The Eye of Love (20 page)

The latter had no thought of being disloyal. She was too good a sort. But her loyalties were now divided between Gibson and Joyce; moreover she realistically saw Mr Gibson's marriage as a splendid way out of all his difficulties. She thought Miss Joyce very chic. Miss Harris wasn't bought by a West End lunch; she simply wanted to do her best for all parties, and fortunately this proved quite straightforward.

“Oh,
no
, Miss Joyce,” declared Miss Harris, “there's never been
any
lady about the place before! Which is why, if I may say so, both Miss Molyneux and me so appreciate you taking an interest—especially you so knowing what is what.”

Miranda accepted the compliment with a friendly smile.

“Of course I take an interest—in my fiancé's business! But I see I didn't make myself clear. The person I was thinking of, the person Mrs Gibson mentioned, was someone more like a secretary—an old employee of some sort—we'd like to surprise Mr Gibson by inviting to the wedding …”

“If I may say so again,” said Miss Harris, “Mr Gibson is a very lucky man. I call that a very beautiful thought indeed, Miss Joyce. It just so happens I don't recall beyond a charlady or two, who really come and go like the wind, anyone at all answering to the description.”

Miss Joyce reflected, while they finished their
tripes à la mode de Caen
.

“Perhaps somewhere among the old letters,” she mused, “there might be an address?”

“Well, I suppose there
might
,” said Miss Harris doubtfully. “It's not exactly in my department. In fact, I don't
know
that we keep any old letters at all …” She hesitated; as she said afterward to Miss Molyneux, Miss Joyce was evidently quite
set;
and it really was a beautiful thought. “I tell you what,” said Miss Harris, “if it's really got to be a surprise—”

“Oh, but it must!” cried Miranda girlishly.

“—Friday evenings, half-past five to six, the charlady comes in to do the office, so Mr Gibson leaves it open and I stay a little late to put the lock down afterwards. If you care to come in next Friday and look round—”

“What a wonderful idea!” cried Miranda. “Oh, but what would the charwoman think?”

“Pop in as she's leaving,” said Miss Harris practically. “Which in my experience is nearer a quarter-to. Then
I
could leave you to put the lock down—couldn't I, Miss Joyce?”

Miranda ordered
Crêpes Suzette
. Miss Harris consumed them cheerfully. She hadn't been bought. Was her suggestion
quite
straightforward? Well, perhaps not
quite
, admitted Miss Harris; but she felt certain it could do no harm. Privately, she thought Miss Joyce would be wasting her time. In any case, there could be nothing in Mr Gibson's office that Joyces hadn't seen already; the Joyce accountants, in Miss Harris's recollection, having made a remarkably thorough job.

3

Until Friday was longer than Miranda wanted to wait; but she had no choice. In the interval she behaved rather discreetly with Harry, and kept her word about never mentioning the comb to him again. She didn't mention it to anyone—obviously: or why should old Mrs Gibson have been so surprised, at the latest alterations to the wedding-array?

“Can you imagine what Miranda has thought of now?” demanded old Mrs Gibson of her son. “For instead of a veil?”

“No,” said Harry.

They were at the breakfast-table. Since they dined so regularly in Knightbridge, breakfast had become more than ever the time for any intimate conversation, and Mr Gibson regretted it. It had been bad enough to start the day on reminiscences of Moscow: to start on his approaching nuptials was far worse. “No,” said Harry Gibson, repressively …

“She wants to wear—but you would never guess!”

“Am I trying to?” asked Harry Gibson.

“A mantilla!” proclaimed his mother. “Now I ask you! A white mantilla! Which might look I admit very nice, very unusual—but with the beautiful Honiton, so Buy British, already ordered! ‘What foolishness!' I said at once. ‘Are you a Spanish girl?' I asked. ‘Is my Harry a Spanish boy? Do you go to bull-fights?' Yet she is now quite set on a mantilla!”

Obviously Miranda had kept her word. What she would say on the wedding-morn, when no Spanish comb arrived to be twined with orange-blossom, Mr Gibson refused to imagine. It was only by keeping the strictest hold on his imagination that he managed to retain any sanity at all.

4

“So what has Miranda thought of now?” demanded Mr Joyce, that night in the study. “A mantilla!”

“I know,” said Harry Gibson. “The mater told me.”

“Also the bridesmaids are to wear mantillas! Those girls will look like dust-sheets on hangers.”

“Their mothers will stop it,” said Harry Gibson, perceiving a ray of hope.

“You forget who is paying,” retorted Mr Joyce. “I am the chappie who is paying. All dresses are the gift of the bride's father. So Miranda has her way. But this is all your work, Harry boy, buying Miranda that Spanish comb.”

Harry Gibson splashed more port into his glass. It was a comparatively quiet night, only Rachel or it might be Denise in the drawing-room, no mothers: Mr Joyce reached companionably for the decanter in turn.

“You still don't want to tell me how much you paid for it? Okay, okay!” said Mr Joyce good-naturedly. “But don't go back to the same shop, son, unless they come cheaper by the half-dozen!”

—How inevitably the spirit of the grotesque intervened! leaving not even the most sacred emblem unfingered! To Harry, Dolores' comb had always been something unique, he thought of it as the only one in the world, a rarity as singular as precious; was he now to go out and buy half-a-dozen, cheap, a job-lot?

“For the bridesmaids,” explained Mr Joyce, chuckling. “
Your
gift to the bridesmaids, Harry boy! To be the hooks on top of the hangers!”

5

In Alcock Road no less bridal-thoughts hovered. It struck Mr Phillips as a good time, while his intended was so down in the mouth, to jockey things along a bit. Nothing had as yet happened about the Midlands post, but something might at any moment; and though, as has been said, he felt little doubt as to his ultimate success as a wooer, he felt also that it was time to jockey things along.

“See here,” said Mr Phillips, “I'm not to be kept hanging about for ever. I made a fair, I may say very fair proposition, and I want an answer. Make your mind up.”

Even as the plea of an impatient suitor, the locution was rough. Dolores, remembering how she couldn't possibly manage without a Regular, swallowed her pride and hedged. She had in any case little pride left.

“I've only known you such a short time, Mr Phillips …”

“The name's Arnold,” said Mr Phillips. “Call me Arn.”

She subdued her tongue to it.

“Arn, then … I haven't known you more than a few months, have I?”

“Fare farther and fare worse,” suggested Mr Phillips jocosely. “You know what I'm going to call
you?
Dot. The other's too daft.”

“I haven't asked you—” began Dolores—and broke off helplessly. How could she stop him calling her Dot, if he wanted to? Unless she gave him notice, as she didn't dare? It was in any case less unendurable than hearing “Dolores” perpetually on his lips …

“That's right,” said Mr Phillips, watching her. “I see I'd better make your mind up for you.”

6

“Word of six letters first two f, 1,” ordered Mr Phillips.

He was engaged not in solving a cross-word, but in composing one. The mysterious, silent occupation of his early days as a lodger, upstairs in his bedroom, was at last disclosed; as a contriver of these ingenuities Mr Phillips made half-a-guinea a time. They weren't eminently ingenious, Mr Phillips not catering, as he frequently pointed out, for highbrows; the journals that employed him bore such reassuring names as “Home Hints” and “Snippets”. Now he brought the dictionary down to the sitting-room and turned it over to Dolores, training her to assist him.

“
Floral
,” offered Dolores.

“Too fancy,” objected Mr Phillips. “I keep telling you.”

So the evenings passed as it were in a foretaste of domestic ease. Mr Phillips had made up Dolores' mind for her—or rather he had made his own mind up, and took hers as read. Indeed, Dolores never spoke out to disabuse him; she was afraid of the consequences. When Mr Phillips said they'd be married at a registrar's, cheaper and less fuss than in church, she said nothing at all; when he suggested that a month should see everything straight, by which he meant that a month should see Martha settled in an orphanage, Dolores said nothing to that either. Her tongue was heavy in her head; she was too worn out—her sleep broken and unrefreshing, each day a long miserable toil—to think at all, with any real coherence …

Sometimes he was quite kind.

“You'll be able to go and see her, don't forget,” said Mr Phillips.

“See who?” asked Dolores vaguely.

“Martha. They've days when the kids can be taken out.”

Dolores' consenting silence was on this point almost rational. When her mind was working best, and remembering her own fruitless attempts to find work, it sometimes occurred to her that Martha would have to be sent to an orphanage in any case—supposing Mr Phillips in some way escaped. When the lease of the little house ran out, without a house how could she even look for lodgers again? Dolores felt incapable of fending even for herself, unless someone looked after her …

Once or twice, when the thought of being looked after again came uppermost, she nearly opened this subject of the lease to Mr Phillips, so that he could tell her what to do. But she didn't, because it was too much effort. She had no idea that in time she might be accused of chicanery; having no idea how confounded Mr Phillips would be, and how justifiably angered, by the discovery that his wife didn't own a house.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

1

Miranda took no chances, that next Friday evening, but waited until she saw Harry Gibson leave. (She knew where he was going. On Fridays, because he left early, he always took his mother to a cinema before dinner. It was all right.) Miranda waited from just after five, behind a chestnut-tree at the corner of Almaviva Place—not a very dignified station, but the nearest cover, and she was too well furred to suffer much discomfort from the cold. (Her hands were in fur-lined gloves; only her feet gradually numbed.) No one remarked her, in that quiet cul-de-sac. A stray pigeon or two waddled up as though looking for crumbs, but that was all her distraction.

Mr Gibson came out at twenty-five to six, and took a taxi off the rank. To occupy the next ten minutes, and restore her circulation, Miranda walked briskly down Kensington High Street, as far as an artist's supply-shop, and briskly back. Her calculations proved exact; within, she crossed first the charwoman bundling downstairs, then Miss Harris on the flight above. Miss Harris, like the charwoman, was already hatted. “Don't forget to put the lock down, don't get me sacked!” breathed Miss Harris—a gay accomplice. Miranda nodded gaily in return.

2

It gave her, immediately, such pleasure to have penetrated into Harry's sanctum, behind Harry's back, that for the first few minutes she almost played. Miranda's girlishness was perfectly genuine; alas that only to the eye of love could it have seemed engaging. As she sat herself in Harry's chair behind the desk—opened Harry's blotter, laid a finger to Harry's telephone—how endearing the spectacle might have been, to a lover! But even her Dadda would have told her not to meddle, for however he indulged his daughter, old Joyce saw her objectively; and every action which performed by Miss Diver would have driven Harry Gibson to rapture, had he seen Miranda performing them would have driven him to fury.

She didn't play the childish game more than a few minutes. She wasn't there to play, she was there to hunt for some clue that would lead her to Harry's Past.

As Miss Harris could have foretold, she wasted a great deal of time. The safe was inviolable, the drawers of the desk were so casually unlocked as to quench curiosity. Miranda went through them nonetheless; and learned only that Harry for some reason hoarded a quantity of Gibson-and-Son-headed notepaper. A file of invoices headed Joyce of Bond Street and Kensington testified to an increasing if modest prosperity; another, of old letters, to certain extramural follies on the part of Mr Gibson senior. (It wasn't auctions alone had been old Mr Gibson's undoing: upon splendidly-monogrammed notepaper equerries to certain princely names thanked him for his visit and enclosed a receipt.) Miranda observed that there were no autographs worth having, put the file back where she found it, and returned to the desk.

The uppermost sheet in the blotter showed only a repeated scrawl, too evidently Mr Gibson's signature to be of interest; and none of the undersheets had been used at all. By the telephone lay a list of numbers, obviously those Mr Gibson most frequently used; but as obviously all connected with the business, for each had a name alongside, and each name Miranda recognised; and when she checked them in the Directory, all were correct, not one was a cunning alibi. She put the telephone directories back too, resentfully.

It was hard to admit that she had drawn blank.

It was so hard to admit that as a last, foolish resort Miranda looked about for a mirror, intending to read Mr Gibson's signature through the glass, to make certain (what indeed she knew to be certain) it was that and nothing more. There was a mirror hooked behind the door, beside a second hook from which depended a tweed jacket—Harry's office jacket, thought Miranda; she didn't remember seeing him in it. Until that moment, concentrating on the desk and the files, she hadn't consciously noticed it. Nor did it now seem probable to her as a hiding-place for anything Harry wished to conceal. Miranda took it down and went through the pockets without any particular hope, simply because it was there; and so found a receipt for a quarter's gas at an address in Paddington.