Reluctantly, Flora took the telegram, while Antony perched himself once more on the stool and continued to drink his tea as if nothing extraordinary was happening.
“Go on, read it.”
She did so.
PARCEL AND LETTER RECEIVED. VITALLY IMPORTANT I SEE YOU. TUPPY SERIOUSLY ILL. FLYING LONDON FRIDAY WILL BE WITH YOU LATE AFTERNOON. SIGNED ANTONY.
Flora’s worst fears were confirmed. That was a telegraphic cri de coeur if ever there was one. And Rose had ignored it, never mentioning it to Flora. She had indeed run away from it.
It was hard to think of any intelligent comment to make. In the end, she said, “Who’s Tuppy?”
“My grandmother. Did Rose say why she was going to Greece?”
“Yes, she…” Flora looked up. Antony’s eyes narrowed, alert. All at once she did not want to tell him. She made an elaborately unconcerned face and tried to think up some elaborately unconcerned lie, but it wasn’t any use. Like it or not, she was involved in it right up to the top of her head, and there seemed no way of getting out of it.
“Yes?” he prompted.
Flora gave in. “She’s gone to see some man she met in New York. She met him at a party just before she came back to London. He’s been lent a villa in Spetsai and he’s invited Rose out to join him.” This information was received in stony silence. “She had a seat booked on the plane. She went this morning.”
After a little Antony said, “I see.”
Flora held out the telegram. “I don’t know what this—your grandmother—has to do with Rose.”
“Rose and I were engaged to be married. But this week, she sent my ring back and broke it off. But Tuppy doesn’t know that. She still thinks it’s all going to happen.”
“And you don’t want her to know?”
“No, I don’t. I’m thirty and she thinks it’s high time I got married. She wants to see us both, make plans, think about the future.”
“And what did you want Rose to do?”
“To come home with me. Ride along with the engagement story. Make Tuppy happy.”
“Lie to her, in fact.”
“Just for a single weekend.” He added, his face very serious, “Tuppy’s very ill. She’s seventy-seven. She may be dying.”
The word, final, despairing, hung in the silence between them. Flora could think of nothing to say. Awkwardly, she pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table, resting her elbows on its gleaming white surface. It became necessary to be very matter-of-fact. She asked, briskly, “Where’s home?”
“The west of Scotland. Arisaig.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to Scotland.”
“Argyll, then.”
“Do your parents live there?”
“I haven’t any parents. My father’s ship was lost during the war, and my mother died just after I was born. Tuppy brought me up. It’s her house.” He added, “It’s called Fernrigg.”
“Does Rose know Tuppy?”
“Yes, but not very well. Five years ago Rose and her mother took the Beach House at Fernrigg for two weeks in the summer, and we all got to know them then. Then they went away, and I never thought about them again, until about a year ago when I met up with Rose in London. But Tuppy hasn’t seen her since that time.”
Fernrigg. Argyll. Scotland. Rose hadn’t mentioned Scotland. She had talked about Kitzbühel, St. Tropez, and the Grand Canyon, but she had not mentioned Scotland. It was all very confusing. But one thing was painfully clear. Confronted by crisis, Rose had decided to clear out.
“You … you said you came from Edinburgh.”
“I work in Edinburgh.”
“Will you go back there?”
“I don’t know.”
“What will you do?”
Antony shrugged and laid down his empty cup. “God knows. Go back to Fernrigg on my own, I suppose. Unless…” He looked at Flora, and went on, as though it were the most natural suggestion in the world. “… unless you’d like to come with me.”
“Me?”
“Yes, You.”
“What good could I do?”
“You could pretend to be Rose.”
What really offended Flora was the calm way he came out with this outrageous suggestion: sitting there, cool and composed, and wearing on his face an expression of marvelous innocence. His original idea of conning Rose into pretending that she was still engaged to him, had shocked Flora to the core. But this …
She found that she was so dismayed that it was difficult to find anything to say. “Thank you very much,” was all she came up with, and very feeble it sounded, too.
“Why not?”
“Why not? Because it would be the most terrible, ghastly lie. And because it would mean deceiving someone I imagine you’re very fond of.”
“It’s because I’m so fond of her that I’m prepared to deceive her.”
“Well, I’m not deceiving anybody, so you’d better start thinking of something else. Like picking up your bag and your raincoat, and getting out of this flat and leaving me alone.”
“You’d like Tuppy.”
“I wouldn’t like anybody I was lying to. You never lie to people who make you feel guilty.”
“She’d like you, too.”
“I’m not coming.”
“If I said please, would it help?”
“No.”
“Just for the weekend. That’s all. Just the weekend. I’ve promised. I’ve never broken a promise to Tuppy in all my life.”
Flora found that her indignation was fading, and this was frightening. Outrage was by far her best defense against this disarming young man. It wasn’t any use being touched by his sincerity. It wasn’t any use allowing herself to be sorry for him.
She said, “I won’t do it. I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“But you can. You’ve already told me that you haven’t got a job, that you haven’t even got anywhere to live, except here. And your father’s in Cornwall, so he presumably won’t be worrying about you.” He stopped. “Unless, of course, there’s someone else to worry about you.”
“You mean, have I got some man who’s crazy about me and telephones every five minutes? Well, I haven’t.”
Antony did not reply to this outburst, but she saw a gleam of humor in his eyes. “I don’t know what’s so funny about that,” she said.
“It’s not funny, it’s ludicrous. I always thought Rose was the most gorgeous thing on two legs, and you’re her identical twin. Nothing personal, I promise you, just an artistic appreciation. So what’s wrong with all the men down here in this mealy-mouthed country south of the border? Have they lost their sight?”
Now he was laughing, and it was the first time that Flora had seen him smile. Before, she had thought him an ordinary-looking young man, even ugly in an attractive sort of way. But when he smiled he became, all at once, quite devastating. She began to see why Rose had succumbed to his charm. She began to wonder why Rose had thrown him over.
Reluctantly, despite herself, Flora smiled too. She said, “For a man who’s just been jilted by the woman he loves, you don’t seem to be too broken up.”
His smile died. “No,” he admitted. “But then at heart I’m a pawky, hard-headed Scottish businessman and I had seen the writing on the wall. Anyway, a man who never made a mistake never made anything. And it was good while it lasted.”
“I wish she hadn’t run out on you. She knew you needed her.”
Antony crossed his arms. “I need you too,” he told Flora.
“I couldn’t do it.”
“You just told me you’d never been to Scotland. And here I am, handing you a free trip on a plate, and you’re turning it down. You’ll never get such an offer again.”
“I hope I don’t.”
“You’d like Fernrigg. And you’d like Tuppy. In fact, the two are so bound up together that it’s impossible to imagine one without the other.”
“Does she live alone?”
“Heavens, no. There’s a fam
ily of us. Aunt Isobel and Watty the gardener, and Mrs. Watty who does the cooking. And I’ve got an older brother called Torquil with a wife called Teresa. I’ve even got a nephew called Jason. All Armstrongs.”
“Does your brother live at Fernrigg?”
“No, he and Teresa are in the Persian Gulf. He’s an oil man. But Jason was left at home with Tuppy, which is why he’s at Fernrigg right now. It’s a sort of dream place for small boys. The house is on the shore, with the sea all around and sands to walk on, and there’s a little mooring where Torquil and I used to keep our dinghy. And inland there are streams full of trout and lochs covered with water-lilies, and now, in September, all the heather will be out and the rowan berries scarlet. Like beads. You really ought to come.”
It was the most invidious sort of coaxing. Flora, with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, eyed Antony Armstrong thoughtfully. She said, “I once read a book about a man called Brat Farrar. And he pretended to be someone else—an impostor, you’d call him—and he had to spend months learning all about himself—about the person he was going to pretend to be. The very thought of it always gave me the shivers.”
“But—” Antony got off his stool and came to sit across the table from Flora, so that they faced each other like a pair of conspirators. “But you see, you wouldn’t need to do that. Because nobody knows Rose. Nobody’s seen her for five years. Nobody known what she’s been doing, except getting engaged to me. That’s all they’re interested in.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about you.”
“That’s easy. I’m male, single, thirty years old, and Presbyterian. Educated at Fettes, did my training in London, went back to Edinburgh to join the firm I work for now. I’ve been with them ever since. What else do you want to know?”
“I’d like to know what makes you think I’d do this dreadful thing.”
“It’s not a dreadful thing. It’s a kindness. Call it a kindness.”
“Call it anything you like. I still couldn’t do it.”
“If I ask you again. If I say please, again, would you think about it? And remember that it isn’t for myself I’m asking, it’s for Tuppy. And for Isobel too. For promises kept and not broken. Please, Flora.”
She longed to be tough—not to be touched or sentimental. She longed for the strength to stick to her own convictions. Because she was right. She knew she was right.
She said cautiously, “If I said I’d come, when would we go?”
Antony’s features took on an expression of wary excitement. “Tonight. Now, in fact. There’s a plane just after seven; we ought to be able to catch it if we get our skates on. My car’s at the airport in Edinburgh. We can drive to Fernrigg. We’ll be there first thing in the morning.”
“And when would I come back?”
“I have to be at work on Monday morning. You could catch the London plane from Edinburgh that day.”
She knew instinctively that she could trust him. Antony would not break his word. “I couldn’t be Rose,” she warned him. “I could only be myself.”
“That’s all I want you to be.”
She wanted to help him. She liked him, but it had, as well, obscurely, something to do with Rose. I am my brother’s keeper.
“Rose is very naughty. She shouldn’t have run out on you and left you in such a mess.”
“The mess is as much my fault as hers. Rose owes me nothing. For that matter, neither do you.”
The final decision, Flora knew, was hers. But it was hard not to be impressed by the lengths to which Antony Armstrong was prepared to go in order to keep his promise. Perhaps, she told herself, if a wrong thing were done for a right reason, then that made it right—at least not wholly bad.
A lie was a dangerous thing. Flora’s finer instincts, painstakingly cultivated over the years by her father, reacted violently against the insane scheme. And yet, in some way, it was her father’s fault. He was responsible for the dilemma in which she now found herself simply because he had never told her of the existence of Rose.
At the same time other, unsuspected reactions were manifesting themselves. They had to do with Rose, and on inspection proved to be part curiosity and part—Flora felt ashamed—envy. Rose seemed to have so much. The temptation offered by this young man to become Rose, just for a couple of days, was growing harder to resist by the minute.
He was waiting. She finally met his eyes across the table and discovered to her shame that when it came to the crunch, words were not going to be necessary. He sensed that she had fallen. A sudden smile lit up his face, and with it, the last of her defenses crumbled about her ears.
“You’ll come!” It was a shout of triumph.
“I must be mad.”
“You’ll come. And you’re not mad, you’re marvelous. You’re a super girl.”
He remembered something, and from the pocket of his jacket took out a jeweler’s box. Out of it he produced a sapphire and diamond ring. He took Flora’s left hand, and pushed it on. She looked down at it, glittering on her finger and thought it looked very pretty. He closed her fingers into a fist and held it within his own two hands.
He said, “Thank you.”
5
ANNA
Jason Armstrong, seven years old, sat up in the big double bed alongside his great-grandmother and listened while she read him The Tale Of Two Bad Mice. He was really too old for Two Bad Mice. He knew it, and Tuppy knew it, but her being in bed and unwell made him nostalgic for babyhood pleasures. When she sent him for a bedtime book, therefore, he had chosen Two Bad Mice, and she, being tactful, had not commented, but had put on her spectacles, opened the book at the front page, and started to read.
“Once upon a time there was a very beautiful doll’s house.”
He thought she read books very well. She read aloud to him every evening after he had had his bath and his supper, usually in the drawing room by the fire. But lately she hadn’t been able to read to him at all, since she was too ill. “Now don’t you go worrying your great-granny,” Mrs. Watty had told him.
“I’ll read to you,” Aunt Isobel had promised, and had kept her promise too, but somehow it wasn’t the same as Tuppy’s reading. Aunt Isobel didn’t have the same voice. And she didn’t smell of lavender the way Tuppy did.
But, as Mrs. Watty was apt to say, “Every cloud has its silver lining,” and there was no denying that there was something pretty special about being in Tuppy’s bed. It was unlike anybody else’s bed. It was brass decorated with knobs; the pillows were enormous with great white monogrammed covers; and the linen sheets were hemstitched and very old and full of interesting patches and darns.
Even the furniture in Tuppy’s room seemed magic and mysterious, made of carved mahogany and faded buttoned silk. The dressing-table was crowded with silver-topped jars and strange things like button hooks and hair nets which Tuppy had told him ladies used to use in the olden days, but now no longer had any need of.
“There were two red lobsters, and a ham, a fish, a pudding, and some pears and oranges.”
The curtains were drawn, but outside a wind was getting up and a draft edged its way through the ill-fitting sash windows. The curtains ballooned slightly as though there were someone hidden behind them. Jason drew closer to Tuppy and was glad that she was there. These days he did not like being too far away from her in case something nameless happened and she would not be here when he got back again.
There was a nurse, a proper hospital nurse, who had come to Fernrigg to take care of Tuppy until she was better. Her name was Mrs. McLeod, and she had come all the way from Fort William to Tarbole on the train, and Watty had taken the car to Tarbole to fetch her. She and Mrs. Watty had made friends, and talked importantly in half whispers at the kitchen table over endless cups of tea. Nurse McLeod was thin and starched. She had varicose veins, too, which was perhaps one of the reasons that she and Mrs. Watty had made friends. They were always comparing their varicose veins.
“One morning Lucinda and Ja
ne had gone out for a drive in the doll’s perambulator.”
Downstairs, in the cavern of the hall, the telephone started to ring. Tuppy stopped reading and looked up, taking off her spectacles.
After a little Jason said, “Go on.”
“There’s the telephone.”
“Aunt Isobel will answer it. Go on.”
Tuppy went on, but Jason could tell her mind wasn’t on Lucinda and Jane. Then the ringing stopped and once more she stopped reading. Jason gave up. “Who do you think it is?” he asked.
“I don’t know. But I’ve no doubt that in a moment or two Isobel will come upstairs and tell us.”
They sat together in the big bed, the old lady and the small boy, expectant. The sound of Isobel’s voice floated dimly up the staircase, but they could not hear what she said. At last there came the single ring as she put down the reciever, and then they heard her coming up the stairs and along the passage toward Tuppy’s room.
The door opened and Isobel put her face around the edge of it. She was smiling, radiating suppressed excitement. Her soft grayish hair formed an untidy aureole about her beaming face. On such occasions she looked very young, not at all like a great-aunt.
“Do you two want to hear some nice happy news?” she asked, coming in and shutting the door behind her. Sukey, almost lost in the folds of the silk eiderdown, raised her head to give a cursory growl, but Isobel took no notice. She leaned on the rail at the end of Tuppy’s bed and said, “That was Antony, calling from London. He’s coming home for the weekend and he’s bringing Rose.”
“He’s coming.” Tuppy loved Antony more than anyone else in the world, but now she sounded as though she were about to cry. Jason glanced at her anxiously but was relieved to see no sign of tears.
“Yes, they’re coming. Just for a couple of days. They both have to go back on Monday. They’re catching the evening flight to Edinburgh and then driving over. They’ll be here first thing in the morning.”