The Fancy (48 page)

He did not have to explain about Connie because Wendy never tried to find out. She accepted the fact that Connie had gone away without curiosity, as naturally as she accepted his offer. When the light over the bench went on he saw that crying did not make her face ugly and blotchy. Her nose was not even red. She looked at him out of tired, wet eyes and simply said : “Oh, Edward,
yes
”

Was it only a month ago that Edward had sat trying to write about Coccidiosis and known that everything in his life was going wrong? The very day after Wendy arrived, bringing her mother along with the rest of her luggage, the shadow that lay over Edward at the factory was miraculously lifted. Ivy’s husband arrived truculent and not quite sober to say that his wife wasn’t coming in no more. She was fed up, that was what it was, and as far as she was concerned, they knew what they could do with their factory ; she was going for a AT. She wasn’t going to stop on and be suspicioned by everybody. She didn’t fancy working in a place where people looked at a person as if
they thought she had come in early and changed over the labels on the boxes of valves. An interesting possibility which Mr. Gurley had not considered before, but now realised on further reflection to be the right one.

With the clearing of his name, Edward also discovered that it hardly needed clearing. Most people had forgotten the incident long ago. They had thought nothing of it at the time, they said, and Edward began to wonder whether the contumely in which he had thought himself held had not been mostly in his imagination.

“Just look what happens,” he said to Wendy in the garden that night. “The day after you come to live with me, that business with the valves is cleared up at last and Ledward Julie has a first litter of six. You bring me luck, that’s what it is.”

“Do I really?” she said seriously. The kitchen door opened and a bar of light slanted across the garden.

“Oh, mother, the black-out!” cried Wendy starting forward, and obediently the kitchen light went off.

“Are you coming in to supper?” Mrs. Holt’s voice wavered and cracked when she tried to raise it.

“Rather.” Edward took Wendy’s arm and moved with her towards the house. “What’s on the menu?”

“Fish,” said the voice. “How do you want it done?”

“How do you usually have it?”

“We always used to have it boiled or steamed when father was alive,” said Wendy. Boiled or steamed : that was how Connie had always wanted it. He had not had a bit of fried fish in his own house for ten years.

“Do as you always do of course,” he said, wanting them to feel they were at home.

“Well,” said Wendy tentatively, “Mother and I really like it fried.”

Edward was so happy in his present life that he did not look far into the future. It was up to Connie to decide what she was going to do, and at the moment, she showed no signs of wanting to come back. Her only communication in three months had been a postcard with a view of the Railway Hotel on one side and a request for her winter dressing-gown on the other.

Wendy, although she was equally happy, worried quite a lot. She had no idea what the situation was between Edward and his wife, and as he never mentioned it, she could not possibly ask. What worried her most of all was that she had decided that she was fonder of Edward than was right. Sometimes, as she lay in the double bed listening to the snufflings that come from the curled-up ball that was her mother, she found herself imagining wonderful things about the two of them, and had to make herself break off and think about something prosaic like tomorrow’s supper.

Since that time when she had felt him kiss her neck in the dark Inspection Shop, he had never given her more than brotherly gestures of affection, but she knew that he was as happy in her company as she was in his. What was going to happen if hit understand i

s wife came home and she and her mother had to go away? She wished she could ask him.

When Connie did come home, Wendy was alone in the house. It was Sunday morning and Edward had taken Mrs. Holt to Kew Gardens, while Wendy, in one of her old grey factory overalls and a sacking apron did out her kitchen. The bell rang while she was scrubbing the floor and she got up with pink, wrinkled marks on her knees over the kitchen table which she had put outside in the passage, drying her hands on her apron as she went to the door.

Connie’s eyebrows, which were plucked now and lengthened with a pencil, went
up.
This was not the woman she had found to clean for Edward.

“Is Mr. Ledward in?” she asked, her eyes busy.

“I’m sorry,” said Wendy, “he’s out for the morning. Did you want to leave a message for him?” She thought it must be someone from the Club, and when Connie said : “I am Mrs. Ledward,” and stepped firmly into the hall, Wendy stood back against the wall with a sinking heart and could find nothing to say except “Oh.”

Connie’s eyebrows went higher and higher as she discovered who Wendy was, and that she and her mother were living in the house, although she kept saying : “I see”, and “naturally”, as though she were not surprised at all.

In the sitting-room, her eye travelled round, noting changes, dwelling on the row of plants on the window sill and the picture of carthorses looking over a stable door, which Wendy had hung over the mantelpiece.

“Did you mean to—I mean, arand clambered

e you—will you be staying here tonight?” faltered Wendy. She would have to start packing at once and take her mother away as soon as she got back. She was too agitated to begin to think of where they would go.

“Good Heavens, no,” said Connie. “I have to get Inauguration Show’, p alongback to Birmingham tonight. My friend had to come down on business, so I took the oppoe and collect one or two things I’d left here. What have you done with my green clock?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Wendy made a dive for the sideboard cupboard. “I put it away because it loses so. It was always making us late for work.”

“I’ve never known that clock to lose,” said Connie. She took it from her and wound it, putting it on the table, where it ticked loudly in the silence between them.

“Please say when you want to come back,” said Wendy desperately at last, “and my mother and I’ll leave at once. We only came here, you see, because we were turned out of our house and couldn’t find anywhere else.”

“I wouldn’t hear of you going,” said Connie. “I’m sure it’s been very nice for my husband having someone to look after him.rtunity to com

He could never have managed on his own.”

“Yes, but if you want to come back——”

“Oh, please don’t think I want to come back,” said Connie with a little laugh, picking up a photograph of a rabbit with a silver cup and putting it down again as if it were no more than could be expected. “There’s far too much work f in Birmingham. I don’t know what my friends would say, I’m sure if I talked about leaving. And as far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to live in this house. I never did like it. It simply makes work and nothing to show for it. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll go and look out the things I want. I haven’t too much time. I left a lot of winter things in a trunk in the cupboard under the stairs. I suppose it’s still there?”

“Oh yes,” said Wendy, thankful that it was. “I’ll just move the kitchen table for you. I stood it out there while I’m doing the floor. It’s an awkward floor to do, isn’t it, with all those corners?”

Connie had scrubbed it so seldom that she hardly knew. She looked at her smooth, secretary’s hands with their oval nails and thought with satisfaction of the detached house on the outskirts of Birmingham, which had a refrigerator and a gas boiler in the kitchen, which she hardly ever entered except on the maid’s day out.

“But you mean she’s not coming back at

all?
” Edward kept asking. “I can’t think why she hasn’t written before and told me so.”

“Well, she didn’t say exactly, but I don’t think——”

“Why didn’t you ask her what her plans were? I would like to have things straight, I must say.or me to do up