She Came Back

CHAPTER 3

Philip Jocelyn rang up at eight o’clock. “Who’s that?… Lyn?… All right, tell Aunt Milly I’ll be down to lunch tomorrow-or perhaps not till after lunch. Will that disorganize the rations?”

Lyn gurgled.

“I expect so.”

“Well, I shan’t know until the last minute. Anyhow I can’t make it tonight.”

“All right. Just wait a second-someone rang you up this morning.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t give any name-only asked if you were here, and when I said you were up in London she wanted to know when you would be back. I said perhaps tonight but most probably not till tomorrow, and she rang off. It was a long distance call and the line was awfully faint.”

She heard him laugh.

“The Voice on the Telephone-our great serial mystery- to be continued in our next! Don’t be apologetic-I expect she’ll keep. Give Aunt Milly my love. I kiss your hands and your feet.”

“You don’t do anything of the sort!”

“Perhaps not-it’s a sadly unpicturesque age. Goodbye, my child. Be good.” He hung up.

Lyndall put down the receiver and came back to the fire. She had changed into a warm green housecoat, and Mrs. Armitage into a shapeless garment of brown velveteen with a fur collar which was rather the worse for wear.

Lyndall said, “That was Philip.”

“So I gathered.”

“He doesn’t know whether he’ll be down for lunch tomorrow.”

Things like that never worried Mrs. Armitage. She nodded, and said with what appeared to be complete irrelevance,

“What a good thing you and Philip are not really cousins.”

Lyndall bent forward to put a log on the fire, her long, full skirt flaring out from a childish waist. The glow from the embers stung her cheeks. She murmured,

“Why?”

“Well, I just thought it was a good thing. Jocelyns are all very well, and poor Louie was very happy with Philip’s father-he was a most charming man. But that’s what it is with the Jocelyns-they’re charming. But you can have too much of them-they want diluting.”

It was at this moment that the front door bell rang.

Anne Jocelyn stood on the dark step and waited for someone to come. The taxi which had brought her from Clayford turned noisily behind her on the gravel sweep. Then it drove away. The sound receded and was gone. She stood in the dark and waited for someone to come. Presently she rang again, but almost at once the key turned in the lock. The door opened a little way and a young girl looked round it. When she saw that it was a woman standing there she stepped back, opening the door wide open.

Anne Jocelyn walked in.

“Is Sir Philip back?”

Ivy Fossett was a little bit flustered. Visitors didn’t just walk in like that after dark, not these days they didn’t. But it was a lady all right, and a lovely fur coat. She stared her eyes out at it and said,

“No, ma’am, he isn’t.”

The lady took her up sharp.

“Who is here then? Who answered the telephone this morning?”

“Mrs. Armitage, and Miss Lyndall-Miss Lyndall Armitage. It would be her answered the phone.”

“Where are they?… In the parlour? You needn’t announce me-I’ll go through.”

Ivy gaped, and watched her go. “Walked right past me as if I wasn’t there,” she told them in the kitchen, and was reproved by Mrs. Ramage, the rather more than elderly cook.

“You should have asked her name.”

Ivy tossed her head.

“She never give me a chanst!”

Anne crossed the hall. The parlour looked out to a terrace at the back. The name came down, with the white panelling, from the reign of good Queen Anne. The first Anne Jocelyn had been her god-daughter.

She put her hand on the door-knob and stood for a moment, loosening her coat, pushing it back to show the blue of the dress beneath. Her heart beat hard against her side. It isn’t every day that one comes back from the dead. Perhaps she was glad that Philip wasn’t there. She opened the door and stood on the threshold looking in.

Light overhead, the blue curtains drawn at the windows, a wood fire glowing bright, and over it the white mantelshelf with The Seasons looking down, and over The Seasons, The Girl with a Fur Coat. She looked at her steadily, critically, as she might have looked at her own reflection in the glass. She thought the portrait might very well have been a mirror reflecting her.

There were two people in the room. On the right of the hearth Milly Armitage with a newspaper on her lap and another sprawling beside her on the blue carpet. Untidy, tiresome woman. Never her friend. Of course she would be here. Well dug in. Nous allons changer tout cela. Down on the hearthrug, curled up with a book, that brat Lyndall.

The paper rustled under the sudden heavy pressure of Milly Armitage’s hand, the book pitched forward on to the white fur rug. Lyndall sprang up, stumbling on the folds of her long green skirt, catching at the arm of the empty chair against which she had been leaning. Her eyes widened and darkened, all the colour went out of her face. She stared at the open door and saw Anne Jocelyn stepped from the portrait behind her-Anne Jocelyn, bare-headed, with her gold curls and her tinted oval face, pearls hanging down over the thin blue dress, fur coat hanging open.

In the same moment she heard Milly Armitage gasp. She herself did not seem to be breathing at all. Everything stopped while she looked at Anne. Then irrepressibly, incongruously, there zigzagged into her mind the thought, “Amory painted her better than that.” When this came back to her later it shocked her horribly. After more than three years of privation, suffering, and strain, who wouldn’t look different- older? A rush of feeling blotted out everything except the realization that this was Anne and she was alive. She ran forward with a half articulate cry, and Anne opened her arms. In a moment Lyndall was hugging her, saying her name over and over, the tears running down her cheeks.

“Anne-Anne-Anne! We thought you were dead!”

“I very nearly thought so myself.”

They came across the room together.

“Aunt Milly! How good to see you! Oh, how very, very good to be here!”

Milly Armitage was embraced. Struggling with a horrid rush of completely disorganized emotions, she kissed a cheek which was thinner and considerably more made-up than it had been three years ago. She couldn’t remember ever having been embraced by Anne before. A cool kiss on the cheek was as far as they had ever got or wanted to get. She stood back with a transient feeling of relief and endeavoured to find words. It wasn’t that there weren’t plenty of things to say, but even in this moment of shock she had a feeling that she had better not say them. Philip-she mustn’t say or do anything which would hurt Philip. A sense of immeasurable disaster hovered. Three and a half years was a long time to be dead. Anne had come back. Awful to come back and feel that you weren’t wanted any more. “The living close their ranks.” Who said that? It was true-you had to. Under this high-flown strain, something quite homely and commonplace. “Gosh! Why did she have to come back?”

Lyndall was saying, “Anne darling-oh, Anne darling! How lovely that you are alive!”

Mrs. Armitage remembered that she had been brought up to be a gentlewoman. With grim determination she set herself to behave like one.