âYou have good taste,â
Lady Manderly admitted.
âYour clothes are rather dull, but then of course you have to buy things which will wear well, but I must admit that you make the most of them.â She got up from the dinner table. âI shall read this evening and you shall play to me.â
Jemima played Ravel, Bach, My Fair Lady, Bitter Sweet and then back to Ravel and finally Delius.
âThatâs very sad,â observed her listener as she finished and sat quietly with her hands folded in her lap. âDo you feel sad, Jemima?â It was so unexpected a question coming from Lady Manderly, who had never expressed any interest in her before, that Jemima couldnât think of a ready answer. âYou are in love, perhaps?â
Jemima looked down at her hands and willed herself not to blush. âThat would hardly fit into my life at present, Lady Manderly. Would you like me to continue playing?â
THE ROOM WAS small and shabby, but comfortable enough, with the firelight flickering on the unimaginative furniture and the small table with the remains of a meal upon it. Two people were sitting there, a young man with a thin, spectacled face and a girl somewhat older, with straight shoulder-length mousy fair hair and a face which just missed being pretty by reason of a slightly turned up nose and a too wide mouth. But the mouth curved gently and her eyes, hazel and thickly fringed, were quite beautiful. She sat very quietly, her hands, small and capable and a little roughened from housework, clasped loosely on the table before her. When she spoke her voice was brisk but pleasantly soft.
âWell, love, thatâs settled, then. Weâll give up this flatâI never liked it much, did you? You go off to Boston and Iâll find a job to keep me going until you come home again,â and when her brother made an impatient gesture: âNo, Dick, itâs no good arguing any more, itâs a heavensent chance for you and you simply must take it, and whatâs two years? Youâll only be twenty-threeâ¦â she ignored his muttered âAnd youâll be twenty-eight,â and went on firmly: âYouâll probably be a famous scientist by then and weâll live in a nice house in the country and Iâll keep hensâ¦â
âBut thatâs years away, Jemimaâwhatâs going to happen to you in the meantime?â He sighed heavily. âYouâre not trained for anything, are you?â
Rather like a magician she produced a folded newspaper and passed it to him. âRead that,â she begged him, and tapped the advertisements column. âIâm cut out for itâI shall go there tomorrow.â
Her brother read it, frowning. âBut this wouldnât doâitâs drudgery!â
âRubbish.â If her voice faltered a little he didnât notice it. âIâve walked dogs all my life, havenât I, and read aloud to Mother and Father every day for years, I can answer the phone intelligently and write letters and play cards. I shall do very nicely. Itâll be an old dame with a Peke and a hearing aidâand the money is good.â
She got up, a girl not much above middle height and rather on the plump side, and began to clear the table.
âIâve got to get your suit from the cleaners and fetch your shoes. Will you have enough money until they pay you?â
âIâll manage; I shanât know anyone to start with, shall I? Besides, I plan to work.â
âYes, love, but you canât work all the time. I wonder what Boston is like? America for that matterâmind you write at least once a month.â She grinned at him. âAnd take most of whatâs left in the bank just to be on the safe side.â
âWhat about you?â
âOh, Iâll do fine. Iâve enough clothes and thereâll be enough to keep me going until I get my wages. It says âGood salaryâ and if I live in Iâll not have a care in the world.â Jemima spoke cheerfully and inwardly contemplated the future with some doubt; she was a practical girl, not given to moaning or wanting the moon, but she did wish that she had been trained to do something. But there had been no needâher parents had assured her of that each time she had brought the subject up. Her father was a Professor of History at one of the colleges at Oxford, living in a delightful old house which went with the job, and her mother had been only too delighted to leave more and more of the housekeeping to her. And she hadnât complained; she had a small allowance, a number of friends and no prospect of marrying; she was neither clever enough nor pretty enough to catch the eye of younger men, and the older ones were all married. She hoped that one day she would marry, but here she was, twenty-six last birthday and apart from a middle-aged don, a widower with three teenage children, no proposals. And for the last four years she hadnât minded at all. When her father died her mother had somehow lost her zest for living too, and Jemima had taken over the running of the house, the paying of the bills and the shopping, not thinking too much about the future. Authority had allowed them to stay on in the house which had been their home for so long and Dick had finished his studies and done brilliantly and somehow she had managed very well on the pension which they now lived on. But when her mother died suddenly, life changed drastically. They had to leave their home; there was no more pension and only a very little money left in the bank. They had sold the furniture and moved into a poky little flat so that Dick could continue his studies while he waited to see if he had won a place at Boston University, where he would have a grant sufficient to keep him while he worked for still another degree. He had done even better; he had been offered a place there with the prospect of a good job at the end of it, and Jemima had urged him to snap it up, brushing aside his doubts about her own future.