The Winds Of Heaven Read online

  KANSAS CITY, MO. PUBLIC LIBRARY

  DATE DUE

  /-iff?'

  NOVQ?

  261-2500

  1915- 55-H210 The of [1955]

  Kansas city 111 public library

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  THE WINDS OF HEAVEN

  COPYRIGHT © 1955, Bt MONICA DICKENS

  All rights reserved. This hook, or farts thereof, must not he reproduced in any form without permission.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 55-10078

  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES 0* AMERICA

  To Pamela

  THE WINDS OF HEAVEN

  1.

  WHEN the winds of Heaven blow, men are inclined to throw back their heads like horses, and stride ruggedly into the gusts, pretending to be much healthier than they really are; but women tend to creep about, shrunk into their clothes, and clutching miserably at their hats and hair.

  To Louise Bickford, on this late April day, the wind that jostled through the London streets seemed a bitter personal enemy, turning to meet her whichever way she turned, beating against her small figure on the open stretches, and calling in reserve cohorts to attack her afresh at every corner.

  She had intended to walk to the Park and look at the spring flowers, but she was soon so tired of fighting the wind's fiendish determination to pluck her clothes and hair awry that she turned into a teashop to resettle her hair and recover her breath, until it was time to meet Miriam and the children at Marble Arch.

  Miriam was Louise's eldest daughter. She had borne three daughters, to her surprise, for her husband had set his heart on a son, and Louise was in the habit of giving him everything he asked for. That she failed to give him a boy, with a long conceited nose like his own to look down on the world, had not helped to raise his opinion of his wife's usefulness to society.

  Miriam was buying school clothes for the summer term. She would not let her mother come to the shops with her, because Louise talked too much to the salesgirls and confused the issue with irrelevant suggestions. Today they had parted after a

  restaurant lunch, and Louise, who could not afford to buy clothes for herself, had then walked about and looked in shop windows, until the tmculence of the untiring wind had driven her into the universal haven of Lyons.

  It was that hour in mid-afternoon when those who are on the early lunch and tea break come forth among the exhausted shoppers to get themselves a bite of something to keep them going until five-thirty. When she had stood in line and paid for her cake and cup of tea, Louise could not at first see anywhere to put down her tin tray. Being a Londoner, she did not mind holding a tray among a crowd of people with similar trays laden with unlikely food for the hour 'of day, and women stacking dirty dishes and wiping off tables with damp cloths.

  She walked about determinedly, turning her feet outward in the narrow, old-fashioned shoes she had been buying at the same shop for thirty years, until she saw an empty chair at a table by the wall, and gained it easily ahead of a vacillating man in a raincoat. Two girls were talking earnestly across the remains of their tea, and opposite Louise a fat, elderly man in clothes slightly frayed at points of friction was eating biscuits and reading a paper-backed thriller.

  When she had finished her cake, Louise lit a cigarette and smoked it with quick, naive puffs. Dudley had not liked her to smoke, and although she had been widowed for more than a year, and had been smoking since she came back from her husband's funeral, she was still inexpert at it.

  She reached for the ashtray, for she wanted to tap off the ash frequently, as she had seen highly-strung, busy people do. Louise was neither highly strung nor busy, but when she was in London, among people who all seemed to be doing something important in a hurry, she liked to try and keep the pace,

  Perhaps the fat man and the seriously gossiping girls would think she ran a dress shop, or was the key woman in a travel agency, or a writer of significant memoranda in Whitehall Louise was always much concerned with how people were

  thinking of her and summing her up, not knowing that a small, middle-aged lady with stubby features and hair no longer brown and not yet grey usually goes unnoticed.

  She reached for the ashtray with a purposeful gesture, and knocked the remains of her tea over the fat man's book, which he had just closed with a breathy, contented sigh. A small puddle spread over the grotesquely pointed breasts that upheld the swim-suit of the murdered girl on the cover, and the glossy paper began to sag and pucker.

  "I'm so terribly sorry. I don't know how I could have done such a thing," Louise gasped, although she spilled things every day, being naturally clumsy.

  "Don't give it a thought/' the man said, in one of those surprisingly soft, inadequate voices that sometimes come out of fat people, like a small puff of air from broken bellows. "It doesn't matter a pin/'

  "Oh, but it does. We must get a cloth 5> Louise looked

  round for one of the wipers of tables, but the man said: "Please don't bother. It's a worthless thing." Nevertheless, he blotted the book meticulously with a torn silk handkerchief, drying the blood- and sex- and tea-soaked girl on the cover with almost loving care.

  The two girls had glanced across when Louise spilled the tea, then looked at each other with faint, withdrawn smiles, raising themselves with a lift of the eyebrow to a higher plane, where people were not so silly. The accident had disrupted their conversation, so presently they dabbed at their mouths with face tissues, and left the table. Louise saw one of them turn back on her way to the door, and knew that they were talking about her.

  "Don't look so distressed," the fat man murmured, so much like a friend instead of a stranger that Louise, whom even marriage to Dudley had not taught circumspection of speech, was encouraged to say: "If only one knew what people were thinking and saying about one behind one's back! How much less mysterious and difficult life would be."

  manner of unpleasant things about me at my place of business, but what of it?"

  Louise leaned forward. How wonderful that instead of drawing back, as most people would, from her blurted, too confiding remark, he had answered so naturally, as if there were nothing odd in suddenly starting a conversation in Lyons about the mysteriousness of life.

  She gave him one of the broad, sweet smiles that were the prettiest things her face had to offer. Tm sure they don't," she said.

  "I know they do, because other people sometimes obligingly repeat them to me. But I don't get bothered. I daresay it's because I'm so stout."

  It was no good saying: Oh, but you're not, because he so obviously felt stout, from the way he sat in his chair, and puffed a little when he spoke; so Louise said: "But I get bothered, although I'm a bit plump. I always have been."

  "Bothered or plump, madam?" he asked courteously, like a butcher asking: "Lean or fat?"

  "Both. My late husband used to call me Tubby," She could hear Dudley saying it now, looking down at her from his enormous height, as if she were a teddy bear.

  "If that was the nicest thing he ever called you," the fat man said, so quietly that Louise barely caught the words, "you were not fortunate."

  Although, now that she thought of it, that was about the nicest thing that Dudley had called her in the later years of their life together, Louise was not offended. This chance teashop conversation had started off so stimulatingly, so unlike the flippant meaningless talk to which she was accustomed with the people she met at Miriam's house. She warmed to the fat man
with his pouchy skin and mild, half-hidden eyes, and his faraway, murmuring voice, like a priest in the confessional She hoped that he would not get up and go away.

  He stayed, refolding the handkerchief to polish the cover of the trashy book as if it were a first edition.

  Louise apologized again, "I'm afraid I spoiled it. Is it a favorite of yours? I like thrillers, too. Miriam, my daughter, is trying to remold my taste. I have to keep books like that in a drawer, because if I leave them by my bed, she takes them away and substitutes a biography she thinks I should read, or one of those novels they write nowadays about uneasy people who think things for pages and pages."

  "You like these things?" The man leaned back and pushed the small book across to her, his swollen hand more than covering it. "Have you read this one?"

  "I don't think so. The Girl in the Bloodstained Bikini. That sounds fascinating. Is it any good?"

  "You mustn't ask me." He lowered his pouched eyes. "I

  wrote it."

  "You!" Louise stared at him, amazed. His soft lips trembled slightly and he put out a fumbling hand to draw the book back.

  "I'm so sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to be rude. It was just that—well, you don't look like someone who would write books like fiat."

  "What do people look like who write books like this?"

  "I've never thought about it."

  "Neither had I, until one day it chanced across my mind. I was on holiday, by myself, and there was nothing to do, so I hired a deckchair and sat by the sea and read one of these every day for two weeks. Who writes them? I began to wonder. Aren't they perhaps just ordinary people one might meet every day on the street? And then I thought: Why shouldn't it be me?"

  "How enterprising of you!" Louise was genuinely admiring.

  "I'd never have thought " All her life, she had believed that

  some people could do things and some could not; and that it was no use trying to do the things that other people were born able to do, like playing tennis, or the piano, or writing a book for that matter. She was so entranced by the fat man's revelation that she was barely aware of the cavernous man and the

  anaemic girl, who had sat down at the table meanwhile, and were also listening with interest,

  "So when I got home," the fat man went on, "I locked the door against my landlady, who likes a chat, and wrote a thriller, putting in all the most shocking things, if you'll excuse me, I could think of. It still wasn't as shocking as some Fd read, but the publishers took it and asked for more."

  "How wonderful," Louise said, and die man and the girl nodded admiringly at each other, and being caught at it by Louise, turned hastily to their food, pretending they had not been listening.

  Louise looked again at the book, and tried to reconcile the lurid cover with the docile mass of man opposite her.

  "Lester Drage," she read. Is that really you?"

  "In a way. It's me and several other people. The publishers have six or eight authors' names, and several anonymous scribblers like myself supply the stuff they're supposed to have written. It's not fame, and it's not riches, and most people who know I do it think I'm a bit of an ass, but I enjoy it."

  "Of course." Louise narrowed her uneven brows, because she was going to say something intelligent. "It's creative. Everyone has to create things to justify their existence." She had heard someone say that, and it seemed to her to be true. She could not herself recall having created anything except a hooked rug one winter when she was ill, and her three daughters, whicli she hoped was enough justification.

  "Thank you," said the pseudo Lester Drage, his smile pleating the lower part of his face into semicircular folds, "You're very encouraging. I wonder"—he cleared his throat with a shifting of phlegm that made his voice husky—"I wonder if I might ask you to read this little effort? It's my sixth. My best, I think. I'd value your opinion."

  Tm flattered," said Louise, whose opinion was seldom asked* "I'd love to read it. She took the book upside down, so as not to appear to be looking too closely at the rude, sexy cover. "What a pity It won't go into my handbag. Miriam won't be

  too pleased to see me with it. Shell think Fve been hanging round the bookstalls again. And she told me to go to the portrait exhibition, and I haven't been. Oh dear! I'm afraid I must go if I'm to get to Marble Arch at the time we arranged."

  "So must I/' the man said, "or Mr. ," he named a big

  department store, "will think IVe died on him at last. I'm in beds there, you know."

  "In bed?" Louise frowned. t

  "I sell beds. For sleeping in."

  "Oh, yes, I understand. How interesting," Louise said brightly, not knowing whether to be pleased or sorry for him at this news. "I never met anyone who sold beds before. I mean, not socially. Of course, I've bought beds, but " She was beginning to sound foolish to herself, so she stopped, and smiled at him so nicely that he leaned forward with a grunt, and said: "Will you really read The Girl in the Bloodstained Bikini?" He brought the title out with no difficulty. "You don't have to, you know, if you "

  "But I want to!" Louise was anxious to read it now, to see what a man who sold beds for fifty weeks of the year would know or imagine about crime and sex and violence. "You must give me your address, and I'll return it. I'll give you mine, if you like. I'm staying with my daughter." She found one of her old cards in her handbag, and altered the address on it to Miriam's faintly embarrassing address: Pleasantways, Monk's Ditckling, Bticfes.

  The fat man tore a page out of a pocket diary and wrote in a scrawl: Gordon Disher, and an address in West Kensington. Our Mr. Disher, Louise could hear them saying in the bed department. Our Mr. Disher will assist you, and he would roll forward, with thirty years' experience, knowing all about inner springs and overlays.

  "My card," he said, handing her the piece of paper, and she wondered if he was mocking her for having an engraved card. Heaven knows she seldom used them. She still had some of the cards that Dudley had made her order after they were married.

  Louise and Mr. Disher rose to go out together. The man and the girl at the table had finished their food, and were missing nothing. What do they think? Louise wondered. Do they think I have picked him up? I have, though. Or he me. This will be something to tell Miriam. Quite an adventure. It's usually so dull, what I tell them when they ask me what I've been doing.

  Outside the teashop door, constantly on the swing now that the tea hour was at its height, the temporarily forgotten wind attacked Louise as if it had been waiting there especially for her.

  "Oh, this wind!" she fretted. "Don't you hate it?"

  "It's healthy, they say," Mr. Disher observed mechanically. He had put on a smallish grey hat with a soft, flat brim, that looked as if it had been out in the rain. His hair was too long at the back and hung in a silky fringe below it. Although Louise guessed that he was about her age, he still had quite a lot of fine, soft hair, the color of tarnished silver.

  He lifted the hat rather high in the air. "Please write to me," he said, so softly that Louise could only wonder if she had heard the words before the wind took them away, and Mr. Disher with them, breasting die gale with his coat blown open like a square-rigged ship.

  At a telephone booth near Marble Arch, Miriam Chadwick had parked the car with the children in it, bickering with shopping fatigue. She was telephoning to her sister Eva.

  "Look here, Eva," Miriam said, "I wish you wouldn't be so indefinite."

  "Do you want your spare room for somebody?"

  "Well, no, not exactly, but I just wish you'd give me a date."

  "It's so difficult. Honestly, Miriam, I don't want to be mean, but I'm reading this play, and it's exciting. It might really be something big for me. And the B.B.C. are starting a new series, and it's a bit hectic. And there are ... other things, too, at the moment." There was David. Sitting on the floor, Eva shiv-

  ro

  ered suddenly, although she was wearing a polo sweater and tight black trousers. What was going to happen about D
avid? She did not know herself.

  "You know how it is, Miriam. Mother . . . God bless her. I love her dearly, but "

  "I love her, too/' Miriam said crisply. "And IVe had her for two solid months. When is she going to you?"

  "Why are you never in the place we agree to meet?" Miriam asked in her clear, level voice, as they drove away from Marble Arch, round which she had driven two or three times before she found her mother, waiting in the wrong place.

  "I forget, dear," Louise said placidly, trying to check the futile argument of Where were you? and You know we said, in which the children would join, and which was so pointless now that they were all safely come together.

  "Oh, Gran-nee!" Miriam's two youngest children, Simon and Judy, were in the back seat, wishing they were in the front, which was where they rode when their grandmother was not with them. Their elder sister, Ellen, who was eleven, had been left at home with the daily woman. She went to a day school, and so did not need the variety of expensive clothes without which life at Simon's preparatory school was traditionally un-supportable. Small Judy went to the day school, too, but she was brought on these shopping expeditions, while Ellen usually stayed at home.

  "How did it go?" Louise asked, turning to give the children the chocolate bars she had bought for them, which they examined critically before unwrapping.

  "Oh, the usual," Miriam said. "They were out of most of the things in Simon's size, of course; but they've promised to send."

  "Isn't it maddening?" Louise entered happily into a discussion of shopping, which was a subject, she had found, that a mother could discuss safely with any of her daughters, without being cut short for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick,

  or saying something irritating. Mothers were good for talking to about things like clothes and shopping, which would bore a husband or an intelligent friend. That was one of the things mothers were good for.

  Miriam chatted pleasantly as she drove the car through the late afternoon traffic out of London toward the village where she and her barrister husband had made their home. It was not a village any more, but the Londoners who commuted to and from it called it one, and thought it was the real country,