The Toff and the Fallen Angels

He heard her coming. There were no signs of tears, now, and he could have been mistaken before, although her make-up was suspiciously new. But her smile was bright. He handed her up the single step, drawing out her chair.

“Sugar or ginger?”

“I don’t think I’ll have either,” she said. “It looks delicious.”

Rollison took a little ginger, and they ate, for a time, in silence. Then he asked with a gleam in his eyes :

“Do you find it rewarding?”

She drew a deep breath.

“It can be. But at the same time it can be—purgatory.” There was such feeling in her voice that he felt a kind of hurt for her. “And when things go wrong, as they have done lately, I almost despair.” She hardly seemed to notice Jolly’s soft-footed approach to change the plates, as she went on: “They really are girls of exceptional talent. I am quite serious about that. The hostel was founded three years ago, when there was a scandal at a red-brick university. A dozen girls were sent down for drug taking, and a certain amount of sexual promiscuity. At the time I was the matron at one of the main resi-dential houses, and four of the girls were under my care. I knew they were brilliant students. One was an outstanding architect, another had a positive genius for mathematics—oh, the details don’t really matter. They all were sent down and disgraced, their studies cut off as with a knife. Several of the professors were greatly disturbed about the waste. They knew the decision of the President was both right and just, but they also knew the talents of these girls and were desperate to find a way of preventing them from being wasted.”

Naomi Smith broke off, as Jolly held the appetising cottage pie with its potato crust perfectly browned, in front of her. She helped herself but did not cease talking, so absorbed was she in what she was saying.

“One of the professors was—and still is—very wealthy. And the others were prepared to give private tutoring if the girls could be cared for nearby. All the girls were scholarship undergraduates, none had enough money without the government grant. And each leapt at the chance of going on with her studies. That’s how it began,” Namoi went on. “That was how the house of the fallen angels, as you call it, was founded. In a way it’s been a great social experiment and on the whole very successful. But I have a feeling—oh, I have more than a feeling, I know someone is trying to make it fail.”

She was now quite oblivious of Jolly and the dish of young carrots he was proffering, as she stared at Rollison as if challenging him to believe everything she told him: willing him to promise to help.

CHAPTER 3

A Promise From The Toff

ROLLISON flickered a glance at Jolly, who immediately began to serve their guest, while he looked very straightly into Naomi Smith’s eyes, feeling great warmth for her.

“On the strength of your feeling,” he said, “I will help if I can.”

Jolly’s expression relaxed into obvious approval, and Naomi Smith caught her breath, as if the suddenness of Rollison’s decision took her by surprise. But in a moment she was gripping his hand, and her eyes blazed with rare radiance.

“Oh, thank God!” she exclaimed. “Thank God!” She held tightly for a few moments, then suddenly released him and turned away; for the second time her eyes were dimmed with tears. Almost blindly she picked up her knife and fork, beginning to eat as if she had no idea what was in front of her. “I really didn’t think you would, I couldn’t believe you were all you’re said to be.”

“I’m probably half as bad as my enemies say and half as good as my friends would like to believe,” Rollison said, to ease the tension. He paused, to eat; and Jolly came and poured out wine for the Toff to taste and approve. For the first time, Jolly was noticed; and smiled at. “But the one person who probably sees me as I am is my Aunt Gloria,” went on Rollison.

“Oh?” said Naomi, blankly.

“She also has a heart of gold and a helping hand for fallen angels,” Rollison told her. “So I’ve had some experience.”

“Good gracious !” exclaimed Naomi.

“Now what I need, and do take your time about it, is the full story of what is going wrong among your young women, and why you think that someone is trying to make the hostel fail. What do you call the hostel, by the way?”

“Smith Hall,” she answered.

Rollison’s eyebrows shot up.

“Named after you?”

“Yes.” She was suddenly almost gay. “It’s a big old house in Bloomsbury, very handy for London University. The girls originally called it ‘Smith Hall’ for a joke, now the name has become a fixture.” She went on talking, as she ate, with an easy control of words which Rollison found himself enjoying almost as much as he enjoyed the sound of her voice. “The house was much too large for the half-dozen or so girls we had when we started and we used only the ground floor. Gradually we’ve opened all the rooms. It’s been a remarkable success in a lot of ways—the sponsors put up the money for basic alterations and the fallen angels did all the decorat-ing and arranging.” She paused. “I must stop calling them fallen angels !”

“It sounds all right to me,” murmured Rollison.

Her plate was nearly empty and he got up and went to the hotplate.

“Some pie?”

“I—oh, may I? It’s very nice . . . They do their own cooking and the housework, too, it’s quite remarkable how with a community of twenty-five there’s someone good at every job . . . Even baby-sitting!” She looked up as if wondering how he would react to that.