Child Friday Read online

  When, later, she sat in a crowded Lyons and ate steak and sausage and chip potatoes with the deliberation of long privation, she thought back to other Christmases. When her father had been alive she had tried to make the season gay, to please him with small surprises, to show him that she was growing up and could, if he would accept her, take the place of her dead mother. But he had not wanted that. He was gentle to her always, but disinterested. A new frock, a fresh hair-style might evoke a tolerant smile, but to him she had no separate being and sooner or later he would say: “I remember your mother—” and after the nostalgic reminiscence which might last half the evening he would finish by saying: “But such beauty, my dear, is beyond your conception. It should have lived on ... lived on...”

  Only once had she rebelled. The year she became seventeen she had pleaded on such an occasion:

  “But I am her daughter and yours. Can you see nothing of her in me?”

  He had answered gently, tolerantly, not meaning to be unkind:

  “No, my child, why should I? Your mother had something with which few women are gifted. You have inherited nothing from her—more’s the pity.”

  At seventeen that had hurt unbearably. Emily had begun to envy beauty and resent it at the same time, and later, after her father had died, and she was trying to earn her own living, there had been Tim, with his Irish charm and easy way. Tim and Rosemary had been the focus of her affections at that time. Tim, because he had paid her the first attentions in her own right that she had ever known, Rosemary, because she was gay and pretty, and shared her first lodgings and brought color into her life.

  She remembered the dress which had caused all the trouble, a dress of unbelievable delicacy and charm which she had saved for months to buy in order to do Tim credit at a certain dance. She remembered how Rosemary had yearned over it and begged her, with that charm which she could never resist, to lend it to her just once.

  “We’re the same size,” she had cajoled with that melting air of supplication her pretty face could wear when she passionately wanted something. “Emily darling, you couldn’t be so mean ... I’ll take the greatest care and, next week, when you wear it for Tim, it will be as lovely and fresh as ever.”

  Of course she had lent the dress. Rosemary with her lovely empty face had never been easy to resist but she had worn it for Tim. Emily could still remember with pain his expression when he observed her in the frock a week later.

  “You’ve borrowed Rosemary’s dress,” he had said, his eyes twinkling with amusement.

  “No, it’s mine,” she had said indignantly, only partly realizing that Rosemary, besides borrowing her dress, was also stealing her young man.

  “Really?” Tim had replied indifferently. “Well, if you’ll forgive me saying so, it suits her a great deal better. You’re nice, but no beauty, my sweet.”

  Beauty ... was she never to be done with it? Was she so plain that the eagerness, the desire to please was lost, or, worse still, laughed at?

  Emily finished the last of her steak and regarded the empty plate with affectionate content. All that was past; the succulent savouring of a meal, after weeks of frugal snacks, was the answer to well-being, she thought. She had a job and enough money to pay her landlady; beauty, or the lack of it, scarcely mattered any more. She could laugh at Tim and Rosemary and even at the memory of her dead mother, reaching out to mark her child a failure.

  She paid her bill and went out into the snowy streets, with a vague, unfamiliar feeling of fulfilment.

  III

  The mood had left her by the time she boarded the Cornish Riviera express two days later. Another interview with Miss Pink, who provided her ticket and final instructions, had not bolstered up confidence. Indeed, Miss Pink’s very obvious doubts at the last had brought back the old feeling of inferiority.

  “You have no faith in me, have you?” she said.

  Miss Pink’s response was not reassuring.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said dubiously. “It hasn’t been easy to fix up Dane Merritt with someone suitable—in fact I told him at the start that he’d picked the wrong agency. What he needed was a—however, I’ve spoken to him on the telephone and explained it was the best I could do.”

  “Oh! Will he dislike me, do you suppose?”

  “That’s up to you, surely. It’s time, Emily, that you stood on your own feet. If this position doesn’t ultimately work out, I shall understand, but do your best. In spite of not very propitious circumstances, I still think it might work.”

  It was not encouraging, thought Emily, sitting in a third-class compartment uneasily inspecting her fellow passengers. One burnt one’s boats going off into the blue to a strange job and a strange employer and at the end of it one could be back where one started. Still, she consoled herself, settling back into her corner, at least Christmas was assured, and Christmas was a time when the wants and penury of non-employment meant unhappiness and a sense of failure. Christmas was a time of loving and giving, and even a strange household was better than a solitary room in a cheap boarding house where no one knew of your existence.

  It was a long journey, and to Emily one beset with unhappy memories of the past; the father she had loved but never satisfied, Rosemary whose friendship had seemed so miraculous, Tim who had awakened her youthful dreams and brought the shy hope of felicity. Well, thought Emily, trying to laugh at herself, she had been wrong about them both, wrong about her own approach to life. She had not understood that men amused themselves, that friends of one’s own sex took the plundered and cast aside; she had not understood anything, she thought wryly, and could suddenly appreciate Miss Pink’s impatience. To her young girls must seem irritating and wholly without common sense, and before she dropped into a fitful sleep, Emily resolved that however peculiar or difficult Mr. Dane Merritt might prove to be, she would hold down the job, whatever it cost her.

  She was to be met at Plymouth by Mr. Merritt’s manservant, who, Miss Pink had told her, combined the offices of valet, chauffeur, and handy man at Pennyleat, and would acquaint her with the ways of the household. It was some time before they discovered each other in the snowy station yard, and Emily saw the man’s look of surprise and, perhaps, disapproval, when she made herself known to him.

  He was a wiry little man of indeterminate age with a simian cast of countenance, a flat nose that had once been broken, and an unmistakable cockney voice. He put Emily’s shabby luggage into the car with scant regard for any breakables it might contain and looked disgusted when she asked if she might ride beside him rather than in isolation at the back.

  “Have we far to go?” she asked when they had left the city for dark country roads and still he had failed to respond to her timid attempts to draw him into conversation.

  “Matter of fifteen miles or more,” he replied laconically, adding with a certain satisfaction: “Reckon the moor will get you down, same as them others.”

  “What others?” asked Emily with faint alarm. “And how did the moor get them?”

  “Them others after the post of course, Scared ’em, the moor did, or maybe it was just the governor.”

  “The moor won’t scare me,” said Emily firmly. “And I see no reason why Mr. Merritt should, either.”

  He gave her a quick, sidelong glance.

  “You aren’t the type for Pennyleat,” he said. “Too young, and too green, I shouldn’t wonder. Pennyleat’s a lonely place and you have to mind your p’s and q’s.”

  “I think you’re rather rude,” said Emily mildly, and he grinned.

  “So did the others,” he retorted with a chuckle. “But if you stays, you ‘ave to make the best of me, see, because Mr. Merritt can’t get on without me, and it wouldn’t be me wot has to leave if it comes to a choice.”

  Emily was used to the natural resentment which servants felt for paid companions and governesses, and even private secretaries, but sitting beside this disagreeable little man in the darkness, with the snow driving against them in hypnotic wh
irls and arabesques in the glare of the car’s headlights, she suddenly knew what was troubling him. Underneath the impertinence and bombast he was afraid. For some reason he did not quite believe in the self-assurance he so rudely proclaimed and for all beings who doubted themselves, Emily had an instinctive sympathy.

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t,” she said gently. “And I would never try to oust you from your job, even if I could.”

  “That ain’t what the others said,” he replied, giving her another sidelong glance. “ ‘You’ll not be wanted here much longer,’ they said. ‘When I’m mistress here you’ll get your notice.’ ”

  “Mistress?” repeated Emily, wrinkling her forehead.

  “In a manner of speaking, you understand.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, I hope we shall both keep our jobs, Mr.—Mr.—”

  “Me name’s Short—Shorty when you knows me,” he replied and added crushingly: “Don’t you know no better than to address servants the same at gentry?”

  Emily felt herself flushing.

  “The few I’ve come across haven’t been like you,” she replied reprovingly, “and in my own home we never had any. We couldn’t afford them.”

  “Well,” he said grudgingly, “I’ll say this for you, miss, you don’t give yourself airs.”

  “Why should I?” asked Emily with surprise. “My father used to say that only the socially insecure do that.”

  “Sounds like fancy talk to me,” he grunted. “You a Socialist?”

  “I don’t think so, I don’t know much about politics,” she answered.

  “Then you did ought to,” he returned severely. “You and me ’as our rights, same as everyone else, and I stand on me rights and no nonsense, and so I tells the governor from the start.”

  “Is Mr. Merritt and exacting master, then?”

  “Naow!” said Shorty contemptuously. “Wouldn’t ’ave been with ’im all this time of the ’ad been. ’Course, his affliction makes him tetchy at times, but I don’t take no notice of that.”

  “You’ve been with him ever since he became blind?”

  “Yes—and before.”

  “How did it happen?” Emily asked impulsively. The darkness and the snow had shut them into a little world of their own, and it no longer seemed difficult to ask questions of the unfriendly Shorty.

  “Something blew up in his face. I ask you—grown men playing about with stinks like a lot of kids!”

  “Do you mean a chemical experiment?”

  “Something of the sort, I suppose. Always messing about with stinks in that laboratory where he worked.”

  “What was his job?”

  “Research chemist, I believe they calls it. Very clever, Mr. Merritt was said to be. Still advises ’em when called upon. Writing a book, too, about his discoveries. Hope you’ll be able to make head nor tail to it better than wot I can. You don’t look very bright to me, but nor more did the others.”

  “I don’t imagine it’s a matter of doing any more than taking dictation,” said Emily with more assurance than she felt. Miss Pink had not mentioned that technical knowledge might, be required in her secretarial duties, but neither had she touched on the nature of Mr. Merritt’s work or the cause of his accident.

  Emily was suddenly filled with a sense of her own inadequacy. Miss Pink’s own half-expressed doubts returned to undermine her budding confidence. If others had failed before her, what chance had she, the least experienced of the agency’s many proficient young women, of holding down a job with an employer who she was now convinced must be exacting and hard to please?

  The road wound now across unbroken snowy wasteland. They had passed no human habitation for some time, and she could hear the sound of the rising wind as it piled the snow in ridges against the windscreen.

  “Is this Dartmoor?” Emily asked, and Shorty replied with a note of sardonic pleasure:

  “Yes, this is the moor. Picked a cushy spot for a gaol, didn’t they? Might as well be buried, as I tell the governor. That’s what he wanted, he said, when the old man died and left him the place.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Naow, ’tain’t natural! Give me London and the crowds on a Saturday night and the stink of fish and chips and the four ale bar. Still, it takes all sorts to make a world.”

  Emily had not taken to Shorty in their brief acquaintance but she found herself touched by the tough little cockney’s loyalty. He must be genuinely attached to his master, she thought, to share in a voluntary exile and fear for the continued safety of his job.

  “And the little girl? Does she mind the loneliness, too?” she asked.

  “Miss Alice? Well, it’s always been ’er ’ome, see? Anyways, she’s a queer kid—no telling what she thinks. Mr. Carey adopted her in the first place so she’s never properly belonged nowhere in a manner of speaking.”

  “Mr. Carey?”

  “The old gentleman wot left the governor the place and his money. The kid was thrown in, too.”

  “Poor little girl,” said Emily softly, reminded of her own childhood. “It isn’t very nice not to be wanted.”

  “You’re a queer one,” observed Shorty, and added with sudden shrewdness: “Shouldn’t wonder if that Miss Pink ain’t trying out a new line. Loving kindness and fond ’earts—cor, it makes you sick!”

  “Why should fond hearts make you sick?” demanded Emily with spirit. “Better than no heart at all, I would have thought.”

  “Only there ain’t no such thing in females, see?” said Shorty crushingly. “Mr. Merritt ’ad ’is basinful with that Miss Larne five years ago. Not likely to be caught again with the same soft soap.”

  Emily frowned in the darkness. Miss Pink had hinted at some unfortunate love affair which had left its mark.

  “That’s a hard view,” she said a little primly. “All women aren’t the same, besides—one never knows all the ins and outs of a broken love affair.”

  “Says you!” retorted Shorty rudely. “Miss Larne give him the air because he went blind, see? Might ’ave changed her tune if he’d come into his money earlier. It only goes to show, don’t it?”

  “Oh, that was cruel!”

  “Of course it was. Like I was telling you, there ain’t no ’eart in females. Well—’ere we are. The governor wants to see you at once. ’E’s ’ad ’is dinner, of course. You’ll get yours later on a tray.”

  A high stone wall had risen suddenly out of the darkness , and the car turned in through a gateway and circled a short I drive to the front of the house. Emily had an impression of a long, gaunt building, unlighted and shuttered. The wind had piled snow against the buttressed walls, and the steps which led to the front door were already covered. As she followed Shorty up them, Emily could feel the snow seeping through the shoes which so badly needed resoling, and the sensation of cold matched the chill round her heart as she stood on the threshold of this new, unknown venture.

  The man pushed open the heavy front door and did not stand aside for her to enter first, but impatiently beckoned her in so that he could shut it. The hall was unlighted except for the glow of a log fire at the farther end. The silence matched the darkness out of which the dim shapes of tall presses and chests loomed with the half-seen menace of shadows.

  “Is there no electricity here?” Emily asked, wondering why, at least, an oil lamp had not been left burning.

  “Oh, yes, but we forgets in this part of the ’ouse,” replied Shorty carelessly, and flicked down a switch somewhere near the door. A blaze of illumination sprang suddenly from a vast crystal chandelier hanging high above them and Emily stood blinking in the light.

  “You’ll get used to the darkness. At least, if you don’t you’ll be no different to the others,” Shorty grinned, but he left the lights on and Emily saw that the hall soared to the roof of the house, and a shallow stone staircase mounted to a short gallery where doors stood open to the darkened bedrooms beyond.

  “This way,” Shorty said, and jerked his head towards one of t
he ground-floor rooms. “I’ll take up your traps while you’re saying your piece to the governor.”

  Emily would have liked time to wash and remove the traces of her long journey, before being interviewed by her new employer, but Shorty was already opening a door and announcing her.

  “The young lady, sir,” he said in the suddenly expressionless voice of the well-trained servant, and quietly shut the door on Emily.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SHE stood just inside the room, feeling suddenly nervous. There were no lights here, either, but the glow from the fire flickered on walls lined from floor to ceiling with books, so it was, presumably, a library. The quietness and the knowledge that a stranger sat somewhere in the shadows, waiting for her, gave Emily a rising sensation of panic.

  “Well?” A voice spoke suddenly and impatiently out of the darkness. “Come to the fire and get acquainted.”

  She had to feel her way across the room, unfamiliar with the placing of the furniture, and as she approached the circle of firelight, a low growl halted her. She could see the bright eyes of an Alsatian bitch watching her from where she lay beside a chair by the fire and her lip lifted threateningly.

  “It’s all right, Bella.” The man sitting in the chair spoke caressingly. “Are you nervous, Miss Moon?”

  “No,” said Emily, who liked dogs. “Though I imagine her job is to guard and—and guide you.”

  “So you’ve heard of the Guide Dogs’ work, have you? Come and speak to her, then. If you don’t get on with Bella it will be no use your remaining here, I’m afraid.”

  Emily went up to the bitch and put a hand lightly on her head.

  “Good girl, good Bella,” she said softly. “I won’t hurt your master—so please be friends.”