Return I Dare Not by Margaret Kennedy

Author:Margaret Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473513082
Publisher: Random House

14. Night and Day.

A lady, dressed for a journey even to her gloves, was kicking a very large dressing case down the shallow polished stairs. At his exclamation she turned round and glared up at him. It was Aggie.

“What am I doing?” she echoed. “What do I look as if I’m doing? I’m getting out of this house.”

“But …”

“And I’m dragging my own box downstairs because nobody answers the bell. I’ve rung it twenty or thirty times. Either it’s out of order or else my maid is drunk. I had to pack the thing myself.”

“But Aggie …”

“Don’t mop and mow like that, Gibbie. Carry it down for me.”

“But Aggie, there’s no train.”

“No. I don’t suppose there is. I must have a car.”

“Everybody is asleep.”

“Then they must wake up.”

“But Aggie, what’s the matter? Why do you want to hurry off in the middle of the night?”

Aggie told him furiously that Syranwood was intolerable. She could not stay there an instant longer. Her bed was like a sack of potatoes and faced north, whereas anybody who cared about her must know that she could only sleep facing east. She thought that she had got hernia trying to push it round. The bell was a mile off, by the door, so that if she had had a heart attack in the middle of the night she would have had to die in her bed. She shouldn’t wonder if she was going to have another baby, and it was very bad for her to be upset. So she was going.

At this point the staircase, which had been but dimly lighted, sprang into a yellow glare, for somebody overhead had turned on the chandelier in the hall. Softly padding feet were heard and presently Lady Geraldine appeared, wrapped in the same red shawl which she had worn at the bathing pool, and wearing on her head an antique mob cap, nodding with rose-coloured ribbons. She looked infinitely older and more wizened than she had seemed by daylight.

“What is the matter with you, Aggie?” she asked severely.

Aggie explained and when she got to her probable condition, Geraldine said:

“Fiddle.”

Aggie began to cry.

“You can go if you like,” said Geraldine. “But I won’t have my servants roused. You must carry your own bag into Basingstoke.”

“It’s not a bag,” sobbed Aggie.

She began a tirade in which her own health, the mattresses of Syranwood and Laura’s morals were the main themes. Also she said that it was very unkind of Geraldine to ask all the boors and popinjays in London to meet her.

“They seem to think they’ve come here for a rest cure.”

Geraldine laughed.

“Take her bag up to her room for her, Gibbie.”

“It’s not a bag …”

“And come with me, Aggie. I’ll give you a cachet fièvre.”

“I’ve had a whole boxful of cachets fièvres.”

“Then I’d better give you an emetic, I should think. Come along.”

After a little dosing, Aggie consented to go back to her own room, though she said, before they parted:

“I shall never feel quite the same towards you again, Geraldine.

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