Prudence

Chapter Nine

I woke next morning back in my own bed and not feeling any better. A fire had been lit in the grate. The smoke made me cough. Ace and Jack came in to see me on their way to the firm’s board meeting.

‘I’ve left a note for Mrs Braddock to ring the doctor,’ said Ace.

Hours later Maggie wandered in. ‘I tried to ring the doctor just now but he was engaged. I think he hunts on Monday anyway. Blasted Mrs Braddock’s got flu, too. Do you need anything?’

‘I’d love some water,’ I said.

She filled the jug from the bathroom. She was wearing a silver-grey silk shirt.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she said. ‘Ace brought it me from America. I’ve been dying to have a gossip with you. Wasn’t it awful Pen grabbing me like that? You missed the best part, rushing off. They simply swore at each other after you’d gone. Ace is getting so righteous, he really ought to go into the church.’

‘It’s only his family being hurt that he minds,’ I said. Heavens, who was I to defend him? But Maggie wasn’t listening.

‘It’s incredible this thing Pen has for me,’ she said. ‘He felt guilty about you. D’you know, he deliberately brought you up here because he knew Jack would fancy you. But I told him not to worry, you were having such fun with Jack. Perhaps we should swap.’

It’s a vicious circle, I thought wearily. She droned on until Rose walked in.

‘Hullo, sweetie, how are you? Mrs Braddock’s got the bug. Such a bore — cold meat again for supper. Mustn’t come too near; flu can play havoc with one’s looks at my age. Are you ready, Maggie?’

‘Is it time to go?’ said Maggie.

‘We’re going out, darling,’ said Rose to me. ‘You’ll be all right. They always say starve a fever. We’ll be back soon.’ She drifted out on a wave of expensive scent.

At first I was glad to be left in peace, but as the hours limped by and night fell, I began to get frightened. One moment I was drenched in icy sweat, the next hot as a volcano. It started to rain and the wind was rising.

The telephone rang. I dragged myself out of bed. Black whirls of giddiness overwhelmed me. It took hours to get along the passage, and as I reached the telephone it stopped ringing.

Burglars, I thought in terror, ringing to see if anyone was in. A door was banging. The wind was rattling the trees against the window pane. I staggered back to bed, delirious with fear.

I don’t remember how long I waited, but suddenly another door banged downstairs. Someone was coming up the stairs, moving lightly but inevitably towards me.

‘Oh God, Oh God!’ I wept.

The door was pushed open. A figure towered in the gloom. I gave a shriek and was about to pull the sheets over my head when I suddenly realized it was Ace.

‘I thought you were burglars,’ I said, bursting into a wild fit of sobbing.

He crossed the room in an instant and put his arms around me.

‘It’s all right,’ he said.

‘I was so frightened.’ I sobbed. ‘The telephone rang and stopped as soon as I got there.’

‘There, there, it’s all right.’

He was stroking my hair. I felt sanity flow back into me from the warmth of his body.

‘The bloody board meeting dragged on and on. It was me ringing. I came straight back when there was no answer.’

He laid me gently back on the pillows.

‘Where’s Mrs Braddock?’

‘She’s got flu.’

‘And Rose and Maggie?’

‘They popped out for a minute.’

‘For lunch, I suppose. What did the doctor say?’

‘He hasn’t arrived yet.’

Ace’s face blackened. ‘He soon will,’ he said, stalking out of the room.

I heard him dialling. ‘Can I speak to Doctor Wallis? It’s Ivan Mulholland.’

There was a pause, then: ‘I don’t give a bugger if he’s in the middle of his supper! I want him over here at once.’

Ivan the Terrible! The doctor was over in ten minutes. A little man with spectacles, absolutely gibbering with fear. His hands were cold and sweating when he touched me.

I heard him mutter about pneumonia as he went downstairs. I was scared rigid. I’m a terrible hypochondriac.

‘I’m not really ill, am I?’ I asked Ace when he came back.

He smiled and pushed my damp hair back from my forehead. ‘You’ll live,’ he said.

‘Dear Jane,’ I wrote five days later, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t written before, but my rotten temperature has only just come down. I hope Pendle rang and said I wasn’t coming back. His family really are weird. I’d better not say too much as they’re quite capable of steaming this open. I wish you were here. Pendle has two brothers. One is terribly handsome and lecherous (right up your street) the other one is older — in his thirties. I loathed him at first, he’s very tough and doesn’t give an inch, but he’s been simply angelic since I’ve been ill. He brought me a kitten from the stables today to cheer me up. I think Pendle and I are washed up — his choice not mine. I’ll tell you about it when I see you. Do write soon. Tons of love, Pru.’

Certainly Ace had been angelic. Never in a million years would I have expected him to display such patience, gentleness and sensitivity; comforting me through the worst phase when I was half delirious and screaming for Pendle, bringing me hot lemon laced with honey and whisky in the middle of the night when I was coughing my guts out. Even on the nightmarish occasion when I forced myself to eat some lunch in an attempt to please him, and promptly brought the whole lot up over newly changed sheets, he didn’t bat an eyelid. Afterwards as I sat huddled in a basket, shuddering with mortification, watching him put another lot of sheets on the bed with admirable deftness, I suddenly thought how hopeless Pendle with all his fastidiousness would have been in such a situation.

Not that we didn’t have our battles. Ace was inflexible about me taking my medicine, and wearing a dressing-gown, and not smoking, and he promptly confiscated my wireless, when he came in at midnight one evening, and caught me curled up under the blankets at the bottom of the bed, listening to Top Twenty. Nor would he allow me any visitors. I liked that. I didn’t feel up to the scrapping and intriguing of the rest of the family. I was quite happy lying in bed, flitting through novels, playing with the kitten, which we christened McGonagall, listening to the gentle snoring of Wordsworth and Coleridge stretched out in front of the fire, and the faint scratch of Ace’s fountain pen steadily moving over the notepad. He was finishing a piece on Venezuela for the Sunday Times and had holed up in my room, sitting in the big, faded blue velvet armchair, a pile of books and papers at his feet, only leaving occasionally to make telephone calls, or walk the dogs. I admired his application. He could gut a book in three-quarters of an hour, and he only paused occasionally when he was writing to cross out a word, or listen to a few bars of music on the wireless. It was so different from my haphazard methods of producing advertising copy, chain-smoking, gossiping to Rodney, writing endless variations on different bits of paper, only to produce one very undistinguished slogan by the end of the day. Rodney had sent me a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums as big as grapefruit, and a get-well card signed by the rest of the department. All the same, advertising and the tinned peaches campaign seemed very far away. It was very cosy in my bedroom. I got to know the blue and green flower pattern of the curtains extremely well and I found my thoughts straying less and less to Pendle.

Friday was a red letter day. I managed my first meal: chicken soup, hot ginger bread and a cup of tea, and Ace finished his piece as night fell, and went downstairs to telephone his copy through to the paper.