‘Bewitched’. “I’m wild again, beguiled again…”
She gave in. “All right.”
She turned back, stepped into his arms. Conrad drew her close, laid his cheek against her hair. They danced, scarcely moving, hardly aware of other couples, who, succumbing to the seduction of the plangent piano, had taken once more to the floor.
He said, “Do you think this guy knows how to play ‘The Look of Love’?”
She smiled to herself. “I don’t know. You could ask him.”
“It’s been a good party.”
“I’m impressed by your reeling.”
“If you can do a square dance, I guess you can do anything.”
“Just needs guts.”
“Do they still have Saturday-night dances at the Leesport Country Club?”
“I expect so. A whole new generation smooching around the terrace under the stars.”
“We’re not doing too badly right now.”
She said, “I’m not coming back, Conrad. I’m not coming back with you.”
She felt his hand, against her ribcage, moving, gentle as a caress. She looked up into his face. “You knew already, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I guessed.”
“Everything’s changed. Henry’s home. We’ve talked. It’s different now. We’re together again, Edmund and I. It’s all right again.”
“I’m glad.”
“Edmund’s my life. I lost sight of him, but he’s back and we’re together.”
“For you, I’m really glad.”
“Right now isn’t the time to go away and leave him.”
“He’s a lucky man.”
“No, not lucky. Just special.”
“He’s also a nice guy.”
“I am sorry, Conrad. Whatever you feel, I don’t want you to think that I was just using you.”
“I think we used each other. We levelled off with our mutual need. At exactly the right time, the right person was there. At least, for me it was the right person. It was you.”
“You’re a special man, too. You know that, don’t you? And one day, sooner or later, you’ll meet someone. Someone just as special as you are. She won’t fill Mary’s place, because she’ll have a place of her own. And she’ll fill it for all the right reasons. You’ve got to remember that. For your own sake, and for the sake of your little daughter.”
“Okay. A positive approach.”
“I don’t want you to be sad any longer.”
“No longer the Sad American.”
“Oh, don’t remind me! How crass I was to blurt that out.”
“When will I see you again?”
“Oh, soon. We’ll come out to the States, Edmund and I. Some time. We’ll all get together then.”
She laid her head on his shoulder. “Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered, am I.” The last notes of the song trickled away off the piano.
He said, “I love you.”
“Me too,” Virginia told him. “It’s been great.”
Noel drove back to Corriehill. With the wind pouring in through the open window, the Golf headed back into the hills, and he took his time and did not speed. Being on his own was strangely peaceful, a small breathing space in which to collect some of his thoughts and let others wander. Leaving Croy, he had toyed with the idea of putting on a tape for company, and then decided against it because, for once, quiet was what he craved. Besides, it seemed almost blasphemous to intrude on the infinite, bloomy darkness of the night by letting loose a blast of rock.
The countryside, all about him, was obscured, desolate, and scarcely habited, and yet he felt that his passage, in some inexplicable way, was being observed. This was an ancient land. The hilltops thrusting up into the sky had held those shapes since the beginning of time, and his immediate surroundings had probably looked for hundreds of years much as they looked now.
Ahead, the narrow road twisted away from him. Long ago, when its course was first laid, it would have followed the boundaries of a farmer’s land, circumvented the drystone dykes of a crofter’s smallholding. Now, others owned these lands, and tractors and milk-floats and buses came this way, yet the road wound and climbed and dipped, to no apparent purpose, just the way it had always done.
Unable to shrug off the sensation that he was being watched, he thought about those long-gone crofters pitting their energies against the cruel climate, the stubborn land, the barren soil. Ploughing the thin soil behind a horse, harvesting, with sickles, the meagre crops, braving blizzards in search of sheep, cutting peat to stack for fuel. He imagined just such a man making his way home, along the road Noel was now travelling, headed up the empty glen, on horseback maybe, but more likely on foot. Slogging up the hill, bent against the wind that blew from the west. The road, then, would have seemed very long, and the labours of survival endless.
He found it impossible to imagine such hardships, such a tenuous existence. Safe in the twentieth century, taking both necessities and luxuries for granted, the problem of surviving was not one that Noel had ever contemplated, let alone had to deal with, and in comparison his own uncertainties seemed so unimportant that he felt diminished by their triviality.
And yet, it was his life. You only have one life, Pandora had told him. You don’t get second chances. Let something really good slip through your fingers and it’s gone for ever.
Which brought him back to Alexa. Alexa was gold. Pandora was right, and he knew she was right. If you have to hurt her, then you must do it now… That was old Vi, sitting on the hill above the loch and opening her heart to him.
He thought about Vi, and Pandora, and the Balmerinos and the Airds. Together they constituted a way of life that he had never before truly experienced. Family, friends, neighbours; involved and interdependent. He thought about Balnaid and once more was assailed by the reasonless conviction that here was where he belonged.
Alexa was the key.
Now, taking him by surprise, his mother joined in the argument. Happiness is making the most of what you have. Penelope’s robust and certain tones rang clear in his head, brooking no argument, laying down the law as she always had when she felt strongly about some issue.
So what had he got?
The answer was painfully straightforward. A girl. Unsophisticated and not particularly beautiful. In fact, the very antithesis of every woman who had gone before. A girl who loved him. Not to distraction; never nagging him with demands. But with a constancy that burned bright as a steady flame. He thought about the last few months, during which he had lived with Alexa in her little house in Ovington Street, and a series of random images floated, unsummoned, into his mind. And these took him by surprise, because for some reason his subconscious did not come up with any of those rich and material possessions which had first caught his attention that evening, so long ago, when Alexa had invited him in for a drink. The pictures, the furniture, the books and the porcelain; the handsome coasters on the sideboard, and the two silver pheasants which stood in the middle of her dining-room table. Instead, he saw delicious and domestic objects. A bowl of fresh apples, a loaf of newly-baked bread, a jug crammed with tulips, the gleam of evening sunshine on the copper pans that hung in the kitchen.
And then the other good things which they had shared together. Kiri te Kanawa at Covent Garden, the Tate Gallery at weekends. Sunday lunches at San Lorenzo. Making love. He thought of the peaceful feeling of walking home in the evenings, back from the office, turning into Ovington Street and knowing that she was there, waiting for him.
That was what he’d got. Alexa. There. Waiting for him. That was all he wanted. That was all that mattered. So what the hell was he dithering about? What the hell was he looking for? All at once the questions were of so little importance that he didn’t even bother to attempt to think up the answers.
Because the prospect of a future without her was unimaginable.
He knew then that he was over the watershed and on the path of commitment. For better, for worse. Til
l death us do part. But the daunting words no longer rendered him shit-scared. Instead, he found himself filled with an unaccustomed and unexpected sense of purpose and elation.
And urgency. No more reason to linger. Instead, a new impatience. He had wasted enough time. He took a deep breath, accelerated. The engine responded and the car sped up the hill. Along the road that led to Corriehill.
His mother was still around somewhere. “All right,” he said, “I heard you. You’ve made your point. I’m on my way.” And he said the words aloud, and the wind snatched the words from his mouth and tossed them away behind him. He shouted, “I’m coming!” And the reassurance was for the two of them, his dead mother and his living love.
The first of the guests were on their way home from the dance. The headlights of their cars could be seen from far off, moving away from Corriehill, down between the trees and out of the imposing gates. Driving up the hill towards the house, Noel passed a couple of these cars, but there was plenty of space on the wide driveway and time, as well, for a certain amount of badinage; derisive remarks about Noel’s apparently tardy arrival at the party, and assurances that it was better to be late than never.
The home-goers had clearly been enjoying themselves.
As the exodus had already begun, Noel did not bother to park the car in the field, but instead, took it to the side of the gravel sweep of the front door. As he went up the steps, an old couple emerged, and he stood aside, to hold the door open for them and let them by. The husband thanked him courteously, and bade him goodnight, and then tucked his arm solicitously into his wife’s, and helped her on her way. Noel watched them go, stepping cautiously, and deep in conversation. He heard their laughter. Elderly, perhaps, but they too had enjoyed themselves, had a fine time, and now together were going home. He thought again, till death us do part. But death, after all, was simply a part of life, and it was the living bit that was important.
He went through the doors and in search of Alexa. She was not in the disco, nor the drawing room. Emerging from the drawing room, he heard his name being spoken.
“Noel.”
He stopped and turned, and saw a girl to whom he had not been formally introduced, but whom he knew to be Katy Steynton, because Alexa had pointed her out to him. She was blonde and very slender, with features the quintessence of Englishness; a beautiful complexion, a long face, pale blue eyes and a tiny mouth. She wore a dress of slipper satin in exactly the same shade as her eyes, and held the hand of a man who was obviously impatient to get her into the throbbing, strobe-lit den of the disco.
“Hello, there.”
“You are Noel Keeling, aren’t you? Alexa’s friend?”
For some reason, Noel felt faintly foolish. “That’s right.”
“She’s in the marquee. I’m Katy Steynton.”
“Yes, I know.”
“She’s dancing with Torquil Hamilton-Scott.”
“Oh, thanks.” Which sounded a bit abrupt, so Noel added tactfully, “Wonderful party. You must be thrilled. So kind of you to ask me.”
“Not a bit. It was super…” she was already being towed away from him “…that you could come.”
A waiter bustled by with a trayful of brimming champagne glasses. As he passed, Noel adroitly lifted one off the tray, and then made his way through the library towards the marquee. The beat of the music there had reached a crescendo, for the band was on its second run through the dance, and the pace seemed to quicken with every moment that passed. At the top of the steps, he paused, to search for Alexa, but then, despite his anxiety to find her, and his impatience, found himself diverted, captivated by the sight before him. He had no great love of dancing, let alone Scottish country dancing, but the atmosphere had become electric, with a charge that could not be ignored. As well, his professional, creative instincts automatically responded to this visual assault on his senses, the whirling circles of colour and movement, and he wished, more than anything, that he were able to capture it on camera. For this dancing had about it an aggressive symmetry that reminded him of the precision of some oft-rehearsed military tattoo. The false floor of the marquee audibly groaned as one hundred pairs of feet banged down on it in perfect rhythm, and the centre of each ring was a vortex, sucking a dancer from the side of the set, and then throwing him out a second later with the full impact of centrifugal force. Bare-armed girls wryly displayed bruises inflicted by the silver cuff-buttons of a partner’s kilt-jacket, but to all intents and purposes, they were mesmerised by the intricacies of the reel, concentrating and waiting for their next turn to be pulled into the spinning inferno.
He saw Alexa at last, in her flower-splashed dress, with her cheeks rosy and her hair flying. She was unaware of his presence, and dancing with one of the young soldiers, a handsome figure with his raven-black hair and his scarlet mess jacket. Noel saw her engrossed, excited, blissfully happy, her face tilted up to her partner’s, and filled with laughter.
Alexa.
“It’s a hell of a dance, isn’t it?”
Startled, Noel looked round and saw the man who stood beside him, come, presumably, to enjoy the spectacle, as he was.
He said, “It certainly is. What is it they’re doing?”
“The Reel of the Fifty-First Highland Division.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It was devised in a German prison camp during the war.”
“It looks extremely complicated.”
“Well, why not? They had five and a half years to make the bloody thing up.”
Noel smiled politely, and went back to watching Alexa. But now his patience was wearing thin, and he longed for it all to be over. Which, in a moment or two, it was. A rousing last few bars, and then a final, shattering roll of drums. Applause, clapping, and cheers took the place of the music, but Noel wasted not a moment. He laid down his glass in a handy plant pot, and shouldered his way across the crowded floor to her side, where he found her being gratefully and robustly embraced by her overheated partner.
“Alexa.”
She looked and saw him, and her flushed face lighted up, and she disentangled herself, reaching out her hand to him.
“Noel. Where have you been?”
“I’ll explain. Come and have a drink…” And he took her hand, and pulled her firmly off the dance floor, Alexa meanwhile calling her thanks to the young soldier over her shoulder, but doing nothing to resist Noel’s masterful progress. He led her out of the tent, through the library; he searched for a peaceful spot, and decided that halfway up the staircase was as good a place as any.
“But, Noel, I thought we were going to have a drink.”
“We will in a moment.”
“You’re taking me to the Ladies.”
“No, I’m not.”
On the half-landing it was quiet, and softly lit. He sat on the wide, Turkey-carpeted stair and drew her down beside him, and took her head between his hands and kissed her warm, flushed cheeks, and her brow, and her eyes, and then her sweet and open mouth, thus stilling her laughing protests.
It took a long time. They drew apart at last. After a bit, he said, “I watched you dancing, yet that was all I wanted to do.”
“I don’t understand, Noel.”
He smiled. “Nor do I.”
“What has happened?”
“I took Pandora home to Croy.”
“I didn’t know where you’d gone.”
“I love you.”
“I looked for you, but…”
“I want you for always.”
“You have me.”
“Till death us do part.”
She looked, quite suddenly, almost frightened. “Oh, Noel…”
“Please.”
“But that’s for ever.”
He thought of the old couple, arm in arm, setting off in the darkness for home. Together. “I know.” He had never felt so confident, so unafraid, so certain in the whole of his life. “You see, my darling Alexa, I am asking you to marry me.”
Pan
dora shut the door behind her. Inside the house, with curtains drawn and doors closed, it was very dark, the great hall illuminated only by the glow of red ashes from the dying fire. She was alone. It was the first time in her life that she had had Croy to herself. Always, there had been others around the place. Archie, Isobel, Lucilla, Conrad, Jeff. And long before them, her parents, their servants, the constant stream of visitors and friends; always somebody, coming or going. Distant voices, distant laughter.
She switched on the light. Went upstairs, down the upper passage to her room. She found it all just as she had left it, flung with clothes, the bed crumpled, the empty whisky glass still on the bedside table, along with her radio and a dog-eared paperback. The dressing-table was littered with bottles and jars, dusted with spilled face-powder; the wardrobe door hung open, and random shoes lay about the floor.
She tossed her bag on to the bed, and went over to the bombé desk. Here lay the letter that she had been writing before succumbing to exhaustion and taking to her bed to have one of her little toes-ups. She picked it up and read it through. It did not take very long. She folded it and put it into an envelope and licked the flap and pressed it down. She left the envelope on the blotter.
She went into the bathroom. This, too, was in its habitual state of disorder, with damp bathmat and towels on the floor, and the soap lying, forgotten and soggy, in the bottom of the bath. At the basin, she filled a glass with water and drank it down, watching her own reflection in the tall plate-glass mirror. Her jars of pills stood on the shelf below this, and she reached for one of them, but clumsily, or perhaps her hand was shaking, because, inadvertently, she knocked over the bottle of Poison that stood alongside. It tipped and fell, and she watched this happen, and it all seemed to happen quite gradually, like watching a slow-motion film. It wasn’t until it hit the basin and had smashed into smithereens that she put out her hand as though to save it.
Too late. All gone. The basin filled with shards of glass, and she herself, almost anaesthetised by the concentrated scent of the precious golden perfume…