You Have Chosen

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

Toni Kenyon was young and pretty and passionately fond of all that life had to offer, but at this particular moment it seemed to offer nothing but unhappiness. For her best friend Helena had become engaged to the most wonderful man Toni had ever met. Nicholas Brendon; but Toni knew she was marrying him not for love, but for his money. For Toni, this was a heartbreaking situation and one which could only be overcome through much misery and unhappiness - but then, the path of true love was never an easy one, as Toni was to discover..

Release date: April 24, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

IT seemed to Toni the longest day she had ever spent.

For September, it was unusually hot. An ‘Indian Summer’ can be lovely. But in town it is apt to become singularly trying for workers in small shops. And ‘Violette’s’ was surely the smallest and stuffiest shop in Shaftesbury Avenue? So thought Toni, as she ran up and down the basement stairs, selling clothes. Cheap, shoddy clothes which she hated just about as much as she hated the whole atmosphere of the place.

The buxom, hard-driving woman who was her employer kept her girls hard at it from nine in the morning until half past six at night. There were two others besides Toni. Helena, the tallest and darkest, was a mannequin.

Toni shared a flat with Helena. Sometimes she wondered which one of them worked the harder. It was exhausting in this weather to put on dresses and drag them off again hour after hour. Equally so to take this gown off a hook or that coat from the cupboard and enter into endless arguments and discussions with tiresome customers.

Madame was not very pleased, either, if the customer retired having purchased nothing. When that happened, instead of blaming the fact upon her own choice of garments, Madame invariably cursed the girl who had not put through the sale.

This evening, as Toni washed her hands and powdered her nose in the tiny cloakroom at the back of the shop, she wondered whether life must go on like this for ever.

She was young. She was pretty, and passionately fond of life and all that it offered. And it appeared to offer nothing at the moment but drudgery. Time and time again, Toni had tried to get other work and failed. And she could not afford to be out of a job, because, except for an old aunt in Cornwall whom she never saw, and a few cousins who had not the least interest in her, she was alone in the world.

A year ago, after the death of her mother which had left her penniless, she had been offered work at ‘Violette’s’ and seized it, gladly, because she was on the verge of being turned out of the tiny two-roomed flat in Earls Court which was her home. Later, Helena, with whom she had made friends at the shop, elected to share the expenses of the flat with her.

Helena was a queer, secretive girl a few years older than Toni. She had good points. She could be very gay and amusing. But she had a side which Toni discovered shortly after they started living together. A side which she could not pretend to admire. Ugly, greedy, Helena was insatiable for admiration. Ungenerous in many of her ideas about life and love. Yet in Toni’s eyes, Helena was lucky. She had something to look foward to in the future. And Toni had nothing.

Helena had been engaged for the last twelve months. Her fiancé, Nicholas Brendon, was madly in love with her, but because he had no money they had not been able to marry at once. Almost immediately after their engagement, he had been offered a partnership in a silver-fox farm out in the South of France, and since then had been there, away from Helena. The farm was not paying sufficiently to enable him to support a wife. In any case, his contract did not permit him to marry during the first year. So Helena Lane, in the same impecunious and orphaned position as Toni, continued her job in ‘Violette’s’.

And for the last few months she had been as discontented and unhappy as Toni. Discontent had not a similar reaction upon Toni as it had on Helena. Toni grew quiet and introspective. Helena went into flaming, angry moods which made her snatch at every little chance of gaiety that life offered. Sometimes Toni was horrified by Helena’s lack of constancy. One moment she would dash off a love-letter to her fiancé assuring him of her fidelity, and the next moment she would be dining and dancing with any young man who asked her.

Indeed, there had been many days when Toni turned from her friend in disgust, and wondered what Nicholas Brendon, out there on his farm to make a home for Helena, would think if he knew what she was like.

And now there was a new interest in Helena’s life. No ordinary young man without means, ready to give her a dinner in Soho or an evening in the cheap seats of a cinema. But a rich member of ‘Society’ who would one day come into a title. A mere boy, just ‘down’ from the Varsity, who had ‘fallen’ for Helena’s magnificent figure and rich gipsy colouring.

It was not really Toni’s business what Helena did and she rarely bothered to criticize her, nor protest when Helena jeered at her for being stupid and stand-offish in her own dealings with men. She called Toni incurably romantic, and Toni let her laugh. But there was something to be said for romance, whatever Helena thought.

Curiously enough, the one thing which Toni could not tolerate was Helena’s callous attitude towards her fiancé.

Toni had never met Nicholas Brendon. But she knew a great deal about him. Helena, when in a communicative mood, liked to talk intimately of him and even read some of his letters aloud. Letters that seemed to Toni the loveliest things in the world, for they were the outpourings of a man’s sincere, honest heart. A man who really loved Helena and believed in her.

Helena’s romance was, in a queer way, also Toni’s. She moved in its aura and waited for those letters with the French postmark even more eagerly than Helena waited for them. At moments, ludicrous though it seemed, Toni had to admit that she was far. more excited than Helena when they came home and found one of those foreign-looking envelopes with the blue stamp, lying on the mat. Another love-letter for Helena. Nothing for Toni. Photographs of Nicholas in the bedroom which she shared with Helena, and in the little sitting-room. She knew every line of his face, was familiar with his smile, the idiosyncrasies of his nature, as Helena had described them to her.

This hot September evening Toni put on her hat, found Helena and walked with her from the shop. Outside the heat was almost greater, flung up from the concrete pavements. It seemed no cooler now when it was sundown than it had been at midday.

‘Heavens!’ said Toni. ‘I am exhausted. Aren’t you?’

‘Absolutely done,’ said Helena. ‘Thank God Bobby is driving me down to the river for dinner. We shall bathe and get cool.’

Toni made no reply. She was not going to tell Helena that she was lucky. Nor congratulate her on the fact that Bobby Deane was heir to a quarter of a million and ran a Rolls-Bentley and could afford to give Helena exactly the sort of time she wanted. There was that wretched boy out there in France whose one aim and object was to send for Helena and make her his wife.

Toni said:

‘I wouldn’t mind the heat if one hadn’t to work so hard. I don’t suppose it’ll last. The papers said this morning that it would soon break. It isn’t really seasonable. I expect we shall have a raw, cold October and then we’ll grumble because we can’t get warm.’

Helena Lane stepped on to a bus with her friend. She was hardly listening to Toni. She was looking through her heavily blacked eyelashes at a young man who had admired the slim roundness of her ankle as she boarded the bus.

She adored admiration, even from strangers, and was always rather pleased to be seen about with Toni. They were such a good foil for each other. Toni, so small and fair, with very little colour, especially in this heat, faded, Helena felt, into insignificance beside her own glowing beauty. Although at times she admitted that Toni could look lovely. But she was rather a little fool in Helena’s estimation. Too full of ideals and principles. Very boring to Helena. Her Nick had the same sort of outlook on life. She had learned that since her engagement. And a virtuous young man without cash was really not so acceptable as a young cad like Bobby with his thousands. (A Cad, by the way, whom she fully intended to land in the matrimonial net before she was finished with him.)

The two girls reached Earls Court and their two-roomed flatlet in the big converted house which was not far from the Underground. The rooms were cruelly hot in this weather. Both girls, gasping, rushed to open all the windows which had been left shut.

It was by no means a modern or luxurious home. The house had been converted ten years ago. The kitchenette was without a refrigerator and the dilapidated bathroom had an old-fashioned geyser. The furniture was out of date, although good, solid stuff which had belonged to Toni’s mother. Toni did not dislike it here, because it was the home in which she had once been happy with a much-loved parent. Not that she did not sigh for something more. But Helena frankly loathed it and accepted it only because it was a cheap deal for her, living here with Toni. She was supposed to share the work with Toni, but it was the younger girl who was left to do the major portion.

Helena was a genius at slipping out of her responsibilities with the best possible excuse.

She knew perfectly well that Toni disapproved of her general conduct, but she also knew that Toni was generous and kind-hearted. She could always work the ‘sympathy stuff’ on Toni when she wanted to.

She did it tonight. Bobby was expecting her at their meeting-place in the West End, in an hour’s time. She must get a bath and dress at once.

She said:

‘Toni darling, my head aches frightfully. Would you be an angel and make a cup of tea while I slip into the bath?’

Toni gave a faint smile.

Innumerable were Helena’s headaches and demands for ‘cups of tea’.

‘All right.’

Toni walked across the sitting-room. On a table by the window, beside a vase of half-dead chrysanthemums which she had bought as a great extravagance at the beginning of the week, stood a photograph. An enlarged snapshot taken out in France of Nicholas Brendon.

Helena, slipping out of her dress and putting on a cretonne wrapper, looked through the doorway and grinned at Toni.

‘I love the way you moon over old Nick’s picture!’ she exclaimed.

A slight colour rose in Toni’s cheeks, but she continued to look at the photograph.

‘Don’t you ever think of him yourself, Helena?’

‘When I have to. I answered one of his letters yesterday, didn’t I?’

‘One of them,’ said Toni slowly. ‘One—out of his every three.’

Helena went into the bathroom, lit the geyser, turned on the bath and shouted to Toni through the sound of the running water:

‘He’s lucky to get that, when I’m so busy.’

Toni, unusually truculent and argumentative, called back:

‘Well, you’re engaged to him, aren’t you?’

‘That doesn’t say I’m in love with him.’

Toni was shocked. It was the first time Helena had actually voiced that sentiment. Helena added:

‘Anyhow, Nick’s across the Channel, and farther than that. And he never seems to be able to raise the cash to send for me. Nor get out of his contract about not marrying. And why should a girl waste her life? I shall be twenty-four next month, and women don’t get younger or prettier. Bobby thinks I’m the cat’s whiskers, and I’m dipping them in the. . .