Dear Deceiver(10)

'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.'