Seven Dials (22 page)

‘Please, don’t call me Aunt,’ Letty said firmly. ‘It was bad enough having one of you doing that - when Katy first came to me. To have three grown people labelling me so makes me feel older than God.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Sophie said gravely. ‘I’ll try to remember. I was just thinking - I’ve brought some supplies from Tansy Clough with me. One of the farmers killed a pig, you know, so I thought I’d stock Brin’s larder for him. Perhaps you’d like to come along to supper, and bring Mr Lackland here? I’ve plenty for all, and it would be good to be able to get to know each other a little better, wouldn’t it? Families ought to stick together -’

‘We’re quite distant cousins, of course,’ Peter heard himself saying and then was furious with his own idiocy. It had sounded so unkind and he opened his mouth to explain that he hadn’t meant to be ungracious but Sophie nodded, still unsmiling but not appearing at all put out, and said, ‘Oh, I know that. I’ve made quite a study of our family history, in my own way, but still and all we are cousins, and bear the same name, so I hope you’ll come and have a meal with us.’

‘Really, Sophie, must you fuss so?’ Brin said, and his expression was still scowling. ‘I’m sure Peter’s got better things to do -’

‘Not at all,’ Peter heard himself saying, again to his own surprise. ‘I’d love to come to supper. You’re not fussing at all, Miss L—’

‘Mrs Priestly,’ Sophie said. ‘I’m a widow.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Peter said, floundering a little in his embarrassment. This cool quiet woman was really having a very odd effect on him. ‘I should have known - perhaps I did, but I’d forgotten. I was out of England during the War, you see, lost touch with -’

‘There was no reason why you should have known,’ she said and dismissed the matter as unimportant, turning back to Letty. ‘Where will we find Katy? It would be nice if she came too, and perhaps if there are other cousins you’d like to invite them? Cousin Harry and his wife, perhaps? It’s a very big piece
of pork and I’ve brought plenty of good fresh vegetables from the Pighill’s farm as well.’

‘Sophie, for heaven’s sake!’ Brin was clearly mortified, and he snapped the words out. ‘This isn’t Haworth, you know, where everyone spends all their time in and out of each other’s houses! You can’t invite everyone to -’

‘I think it’s a delightful idea,’ Letty said firmly. ‘But I’m afraid it won’t be possible tonight, Sophie. Katy is - she’s gone out and most of the rest of the family are, I imagine, rather busy.’ Her lips firmed and Peter looked at her, a little startled. What had happened to make Letty sound so annoyed? ‘But some time in the future, perhaps, when we can get everyone together, it would be very nice. I’d like you to meet them all -’

‘Well, if I can get another piece of meat down from Haworth we’ll consider it,’ Sophie said. ‘But meat’s hard to come by these days, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you. Well, thank you for introducing me, Letty. I’ll look forward to seeing you if not the others at Brin’s flat tonight, then, at about eight, with Mr Lackland. Don’t be late home, Brin. You need a rest. You’re looking quite peaky. Good afternoon, everyone. No, don’t worry about me. I can find my own way back.’ And she smoothed her gloves on to her hands, tucked her bag neatly under her arm and went, and they watched her rather dumpy little figure as it disappeared through the door, and quietly closed it behind her, not saying a word.

‘Dear me,’ Daniel said mildly, coming back to the group from the distance to which he had tactfully withdrawn. ‘What a very pleasant lady! I wish I were a Lackland cousin, I can tell you. I can’t remember the last time I ate roast pork.’

‘Oh, give her a chance and she’ll adopt you too,’ Brin said savagely. ‘She really is the absolute end and always was. How could you let her come down to London this way, Letty? It’s too bad of you!’

‘She thinks you need to be looked after,’ Letty said and turned away, not wanting to discuss what she regarded as private matters before other listeners, but Brin was not to be stopped.

‘
She
needs someone to look after is more like it,’ Brin said wrathfully. ‘I’ll never get rid of her now, not if you aid and abet her this way. Ye gods, why do I have to be cursed with so dreary a sister as that? Look Peter, you don’t have to come to
her ghastly supper party. I’ll see to it she doesn’t bother you again, and I’ll have her on her way back to Haworth as soon as I can -’

‘But I want to come,’ Peter said, and turned away to pick up his papers. ‘I like roast pork too, and what’s more important I like your sister. She’s a very pleasant lady, and you’re very fortunate to have her to care for you. I’ll see you later, then. And you too, Letty. Right now, I’d better go home and see if I can make myself look presentable. Good afternoon.’

And he went, quietly, leaving Brin furious and Letty looking after him with a startled look on her face. But it was not a disapproving one at all.

Sophie slipped into London life so quietly and so easily it seemed as though she had never lived anywhere else. That she had a gift for practical organization she rapidly demonstrated; despite the fact that the demand for flats and even hotel rooms was so intense that the merest rumour of available accommodation brought eager would-be tenants flocking, she managed to get herself a small flat in the building adjoining that in which Brin lived in Earlham Street. And then she arranged for a few of the smaller pieces of furniture from Tansy Clough to be brought to make it, as she said, ‘more homelike - London furniture is flimsy stuff, isn’t it?’, put the sale of the old house in hand, and had effected her permanent move to London in a matter of weeks.

Brin furiously tried to dissuade her from doing it. ‘Tansy Clough’s been in the family for donkey’s years,’ he had shouted at her. ‘And you’ll be miserable living here, anyway. You’re solid Yorkshire - London’s not for you. You’ll hate it here.’

But she had paid no attention to the implied sneer at her provincial ways and had gone on sewing - she was mending his shirts, systematically going through his wardrobe to ‘fettle things up’, as she put it - and said collectedly, ‘I can’t afford to live there on my own. You and the others are all entitled to your share - Pa left everything to be settled equally between us - and it’s beyond me to pay you all out. Anyway, it’s too big and cold and rambling for one person to live in on her own. It would be plain sentimental to do it, and I hope I’ve more sense than that. London suits me well enough, and you need to be looked after, that much is very clear. Will you just look at these cuffs - I’ve never seen worse fraying. Tsk, tsk - they should have been turned long since -’

And Brin had flung out of the room and gone off to sit
sulkily in the pub on the corner of Long Acre where all the dancers and out-of-work actors congregated to slouch their weekends away, not knowing how to get this tiresome sister to leave him in peace.

But then, as the weeks went on and not only were his shirts more agreeable to wear, but every aspect of his daily life became more comfortable as Sophie harried Mrs Burroughs into cleaner and more efficient ways, he stopped sulking so much. Sophie didn’t pry into his private affairs, and was pleasantly unobtrusive except when she was needed; and he came to take for granted the way she would appear with groceries and fruit and vegetables she had managed to buy, by dint of much busy hunting around the small shops of Seven Dials and also sallies further afield into Holborn and the street market at Leather Lane, all of which greatly improved his diet. He looked sleek and contented, and gradually came to take it for granted that his older sister was now part of his daily life.

He was not the only member of the family to find Sophie’s quietly efficient care agreeable. Peter, after that first supper party at which he had eaten more heartily than he could ever remember doing, soon drifted into a pattern of dining with Sophie on a regular basis. He would arrive at her small flat with a bottle from his father’s cellar under his arm - and old Sir Lewis was so delighted to see his beloved youngest son looking so much better that he pressed his choicest vintages on him - and then would sit reading the evening paper in the drowsy clock-ticking potpourri-scented little living-room while Sophie moved around her small kitchen cooking for them. The clink of her pots and pans and the occasional breathy little humming of popular tunes that she would produce as she bent, absorbed, over her concoctions would come to him down the little passageway and often soothed him to such an extent that he would be peacefully asleep in his armchair when she came to tell him food was on the table. But he never felt uncomfortable about that; he would blink up at her and then grin and come eagerly to see what dish she had prepared, and she would sit and watch him with a half smile on her round face as he ate everything she put before him.

He was, she told him gravely, a pleasure to cook for, at which he would grin again and point out that anyone who could make out of that awful dried egg omelettes that
managed to taste as near to the real French magic as hers did need never fear that she would fail to give her guests pleasure, and then they would drink their wine and talk a little desultorily of nothing very much at all. Just comfortable chat and long peaceful silences.

Peter was remarkably comfortable on those evenings as the days lengthened and the light lingered in the skies over London, making it possible to sit without lights on until ten o’clock or even later, and so was Sophie. Or so she seemed to be; it was not possible to be sure how she felt, for Sophie, unlike her younger sister, showed little of her feelings on her tranquil surface.

Katy, of course, did, and she was furious that Sophie had settled into London as she had.

‘It was bad enough when we were children,’ she stormed at Peter on one of the evenings when she had been able to persuade him to come out with her, and she had managed to book a table at the Ritz. ‘She used to fuss after me, and nag me and complain about what I did till I nearly went mad. She was the main reason I left Haworth in the first place, and to have her here now, like this, to try to regain - it’s too bad -’

‘Nonsense,’ Peter said firmly and looked down at his plate on which a minuscule piece of fish lay drably clad in a glutinous sauce. ‘Don’t try and tell me that. I was around, remember, when you first came to London. You said nothing then about wanting to escape from your sister. All you wanted was to get on the stage. Letty took you to dinner at Rules and I was there. I remember it very vividly indeed. And you never even mentioned Sophie then. So don’t try to tell me that -’

‘I didn’t tell you everything about myself then, any more than I do now,’ Katy snapped and pushed her plate away pettishly. ‘This fish is quite disgusting. How they’ve got the brass neck to put it in front of people -’

‘Your sister could show them how to do it -’ Peter said without stopping to think, and Katy reddened with anger.

‘Damn it, there you go again! On and on about Sophie! I told you, I don’t want to talk about her! It’s like having a bloody jailer watching you all the time!’

‘You started to talk about her, not I,’ Peter said mildly. ‘So, it’s really up to you. But I warn you, my dear, I shan’t hear a word against her. She’s a delightful person, and -’

‘Let’s dance,’ Katy said abruptly and got to her feet, and held both hands out to him, her head tilted to one side and her face alight with that famous smile. ‘We’re both getting dreadfully dull, and we need to get rid of the drears! And I just love this tune -’ And she pulled him on to the small dance floor as the band swept into an even faster version of ‘I’m Just A Girl Who Can’t Say No’.

‘We must go and see this show,’ she said as the music whirled them into action. ‘Everyone says it’s quite marvellous, and that the Oklahoma outdoor scenes are simply wonderful - how about next Saturday? I think I can wangle tickets -’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m already booked.’ Prudently, he didn’t say he had promised to take Sophie to see
Born Yesterday
at the Garrick, but she guessed and for the rest of the evening worked particularly hard at being vivacious and exciting. But she knew she was losing, because although he smiled and seemed to enjoy her sparkle there was an abstracted air about him, and it really was infuriating.

That anyone as dismal as Sophie could possibly be more interesting than she was seemed to Katy to be absurd, and to do her justice, most people would agree with her. For the first time in all her life, Katy was beginning to find that she could not beguile people as easily as she had been used to. For as long as she could remember, she had only needed to smile at people and look up at them in that particularly entrancing way of hers and they were, if not literally at her feet, certainly interested and excited by her. Now, the magic seemed to be less potent, to have become tarnished and even tawdry, and that made her uneasy. For it wasn’t only Peter who seemed to be withdrawing from the charmed circle of her regard; Harry too was behaving oddly.

She had for some time now been running a mild affair with Harry. She had always had a special regard for him, not because she found him a particularly exciting person - in her more private thoughts she had to admit he had become a little dull, indeed, positively stuffy, with the passage of the years - but because he had been her first lover.

When she had come back to London to make
The Lady Leapt High
she had wallowed in nostalgia for the first few days, remembering herself as an eager young drama student and
then actress in pre-War London; and a very important part of that nostalgia had been her involvement with Harry. He had been the man she had chosen to initiate her into the mysteries of sex, and when she remembered that absurd time in her draped and cushion-strewn sitting-room in her flat in Fulham, her lips would curve with reminiscent pleasure. He had been so startled, so very funny about it all - and yet so kind a lover, and she had been more than happy to re-establish their old closeness on her return.

And at first it had been fun. He had been as eager as she was to pick up where they had left off, when she had gone off to Hollywood to be with Theo Caspar (and that was one man she always refused to think about, of course; still smarting somewhere deep inside at the way he had, in her opinion, shamefully misled and misused her, though all that was ancient history now) and she had been well pleased to have another man to dangle at her fingers’ ends. Many had been the times these past few months when he had phoned and she had been captious with him, refusing to see him, refusing his eager invitations to out-of-town weekends, preferring to coax Peter to go out with her, finding him more interesting altogether.