All for the Love of a Lady: A Col. Primrose Mystery. Leslie Ford

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СКАЧАТЬ slightly uncomfortable feeling that if I had to meet one of them on a dark night, the other one would be safer.

      Julie waved her hand toward them without looking around.

      “—Do you know these people?”

      “No,” Randy said. He added, “Do you? And who are they?”

      “Don’t pay any attention to him, anybody,” Julie said. “The clean one’s Mr. Austin, and I can’t pronounce the other one’s name so it doesn’t matter. Anyway, it was Cass we wanted to see. Somebody said he was getting back tonight. I thought maybe he’d run into my sainted husband out in the wilds, and I thought I’d like to know whether he’s still alive or can I start looking around. I don’t suppose you’d like to give us a drink.”

      “Have a cigarette,” Randy said. He pulled a moist unattractive pack out of his pocket. “Grace and I just decided alcohol makes you hotter and the hell with it. If you’ll just stick around a few minutes you can have the whole place to yourselves. We’re shoving off.”

      “Oh, I see,” Julie said brightly. “You want us to stay. Sweetie, I’m sorry, but we’ve got to go. Fresh paint makes us break out. Tell Molly goodbye. Goodbye, Grace.”

      The two gentlemen backed out, the immaculate Mr. Austin bowing politely and still more embarrassed, the large wet man with the unpronounceable name looking hotter and wetter and still more good-humored.

      “Goodbye, Randy dear,” Julie called back. “If you ever have to make a crash landing I hope it’s in a nice field of poison ivy.”

      I heard them close the gate. Randy stood looking at me.

      “Now, how the hell did they know Cass was due in?” he asked grimly. “I know that big wet guy. Wait a minute—he signed my short snorter bill in Cairo a couple of years ago.”

      He pulled out his wallet and held a tattered dollar bill under the light on the table.

      “Here we are,” he said. “ ‘Lons Sondauer.’ ”

      He looked at me again. “Where the devil could Julie have picked him up? He’s some kind of great big screwball—rich as a skunk.”

      “Did he recognize you?”

      He shook his head. “I don’t think so, I wasn’t in uniform then.—I’d like to know what this is all about, Grace. Julie isn’t turning an honest penny introducing the right people, is she?”

      He grinned at me suddenly. “You may have gathered that Mrs. Ross gives me a pain.”

      Molly was just coming down.

      “Half a second,” she said. She went to the little panelled cupboard set in the wall in the back room and took out a bottle of Scotch. “I’d just like to . . . welcome the prodigal—if he happens to come back.”

      She smiled quickly at us and went out into the hall and down to the dining room. In a minute she came back with a Waterford decanter with the usual silver chain and plaque around its neck. She put it down on the cocktail bar improvised from an old-fashioned washstand, and set Randy’s thermos tub beside it.

      “There,” she said. “Let’s go before somebody else drops in.”

      She looked at Randy for an instant. “You shouldn’t have been rude to Julie Ross. She hasn’t heard from Spud for months, and his family have practically told her they’ll take the kids and she can support herself. That’s one thing about Courtney, even if I do have to say it. Julie’d just about have been in the street if it hadn’t been for her.”

      “She can afford it,” Randy said calmly.

      “So can a lot of people, but they don’t.”

      Molly closed my front door behind Randy and came back into the sitting room. It used to open out onto a green lawn with masses of flowers in the borders against the brick wall. Now it opens onto something that has very little resemblance to the idea I had when calluses meant nothing, and I had a vision of a horn of plenty, with young carrots and stringless tender beans and tiny yellow squash rolling out of it onto my dinner table, with possibly a dewy basketful for the Old Ladies’ Home. That was when I was reading the front of the seed catalogue, and hadn’t bothered to look in the back, at the pictures of sprays and the price of rotenone and nicotine and copper sulphate, or even remotely suspected the infinity of various-legged things that make a leaf without holes chewed in it an unbelievable miracle. Still, the pungent smell of a ripe unpicked tomato has something that ambergris and all the perfumes of Arabia don’t have. I was sniffing it through the open window, hoping that the night’s invisible invasion would leave a few of them intact for the morning—not round and rosy like in the pictures but deformed and misshapen, poor things but mine own—when I heard Molly cross the room behind me.

      I looked around. She’d gone over to the fireplace and was sitting in the wing chair, staring at some point a long ways past the blackened bricks in front of her, paying no attention to Sheila’s paw resting on her knee.

      I haven’t said very much about what Molly Crane looks like, because it’s a little hard to say. It depends so much on what’s going on inside her. If she and Courtney Durbin were sitting side by side—which was beginning to appear increasingly unlikely—hardly anyone would look twice at her, because Courtney is a really beautiful woman. But if one did look twice, with a perceptive eye, he’d see there was something there. It’s an intangible quality, difficult to name. There’s not more than four years’ difference between her age and Courtney’s—twenty-two, and twenty-six or so—but in the terms other than years that make people seem younger or older there’s more difference than that. I suppose it’s the difference between having a gardener in to plant your radishes and doing it yourself, or having the maid walk the dog on a leash instead of taking him along to the corner store and letting him chase a cat if he wants to. I’d always thought of the quality of simplicity and gaiety Molly has as being something she’d never lose, no matter how old she gets, but I wasn’t so sure as she turned out of herself just then and looked around at me. She seemed to have come a long journey back from somewhere I’d never been, and to have aged a lot while she was there, in the same way that Courtney was older.

      “I ought to go to bed,” she said abruptly. “But do you know what’s going to be the hardest part of all this to take?”

      I shook my head.

      “It’s all the people who’re going to be so kind to me to my face and then say ‘I told you so—these hit-and-run war marriages . . . none of them last.’ ”

      She got up quickly, went over to the window and stood looking out a long time before she turned around again.

      “—I know all the things Courtney’s been saying.”

      It was an effort for her to keep her voice evenly controlled.

      “Kind friends couldn’t wait to tell me. I’ve closed my ears and tried not to mind, because I knew very well I hadn’t thrown myself at him. I didn’t even know he was back when he called me up and asked if I’d have dinner that night. He said he was just off the plane, and I didn’t know he was calling from New York until he was late because the train was. I sort of figured Courtney was busy and he didn’t want to eat alone his first night back. Then bang in the middle of the ground beefsteak à la galloise he said, ‘I was going to send you this from Natal, a couple of months ago, but СКАЧАТЬ