The House of Discontent (2 page)

Her call was not long in coming through, but the line was very faint. She asked to speak to Mr. Leslie, but it was her aunt who came on the line. Her thin voice came through coldly with practised instructions and Patricia tried to put down the lack of warmth in it to the faultiness of the connection, but nevertheless she could not help feeling a little chill of foreboding, and the homesickness which she had felt on and off ever since leaving Hongkong returned to her in full force.

Although the Leslies were so close to her in relationship they were really complete strangers. She had very little recollection of her aunt or of her two cousins, Edward and Mary, and in spite of the memory of Uncle Peter’s kindness she doubted whether she would recognize him again. The family outlook and point of view were quite unknown to her. How unlike her own father, whose every thought had been shared with her, whose every feeling had almost surely been anticipated and whose outlook on the great things that mattered in life had been identical with her own.

The dread she had felt at arriving in London (and which her meeting with the strange young man had temporarily dispelled) returned to her forcibly. She fell to thinking of the young man and wondering what had induced him to be so kind. And then suddenly she remembered that he lived in Shropshire and involuntarily her heart lightened; perhaps one day she would meet him again. Oh, if only she knew his name, if only she had had the courage to ask him where exactly he lived. Perhaps her meeting with him was an augury of the new life into which she was plunging. Perhaps she would find everyone she met kind and considerate as he had been. Perhaps it was a mistake to be as shy and as frightened as she always was of strangers. Probably it was only her imagination that her aunt had sounded cold. Perhaps they were as shy of her going there as she was of arriving. Well, she would go with the firm intention of making friends, of meeting them at least half-way, of making her new life a success—holding in front of her the shining example of the stranger of that evening.

It was with this resolve that she went to bed, and being young and very tired she was asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow. There was no need to wake early in the morning, for her aunt had told her to take the 12.15 train, so she did not ask to be called but decided to sleep on as long as she wanted to. All she had to do in the morning was to collect her heavy luggage from Waterloo.

When she woke she could not think for a moment where she was, and then she heard the hooting of taxis and knew that she was in London, for the taxi horns of London, like those of Paris, have their own particular individual note.

She remembered that she had her luggage to fetch and a train to catch, and sat up suddenly, wide awake, and stretched out her hand to switch on the light. She saw by her clock that it was ten to eleven and thought the clock must have stopped the night before, but when she put it to her ear she found, to her horror, that it was ticking away.

She sprang out of bed and pulled aside the heavy curtains. A flood of light came into the room. It was a glorious, frosty morning.

She rang the bell, and when the maid came asked for a cup of coffee to be brought to her room. Then she telephoned to the reception desk and asked for her bill to be ready in twenty minutes. The voice at the other end of the line said, “Your luggage has just arrived, miss.”

“My luggage?”

“Yes, from Waterloo. Four pieces. Is that right, miss?”

“Yes; but how on earth ...? How did it come?”

“In a taxi, miss. The man said he had been paid the other end. Is that right, miss?”

“Yes ... Yes, thank you.” She put down the receiver slowly. It was
his
doing again. No one in the world except Sir Anthony knew where she was staying or that she had left some of her luggage at Waterloo.

“He is so kind,” she said to herself wonderingly. “So kind.”

There was no longer any need to hurry and she sank down on the edge of the bed, a warm feeling round her heart and a little smile dancing in her eyes and playing at the corners of her mouth.

CHAPTER
TWO

THERE had been a great flutter in the Leslie household when Patricia’s cable had arrived from Hongkong asking if she might stay with them until she could find a job.

Dorothy Leslie’s first reaction was put immediately into words: “We can’t possibly have her here.”

“Why not?” Peter asked. “We must certainly have her. We can do no less.”

“There isn’t room for one thing. Now if we were still at the White House! And, besides, we haven’t got the staff. I expect, living in the East, she’s used to a lot of waiting on. We shall lose Mrs. Milne.” Mrs. Milne was their new cook-general who had been procured with great difficulty.

“There’s no reason why she shouldn’t be a help in the house,” Peter said. “I’m quite sure that Charles’ girl won’t be spoilt.”

“I don’t suppose Charles realized how we have come down in the world,” Dorothy put in reprovingly.

“If we refused Patricia a home we should indeed have come down in the world,” Peter replied quietly.

“But we must keep a spare room in case Edward ever wants to bring a friend to stay.”

“Why shouldn’t Patricia and I share a room?” Mary suddenly asked, breaking into the conversation. She was present at most of the family discussions but was seldom allowed by her mother to take part in them.

“Now don’t you start interfering in this,” Dorothy said sharply. “You can hardly turn round in your room as it is.”

“I thought that perhaps Patricia and I could share Edward’s room,” Mary ventured, “and Edward could have the spare room and my room could become the spare room as we so seldom have anyone to stay.”

“That seems a very admirable suggestion,” Peter said.

“I don’t think Edward would like being moved out,” Dorothy protested. “He’s got all his things in his own room.”

“Well, his things can be moved,” his father replied. “It’s only Mary who is really being inconvenienced, and if she doesn’t mind sharing a room ...”

“Oh, I should like it, daddy.”

“You two are always hand in glove ... Very well, have it your own way, but if Mrs. Milne leaves don’t ask
me
to find another cook, and it must be made quite plain to Patricia that she will have to make her own bed, and help do her own room, and help with the washing-up. We don’t live as we used to do, and the sooner she is made to realize it the better.”

The Leslies lived on the outskirts of the little market town of Church Carding, twelve miles from Shrewsbury, in a small detached villa called The Knowle.

There was a good-sized lawn surrounded with flower borders in front of the house, and at the back half an acre of kitchen garden and a small wood rising up the hill against which the houses nestled. It was a compact, modern, labour-saving villa, with the advantages of central heating, an electric water-heating system, and a sun porch, but to Dorothy Leslie, ousted from the comparative magnificence of the White House on the top of the hill, it represented in its very geographical position all that was most humiliating to her in her social fall. For a woman whose constant ambition in life had been to rise in the world, to have come down in middle age was bitterly mortifying.

The solicitors’ firm of Leslie, Raymond & Son, of which Peter Leslie was a partner, was one of long standing and good reputation, with its offices just off the High Street of Church Carding, on the first floor of one of those lovely, early Georgian houses which still grace the streets of so many small English towns and villages. The firm’s business had remained steady throughout the years, but what with income tax and the rise in the cost of living there had been nothing for it but for the Leslies to cut down their expenses, and that had inevitably entailed moving from the White House.

Dorothy Leslie was doubly embittered because the money they received for the house would have enabled them to go on living there comfortably for many years to come. She could never forgive the Mrs. Grey who had bought it for living in what she still considered to be her house, especially as the latter had a very lovely eldest daughter, Camilla, as well as a nice young son, and even more especially as both mother and children were extremely popular in the neighbourhood.

From having been mistress of the White House, second in importance only to Lady Brierleigh herself, Dorothy now found that she was relegated to the level of the other inhabitants of Leigh Road, where The Knowle was situated; and perhaps the bitterest part of her mortification was that Peter did not share it with her. He certainly missed the spaciousness of the White House, and he badly missed the garden, but he was quite impervious to their reduced social standing and to the resultant slights to which, in his wife’s imagination, they were now always being subjected.

However much she tried, she could never get him to grumble or to feel mortified, and nothing infuriated her more than that.

“Even if you don’t mind for yourself you might at least care a little bit for Mary’s sake,” she would say. “That Camilla Grey will steal all the advantages due to Mary.”

“I don’t see why,” he would answer mildly. “They are not even contemporaries. Mary is only seventeen, and Camilla Grey is twenty, isn’t she?”

How he infuriated her! Why
wouldn’t
he see that if Camilla Grey got half a chance she would steal Anthony Brierleigh as a husband? She had already set her cap at him, as everybody knew—forward, scheming little minx that she was, bossing everybody about, thinking she could rule the roost and organize everything in Church Carding to her own satisfaction. But it was all her mother’s fault really. She had no control over her whatsoever. A weak, sickly woman—a real
malade imaginaire,
if ever there was one. Such people did not deserve to have all that money. No wonder Mrs. Grey had been left a widow so early. She had probably driven her poor husband to death, what with her nerves and her vapours and her lap-dogs. How people
could
like her! They thought her so gentle, so ladylike. Gentle nothing! She was just weak. Dorothy had no patience with nerves.

Thoughts such as these ran on in Dorothy’s head most of the time now. Adversity brings out the best in some people, but in Dorothy Leslie it had brought out all that was worst in her character. It was true that people did avoid her since she had left the White House, but it was not for the reason she believed. They avoided her because she had become a grouser, and that is one of the most unattractive of all small vices. People had even begun to say that Peter Leslie had the patience of a saint, and they hardly ever referred to Mary now without the adjectives “poor” and “little” before her name. “Poor little Mary,” they would say, or more often, “Poor little thing.”

Dorothy fondly believed, or liked to believe, that the upstart Greys had won the heart of the neighbourhood through its stomach. It is easy enough, she had been heard to say on more than one occasion, to bribe people to come and see you if you give them enough food and drink. What could she herself offer them now in the way of hospitality? No wonder they had stopped coming to see her.

The truth was, of course, that in the old days people had come to the White House to see Peter, and later to see Edward, who was equally popular. They had come in spite of Dorothy. But since the move to The Knowle, it was generally considered that Dorothy had grown so unbearable that not even for Peter’s sake would people go to visit her unless they felt politeness absolutely necessitated it; and even when they felt they
had
to see her, they preferred to ask her to their own homes and make sure that there were at least two other women there, reliable friends, to help cope with her, for no one ventured any more for pleasure into the gloomy, grumbling atmosphere of The Knowle. Not even “poor little Mary,” who was such a “nice child,” could do anything to enliven the gloom. Rather she was engulfed in it, for she had not the personality to rise above it. Even Peter these last few years seemed to have been sucked down into the murky depths of Dorothy’s grousing. His men friends preferred to see him at his office or on the golf course.

Only when Edward was at home was the household galvanized into cheerfulness. It was almost as if he brought with him the spirit of Christmas, the spirit of good cheer; but in fact it was from Dorothy herself that the new spirit emanated. Her ill-humour was discarded like an old workaday dress in honour of Edward’s homecoming and her glad rags of sweet temper and sweet reasonableness put on, and there was not one of her subjects in the little kingdom over which she ruled by the strength of her personality who did not feel the benefit of this change in her array.

But when Patricia arrived at The Knowle, Edward was not at home, though he was expected on leave in the near future. He was a regular soldier, now stationed in Germany.

There had been an argument over Patricia’s arrival. Dorothy had wanted her to change at Shrewsbury and come on by train to Church Carding, but Peter had insisted on sending a hired car into Shrewsbury to meet her, and when Peter was insistent about a thing he always carried his point, though usually in an argument with Dorothy he did not care sufficiently about the issue to press it. He was not a weak man, but he would put up with a great deal for the sake of peace—a characteristic which is often mistaken for weakness.

Dorothy, defeated on this occasion, grudgingly ordered the car, but availed herself of the last word by saying:

“Well, you’ll give the wrong impression to start with. She’ll think we’re millionaires. Don’t blame me if she arrives now expecting to be waited on hand and foot. Don’t blame me if Mrs. Milne gives in her notice, but don’t expect me to find another cook, that’s all I say ... I would have gone to the station to meet her if she had been arriving at Carding, but I haven’t got the time to waste going all the way into Shrewsbury ... It’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard of!”