Sequence of Events (part three)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sequence of Events

Chapter One

A Personal Choice

 

 

iii.

 

 

He rode for the first time, handbag hugged to his chest, in the rear seat of an American taxicab. Larry, with pitying looks, had advised Stanley not to pay the driver until he’d found his niece at home. Stanley had thanked Larry for this.

“Is there,” he asked the driver, “a rail station in the city of New York, that is rather out of the way?”

Lying in his berth that night, having at some expense departed westwards from Hoboken, New Jersey, he winnowed away at the errors of Mrs. Luchow’s feeble relation. Her story suited best…but it needed asking if it suited in every particular. Mrs. Luchow, ostentatious over the quality of her tea things and her annual basket from Fortnum’s, had swallowed for charity’s sake an arch chuckle, in relating the bit about the icing sugar candies, offered in a cocoa tin.

“However, one accounts the intention as the deed.”

She smiled upwards into Stanley’s eyes, as though her words were from the Old Testament, and he must himself endorse them. He felt a terrible sympathy for his template’s lonely dodge, her amateurish falsehood.

“Margaret, she said to me, you’d asked me down last year, so I felt sure the invitation got missed in the post!”

Stanley had bought a little book from a platform vendor. He hoped this would seem gauche, while not contemptibly so. His telegram must be tardy, and issued from an unlikely office, as he hadn’t thought of it in time…

But one could not represent an entire correspondence to have gone astray. Better wiring what appeared a follow-up.

 

Arrived New York. Expect two to three days. Stanley.

 

He had hesitated over the signature, but Freda would not recall his Christian name, unless Dolores mentioned him often in her letters, and he found it impossible she should. A mistake, a mis-delivery, might the girl only tell herself so, put the matter aside…

Face-to-face, he could explain.

And he would use this girl, in the manner of an opportunistic cad, because her city was the one given Robert by Desanges. Stanley had crossed on Freda’s ship (thus to gain some conversation-starting minutiae of the Leviathan’s routines). He had paced the deck alone, fearing his sufferings had wrought on his face a visible madness that would, as well as to fellow passengers, be off-putting to his niece.

The name might be false, Desanges.

Or in America, notorious. Robert indeed supposed this the man’s game, a ploy to trap a respectable baronet into a public exchange of letters with a felon.

 

 

For a summer month, Talou had been Stanley’s dear companion, bliss insisting itself into hope. They had spoken of chancing it, living together, in Stanley’s own cottage.

“A student, do you think you might be?”

“Oh, no. Strictly a dilettante. Only let someone ask me what my subject is!”

Laughter. Even banter, and Stanley had left their breakfast café delighted, meeting parishioners in his head and defying them all, to book their ferry. He had stopped, returning, for a boutonniere, had looked up from the beach stalls to the little cliff where the hotel sat.

 

 

3

 

 

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A Personal Choice

Sequence of Events (part one)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Stephanie Foster, 2017, 2021, 2026)