deal of fun in the past few years, and I do not blame you. But I would like to see your son before I die.”

Wynstan laughed.

“That is a very good line, Mama, but you are not really thinking of dying, although you give us a fright occasionally, as you did last month. You know really you are as tough as your pioneering ancestors and you will easily live to be a hundred!”

“I might do that just to spite you all!” Mrs. Vanderfeld said. “As long as I am alive I can keep the family under control, at least where the others are concerned!”

“And I am the exception?” Wynstan asked.

“You always were an obstinate, uppity little boy,” Mrs. Vanderfeld said, “but you managed, even when you were very young, to charm a bird off a tree if it suited you.”

“It always suited me where you were concerned, Mama,”
Wynstan said, “and I think the reason I have never married is that I have never found anyone half as amusing, as witty, or as attractive as you.”

“There you go!” Mrs. Vanderfeld exclaimed. “Now I am quite certain that you have something to hide from me, or you would not be going out of your way to flatter me.”

She looked at her son and her eyes twinkled rather like
his.

“Do what you have to do,” she said, “then come back and tell me all about it. I get a vicarious excitement at my age hearing about your love-affairs.”

“As a change from your own, Mama?” Wynstan asked and again she laughed.

She had however kissed him very tenderly when he said good-bye to her.

“Take care of yourself, my darling,” she said softly. “You are my baby now that Elvin is gone and I shall be thinking about you and praying that you will come back safely.”

“I will be back, Mama,” Wynstan replied, “and just as quickly as I can manage it.”

“And remember what I have said about that son of yours,” Mrs. Vanderfeld cried as he reached the door.

“You have enough men loving you already,” Wynstan replied and they were both laughing as he shut the door of her bed-room.

Looking down at the list of 332 first class passengers Wynstan found a name that held his attention.

The Earl and Countess of Glencairn were on ‘B’ deck.

He had known the Earl for some years, an elderly Peer, who had once been an outstanding rider to hounds. He had broken his leg when he was over seventy and now had to spend his time in a wheel-chair.

He had, however, a few years before this happened taken as his second wife an extremely attractive dark-eyed Frenchwoman.

She had had a somewhat chequered career in Paris, and it had undoubtedly been an achievement on her part to confound those who criticised her by stepping into the English Peerage.

Wynstan had met her six months before when she had dined with his sister at the Duke’s magnificent house near Oxford. He had sat next to her at dinner, and she had flirted with him in a manner which had told him they were both masters of the ancient art.

There was a slightly cynical smile on Wynstan Vanderfeld’s lips as he put down the passenger-list.

The voyage would not be as boring as he had anticipated.

CHAPTER T
HREE

L
arina felt as if her heart had already stopped beating.

She could think of nothing except that the days, hours and minutes were passing and while she felt she ought to do something special, something important before she died, she had no idea how to set about it.

She felt as if her will-power had dissolved and she needed, more than she had ever needed in her life before, someone to take control of the situation and tell her what to do.

She could only wait with a kind of hopelessness for Elvin’s reply to her cable.

Supposing, she thought, he was too ill to answer her cry for help?

Because the idea made her frantic she would take out his letters every hour and read the last one she had received from him from America.

He told her how pleased his mother had been to see him
and also that he had in fact stood the journey far better than he expected.

“I think the sea air did me good,” he wrote. “It made me think of you and a grey day reminded me of your eyes.”

His letters were not long and Larina knew that even if he had wished to write more it would have been too much of an effort.

And yet he had said he felt better. That in itself was encouraging and she was sure that Elvin was alive, otherwise she would have been aware of it.

Because she had felt so terribly lonely when she first returned to London she had tried to remember all he had told her.

“How can you ever be alone,” he had said, “when there is life all around you?”

Remembering his words and telling herself how much they must mean to her now that she had no one to turn to in her loneliness, she walked through the streets into Hyde Park.

It was a relief to get away from the little house which was so silent and oppressive, and there was a sharpness in the wind which made her think of the clear, crisp air of Switzerland.

She walked across the green grass until she reached the Serpentine and although it had been a dull day until then, a pale sun came out and she sat down on a bench near the water.

She looked around and realised that the daffodils were in bloom and the red tulips stood in the flower-beds like Guardsmen.

She had been so intent on her worries which encompassed her like a fog, that walking through the Park she had seen nothing and been aware of nothing except her fear of the future and the difficulties of getting a job.

She pretended that Elvin was there beside her, telling her that there was life everywhere and that she was a part of it.

“Oh, Elvin, Elvin!” she whispered. “Help me! Help me!”

She felt as if she shouted the words aloud. But there was no reply, only the rustle of the wind blowing the dead leaves which still lay beneath the trees and the movement of the branches overhead which were just beginning to show the first green buds of spring.

The wind rippled the water of the Serpentine and the daffodils bent their heads as the breeze touched them.

“I am a part of it, and it is a part of me,” Larina told herself, but she felt they were only words and she could not really understand them.

Then suddenly there was a light on the water that was almost blinding, the daffodils were as golden as the sun itself and she could almost see the grass growing beneath her feet.

It was intense, magic, divine, a glory which lighted the sky and her soul.

She was one with it and it was part of her!

Then as she longed to cling to the vividness and the beauty of it, to hold it close, to be sure it was really happening, it was gone!

It was so momentary, such a transitory experience, that when it was past she thought it must have been an illusion. Yet at the same time she knew it had happened!

“Now I understand what Elvin was saying,” she told herself.

She tried to recapture the radiance, but while the sun was still on the water, it had not the light that she had seen for that one incredible moment.

“Perhaps it will grow easier with practice,” Larina hoped.

The moment of magic glowed like a jewel in her mind as she walked homewards.

It had uplifted and elated her, but it was not exactly comforting. It just made her long more desperately for Elvin to tell her more, to be with her.

She did not forget it as the days passed; she kept trying to make it happen again; but the ecstasy and the wonder eluded her.

Now she could think of nothing but the moment when her heart beating in her breast would stop; when the breath moving in and out of her lungs would cease.

She could only call out to Elvin, as he had told her to do, in her mind and pray that he would answer her cable.

Only Elvin could keep her from being terrified as she knew she would be when the twenty-first day arrived.

If Elvin could not leave at once, it would be too late, and even if he did they would only have a very short time together!

It seemed impossible that what she had said to him in Switzerland had come true.

“I might easily die before you,” she had told him, but she had not meant it.

It had just been a way of talking, but now she knew she would not outlive Elvin, and she was not prepared, as he was, to face the inevitability of death.

‘Help me, help me!’ she cried in her heart as she walked home.

She felt there was something almost menacing about the empty house as she entered the door which needed painting, saw the shabby stair-carpet and felt the silence.

Neither she nor her mother had cared much for 68 Eaton Terrace.

They had in fact both hated leaving their big comfortable home in Sussex Gardens on the other side of the Park.

When Dr. Milton had died unexpectedly from a virus he had caught from one of his patients, his wife found the house belonged to his partners in the practice.

Larina and her mother had also discovered in consternation that he had left very little money.

Dr. Milton had a fairly lucrative practice amongst well
-
to-do people who lived in that part of London.

But being a man of deep compassion and sympathy, he treated a great number of the poor in the slums around Paddington without charging them a fee, and moreover out of his own pocket, he often provided them with medicines and small luxuries they could not afford for themselves.

Many of his poorer patients carrying pathetic little bunches of flowers attended his funeral, all of them ready to talk of the ‘good doctor’ and his kindness.

At the same time it was depressing to realise how little money he had left his wife and daughter.

Because her mother was so unhappy and in a state of collapse after her father’s death it had been left to Larina to find them a place to live.

Because she thought it was a good idea for her mother’s sake to get away from the neighbourhood where she had been so happy, Larina had gone south of the Park and searched round Belgravia for a cheap house to rent.

The one she had found in Eaton Terrace was certainly cheap, but it seemed small, stuffy and unattractive even after it had been furnished with the things they brought with them.

“It is stupid of me, I know,” Mrs. Milton had said after they had been in it a few weeks, “but I find it difficult to think of this house as home.”

She was finding it, Larina knew, far more difficult to adjust herself to being a widow with no husband to take care of her.

Mrs. Milton had always been cosseted and loved all her life. She had no desire for independence nor was she interested in the much talked of emancipation of women.

“I do not want to vote, darling,” she said to her husband once in Larina’s hearing. “I am quite content for you to explain the political situation to me if I have to hear about it, and, quite frankly, I would rather talk of something else.”

“I am afraid you will never make an efficient modern woman,” her husband had replied with a smile.

“I just want to be your wife,” Mrs. Milton had said with an adoring look in her eyes.

They had been so happy together that sometimes Larina had felt unwanted.

Yet she knew that her father loved her deeply, and when he died her mother clung to her in a manner which assured her over and over again how much she mattered.

But now she was alone and she realised how unfit she was to endure loneliness after the close companionship she had enjoyed with her parents.

“Perhaps it is a good thing to have so short a time to live,” she told herself somewhat bitterly. “I have been brought up in the wrong way to cope with a world where a woman is helpless alone.”

She thought of how when she was on her way to visit Sir John Coleridge she had been planning that she must get a job as a secretary.

It had been an idea, but she knew that there was a great deal of unemployment in the country at the moment and it was very unlikely that anyone would employ a woman when they could obtain the services of a man.

Restlessly she walked up to the Drawing-Room to look at her mother’s special treasures: the work-box of inlaid marquetry in which she had always kept her embroidery, the little French writing-desk between the windows on which stood photographs of her father and herself.

She touched the china ornaments on the mantelpiece which had been a present one Christmas and which her mother had loved because they were so pretty.

Looking at them Larina noticed that the china shepherdess’s hand was missing.

She felt angry that the tenants should have been so careless and had not even repaired the broken piece. Then she asked herself why should it matter?

Her mother would not know that the precious mementoes of her married life had been damaged, and in a few days she herself would not be there to see them either.

“What am I to do with all these things?” Larina asked herself in a sudden fright. “I cannot just die without telling someone I have no further use for them.”

She tried to think of a friend in whom she could confide. But while her father and mother had many acquaintances where they had been living in Sussex Gardens, she had, by usual convention, not been allowed to take part in the social entertaining given by her parents.

Being shy, she had not made friends with the few girls she had met. But her mother had always talked as if everything would alter when she was grown up.

“We must give a Ball for Larina,” she had said to her husband once. “You had better start saving, John, because when she is eighteen, I intend to be very extravagant about her clothes, especially her evening-gowns.”

“You will be saying next that you want to present her at Court!” Dr. Milton replied.

“Why not?” his wife asked. “I was presented when I was eighteen!”

“Your family lived in rather different circumstances,” the Doctor replied.

“All the Courtneys were presented,” her mother said with
dignity, “and I would not feel I was doing my duty by Larina unless she went to Buckingham Palace to make her curtsey.” She smiled at her daughter as she spoke and said:

“If they do not think I am important enough to present you, my darling, I shall ask your godmother, Lady Sanderson. She has always sent you a present at Christmas. Although she lives in the country and we seldom meet, I know she is still the dear friend she always was.”

But Lady Sanderson had died the following year and her mother had wept at losing a friend who had meant a great deal to her, Larina gathered, in her childhood.

So there was no Lady Sanderson to whom she could turn now, and having been away for a year in Switzerland, and the year before that being in deep mourning, she found it was difficult even to remember the names of the people who had come to the house in Sussex Gardens.

“Besides,” Larina asked herself, “who wants to meet someone who merely seeks comfort because they are afraid of their approaching death?”

She knew that apart from anything else she would feel shy to talk about the fate which hung over her like the sword of Damocles.

‘I will keep it to myself,’ she thought with sudden pride. ‘I will not whine and complain as women used to do to Papa.’ She could remember her father saying once:

“I am fed up with grizzling women!”

“What do you mean, ‘grizzling women’?” her mother asked with a smile.

“The ones who have more aches and pains than anyone else! Needless to say, they are always the richest! The poor are concerned with the fundamentals such as being born, keeping alive and having the bravery to die, as one man said to me, ‘with his boots on’.”

“They have courage,” Mrs. Milton said softly.

“That is what I admire about them,” the Doctor said. “Many of them are bad, the reformers call them wicked, but at least they have guts! It is the other sort I cannot stand!”

“I must not complain ... I must be brave,” Larina told herself. “I would want Papa to be proud of me.”

She sat down on the sofa and wondered what she should do. There were things that wanted mending and quite a lot of the furniture needed repairing.

But what was the point of doing it?

It was then that there came the sound of the front-door bell ringing in the basement. She could hear it quite clearly in the empty silence of the house.

‘Whoever can it be?’ she wondered then suddenly thought it might be a cable from Elvin.

She jumped to her feet and there was a light in her eyes that had not been there before as she ran down the stairs.

Hastily she pulled open the front-door, but it was not a telegraph-boy who stood there as she had expected, but a man, middle-aged, well-dressed and wearing a bowler hat.

He appeared to Larina to be a kind of superior clerk or perhaps someone in the Civil Service as a number of her father’s patients had been.

“Does Miss Larina Milton live here?” he asked.

“I am Miss Milton!”

She saw there was a faint look of surprise in his eyes as if he had not expected her to open the door.

Then because she felt it might seem strange to admit that she was alone in the house Larina added:

“I am afraid the maid is out!”

“May I speak with you, Miss Milton?” the man asked.

He had removed his bowler hat when she had appeared and she saw his hair was grey and she told herself he looked extremely respectable.

At the same time she did not like to let him into the house.

“What is it about?” she enquired.

As she spoke she wondered if in fact he had come to sell her something.

She was well aware it was often the most unlikely looking people who hawked insurance or expensive goods for sale from door to door.

“I have had a communication from Mr. Elvin Farren,” the man replied.

Her suspicions vanished.

“Oh, will you come in?” she asked quickly.