A Job for Susan (The Susan books) Read online

  A JOB FOR SUSAN

  BY

  JANE SHAW

  Bettany Press

  2006

  First published in Great Britain by Wm. Collins Sons and Co. Ltd, 1969.

  Bettany Press edition published 2006.

  8 Kildare Road London E16 4AD.

  This eversion published 2011.

  Text © estate of Jane Shaw 1969

  The right of Jane Shaw to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978 -1-908304-08-7

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER

  I. BLUEBEARD’S CHAMBER

  II. A JOB FOR BILL

  III. ENCOUNTER WITH AN OGRE

  IV. MR. EGG

  V. A HARD-EARNED POUND

  VI. STRANGE BEHAVIOUR OF A WICKED BARONET

  VII. GUARDING THE MASTERPIECES

  VIII. A FISHY OFFER

  IX. EASY MONEY

  X. THE BAD BART’S SECRET

  XI. DASTARDLY SIR ARTHUR

  XII. HONEST SIR ARTHUR

  XIII. BLOW AFTER BLOW

  XIV. HEIGH-HO THE HOLLY

  XV. THE GREEN GOOSE GANG

  XVI. MONEY, MONEY, MONEY

  FOR FLORA COHEN

  WHO ALWAYS LOOKS AT THE DATE

  I. BLUEBEARD’S CHAMBER

  SUSAN had no letters that morning, so she was perfectly free to poke her nose into her friends’ correspondence. While absent-mindedly forking scrambled eggs into her mouth, she leaned across the table, trying to read Midge’s letter upside down.

  “Is that from Aunt Lucy?” she asked. “How are they all? How’s Bill? What’s the news?”

  “Nothing much,” said Midge. “Charlotte’s coming home for Christmas—”

  Susan was very fond of her eldest cousin Charlotte, who at this time was studying at Perugia, but no one could call this exactly news; Charlotte had mentioned it herself in her last letter to Susan. “Well, I know that,” she said. “What else?”

  Midge glanced up. “If you’d just be quiet for a minute and let me read it first,” she said mildly, “you can read it for yourself—”

  Susan turned her attention to Tessa Marshall. Tessa had abandoned her scrambled egg as she read her letter, and a frown was faintly creasing her usually placid brow.

  “What’s the matter, Tessa?” asked Susan. “Is something the matter? Not bad news—? Is your grandmother—?” Tessa lived with her grandmother in Cornwall while her parents were abroad, and dramatic visions of sudden illness... broken legs... operations were whirling through Susan’s head. She too abandoned her scrambled egg and leaned solicitously across the breakfast table. “Is there bad news?”

  “Well, not exactly, I suppose,” said Tessa in her slow and dreamy voice. “No, of course Granny’s all right—”

  “Not broken her leg or anything?”

  “Broken her leg?” Tessa stared at Susan in amazement and then glanced down at her letter again. “It doesn’t say anything here about breaking her leg... unless there’s a P.S.—” She turned the last pages of the letter rather anxiously.

  “No, no—” said Susan. She should have known better than to start anything like this with Tessa. “What’s the bad news ?” she said quickly.

  Tessa stopped her vague hunt in the letter for the bit about Granny breaking her leg and said, “Well, it’s not exactly bad news, in fact it’s rather fun... for Granny—” her voice tailed off.

  “Och, Tessa, wake up!” said Susan. “What is it?”

  Tessa came out of her dream. “Oh... oh, well, it’s just that some old friends whom Granny hasn’t seen for about a thousand years want her to spend a month or two with them in the South of France or some place, and would I mind spending Christmas with my Aunt Rachel—” She paused.

  “And would you?” asked Susan when nothing else seemed to be forthcoming.

  “Would I what?” said Tessa.

  “Mind spending Christmas with your Aunt Rachel?”

  “Well, not really,” said Tessa. “She lives even deeper in the country than Granny—in Devon, actually—but I’m used to that, after all. Only she writes books—not nice interesting story-books, but terrible books about the history of the district and she’s always looking up things in musty old parish registers and churchyards and so on... but she’s awfully sweet, really, so I suppose it would be all right—”

  “Och away, it would be ghastly, you’d much better come and stay with us,” said Susan briskly.

  Tessa’s brain was not of the lightning variety, but she could recognize trouble when she saw it. “Oh... thanks,” she said reluctantly.

  Susan said indignantly, “Don’t you want to come?”

  “Heavens, yes,” said Tessa. “Fab... But don’t you live next door to Gabrielle Gascoigne?” And she glanced down the table towards Gabrielle Gascoigne, who was extremely pretty, clever and accomplished, Susan’s sworn enemy and the terror of Tessa’s life.

  “Not now I don’t, you’re two instalments behind as usual,” said Susan. “I used to live next door to those ghastly Gascoignes when my parents were in South Africa and I lived with the Carmichaels, Midge and Charlotte and Bill and Uncle Charles and Aunt Lucy, she’s their aunt too, she looks after them because their mother died ages ago—”

  “Well, she knows all that, surely,” murmured Midge in her laziest drawl. She had finished her breakfast and her letter some time before and was wondering when these two mad coots would get to the point. “She knows all that—”

  You never really could count on what old Tessa knew, Susan felt… but this time apparently Tessa was following the conversation quite well. “Well, where do you live, Susie?” she asked.

  “Well, in this dear little house that my parents have rented. I haven’t seen it yet. I mean I’ve seen it hundreds of times, but not since it was ours, it’s just up Tollgate Road from Midge’s—”

  “Then you’re still jolly near the Gascoignes?”

  “Och away, you daft scone, we’ll never see the Gascoignes, they always go ski-ing in Austria or some place for Christmas—”

  “Well, thanks then, Susan,” said Tessa, “I’d love to come. Thanks tons—”

  So it was settled.

  The house in Tollgate Road that Susan’s parents had rented really was a dear little house, a little doll’s-house, a cottage left over from the time when Wichwood was miles out in the country and not, as now, entirely surrounded by extraordinarily dull suburbs of London. It was white, with the dead remains of last summer’s rambling roses still climbing over it. On the left of the front door was a tiny dining-room, into which a table and six chairs just fitted and no more; beyond that was the kitchen, palest yellow with dark-red handles on the cupboards. On the right of the front door, down two steps for some unknown reason, was the smallest sitting-room that Susan had ever seen.

  “Och it’s sweet,” she cried, when Aunt Lucy dropped her and Tessa off after bringing them back from school the week before Christmas. “Mummy, it’s sweet, but where are we all going to sit? When the Carmichaels come, half of us will have to sit in the hall—”

  Looking smug, her mother flung open a door in the far wall of this tiny room, and revealed a most splendid apartment, which stretched nearly the whole length of the house, big enough to seat an army, far less the Carmichaels, with wide windows overlooking the trees and shrubs of the garden. What was more, it was warm... “It’s got one of those heater-things,” Susan’s mother was saying, “heats the whole room, the whole house
, really... You could have a party here easily, if you wanted—”

  Susan was not sure about a party. As far as she was concerned, parties were all too often Gascoigne parties with people playing clever pencil games that just showed up your ignorance or everybody dancing with Gabrielle Gascoigne and nobody dancing with her and Midge... Still, in your own house, you did not have to invite the ghastly Gascoignes, surely? “Well, perhaps,” she said, skating across the parquet floor and sending the rugs flying.

  Upstairs, there were two bedrooms and the bathroom (pink and grey) and although Mrs. Lyle had not nearly finished putting the house in order, Susan’s room was finished, with a most luxurious white carpet into which you sank nearly up to your ankles, and curtains of glazed chintz garlanded with flowers.

  “Wow!” said Tessa, making a mental resolve to take her shoes off before she put a toe across the threshold.

  The girls unpacked and put their things away in the white-painted drawers and wardrobe and bounced up and down on the beds, which seemed all right, like trampolines, Susan thought, not like those ghastly school beds.

  As they were now of course ravenously hungry, they went downstairs looking for tea; and at the bottom of the steep little stairs, to the left of the hall, Susan noticed another door. “Oh,” she said, “here’s another room! We haven’t seen this room—”

  But the door was locked. Susan, like the Elephant’s Child, being full of ’satiable curiosity, wasn’t putting up with that... a locked door, in your own house!… She wasn’t putting up with that... She stood rattling at the handle, twisting it this way and that, pushing against the door with her shoulder.

  It was a sturdy door, but Susan was pretty sturdy too. Tessa, sitting on the bottom step watching the proceedings, looked alarmed.

  “Perhaps it’s locked?” she suggested.

  “Of course it’s locked,” Susan panted.

  “Well, wouldn’t it be better to get a key than to break the door down?”

  Susan, much struck by this idea, stopped flinging herself against the door and shouted, “Mummy-y-y!”

  “Here! Kitchen! Tea’s ready,” Mrs. Lyle called back from across the hall.

  The tea was laid in the cosy little yellow kitchen. There were peanut butter and tomato sandwiches, Susan’s favourite walnut-cake from Fuller’s and a plate of her favourite chocolate biscuits. Mrs. Lyle was toasting crumpets under the grill and sloshing great dollops of butter on them. As she didn’t know Tessa’s favourite things, Mrs. Lyle was saying, she hoped that this would do to be going on with, until she found out...

  “Wow!” said Tessa.

  The sight of all this gorgeous food quite diverted Susan’s attention from the locked room; it wasn’t until the girls had eaten themselves to a standstill and were sitting back feeling slightly bloated, that she remembered. She didn’t feel quite so indignant about it now— that enormous tea had mellowed her.

  “There’s a door across the hall, there,” she said. “Where does that lead to, Ma? It seems to be stuck, or something—”

  “No, it’s locked,” said Mrs. Lyle. “We didn’t really need that room, it’s another mini-sized one, so Maggie Thingummy, who let the house to us, put all the stuff in there that she didn’t want, and that I didn’t want.”

  “Is that her name?” asked Tessa, amazed. “Maggie Thingummy?”

  Mrs. Lyle laughed. “No, no,” she said, “it’s Margaret—I suppose—Zimmerli, but I can never remember that name and everybody calls her Maggie. She’s young, Charlotte’s age, about eighteen, I suppose—”

  “Jings,” said Susan, who hadn’t lost all her Scottish expressions in spite of a two-year sojourn in England, “a girl of eighteen rented her house to you?”

  “Yes. Rather sad, really; she lived here with her grandmother and then the old lady died and Maggie didn’t want to live here alone, I don’t suppose that she could afford to, really, so she let the house to us for a year. With an option to buy, if you know what that means—we can buy it if we want to, after a year. By that time we’ll have a better idea where your father will be working—”

  “And where’s Maggie Thingummy now?” asked Susan.

  “She has a flat in the village, I think,” said Mrs. Lyle. “She has a job—”

  “Is she sort of poor?” said Susan.

  “Well, not rich, I shouldn’t think,” said her mother, “but all right, I suppose. Ask your Aunt Lucy. I don’t really know her, all the arrangements about the house were done through the house-agents, naturally. It was an absolute stroke of luck that we got it—”

  Even Susan, who was never happier than when she was poking her nose into other people’s business and rearranging their lives for them, didn’t think that this girl sounded as if she would need Susan’s help. If she had been left destitute, now, when her old grandmother died, and had had to go out charring or scrubbing floors, that would have been a job for Susan, getting her fixed up with a millionaire uncle or something, out of the blue... But if she had a job and digs and, probably, lots of friends… Susan turned her attention to the locked room.

  “What’s in the room, Ma?” she asked.

  Mrs. Lyle, assisted languidly by Tessa, was starting to clear away the tea things and carry them into the scullery. She paused and glanced back over her shoulder. She was smiling... Susan’s curiosity was as strong as ever, obviously...

  “Oo-oo-ooh!” she said in a sinister voice. “It’s a regular Bluebeard’s Chamber, stuffed full of dead wives and fabulous jewels and—”

  Susan jumped. Then she caught her mother’s eye and giggled. “Och,” she said, “I know what it’s full of— boring old chairs and what-nots and ghastly pictures and bird-cages and antimacassars—”

  “Right!” said Mrs. Lyle. “I was thankful to turn the key on that little lot—”

  Tessa, her mind perhaps still on Bluebeard and his female relations, said, “Who’s Auntie Macassar? Is she in there?”

  “Not Auntie Macassar, antimacassar,” said Susan absently. She wasn’t paying much attention to Tessa, she was precariously piling up half-empty plates in her arms and trying to balance the tea-pot on top of the whole erection.

  “It’s your Scotch accent,” said Tessa vaguely, drifting over to the scullery with one cup in each hand.

  There was, luckily, rather a shortage of tea-towels. Tessa leaned against the draining-board, gazing into space as usual and getting in Susan’s way as she briskly dried the dishes which her mother was washing.

  “First thing tomorrow,” said Mrs. Lyle, “I’m off to town to buy more tea-towels and so on. We didn’t seem to have half the things we needed when we unpacked the luggage that had been in store. Want to come?”

  “Well...” said Susan, rather torn. She loved shopping, but she didn’t love shopping for saucepans and tea-towels, really. “Well,” she said, “the Carmichaels. I don’t want to desert them altogether now that you and daddy are home. I thought I’d take Tessa down tomorrow to see Midge and Bill and Charlotte and Aunt Lucy and Uncle Charles and Mrs. Taylor and everybody, and then show her the village—”

  Wichwood Village was charming, not like a London suburb at all, but like a real little country village with gracious old Georgian houses and prim little bow-fronted shops and enormous great old chestnut trees and grass verges down the wide streets, enclosed with white posts and swinging chains, and a real old mill pond, now prettied up, certainly, and the mill long disappeared, and a real tollgate where you had to pay toll if you went through in a car, although most people went another way round, and there still was a notice that said:

  For every Horse Mule or Donkey not driving 2d

  For Beasts per score, and so on in proportion for any less number 10d

  For Sheep, Lambs or Hogs per score and so on in proportion (but not less than 1/2 d) for any less number 2 1/2 d

  “Quite right,” said Mrs. Lyle, “my shopping is going to be rather dull.” She poured the top of the milk into a saucer and put it down for Chang, Susan’s Siames
e cat, who was weaving himself round their legs and yelling for his tea.

  “Does Chang ever wander down to the other house?” Susan asked, lovingly tickling him behind one ear.

  “Not by himself, as far as I know,” said Mrs. Lyle. “He comes with me sometimes when I walk down to see Lucy…”

  Chang went with the girls when Susan trotted Tessa down Tollgate Road very early next morning. The Carmichaels were tall and fair and extremely good-looking, with the possible exception of Midge who at present just looked like a midge, according to Susan, all big eyes and little pointed face. Susan, in contrast, had dark eyes and dark curls and rosy cheeks. Beside her, Tessa, who had straight flaxen hair, looked like an ethereal creature from another world. She behaved like one too, Susan sometimes thought. Old Tessa lived in a daze most of the time. The Carmichaels were still at breakfast. Uncle Charles lowered his newspaper and affectionately greeted his niece and Tessa. Aunt Lucy hospitably loaded the pop-up toaster, Bill fetched two more cups and saucers, Charlotte pushed butter and honey towards them and Midge lazily waved a hand at a couple of chairs. The girls squeezed in round the comfortable old table, which was drawn up in front of the roaring fire in the dining-room which was also the hall, and ate hot-buttered toast and honey and listened to all the news.

  Charlotte was full of Perugia, which she was enjoying now that she could speak Italian a bit better, and the girls listened with interest because Midge and Susan had been in Italy themselves in the summer—in Venice and other places. But eventually Susan, who noticed everything, noticed that Bill didn’t seem to be his usual sunny self, but was morosely eating his breakfast and scarcely joining in the conversation at all. Susan glanced at him once or twice… could he be sickening for something?… but as he had worked his way steadily through orange juice, porridge, bacon-and-egg, followed by slice after slice of hot-buttered toast and honey, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his appetite, so he couldn’t be ill... not seriously ill, anyway... At last she poked Midge with her elbow and jerked her head towards Bill. “What’s up with Bill?” she whispered.