Riley, page 23
After they’d had their meal and unpacked their bags in the bedroom, which was exceptionally bright and cosy, they told her that they would be going round to see their friends, Mr and Mrs Beardsley, and at this she said, ‘Well, your time’s your own. I’ll give you a key and you can let yourselves in and out when you like. Betty won’t be back till half past six; it’s late night at the shop tonight.’
When Fred opened his door to them he let out an exclamation, not as a blasphemy but as a statement of surprise. ‘God Almighty!’ he said, then added, ‘Where’ve you two sprung from?’
‘Where do you think?’
‘Louise! Louise!’
When Louise appeared at the top of the steps using the same words, ‘Where’ve you sprung from?’ Riley said, ‘Well, let’s get in and we’ll tell you.’
After embracing Nyrene, Louise helped her off with her coat and said, ‘You look marvellously tanned. Where’ve you been?’
‘It’s the wind up in the wilds.’
‘Well, it’s doing you good. Come in. Come in. Oh, I am glad to see you both.’
Louise now pushed Riley sidewards, adding, ‘As Mrs Roberts says, there are some people who are like one’s own soul, and that’s you two at this moment. What’s brought you here?’
‘Dad’s very ill,’ Riley said, and Louise’s manner changed immediately: ‘Oh Lor! Oh, I’m sorry. Really bad?’
‘Yes, by the sound of it: cancer of the bowel.’
‘Good Lord!’ Fred said. ‘He doesn’t want anything more than that. Has he been ill for long?’
‘I suppose he has, but I didn’t hear of it until yesterday, last night, in fact: and I hadn’t time to phone you.’
‘Have you had anything to eat?’
‘Oh, yes. We’ve had a good meal at Nurse’s.’
‘What about a drink then?’
Fred looked from Nyrene to Riley, who said, ‘It would go down very nicely, thanks.’
‘The usual?’
‘The usual.’
Louise now dropped on the couch beside Nyrene and caught hold of her hand, saying, ‘Oh, you don’t know how glad I am to see you! You’re like a breath of fresh air,’ and she glanced towards Fred who was looking at her warningly now. ‘I’m not sorry: I’m going to say it because you know yourself you’re longing for tomorrow when they’ll be gone.’ Then addressing Nyrene again, she said, ‘We have company, you know. Gwendoline’—she paused—‘and her delightful daughter, Yvette.’
‘Oh yes?’ Riley said, turning to Fred, and adding, ‘Sounds interesting.’
‘You’ve said it,’ said Fred. His head was bobbing. ‘Interesting is the word. Amazing is another, not to mention fantastic. And one must ask why? Why the devil are such people put into the world to create havoc in males, from budding youths to old men with damp underwear.’
‘Oh, Fred!’ Louise’s voice was a reprimand. ‘You get more coarse every day.’
‘Well, I’m honest enough to put it into words. All you do is smile and play the hostess and say, “Oh yes, dear. You must call in any time you’re this way.” Hypocrite.’
‘You’re talking about your niece?’ said Riley.
‘Of course I’m talking about my niece. Who else? I wouldn’t have believed it. I can believe everything her mother did, and tolerate it, but this one’s been brought up in a convent and a finishing school and the rest. If Gwendoline had told me she had put her in a brothel when she was seven, I could probably have understood it.’
‘Be quiet! You never know, they might come in at any minute.’
‘What odds! Gwendoline knows what I think. I’ve told her already what she should’ve done with that one when she was a young girl. She should have skelped her from the bare backside up to her lugs.’
To this, Riley didn’t say, She sounds interesting; he never joked about other women in front of Nyrene.
When there was the sound of a door opening and then voices were heard, Fred said, ‘Speak of the devil. Gird your loins, lad.’
At this Riley laughed outright; then he turned to Nyrene and shook his head.
The sitting-room door opened and there entered a very tall woman. She could have been in her middle forties, or even in her fifties, Riley thought. All he could take in at first was that she was very tall, dignified and beautifully dressed. And from where he was now standing, he saw she had an unwrinkled skin and was auburn-haired. And then came the voice, high, clear and bell-like, exclaiming, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, we’re intruding.’
‘Don’t be silly! Gwendoline, get yourself in. You’ve heard about Riley and Nyrene; well, here they are. Peter Riley, my sister Gwendoline. Nyrene, his wife, Gwendoline.’
As Nyrene was shaking the woman’s hand they looked deeply into each other’s eyes, and in the depth of Gwendoline’s Nyrene saw herself as she might be in a few years’ time: likely not as beautiful but of an age that could not be hidden by cosmetics because age, she had found, was expressed by the eyes.
‘Tra-la-la! Tra-la-la! The plane leaves at nine in the morning from Newcastle.’
No-one spoke; they had all turned to look at the figure entering the room. She too had stopped. What age was she? Sixteen? Seventeen? No, she was twenty or more. And there were those long legs that Fred had talked about. He had said legs, loins and licence; it was all there. The legs were beautifully shaped. Clothes were being worn down to the calf this season but her dress, of a light soft woollen material, was inches above the knee and clung to her upper body like a skin. Her breasts were small although full and pointed, and the nipples were almost visible through the thin wool. But at this moment Riley’s eyes, like Nyrene’s, were fastened on her face, which was long and thin and peach-tinted, and the features were such that you had to take them individually: the finely marked eyebrows etching the oval eye sockets. The eyes were dark, their colour unfathomable. The nose was straight, and the mouth below was over-full and wide. The lips were slightly apart now, showing a gleam of teeth.
‘Company! Oh, how lovely!’ There was just the slightest note of a foreign accent to the words and the voice was unusually deep. ‘And me, such a mess! Look at my hair.’ She ran her fingers from her shoulders up through the pale gold strands, exclaiming, ‘I must go and change.’
‘Don’t be so silly, girl! These are our friends.’
‘Oh yes. Oh yes.’ Her whole manner changed: it was as if the young woman, the sophisticated being, had slid back into a seventeen-year-old, for she practically skipped up the room now, saying, ‘I’m sorry. How do you do?’ She held a hand out, first to Nyrene who, when she took it, felt a strange shudder pass through her, causing her almost to tug her hand away.
When the hand was held out towards Riley, he shook it, but said nothing, even in reply to the girl’s, ‘How d’you do?’
Just as everybody else, on meeting this girl, was affected by her, Nyrene felt that Peter, too, was being bowled over. But what could you expect? She had never seen anyone quite like her. And that voice and that manner, that air. As Fred had so crudely suggested, she would affect even the senile. Yet what it was about her she couldn’t put a finger on. It was the total combination of her presence.
Riley’s thoughts were running along similar lines. Good God! he thought. It’s a good job she won’t be around here for long.
‘You’re the actor?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m the actor, so called.’
‘How exciting! I met Maurice Ducan in London last year. Do you know him?’
‘No, but I’ve heard of him.’
‘He wanted me for one of his plays, but there was a bastard of a woman there who said I had too much of what it takes, so I didn’t get the part. What do you think of that?’
‘Yvette! Behave yourself. Sit down.’
‘Mama, I usually behave myself. It all depends upon the company I’m in. This young man’—she turned and looked at Riley, then glanced back towards her mother, saying—‘he’s an actor. They all talk like that, don’t they?’
‘No.’
‘No?’ She was slightly taken aback, as the tone of her voice implied, and he went on, ‘You’ve a wrong conception of actors, I would say; at least of how they talk in public. They might use slang, but they don’t come out with “bastards” unless they’re provoked. I’m speaking from my own experience, of course, with our company.’
‘Oh. Oh.’ She smiled slowly at him now as she said, ‘You sound funny, you know, different from how you look, because you’re so young. All right, Mama, all right: I’ll sit down and I’ll behave myself. What shall we talk about? This fascinating town?’ She now threw herself into an armchair.
‘What’ll you have to drink?’ Fred was standing near her now, his face straight.
‘Cognac. You should know by now, Uncle; there’s nothing to match cognac.’
Riley looked at her, then he sat by Nyrene on the couch; and after Yvette had taken a sip from her glass, she said, ‘I understand you live in a sweet place in the wilds of Scotland and that you have a small son and a Scottish servant. Interesting, I should think, with a name like Hamish. What else could one expect but something unusual: Hamish McClusky.’
‘His name is McIntyre’—there was a cool ring to Nyrene’s voice now—‘and he’s an ordinary kindly Scotsman. There are many such like him there.’
‘Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. Are you of the clan?’
‘No, I am not of the clan, I am English. What are you?’
The question seemed to startle them all, not least the one to whom it was addressed; and her whole attitude now changed as, sitting up straight in the chair, she looked at her mother and said, ‘That was straight from the elbow, wasn’t it, Mama? What am I? I am your daughter and you hail from Northumberland. Now my father, my real father’—she was nodding her head now—‘was, I understand, an American. But then he was of mixed blood! Part Irish, but the other half, we have never got to the bottom of, have we, Mama? Whether it is Maltese or Malaysian; something that begins with an M. Now my adoptive mother is a French lady, or was. I miss her. Yes, I do’—the voice had changed again—‘I miss her very much. She was an enlightened and charming woman. Yes, I do I miss her very much.’ She turned her head to the side now and for a moment appeared a different person altogether; but then, looking at them once more, she finished, ‘But the truth of it is, I don’t think my mother knows exactly what I am; she only knows what she herself is or was. Isn’t that right, Mama?’
‘Yvette, you become more impossible every day. Now whatever we are, we are here, and among friends, my brother, sister-in-law and his friends. Now can I ask you to behave like a normal person for one evening?’
‘You always want the impossible, Mama. By the way, where is Jason?’
‘Yvette, please!’ Gwendoline’s voice was stern now, and the girl turned on her mother and said, ‘Oh, be quiet, Mama! We’re not children, we’re adults. I am an adult and I wish to be treated as such; in fact, I would like to say that I am more worldly-wise and worldly-conscious than any one of you in this room, and I hate to be treated as if I were a numskull; and I would repeat that this young man to me doesn’t appear, by his looks, his voice, or by his manner to be a comedian, not in the manner of those I have heard on the television, the radio, yes and on your London stages for the past eighteen months. Remember, Mama, I’ve been at large for eighteen months.’
She stood up now. Her face had again changed and, her laughter ringing out, she said, ‘It’s odd…it’s odd, I’ve never been in a family, and yet this appears like a family and that we’re having a family row because Mama’s ménage’—she jerked her head back to Gwendoline—‘is anything but homely, whereas here we are five people daring to express our opinions and be contradicted. Definitely, it is what I imagine as home life. I was eight when my dear French Mama put me into the convent. Ten years later I was taken out and thrown into the maelstrom of a so-called finishing school. You know, no brothel,’ she glanced towards her mother before she repeated, ‘no brothel could have educated me more in a way of life than the dormitory of that finishing school where we were never allowed to see a pair of trousers, although what we didn’t know about men wasn’t worth learning.
‘I’ll go now,’ she said, ‘and hold a reasonable conversation with Jason, which will give you time to discuss me.’
Every muscle in her sylphlike body seemed to ripple as she walked away down the room, leaving behind her an embarrassed silence, until Gwendoline sighed, which in itself spoke of weariness, then said to Fred, ‘I’m sorry, Fred, I should never have brought her. But I must say she’s not always as fractious as she appears now. She’s very bored; we’ll be better when we get to Austria. She has many friends there and the skiing always does her good.’
‘Then all I can say, Gwendoline, is that I hope her friends keep her there, because she’s an impossible young snipe.’
‘That, I suppose, is my fault.’
‘No it isn’t. Some lasses would give their ears to have a convent education, followed by a year in Paris and all the things that she’s been given. What’s she going to do with her life? Does she know?’
‘Marry, I hope. There are two or three possibilities in the offing. One is very charming, very entertaining, very everything other than responsible, and has no money. The other is a middle-aged businessman who can give her most of the things she thinks she’s entitled to, and that can be put down to my fault, and perhaps to her French adoptive mother’s because every holiday she would take her away to a different country. I think she’s toured half the world by now. You know’—Gwendoline now turned to Riley and Nyrene, who had been looking at her intently whilst she was speaking, and said—‘this is not a case of the sins of the fathers being passed on, but the sins of the mother: knowing that I didn’t want a child, why did I have her? And when I had her, why did I let her go to her father? At the time I thought it was a marvellous idea, a way out for me, and besides, she was brought up knowing my relationship to her. She accepted me in a funny kind of way, funny to me that is, because she still saw my friend’s wife as her mother.’
Gwendoline, too, now rose and, inclining her head, first to Nyrene then to Riley in farewell, she turned and followed her daughter from the room.
Nyrene had noticed the term ‘my friend’s wife’. How many friends’ wives had that woman distressed in her time? she wondered, because they must have known of her, and looking at her now it wasn’t hard to see from where her daughter sprang. She had her looks, and she certainly had a sexual drive oozing out of every pore. She now thanked God she had come with Peter this time, because that girl could eat a man alive. And yet, would her Peter have allowed himself to be eaten? Not as he was now, no; but who could tell what he might do in the years ahead? That girl could hold her youth everlasting, while she herself developed into …
Oh, for the Lord’s sake, stop it! There’s plenty of time to meet that. ‘What did you say, dear?’ Riley asked.
‘Nothing. But I was thinking it’s about time we got back to Nurse’s house; Betty should be in by now and she’ll be alone.’
‘Yes. Yes.’
‘Oh, Nyrene, and you, Peter, you haven’t been here five minutes! We haven’t had a talk, not our kind of talk.’ Louise had emphasised the last words; then looking at her husband, she said, ‘I can tell you now, I’m just living for tomorrow morning and that plane going at nine.’
‘Well, I can tell you too, madam, that I’m of the same mind.’
‘Don’t worry, Louise,’ Riley said, ‘we’ll pop in tomorrow. The air will be clearer and the atmosphere not so electric, and we can talk about the big fellow’s half-term’—he jerked his head back towards Fred—‘and see if you would like to pop through and stay with Nyrene for a time. Charles would love being with Jason again. They had the time of their lives before.’
‘How is Charles?’ Louise asked, and Nyrene said, ‘Oh, as live a linty as ever; in fact, more so; he never stops. I’ve got him a little tamed inside the house; outside he’s unstoppable. Anyway, we’re going to see a doctor; that is a specialist about him. He’s using up too much energy all the time.’
‘Is it still causing the faints?’
‘Yes, sometimes,’ Nyrene said. ‘It’s sheer exhaustion of energy; but it’s the source of the problem we must sort out.’
At the front door Fred said to Riley, ‘You can now understand what I meant on the phone the other night, can’t you?’
‘Yes. Yes, Fred, exactly. Only thing is, you should have added “maneater”.’
‘Yes, you’re right. It’s a good job this town doesn’t attract her and we won’t be troubled with her much, if at all, but we mustn’t be deceived, and I’ve said this to Louise and to Gwendoline, she’s not just the precocious little piece she makes out to be; there’s a strong will buried there, and all I can say is, God help any man she gets her claws into. Look, Riley, let me run you back.’
‘No, Fred. Thanks. We want to walk; we’ve got a lot to think about.’
‘You’re right. You’re right.’
‘Goodnight, Louise.’
‘Goodnight, Peter.’
‘Goodnight, my dear.’ Louise now kissed Nyrene, and she, her voice soft, said, ‘I don’t envy you in any way, Louise, at this moment.’
They laughed together; then more goodnights were exchanged.
They were some way from the house when Riley broke the silence saying, ‘Well, what did you think of that?’
