And Miss Burton, amid murmured farewells from Kenneth and Betty and a hearty “Sleep well, Frances, and don’t be so touchy,” from Miss Fielding, slowly retired into the shades of evening.
“You ought to give Frances a talking-to about being touchy, Kenneth,” pronounced his sister, when Miss Burton had vanished through the gate in the wail. “She wouldn’t resent it from you, because you’re a man.”
“Really, Connie——”
“She will take anything from a man, where she would get into a ridiculous tantrum if Betty or I tried to tell her, don’t you agree, Betty?”
“Probably,” said Betty, who was amused but also a little dismayed for Kenneth’s sake. They’re all getting old, she thought, and in a few years this will be a most depressing household; far from festive, as Richard’s friends would say.
“And of course that’s why you always take her part,” went on Miss Fielding; to their dismay she had seated herself in Miss Burton’s place and seemed prepared to make a night of it, “because she flatters you.”
“Oh, I say, Con! Really. And I don’t take her part.”
“You are very vain.” Miss Fielding wagged a finger at him with a playful glance at Betty for approval. “You always have been. When you were a tiny thing you used to look at yourself in the glass for hours.”
“Funny little spook,” said Betty.
“Even now you go as red as a beetroot every time Vartouhi does that ridiculous curtsy to you.”
“Well, hang it, Connie, who wouldn’t? I wish you’d—er—drop her a hint—without hurting her feelings, of course.”
“I am used to handling young people: I shan’t be likely to hurt her feelings and I am sure Vartouhi is not the morbid over-sensitive type, anyway. As a matter of fact I have dropped her a hint but I am not sure that she understood quite what I meant. I shall mention the matter again. Have you seen her since dinner, by the way? I want to make sure she has practised her typing to-day.”
“Are you teaching her typing, Connie? That’s very kind of you,” said Betty, surprised and remorseful.
“It will be an advantage to her when she wants to get another post,” said Miss Fielding, getting up. “The more accomplishments she has, the better.”
“But I say, you aren’t thinking of sacking her, are you?” Kenneth’s tone was dismayed and he stopped in his task of stamping out the last ashes of the bonfire and gazed at his sister’s massive form in the near-dusk. “I thought things were going so well.”
“Of course not. Never entered my head. But I don’t suppose she wants to stay here for the rest of her life.”
“Oh, as you were, then; I was afraid she’d been a naughty girl. There!” The bonfire was now a darker patch on the ground with faint wreaths of acrid smoke winding over it. “And it’s just on black-out,” he ended in a satisfied tone.
“I will go and turn on the wireless; I don’t want to miss the news,” said Miss Fielding, striding away. She shouted over her shoulder just as she reached the wall, “Don’t be long, Betty, you’ll get eaten alive with midges if you hang about there.” Then came the slam of the door as she passed through.
She walked briskly up the dim paths towards the dark house, between the beds now filled with red and amber chrysanthemums breathing out their cold scent into the evening. Her thoughts were playing vaguely about the two people she had just left, and suddenly a disturbing and alarming thought struck her. How pretty Betty had looked with the firelight on her face, how well she and Kenneth seemed to be getting on together, and why had Betty lingered on with Kenneth, instead of accompanying her, Miss Fielding, back to the house? Could there be anything in it?
Miss Fielding compressed her lips. I will not have it, she thought. If necessary, I shall tell Betty that I must have her room for another refugee, and she must go. I thought he had got over all that nonsense since the affair with the Palgrave girl. I suppose men are never too old to make asses of themselves in that way. But I am not going to have it. I shall watch, and make sure, and if it is so, then she must go.
She went into the house and banged the door.
It was now nearly dark in the kitchen garden. Betty had been looking idly across the dim beds of brussels sprouts and winter spinach, and suddenly she gave an exclamation.
“Kenneth! There’s someone down by the peach trees!”
He was gathering some scattered tools together and did not trouble to look up at the small, dark figure that was pacing slowly along the twilit path under the espaliers.
“That’s all right, it’s only Vartouhi.”
“How do you know? You can’t see any better than I can, it may be a parachutist!”
“She comes down here almost every night and walks about for a bit—has done, ever since she discovered the peaches. I suppose they remind her of home. She asked if I minded, and of course I said I was delighted—poor little girl.”
“Poor Ken—all your womenfolk pursuing you into your retreat to ask you favours and bring you their grizzles.”
“I don’t mind—much,” said Kenneth, his voice betraying that he was smiling. Betty laughed too and said, “I’m going in, it’s chilly.”
“Yes, you run along, I won’t be a moment now, I’ve nearly finished.”
As she passed the peach espaliers Betty glanced curiously towards the fruit bushes that had concealed Vartouhi while Miss Fielding was in the garden, but there was no dark little figure there now; Vartouhi had slipped away.
Kenneth lingered for a little while longer, unwilling, though it was nearly dark, to leave the garden. He was still whistling If You were the Only Girl in the World as he put away the rake and hoe and other tools in the shed and locked its door and put the key in his pocket.
At last all was tidy. He took a last look round in the dusk in case there was anything he had overlooked, and flashed his torch once or twice over the bonfire to make sure it would not burst into renewed flames. The trees were black shapes against the motionless clouds that hung low in the dark blue air, and the sweet cold smell of dew, mingled with the strong odour of cabbage leaves, came up from the damp vegetable beds. A murmuring noise began to sound in the sky, and Kenneth looked up and waited. Presently the thundering drone passed over his head, growing fainter as the hidden squadron went on its way, and finally fading into the silence. He went across the garden, found the door in the wall and passed through, locking it after him. He was still whistling softly but now the tune had changed to Tipperary.
CHAPTER 9
THE NEWS WAS broken to Miss Fielding that Richard Marten was coming to stay for a week and was amiably received by her, for she flattered herself upon her capacity for understanding what she called the wayward moods of youth and dealing with them and she hoped that Richard might give her opportunities. She also welcomed the prospect of some masculine society, to which she was not averse, and finally she trusted that the sight of her twenty-five-year-old son would banish from Betty’s head any unsuitable ideas that might have got into it.
So a room was prepared for Richard by Vartouhi, and Miss Fielding herself wrote to him about the Bus, trusting to no one else to convey with necessary clarity its times and eccentricities. Drunk with sight of power, the Bus which covered the four miles between St. Alberics and Treme had become since the Nazi War a moody and incalculable tyrant running the gamut of temperament, from being ten minutes late in starting to going round by another route to save wear on the tyres, and generally behaving more like a medieval baron than a bus. Miss Fielding covered two sheets of note-paper with neat instructions and warnings about the Bus and Richard put it down on a chair and never saw it again.
The afternoon of his arrival was of course a Sunday; he was decanted onto the platform at St. Alberics, down which a slight east wind was blowing, with the fish; and stood there for a moment under the gloomy sky, looking abstractedly about him, and sniffing the sweet air. He was hatless and his fair hair blew about and in one hand he dangled a large half-empty rucksack that seemed a long w
ay down because he was six feet two inches tall. He was thinking about Mimas, one of the moons that revolve around the planet Saturn, and although his thoughts had been momentarily interrupted by the pushing of himself out onto the platform by the friendly hands of the people in his compartment, with whom he had shared his lunch and talked about Spain, remnants of reflection were still clinging to him like shreds of the Milky Way.
“Yes. Ticket,” he muttered energetically, and took it out of his trousers pocket and dropped it, and picked it up again. He strode along the platform, a striking figure in clothes unusually shabby even for the third year of a war, with a Greek nose and an absent expression.
The streets outside the station were almost empty of people and looked squalid and ugly under the grey clouds broken here and there by livid light. He walked up the hill in the middle of the road, not thinking about Mimas now, but looking at the mean little shops (one in every three was to let) with their displays of dummy chocolates and empty cigarette cartons, and thinking about them: his thoughts were uncoloured by emotion, and were stiffened by that accurate and extensive knowledge of economics and the mechanics of the social structure possessed by well-educated Leftists, which makes it difficult for generous but lazy Liberals to argue with them. How hideous it is, he thought; and his mind presented him at once with all the historical and sociological reasons for the hideousness; the rise of the joint stock companies in the reign of Charles the Second and the consequent transferring of responsibility from the wealthy individual to the wealthy company; the resultant decline among the cultured rentiers of a sense of personal responsibility for the social structure; their gradual retreat from political life and their replacement by uneducated but able men completely unfamiliar with the tradition of noblesse oblige; the ruthless construction of ugly ill-built towns to house the cheap labour employed in such men’s factories; the displacing of beauty as a natural ideal among the architects by the ideals of utility and comfort for their wealthy but ignorant patrons; the spread of these latter ideals, mingled with a debased conception of rural domestic architecture, among——
At this point in his thoughts Richard’s ankle turned over, and he fell sprawling in the road in front of a car which was slowly approaching him, driven by a young woman beside whom was seated his mother. The latter was loudly hailing him, “Richard! Richard! Coo-ee!” but he did not hear her until it was too late, and then he came out of his fit of amnesia to find himself lying in the road, to hear confused exclamations above him, and then to feel the wheel of the car go slowly, agonizingly, with a horrible crunch, over his right ankle.
“I’m frightfully sorry,” said Alicia Arkwright, leaning back in her seat, white-faced and shaking but calm.
“His head——” stammered Betty, struggling to get the door open, and Richard, hearing what she said through the faintness brought on by pain, called as loudly as he could:
“I’m all right but get the wheel off my ankle,” and moved aimlessly about with his arms in an attempt to shake off the agony by feeling for his rucksack.
“The wheel—it’s on his ankle! Back the car!” cried Betty, kneeling in the road beside him, in the middle of a crowd that had begun to collect. Alicia did as she was told and then sat still again, angry with herself for feeling sick.
“Is there a doctor anywhere near here?” asked Betty, turning round and appealing to the little crowd, and out of the doubtful murmurs and shakings of heads finally someone said, “Dr. Macintosh, just up the road.”
“I’m going for a doctor, it isn’t far,” said Betty, bending over her son’s greenish face. “I’m afraid it’s very bad, isn’t it, darling?”
“Excruciating, thanks,” he answered calmly, not lifting his head from his arms. “That’s you, isn’t it, Betty? Could someone light me a cigarette? In my left-hand coat pocket.”
“Here you are, chum.” A soldier put a lighted one between his lips. “Keep smiling. The lady’s run for the doctor. Only just up the road.”
“Only they’re mostly out of a Sunday afternoon,” pessimistically muttered someone.
“I’m all right. Thanks,” said Richard and shut his eyes and lay still, thinking how hard the road felt and remembering Alec Tankerton who had been killed in Spain.
Alicia got out of the car and walked as steadily as she could for the shaking of her legs round to the place where he lay. She pushed her way past the Sunday school children and elderly women and Air Cadets and knelt beside him.
“I’m frightfully sorry,” was all she could say. “Your mother and I were coming in to meet you because—that is—I did hoot, but you didn’t seem to hear.”
“I didn’t hear,” he answered crossly. “It was entirely my fault but that doesn’t make it any easier to bear. Do you mind if I don’t talk?”
“Of course not. I’m most awfully sorry.”
Here Betty arrived with the doctor, who had just been setting out for a well-earned game of golf and was inclined to be terse. With the help of the soldier they got Richard into the car, and Alicia drove to the surgery and he was carried in by the Army and the R.A.F., who afterwards expressed opinions favourable to his fortitude.
The ankle was pronounced to have a number of bones injured but not so seriously as to make an X-ray necessary, and the doctor gave it treatment and gave Richard something to lessen the pain. There then arose the question of where he should be taken to, for it was obvious that he would have to remain at wherever he was going to for many weeks, and that expert massage would be needed. Three nursing-homes and the Cottage Hospital were telephoned without a vacant bed being found, and then Betty, who had been glancing anxiously at her son’s face, said decidedly:
“You must come back to Sunglades, darling. Your room’s all ready and I’ll telephone Connie now—if I may?” to the doctor.
While she was answering as briefly as possible the staccato exclamations and questions from the other end of the line, Richard was helped out to the car again by the doctor and Alicia with an arm about the neck of each. He was no light weight, and Alicia reflected how much difference there was in having a personable young man’s arm around your neck for his pleasure and having it there for his support.
Then, the party being settled and their address being given to the doctor, she drove them quickly homewards past the fields of stubble and yellowing hedges, and the oaks and elms with here and there a great branch already fading into gold. There was relief and pleasure to Betty and to Richard, even in his pain, as the car left St. Alberics behind and they drove on, deeper into the open country; but Alicia’s spirits drooped still further, as they always did when she found herself surrounded by hills or the silent fields. It was not that she was still affectionately pining after that H. who had caused all the trouble; indeed, she had now reached the stage when she wondered how she could ever have cared for him, but although she no longer found his qualities attractive even in memory, the anger and humiliation that she had experienced when, having permitted herself to be cited as co-respondent, he became reconciled with his wife, remained with her in their first painful strength; and therefore, as fields and hills were conducive to a reflective mood, she preferred streets and cinemas, which were not.
Unrelieved pain is very tiring, and by the time the car drove up to the front door of Sunglades, Richard, whose health was never good, felt completely exhausted. He sat without moving, staring in front of him, and observed to his mother:
“I’ll make the effort in a minute, Betty.”
“Take your time, darling,” she said, trying to be casual. She leant forward and asked Alicia for a cigarette.
At this point in the proceedings a kind of distant cackling and chattering, suggestive of the Parrot House on a sunny afternoon, was heard approaching across the hall of Sunglades, and the next moment the door was flung open and out into the porch hurried Miss Fielding—“Well, Richard, you are unlucky! The last time you were here you fell out of the cedar-tree!” Miss Burton—“Poor dear, poor dear, what a beginning
for your visit, what bad luck!” Vartouhi (the only silent member of the party, who at once made her way to Richard’s rucksack), and Kenneth—“Hallo, Richard, glad to see you but sorry to see you like this, just lean on me and take it easy.”
Richard could make no response to all this kindness except to smile as they crowded round the car; but then, noticing a pair of small sallow hands that he at first took to be a child’s tugging at his rucksack, he roused himself enough to turn slightly and look down upon a head crowned with plaits of fair hair.
“Don’t bother with that, it’s full of books and extremely heavy,” he said faintly.
She looked up and curtsied and smiled. He saw a face that seemed to him delightful, round and dimpled, with long brown eyes. Just the sight of it made him forget his pain.
“Gently does it,” said Kenneth, helping him out of the car. “That’s right—arm round my neck.” Alicia moved forward to help once more, as Miss Fielding and Miss Burton had fallen into that state of interested staring which comes so easily to most of us when there are pathetic and interesting doings afoot, and Betty was helping Vartouhi with the rucksack. “Other arm round me,” suggested Alicia without coquetry.
“Oh no, you’ve done your stuff already and I’m so heavy,” he protested, not too much in pain to try to secure the neck that he wanted, and even as he glanced helplessly round, Vartouhi came forward and lifted his arm and arranged it over her shoulders. The contrast in their respective heights was ludicrous and she saw it as soon as he did and laughed up at him, gently removing his arm from her neck.
“You put your hand on me—so,” she commanded, pressing his hand down upon her shoulder. “Better like that.”
“Much too heavy for you,” he smiled, shaking his head.