‘I have been told,’ she said, ‘that once upon a time you hit a mark you didn’t bargain for, down there.’
Syce stopped dead. She saw that beads of sweat had formed on the back of his neck. ‘Alcoholic,’ she thought. ‘Flabby. Shame. He must have been a fine man when he looked after himself.’
‘Great grief!’ Syce cried out, thumping his fist on the seat of her bicycle, ‘you mean the bloody cat!’
‘Well!’
‘Great grief, it was an accident. I’ve told the old perisher! An accident! I like cats.’
He swung round and faced her. His eyes were misted and his lips trembled. ‘I like cats,’ he repeated.
‘We all make mistakes,’ said Nurse Kettle, comfortably.
He held his hand out for the bow and pointed to a little gate at the end of the path.
‘There’s the gate into Hammer,’ he said, and added with exquisite awkwardness, ‘I beg your pardon, I’m very poor company as you see. Thank you for bringing the stuff. Thank you, thank you.’
She gave him the bow and took charge of her bicycle. ‘Dr Mark Lacklander may be very young,’ she said bluffly, ‘but he’s as capable a GP as I’ve come across in thirty years’ nursing. If I were you, Commander, I’d have a good down-to-earth chinwag with him. Much obliged for the assistance. Good evening to you.’
She pushed her bicycle through the gate into the well-tended coppice belonging to Hammer Farm and along a path that ran between herbaceous borders. As she made her way towards the house she heard behind her at Uplands, the twang of a bow string and the ‘tock’ of an arrow in a target.
‘Poor chap,’ Nurse Kettle muttered, partly in a huff and partly compassionate. ‘Poor chap! Nothing to keep him out of mischief.’ And with a sense of vague uneasiness, she wheeled her bicycle in the direction of the Cartarettes’ rose garden where she could hear the snip of garden secateurs and a woman’s voice quietly singing.
‘That’ll be either Mrs,’ thought Nurse Kettle, ‘or the stepdaughter. Pretty tune.’
A man’s voice joined in, making a second part.
‘Come away, come away Death
And in sad cypress let me be laid.’
The words, thought Nurse Kettle, were a trifle morbid but the general effect was nice. The rose garden was enclosed behind quickset hedges and hidden from her, but the path she had taken led into it, and she must continue if she was to reach the house. Her rubber-shod feet made little sound on the flagstones and the bicycle discreetly clicked along beside her. She had an odd feeling that she was about to break in on a scene of exquisite intimacy. She approached a green archway and as she did so the woman’s voice broke off from its song, and said: ‘That’s my favourite of all.’
‘Strange,’ said a man’s voice that fetched Nurse Kettle up with a jolt, ‘strange, isn’t it, in a comedy, to make the love songs so sad! Don’t you think so, Rose? Rose … Darling …’
Nurse Kettle tinkled her bicycle bell, passed through the green archway and looked to her right. She discovered Miss Rose Cartarette and Dr Mark Lacklander gazing into each other’s eyes with unmistakable significance.
III
Miss Cartarette had been cutting roses and laying them in the basket held by Dr Lacklander. Dr Lacklander blushed to the roots of his hair and said, ‘Good God! Good heavens! Good evening,’ and Miss Cartarette said, ‘Oh, hallo, Nurse. Good evening.’ She, too, blushed, but more delicately than Dr Lacklander.
Nurse Kettle said: ‘Good evening, Miss Rose. Good evening, Doctor. Hope it’s all right my taking the short cut.’ She glanced with decorum at Dr Lacklander. ‘The child with the abscess,’ she said, in explanation of her own appearance.
‘Ah, yes,’ Dr Lacklander said. ‘I’ve had a look at her. It’s your gardener’s little girl, Rose.’
They both began to talk to Nurse Kettle who listened with an expression of good humour. She was a romantic woman and took pleasure in the look of excitement on Dr Lacklander’s face and of shyness on Rose’s.
‘Nurse Kettle,’ Dr Lacklander said rapidly, ‘like a perfect angel, is going to look after my grandfather tonight. I don’t know what we should have done without her.’
‘And by that same token,’ Nurse Kettle added, ‘I’d better go on me way rejoicing or I shall be late on duty.’
They smiled and nodded at her. She squared her shoulders, glanced in a jocular manner at her bicycle and stumped off with it through the rose garden.
‘Well,’ she thought, ‘if that’s not a case, I’ve never seen young love before. Blow me down flat, but I never guessed! Fancy!’
As much refreshed by this incident as she would have been by a good strong cup of tea, she made her way to the gardener’s cottage, her last port of call before going up to Nunspardon.
When her figure, stoutly clad in her District Nurse’s uniform, had bobbed its way out of the enclosed garden, Rose Cartarette and Mark Lacklander looked at each other and laughed nervously.
Lacklander said: ‘She’s a fantastically good sort, old Kettle, but at that particular moment I could have done without her. I mustn’t stay, I suppose.’
‘Don’t you want to see my papa?’
‘Yes. But I shouldn’t wait. Not that one can do anything much for the grandparent, but they like me to be there.’
‘I’ll tell Daddy as soon as he comes in. He’ll go up at once, of course.’
‘We’d be very grateful. Grandfather sets great store by his coming.’
Mark Lacklander looked at Rose over the basket he carried and said unsteadily: ‘Darling.’
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Honestly; don’t.’
‘No? Are you warning me off, Rose? Is it all a dead loss?’
She made a small ineloquent gesture, tried to speak and said nothing.
‘Well,’ Lacklander said, ‘I may as well tell you that I was going to ask if you’d marry me. I love you very dearly and I thought we seemed to sort of suit. Was I wrong about that?’
‘No,’ Rose said.
‘Well, I know I wasn’t. Obviously, we suit. So for pity’s sake what’s up? Don’t tell me you love me like a brother, because I can’t believe it.’
‘You needn’t try to.’
‘Well, then?’
‘I can’t think of getting engaged, much less married.’
‘Ah!’ Lacklander ejaculated. ‘Now we’re coming to it! This is going to be what I suspected. Oh, for God’s sake let me get rid of this bloody basket! Here. Come over to the bench. I’m not going till I’ve cleared this up.’
She followed him and they sat down together on a garden seat with the basket of roses at their feet. He took her by the wrist and stripped the heavy glove off her hand. ‘Now, tell me,’ he demanded. ‘Do you love me?’
‘You needn’t bellow it at me like that. Yes, I do.’
‘Rose, darling! I was so panicked you’d say you didn’t.’
‘Please listen, Mark. You’re not going to agree with a syllable of this, but please listen.’
‘All right. I know what it’s going to be but … all right.’
‘You can see what it’s like here. I mean the domestic set-up. You must have seen for yourself how much difference it makes to Daddy my being on tap.’
‘You are so funny when you use colloquialisms … a little girl shutting her eyes and firing off a popgun. All right; your father likes to have you about. So he well might and so he still would if we married. We’d probably live half our time at Nunspardon.’
‘It’s much more than that.’ Rose hesitated. She had drawn away from him and sat with her hands pressed together between her knees. She wore a long house-dress, her hair was drawn back into a knot at the base of her neck but a single fine strand had escaped and shone on her forehead. She used very little make-up and could afford this economy for she was a beautiful girl.
She said: ‘It’s simply that his second marriage hasn’t been a success. If I left him now he’d really and truly have nothing to live for. Really.’
&
nbsp; ‘Nonsense,’ Mark said uneasily.
‘He’s never been able to do without me. Even when I was little. Nanny and I and my governess all following the drum. So many countries and journeys. And then after the war when he was given all those special jobs: Vienna and Rome and Paris. I never went to school because he hated the idea of separation.’
‘All wrong, of course. Only half a life.’
‘No, no, no, that’s not true, honestly. It was a wonderfully rich life. I saw and heard and learnt all sorts of splendid things other girls miss.’
‘All the same …’
‘No, honestly, it was grand.’
‘You should have been allowed to get under your own steam.’
‘It wasn’t a case of being allowed. I was allowed almost anything I wanted. And when I did get under my own steam just see what happened! He was sent with that mission to Singapore and I stayed in Grenoble and took a course at the University. He was delayed and delayed … and I found out afterwards that he was wretchedly at a loose end. And then … it was while he was there … he met Kitty.’
Lacklander closed his well-kept doctor’s hand over the lower half of his face and behind it made an indeterminate sound.
‘Well,’ Rose said, ‘it turned out as badly as it possibly could, and it goes on getting worse, and if I’d been there I don’t think it would have happened.’
‘Why not? He’d have been just as likely to meet her. And even if he hadn’t, my heavenly and darling Rose, you cannot be allowed to think of yourself as a twister of the tail of fate.’
‘If I’d been there …’
‘Now look here!’ said Lacklander. ‘Look at it like this. If you removed yourself to Nunspardon as my wife, he and your stepmother might get together in a quick comeback.’
‘Oh, no,’ Rose said. ‘No, Mark. There’s not a chance of that.’
‘How do you know? Listen. We’re in love. I love you so desperately much it’s almost more than I can endure. I know I shall never meet anybody else who could make me so happy and, incredible though it may seem, I don’t believe you will either. I won’t be put off, Rose. You shall marry me and if your father’s life here is too unsatisfactory, well, we’ll find some way of improving it. Perhaps if they part company he could come to us.’
‘Never! Don’t you see? He couldn’t bear it. He’d feel sort of extraneous.’
‘I’m going to talk to him. I shall tell him I want to marry you.’
‘No, Mark, darling! No … please …’
His hand closed momentarily over hers. Then he was on his feet and had taken up the basket of roses. ‘Good evening, Mrs Cartarette,’ he said. ‘We’re robbing your garden for my grandmother. You’re very much ahead of us at Hammer with your roses.’
Kitty Cartarette had turned in by the green archway and was looking thoughtfully at them.
IV
The second Mrs Cartarette did not match her Edwardian name. She did not look like a Kitty. She was so fair that without her make-up she would have seemed bleached. Her figure was well-disciplined and her face had been skilfully drawn up into a beautifully cared-for mask. Her greatest asset was her acquired inscrutability. This, of itself, made a femme fatale of Kitty Cartarette. She had, as it were, been manipulated into a menace. She was dressed with some elaboration and, presumably because she was in the garden, she wore gloves.
‘How nice to see you, Mark,’ she said. ‘I thought I heard your voices. Is this a professional call?’
Mark said: ‘Partly so at least. I ran down with a message for Colonel Cartarette, and I had a look at your gardener’s small girl.’
‘How too kind,’ she said, glancing from Mark to her stepdaughter. She moved up to him and with her gloved hand took a dark rose from the basket and held it against her mouth.
‘What a smell!’ she said. ‘Almost improper, it’s so strong. Maurice is not in, but he won’t be long. Shall we go up?’
She led the way to the house. Exotic wafts of something that was not roses drifted in her wake. She kept her torso rigid as she walked and slightly swayed her hips. ‘Very expensive,’ Mark Lacklander thought; ‘but not entirely exclusive. Why on earth did he marry her?’
Mrs Cartarette’s pin heels tapped along the flagstone path to a group of garden furniture heaped with cushions. A tray with a decanter and brandy glasses was set out on a white iron table. She let herself down on a swinging seat, put up her feet, and arranged herself for Mark to look at.
‘Poorest Rose,’ she said, glancing at her stepdaughter, ‘you’re wearing such suitable gloves. Do cope with your scratchy namesakes for Mark. A box perhaps.’
‘Please don’t bother,’ Mark said. ‘I’ll take them as they are.’
‘We can’t allow that,’ Mrs Cartarette murmured. ‘You doctors mustn’t scratch your lovely hands, you know.’
Rose took the basket from him. He watched her go into the house and turned abruptly at the sound of Mrs Cartarette’s voice.
‘Let’s have a little drink, shall we?’ she said. ‘That’s Maurice’s pet brandy and meant to be too wonderful. Give me an infinitesimal drop and yourself a nice big one. I really prefer crème de menthe, but Maurice and Rose think it a common taste so I have to restrain my carnal appetite.’
Mark gave her the brandy. ‘I won’t, if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I’m by way of being on duty.’
‘Really? Who are you going to hover over, apart from the gardener’s child?’
‘My grandfather,’ Mark said.
‘How awful of me not to realize,’ she rejoined with the utmost composure. ‘How is Sir Harold?’
‘Not so well this evening, I’m afraid. In fact, I must get back. If I go by the river path perhaps I’ll meet the Colonel.’
‘Almost sure to, I should think,’ she agreed indifferently, ‘unless he’s poaching for that fabled fish on Mr Phinn’s preserves which, of course, he’s much too county to think of doing, whatever the old boy may say to the contrary.’
Mark said formally: ‘I’ll go that way, then, and hope to see him.’
She waved her rose at him in dismissal and held out her left hand in a gesture that he found distressingly second rate. He took it with his own left and shook it crisply.
‘Will you give your father a message from me?’ she said. ‘I know how worried he must be about your grandfather. Do tell him I wish so much one could help.’
The hand inside the glove gave his a sharp little squeeze and was withdrawn. ‘Don’t forget,’ she said.
Rose came back with the flowers in a box. Mark thought: ‘I can’t leave her like this, half-way through a proposal, damn it.’ He said coolly: ‘Come and meet your father. You don’t take enough exercise.’
‘I live in a state of almost perpetual motion,’ she rejoined, ‘and I’m not suitably shod or dressed for the river path.’
Mrs Cartarette gave a little laugh. ‘Poor Mark!’ she murmured. ‘But in any case, Rose, here comes your father.’
Colonel Cartarette had emerged from a spinney halfway down the hill and was climbing up through the rough grass below the lawn. He was followed by his spaniel, Skip, an old, obedient dog. The evening light had faded to a bleached greyness. Silvered grass, trees, lawns, flowers and the mildly curving thread of the shadowed trout stream joined in an announcement of oncoming night. Through this setting Colonel Cartarette moved as if he were an expression both of its substance and its spirit. It was as if from the remote past, through a quiet progression of dusks, his figure had come up from the valley of the Chyne.
When he saw the group by the lawn he lifted his hand in greeting. Mark went down to meet him. Rose, aware of her stepmother’s heightened curiosity, watched him with profound misgiving.
Colonel Cartarette was a native of Swevenings. His instincts were those of a countryman and he had never quite lost his air of belonging to the soil. His tastes, however, were for the arts and his talents for the conduct of government services in foreign places. This odd assortment of elements h
ad set no particular mark upon their host. It was not until he spoke that something of his personality appeared.
‘Good evening, Mark,’ he called as soon as they were within comfortable earshot of each other. ‘My dear chap, what do you think? I’ve damned near bagged the Old ’Un.’
‘No!’ Mark shouted with appropriate enthusiasm.
‘I assure you! The Old ’Un! Below the bridge in his usual lurk, you know. I could see him …’
And as he panted up the hill the Colonel completed his classic tale of a magnificent strike, a homeric struggle and a broken cast. Mark, in spite of his own preoccupations, listened with interest. The Old ’Un was famous in Swevenings: a trout of magnitude and cunning, the despair and desire of every rod in the district.
‘… so I lost him,’ the Colonel ended, opening his eyes very wide and at the same time grinning for sympathy at Mark. ‘What a thing! By jove, if I’d got him I really believe old Phinn would have murdered me.’
‘Are you still at war, sir?’
‘Afraid so. The chap’s impossible, you know Good God, he’s accused me in so many words of poaching. Mad! How’s your grandfather?’
Mark said: ‘He’s failing pretty rapidly, I’m afraid. There’s nothing we can do. It’s on his account I’m here, sir.’ And he delivered his message.
‘I’ll come at once,’ the Colonel said. ‘Better drive round. Just give me a minute or two to clean up. Come with me, won’t you?’
But Mark felt suddenly that he could not face another encounter with Rose and said he would go home at once by the river path and would prepare his grandfather for the Colonel’s arrival.
He stood for a moment looking back through the dusk towards the house. He saw Rose gather up the full skirt of her housecoat and run across the lawn, and he saw her father set down his creel and rod, take off his hat and wait for her, his bald head gleaming. She joined her hands behind his neck and kissed him. They went on towards the house arm-in-arm. Mrs Cartarette’s hammock had begun to swing to and fro.
Mark turned away and walked quickly down into the valley and across Bottom Bridge.