'So silly,' Antonia returned clearly. 'So silly to be afraid of the truth. I'm not.'
A shadow crossed her face, but her eyes did not close. When the nurse heard the bell and came in, they were still open, staring into Haidee's with complete tranquillity.
When Haidee reached home that evening Brand was on his usual vantage point, the high windowsill of the larder. He looked fed up. All this going out, what about me, Brand challenged, left here to starve.
Haidee went out to apologize. Brand was gracious. He yawned stretched and stepped on to her shoulder. This was precision toeing and he was good at it. Haidee was equally skilled in her part of the manoeuvre. It was one of the pleasures of their day.
That evening she needed it badly. She needed the whole house badly. Only that morning, before she had closed its door and gone to call for Skipper, she had been thinking gratefully that it was losing the barren feel of those days after the funeral and showing itself to her, corner by corner, as her own place-the piano, the fringed Spanish rug, the galloping white horses in the blue-green picture of the Elysian Fields. Her own place, her own things, her own peace. What craziness had involved her in today's unpeaceful morass. The accident was tragic enough, the threads and cross-currents were baffling, and daunting in the extreme.
'I must have been mad, Brand,' she said flatly. 'I don't even know how to get there.'
It might seem a minor difficulty. 'You've a tongue in your head' had been one of the maxims on which she had been reared. But in this case it was major. All right for Haidee Brown to have a tongue and use it; for Suzanne Desmond to ask the way to her own home was somewhat different. Taxi? From Dollymount it would be a run of at least twenty miles and priced accordingly. Besides, she would be able to give the driver no directions at all.
There remained one possibility-a cool assumption of rights.
She carried the phone across and sat down with the directory.
Government Services. Lands, Department of-Forestry Division-Foresters' Residences.
The list was long and there were several beginning with 'Glen'. Glendalough. Glenealy. Glengarra. Glenglass. Glemnalure. Glen Imaal. Glenglass had no appendage clue. Glen Imaal, for instance, had Donard after it, so you knew it was in West Wicklow. Her mind was so reluctant to dial the Glenglass number that on the first attempt it made her fingers go wrong. The second try was successful. The bell rang, the phone was lifted and a voice sang out:
'Hello. Glenglass Forest. Forester's Residence. Toby Hart speaking.'
It was a child's voice, clear and high. In itself a shock because Rory Hart had not struck her as being in any sense paterfamilias.
'May I speak to Mr. Hart, please, Mr. Rory Hart?' Haidee asked.
'Yes. Hang on, I'll get him,' the voice responded cheerfully.
Haidee liked all children, but boy children especially, and Toby sounded agreeably relaxed. Not so the voice that suddenly growled in the background.
'Well, find out. And apologize. And stop saying: "Hang on"!'
A second later she heard the phone being picked up. 'My apologies,' the treble tones announced. 'I omitted to ask who was calling.'
Haidee's lips twitched. 'Suzanne Desmond.'
Once more the phone went down-and was whipped up. Extraordinarily for all the miles it was away from her, haste and urgency came overpoweringly across. 'What did you say to him?' Rory Hart's voice demanded. 'What name did you give?' There was a thud as though he had pulled a door to. 'He knows nothing, remember.'
A tongue of fire that had nothing to do with the proximity of 'Scandinavian, meaning flame' seemed to be licking up Haidee's face. 'What name?' The rough tone had been quite unlike that in which he'd jibed at 'Suzanne Brown'. So the implication was terrifying. Had he spotted the deception? Was he trying to catch her out? So! She would brazen it out.
'You know the name I gave him. He told you, I take it? Suzanne Desmond.'
'Yes-well, I had to be sure,' a somewhat mollified tone responded. 'He's problem enough, I assure you, without that particular hare being started. What made you phone?'
'To tell you I'm coming to Glenglass after all.'
'You're doing what?' It seemed a bombshell. 'To stay, do you mean? Where?'
'Wherever Jennie is. My mother is anxious she shouldn't be alone.'
'She's not alone.'
'Then who has her?'
'I have.'
'Oh, I see.' That certainly put a different complexion on things, might even relieve her of her promise. Jennie in the bosom of the forester's family was probably in no need of sisterly care. 'You're looking after her? You and your wife?'
The silence, so sharp and short, was almost as though the line had failed. 'Are you still there?' she asked.
In reply the voice cut against her ear. 'Who are you?'
'I told you. Suzanne.' Her blood was beginning to chill.
'Then what's the game? You said my wife-or didn't you?' He hurled a request into the background. 'Turn that thing down!'
It was a lifeline, giving her time to collect herself. She'd boobed. Obviously there was something about his wife which the real Suzanne would have known. Dead? Separated? One thing alone was clear. Mrs. Rory Hart was not in Glenglass. She thought quickly. 'No. I said "Is she all right?" Jennie. Is she all right?'
'Why wouldn't she be?'
More was now becoming clear, clearer with every second. Antonia's fears for her younger daughter, the quavering references to 'that man' and 'getting into trouble'. And Haidee did not blame her. A teenager with Jennie's looks and that kind of man, a man who would stalk uninvited into your bedroom while you were changing! For the first time she felt that the need was urgent. She could not live with her thoughts were she to do nothing.
'She's all right,' Rory Hart was now saying. 'They wanted her to stay at school, but she broke out and turned up here. And I'm not having her blamed for it. In her shoes I'd have done exactly the same.'
'So would I,' Haidee said firmly. 'But that's not the point. The point is Mother has put her in my charge at least for the present. Arrangements can be made later.'
'Later?'
'When it's all over.' Was he being deliberately obtuse? 'Then presumably she'll go back to school and won't need me any more.'
'And you?' The words were clipped.
'I shall leave too, of course, though naturally I'll keep in touch with Jennie.'
'But of course,' Rory Hart agreed deferentially. 'What could be more natural? The moon, perhaps, turning blue. A fascinating topic for discussion during the long winter nights!' Definitely he had emphasized the last word. A man to steer clear of, Haidee decided, and wished she could do so. As she couldn't, she let the quip go in a silence which she could only hope would register as icy.
It may have done, for the subject was not pursued. Instead Rory Hart said briskly: 'You want transport, I suppose?' Astonishingly this, which to Haidee seemed far more surprising than keeping in touch with Jennie, appeared to be taken for granted. 'Tomorrow? Let me see. Dollymount...'
'I don't want you to come in for me.' It was a horrifying prospect. 'I can get the bus if you'll meet it.' A gamble. Many buses left the city for destinations in Wicklow-Bray, Greystones, Delgany, Enniskerry, Kilcoole, to mention just five. She still had no notion which was nearest to Glenglass. But it sounded right. At least she hoped it did.
The hope was vain. 'That doesn't sound a bit like you,' Rory remarked flatly. 'But we'll nail it before you change your mind. Preferably Enniskerry, because I'll have a chap near there about half past three. Look for a timber lorry-unless you object to travelling that way?'
'Not in the least,' Haidee said crisply. 'Why should I?' She was answered by a low-pitched whistle. 'God's fish, you have changed! Better watch that, Suzanne Brown. As a nice girl you'd be a disaster.' He added brusquely, 'As far as I remember, there's a bus from town at two-thirty. See that you're on it,' and put down the receiver.
CHAPTER THREE
Brand was asleep. His pink nose pointing in a nest of amber down made him a little like a hedgehog. Thanks be to Pan she was sitting down again. He hated her to use the phone. It was a deflecting of attention and this was wrong. Haidee was Brand's, he shone for her and she should shine exclusively for him. He had been very annoyed about her going away.
Haidee knew this and also that he had let bygones be bygones. The thought of leaving him so soon again was heartbreaking, so the news five minutes ago that the friend who had looked after him before could not, for family reasons, oblige again had been in one setback and solution.
'Going away again?' Skipper's mistress echoed Inquisitively next morning. 'Where to this time?'
'Over there,' Haidee responded cryptically, and pointed across the bay to the red and white chimney on the generating extension, the soft looming saddles of the Dublin foothills and the peaks of the Sugar Loaves. 'Wicklow. I've a friend in hospital. I've promised to go and stay with her daughter.'