Dale A Spring of Love

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-914198-93-9
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 376 Seiten

What price would you pay for love? Esther Williams is thirty and single. She has been nowhere, done nothing, loved no one except her recently deceased grandfather. Her life is one of routine and order, following the same pattern week after week. That is, until she meets Raymond Banks. Raymond is unassuming but insistent, and each conversation with him brings Esther further out of her shell. He alters her awareness of the world, and their budding love is soon cemented with a proposal. For the first time ever, she feels truly alive. But marriage to Raymond brings a different kind of order, one of increasing control and possession. When Esther discovers something that threatens their happiness, she is forced to decide whether true love really should conquer all. An unsettling portrait of love in all its guises, A Spring of Love asks the most sinister question of all - can we ever truly know anyone.

Celia Dale was born in 1912 to parents who were both on the stage. She was once a secretary to Rumer Godden, and also worked as a publisher's advisor and a book reviewer. Her first novel, The Least of These, was published in 1943, and she went on to write twelve others, among them A Helping Hand and Sheep's Clothing. She won the 1986 Crime Writers Association Veuve Clicquot Short Story Award for 'Lines of Communication', which appears in her only short story collection, A Personal Call and Other Stories. She died in 2011.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dale, Celia

Leseproben

One

THE FLOOR with waitress service was always crowded between four and seven o’clock and Esther often had to stand in a queue on the staircase that led up from the ground floor. There was never long to wait. Under the signpost that ordered ‘This Side Up’ the queue obediently ascended on the right side of the rail that divided the staircase like a crush barrier, alert to advance briskly or even enter, if the commissionaire on the landing above them so willed it. People came out through the swing-doors from the tea-room, replete, buttoning their coats, letting loose with their egress a wafer of Puccini and the smell of teapots. Esther shifted two steps upwards, leaning comfortably against the burnished rail. She was in no hurry. Thursdays were her evenings out.

Once within, passed with the speed of a conveyor belt from commissionaire to head waiter, head waiter to the destined, vacant place, warm still from its last occupant, she took off her gloves, undid her coat. Madame Butterfly’s selections had just come to an end and the soft clamour of crockery and voices filled the huge, hideous hall. Women’s voices mostly, for women predominated, middle-aged women with parcels and the sated look of hunters. Here and there a child sat aghast before a towering orange torch of squash, bemused by the luxurious carpet, the luxurious teapots, milk jugs, sugar tongs; the luxurious silken slave-master in sleek tails whose smile was silver beneath eyes of slate; the impersonal luxurious women in pink uniforms and pale green aprons who sped and bent over them, did sums with captive pencils, bore monstrous towering trays imperviously through the warm, music-scented, luxurious air.

Esther had been put at a table for two. It was not customary to acknowledge the presence of fellow-eaters, and she did not glance at the elderly female person finishing a peach Melba opposite her. She chose her own meal slowly, set the menu neatly back between sugar bowl and salt cellar, and looked about her in content.

She came here every Thursday. On Thursdays the store stayed open until seven and she stayed on alone in the Invoice Department until half past six or more so that there should not be too much to get through the following morning. She had offered to do it when the late opening first started, for Miss Burroughs was older than she and liked to get home, and Jacqueline was very much younger and liked to get out. Esther enjoyed working quietly in the office that had become so familiar to her in the last fifteen years, from whose windows she could look out over the roofs of London and see on a clear day the tips of Tower Bridge and the top of St. Paul’s. Five floors below, the traffic clogged and sweated in the streets; but up here, on a Thursday, the only sounds were the oiled slither of the filing cabinet drawers, the crunch and ping of the adding machine or Esther humming to herself.

No one bothered her. They knew she would do all that was necessary. When she was ready she closed and locked the machines, took her towel and soap-box to the deserted Ladies’. There she washed, combed her brownish, longish hair, dusted her pale skin with powder, touched her mouth with a little pale lipstick, put on her plain brown coat. Coming out of the staff entrance she turned, on Thursdays, not to the bus stop and home but to the clangour of the Charing Cross Road.

On the dais the musicians roused themselves and, as Esther’s plaice and chips, roll, butter and pot of tea were set before her, launched into a medley from The Boy Friend. The room was not so crowded now, with here and there a vacant table from which the waitress flicked gratuity and crumbs. The elderly female person opposite crashed together great paper bags, reared to her feet and in a sudden loud voice said, ‘Good evening,’ and was gone. Esther looked after her abashed; perhaps after all she would have liked to talk? Well, it was too late now. She folded the newspaper open at ‘Points from Letters’ and began to read.

It was interesting what people wrote about. There was someone complaining that weeds seeding themselves from neglected gardens were destroying the nation’s heritage; certainly, Esther thought, it was queer how year after year that plant of willowherb flowered in the wall at the back of the kitchen yard. There was someone else complaining that migrating birds no longer appeared to be nesting in the trees of Hampstead Heath; Esther had never seen anything but ducks and sparrows there, but perhaps she didn’t go often enough. And there was an MP denying that he ever said something the paper’s reporter had said he said; but this Esther didn’t read. Then she turned to the Women’s Page, and as she ate the last of the plaice and chips studied a 3-column picture of a girl stretched out on a hearthrug wearing ‘Zebra-striped matador tights with fur-topped jersey sheath, fine for informal evenings at home’. The article was about how Young Marrieds could make one room seem like three by the clever placing of bamboo screens; and although at thirty Esther did not consider herself young, and had never been married, she read this carefully, for she liked domesticated things.

Someone else was sitting opposite now, a man, but without paying him any attention she looked at the menu and decided on gateau. The waitress was standing by the table, looking dubiously at the newcomer.

‘You were at my table over there, weren’t you, sir?’

‘That’s right.’

‘They don’t really like customers shifting theirselves.’

‘Not without permission from Big Brother, eh?’ He nodded his head towards the head waiter.

The waitress softened a little. ‘Well, not really.’

‘Well, you don’t tell him and he won’t know. And I’ll start all over again with a pot of tea and some pastries.’ He smiled persuasively.

‘Well …’ The waitress looked at Esther, ‘If the lady doesn’t mind …’

Embarrassed at finding herself drawn in, Esther said, ‘No, I don’t mind.’

‘Well, all right then. Only they don’t like it. Pot of tea and pastries, was it? And you, miss …?’

‘Some gateau, please.’

The waitress went away.

‘Sorry to disturb you like that,’ the young man said, ‘only the fact is I can’t stand to sit facing the orchestra. They give me the willies.’

She looked across to the platform where the three musicians, with their white jackets and indoor faces, twitched to their own rhythms.

‘See what I mean?’ he asked.

She smiled, picking up her newspaper again. ‘Oh well, they’re doing their best,’ she said and began to read; for you did not get into conversation with people sitting at the same table, leastways only sometimes and if it was a woman like the woman who had just gone. Not with a man, ever.

There was an inquest on a poor girl found strangled in Bristol; and a TV star who had been married for eighteen months was divorcing her husband. Gran would be pleased; Gran stored up the discreditable deeds of celebrities as a squirrel stores nuts. A good divorce was better than a good murder to Gran, but best of all was a good breach of promise case. You didn’t get many of those now. Esther remembered when she was a child sitting eating her tea in the kitchen while Gran read out all the evidence and all the love letters that were printed in the papers then, rolling out the endearments and the admissions as though she were back on the stage at the Metropole, but with one ear cocked for Grandad’s step down the area, when she’d whisk up and off and be cooking his fish in the scullery with a face as clear and wholesome as a two-year-old’s …

She became aware that the man was speaking to her. ‘I wonder if I might trouble you for a loan of your paper?’ he was saying. ‘That is, if you’ve done with it?’

‘Yes, of course.’ She handed it to him over the teapots.

‘That’s ever so good of you. There’s just something I have to have a look at.’ He turned to the Small Ads pages and skimmed down them. Esther went on with her tea, but from a glance as the newspaper changed hands she had reassured herself that he was not at all a flashy type. Quietly dressed, pale, with nice fair hair worn a little long perhaps, but that was the fashion now. You could see he took care of it. He had a pleasant voice, and a pleasant smile as he refolded the pages before returning the paper to her.

‘Thanks very much,’ he said. ‘I just put in an ad to sell my car and I wanted to check it was there all right.’ She smiled faintly but said nothing, eating the last of the gateau. ‘It’s a 1946 Vauxhall,’ he continued, breaking the back of an éclair with his fork. ‘Perfect condition. Well …’ he munched and swallowed, ‘perfect that is for a car that’s been flogged up and down little old England for the last few years by yours truly. But I know about cars, mind.’

She still said nothing and he gave her...