Riley, page 36
When he looked in the bathroom he couldn’t recognise his face for a moment, not because the lower part was covered in blood from what looked like a gash across the bottom of his jaw, but because his eyes seemed to be staring out of his head; the expression wild. They weren’t his eyes at all.
He wetted a towel and wiped it round his jaw only to see the slit, all of two inches long, freely oozing blood.
He felt sick, even faint. He put his hand out against the mirror to steady himself, then, turning, he leant his back against the sink and pulled off the wet bloodstained shirt and trousers for they, too, had blood on the waist.
He now opened the medicine cabinet and, taking out a piece of lint he pressed it over the cut, only to see it immediately soaked with blood. He looked round helplessly; then taking up a hand towel he tore it into strips and wound it round the lower part of his face.
As he staggered across the room there came a banging on the front door. But he took no heed of it and made for the couch until he heard a muffled voice saying, ‘Open the door, Mr Riley! It’s me, Lily.’
He stopped, but it was some seconds before he released the door catch and turned back into the room, Lily following him and exclaiming, ‘What on earth’s happened?’
Standing before him, she simply pointed dumbly at his face, then brought out, ‘Oh, my goodness, man! Who did that? Her?’
When he did not answer, but dropped onto the couch, she went on rapidly, ‘I bumped into her. She was running along the front, her hand to her face, making for her car, I suppose. Oh! You needn’t look like that,’ and she flapped her forearm wildly, ‘they all know. They’re not blind or daft…just because she hides her car round there. But about the other thing. Anna and Jane were in the dressing room talking, and Anna turned to me saying, “It was her I saw, Mrs Riley. I know she wasn’t supposed to come until tomorrow. But there she was, out on the front street. And she seemed to be arguing with him. Then she walked off and left him standing.” Well now’—Lily shook her head—‘hearing that, I put two and two together. And when I bumped into the other one I knew I wasn’t far out. But she did that to you?’
He moved the bloodstained pad on his jaw, and then had to spit out some blood onto it before he was able to mutter, ‘Be quiet, Lily! Just…just bring me a wet hand towel.’
Within seconds she had brought him the towel, but when she went to place it on his face she exclaimed, ‘Oh no! Mr Riley, a wet towel’s not going to stop this bleeding; you’ll have to go to hospital.’
‘No!’—he had pulled himself to the edge of the couch—‘No hospital. Listen! Give me a hand and get me a coat. Dr Carter will be taking his surgery about now.’
‘Oh aye. Yes, he’s good. But can you make it across the square?’
‘Of course, yes, just give me a hand.’
He had said, ‘Of course, yes, just give me a hand,’ but his head was whirling, and not only with the knowledge that the whole cast must have known what was going on, even David. No, not David, David would have waylaid him. But for the rest, during all these past weeks, their attitudes towards him had never changed.
He thought he was going to pass out.
‘Steady up! Lean against there till I lock the door.’
She pressed him against the wall; then, putting her arm around him, she said, ‘Come on now!’
The rain pelting against his face seemed to revive him, until Lily opened the surgery door and the smell of damp humanity came at him like a wave.
After she had guided him to the one empty seat in the waiting room, she went to the reception desk and said, ‘My…my friend has had an accident. His face is badly cut, and he’s losing a lot of blood.’
The woman looked past her to where the young man was sitting. His head back against the wall, he was holding a large bloodstained pad to his face. Then peering at Lily she said, ‘You’re one of the actresses from the Palace aren’t you? And that’s Mr Riley across there, isn’t it?’
‘Yes it is, and he’s in a very bad way.’
‘Oh well, I’ll see what I can do.’
When the surgery door opened she slipped from her seat and said to the patient who was about to enter, ‘Would you mind?’ and she pointed back to Riley.
The man gave way gracefully, saying, ‘No, OK.’
Lily helped Riley up from the seat and into the surgery. It was as if she were leading a child, and the doctor, rising from his chair behind his desk, greeted them with, ‘Well, well! What’s this?’ It was evident that he too had recognised them both.
After only a cursory examination of Riley’s face, he said, ‘You should’ve gone straight to the hospital with this, but we’ll see what we can do without wasting any more time,’ and from a cabinet he took a bottle and some dressings and a narrow case. ‘This is going to sting, mind,’ he said to Riley.
As he continued to clean Riley’s face and staunch the flow of blood, he said, ‘If this was done with a knife, it was jagged.’
When Riley made no reply, both Lily and the doctor stared down at him.
‘Well?’ It was the doctor’s query.
‘It was a stone…in a ring.’
Riley closed his eyes, and as the doctor started to ply the needle he gritted his teeth.
Yes, it had been done with a stone in a ring, and she had known what it would do when she had clenched her fist. She had used it as a knuckleduster.
However, the doctor refrained from further questioning: he had decided the matter was touching on something personal here. But what he said was, ‘There! That’s as much as I can do for you tonight. I’ve put ten of the best in, and they’re small and neat so there shouldn’t be much of a scar. My advice to you now is, put yourself to bed. And don’t take off that padding for a couple of days, no matter what it feels like. Come back in a week’s time and I’ll take those stitches out.’
He now turned and said to Lily, ‘You’ve been very good, although at one time you looked a bit green around the gills,’ and she, laughing, said, ‘I was green around the gills, and you nearly had another patient.’
He laughed as he led them to the door, saying, ‘You’ll do.’
The rain was still pouring down, the wind was still blowing, and Lily had to put her arm about his shoulders to steady him as they crossed the square.
She did not speak until she had him in the flat and seated on the couch. ‘As the doctor said, the best thing to do is to get you to bed. I’ll make a hot drink.’
‘I can manage, Lily, thank you. I’m all right now.’
‘Don’t be silly! You don’t think you’re going on the stage like that, do you? I must phone Mr Bernice, and Larry too. They’ll have some rearranging to do, and quick! So get it into your head, Mr Riley, that you won’t be treading the boards for a day or so.’
Louise and Fred were about to leave the house for Louise’s monthly treat of a trip to a good restaurant—the babysitter for the ten-year-old Jason was already upstairs playing chess with him—when the phone rang.
Jerking his head back towards the stairs, Fred said, ‘Let Nancy take it.’
‘No, you see who it is.’
Reluctantly, Fred grabbed up the phone, saying, ‘Beardsley here.’
‘I’m…I’m Lily, from the theatre, you know.’
‘Oh yes, Miss Poole from the theatre.’ He glanced towards Louise, then nodded at the phone, saying, ‘What can I do for you, miss?’
‘It’s Mr Riley, he’s in a bad way. There’s been an accident.’
‘An accident? What kind of an accident; car?’
‘No, nothing like that; there’s…well, you’re a friend of his and so you know all about him and his wife. Well, his wife came here unexpectedly tonight.’
‘What?’
And then the voice was a shout, saying, ‘Perhaps it’s because of the wind; can’t you hear?’
‘I can hear all right, woman! You said his wife came unexpectedly tonight; we weren’t expecting her until tomorrow.’
‘Well, she was here. She was seen talking to Mr Riley in the street. But Mr Riley had another visitor. I don’t know all the ins and outs, the only thing I know is his face is slashed. It’s just missed his lips. But I’ve taken him to the doctor’s and he’s had it stitched.’
There was a silence on the phone now, and Fred again looked at Louise before he bawled, ‘His jaw slashed? Where is he now?’
‘In bed. Mr Bernice and the others have been in and gone; and I must go now, because I’ll be on soon. I’ll leave the key behind the footscraper; it’s at the right of the front door. Are you there?’
‘Yes, yes, I’m here, and thank you.’ His tone was quiet now. ‘Thank you very much for taking all this trouble. It’s very kind of you indeed.’
‘Not at all, not at all; I’m very fond of him. He’s done a lot for me; I mean in my career, helped me a lot; but I can’t help saying he’s a silly bugger, and Mrs Riley’s such a lovely woman. People would say he deserves all he’s got but…but he’s nice at bottom. Anyway, that’s where the key is.’
When the line went dead Fred put down the receiver and turned to Louise and, slowly shaking his head, he said, ‘Yes, as she says he is a silly bugger. That should make me laugh but it doesn’t.’
‘What is it? What is it then?’
‘We’ll soon find out. As far as I can gather, Nyrene came on the hop, and he’s got a split jaw. How, I don’t know, but we’ll soon find out. So you can say goodbye to your posh dinner.’
Louise dropped onto a hall chair and, beating one hand on her lap, she said, ‘She must have figured something out and my invitation clinched it. And if she found that one there, there was bound to be words, plain words, and that’ll be the finish of him with her because she’s so conscious of her age and of him needing youth. It must have been going on all these weeks. And he’s hoodwinked us, too.’
‘Well, what did you expect him to do, take us into his confidence? Don’t be silly, woman. Come on now! Let’s get away and find out exactly what’s wrong.’
As Louise rose from her seat, the phone rang again, and almost with a pout of exasperation, he snatched it up, to hear a voice cry, ‘Fred!’
‘Yes, Gwendoline.’
‘Get yourself over here quick and see what that common low-class individual has done to my daughter.’
‘Well, before I come and see it, can you explain what he’s done?’
‘Yes, I’ll explain. He’s not only blacked her eyes and battered her face, but he’s tried to murder her. You should see the marks on her throat.’
Fred said nothing, but turned to Louise and shook his head.
At this Louise put her head to the side of the phone and heard Gwendoline say, ‘Did you hear what I said, Fred? I said murder. He attempted to murder her. Her beautiful face is ruined. He’ll go to prison for this. I’ll see to it. I’ll make such a scandal.’
‘I think you’ll find there are two sides to this, Gwendoline, and before I come to see you I’m going to see him, because from what I can gather he’s been slashed across the face. So, ask your daughter to explain that away, will you? Until I get to the bottom of this, goodbye, Gwendoline.’ And he banged down the phone; then stood looking glumly at Louise for a moment before he said, ‘My God! What an outcome! Where is it going to end?’
Twenty
Nyrene was seated at one end of the kitchen table and, at either side of her, sat Mary and Hamish. Mary had her hand on top of Nyrene’s, patting it as she said, ‘Oh, ma’am, it’s the saddest day of my life, it is really!’
Nyrene looked at her and said quietly, ‘And mine too, Mary.’
Her face was devoid of tears. Strangely, she hadn’t cried at all since she had run from Riley through the rain to her father-in-law’s house. There she had stayed the night and had left early next morning. That was yesterday morning; but there had been last night when, alone in bed and going over every minute from the time she opened the glass door until she closed it behind her, she still hadn’t cried.
Hamish now said, ‘I cannot imagine, ma’am, Mr Peter striking a woman, no matter what for, then trying to throttle her, but I can well imagine that long-legged piece whom I’ve seen but once taking a knife to a man; and a rough cut diamond would be better than any knife. Yes, I can imagine her using that. The devil creates beautiful fiends, but what I cannot get over, ma’am, is why you won’t speak to him, especially as he is in such a state.’
Nyrene’s voice was very firm now as she said, ‘Hamish, I am determined on this point; I do not wish to speak to my husband, and so, as I said, I want you or Mary, whoever answers his call, to make any excuse you like; that I am out or busy; or to just tell him the truth: that I have no wish to speak to him.’
‘Pardon me saying so, ma’am, but I don’t think I can do that, so if you don’t mind, I’ll leave the answering of the phone to Mary. She is looking at it from a woman’s point of view and I, at the moment, am seeing his; not, mind,’ his voice changed now, ‘that I condone anything that he has done, not one wee thing; no, no, I don’t condone; but I know something of the temptations a man is brought to, and therefore I understand his plight when separated from you week after week. A young sprite comes on the scene and throws herself at his head…at his whole body. Ma’am, there are those things that I call circumstances that we have discussed before. It’s the circumstances that make the tragedies and the environment or the place that provides the setting for them.’
Returning his intense stare, Nyrene said, ‘Well, Hamish, there could be circumstances in environments in the future. He is still a young man and I am a middle-aged woman.’
‘No, it’s not a matter of your being a middle-aged woman,’ Mary put in quickly as she wagged a hand towards Nyrene in protest against such denigration. ‘Nobody looking at you would say you were almost forty, never mind fifty.’
Nyrene did not reply, but just looked kindly at Mary and shook her head. Then she said, ‘What I really want to talk about is our business venture’—she was looking at Hamish now—‘both in the barn and on the land. Now the land will be entirely your concern, Hamish. You can hire what help you like, and you need a cultivator as you’ve said. Well, see to that. Once that rough patch of land is cleared and drained and fenced, then we can talk about what’s best to be done with it.’ Smiling wanly at him now, she added, ‘By that time you’ll have it all cut and dried in your own mind, if I know you,’ to which his answer was simply, ‘Likely, ma’am. Likely.’
She looked from one to the other now as she said, ‘My end of the business, I can see progressing faster than I can cope with on my own. My main asset in this will be Mr Rice. For his whole working life he has been an accompanist and he’s so happy to be brought out of forced retirement, or redundancy; and you’ve both seen Miss Gray at work: she’s very good; at least with her feet, although, unlike Miss Fuller, she’ll never make an elocutionist.’
‘Well, that’s something to be thankful for; that Fuller woman gives me a pain in the neck with her plum-in-her-mouth voice. She’s worse than any Professor Higgins.’
‘She’s a very good teacher, Mary.’
‘Yes, I suppose she is,’ Mary said, then added, ‘What I can’t get over is the child taking to her; she’ll soon have him speaking as she does.’
‘Well, that wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it, Mary?’
‘Oh, I don’t know so much. Anyway while we’re talking of the child, I think that both sides of the business are going to be good for him because whenever he can he’ll want to be out with you, Hamish, and who knows? in time he might get his strength back and even do some digging for you.’ Nyrene smiled, then letting out a long sigh she seemed to think for a moment before she added, ‘I think it’s good for him, too, to meet people, all kinds of people, and that’s what the barn will provide for him.’
There followed a short silence before Hamish said, ‘What are you telling him, ma’am?’
There was no need to ask to whom he was referring, so Nyrene answered, ‘I told him that his father’s been engaged by a touring company that had been about to go abroad when the leading man took ill and…and his father took over his place.’
‘Do you think he believed you, ma’am?’
Nyrene looked back into the rugged face and answered truthfully, ‘I don’t know, Hamish.’
‘What did he say to it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Then he didn’t believe you, ma’am.’
‘That might be true, Hamish. That might be true.’ She rose abruptly from the table, saying, ‘Well, that’s our future taken care of: the two concerns will eventually run as one; or, at least will be booked as one, and we’ll share the profits.’
Both Hamish and Mary were on their feet now, with Hamish saying, ‘It’s kind of you, indeed it is, ma’am. Such a proposition is not to be sneezed at; but neither of us want it or need it. We’ve talked it over, haven’t we, Mary?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Mary was nodding at Nyrene. ‘We’re only too glad to be with you and work here, and you pay us very generously. And then you’re seeing to the alterations being made to the rooms, and that addition at the end. We couldn’t ask for more. Hamish isn’t in need of any; neither am I.’
Nyrene looked from one to the other and said quietly, ‘I’m very lucky to have you, but the contract, as it will be made out shortly, will stand,’ and she turned and walked out of the kitchen. In her bedroom she dropped onto the side of the bed. What she wanted to do was to lay her head on the pillow and…the word ‘cry’ brought her up from the bed and to the dressing table, where she combed her hair back, then marched out of the room and into the nursery where her son was endeavouring to copy large coloured letters from a book.
Two days later Riley phoned. As she left the room she heard Mary answer him: ‘In the morning.’ How long Mary was on the phone she did not know, but in the evening she knew he had called again, and after some time Mary put the phone down and came to her, saying, ‘Ma’am, I can’t stand it; it’s awful. Won’t you just say a word?’
