“Look at that! Just look at that! What did I tell you?”
Mrs. Wolverton-Gush looked.
Angie Moon was coming easily down the steep slope that led from the road, and Buckland was close behind her.
Coral muttered an epithet.
“Now, dear, listen to me. Will you let me have a talk with that young man? I think I can bring him to his senses all right. You don’t want to have to get rid of him just now, do you, on account of Patrick?”
“A fat lot of good he does Patrick!”
“You don’t want to lower yourself by speaking to him about his present behaviour, in any way. Really, dear, I wish you’d leave it to me,” earnestly said Mrs. Wolverton-Gush.
She did not want Buckland to offend Coral Romayne irretrievably. She had herself obtained the position for him, and a business-like arrangement subsisted between them that she found advantageous.
She was also anxious to retain Coral Romayne’s friendship. It had been useful to her in the past, and she fully intended it to be so in the future as well.
“Let me have a word with him. You can trust me not to compromise your dignity in any way.”
“Dignity be damned, Gushie!” Mrs. Romayne burst out laughing, her temper altering suddenly. “Go ahead if you want to. But you must make him understand that it’s his last chance. I’ll take him to Monte Carlo to-morrow — they’re making up a party — and if he spends his time running round after that pop-eyed girl, then it’s finish.”
Coral stood up, passed her hands swiftly along the slim line of her hips, and went down to the edge of the water.
Angie Moon, sprawling on the sand, was arranging her tight white rubber helmet over her curls. Her long limbs were already tanned to a lovely golden-brown. She had lacquered her toe-nails, as well as her finger-nails, with vermillion.
The Frenchmen, most of them surrounded by their families, were staring at her openly.
Buckland stood just beside her, his big torso displayed to full advantage.
He was gazing down at her.
Mrs. Wolverton-Gush, with an effort, heaved herself up. Grimly conscious of the heaviness of her body, she walked up to him with dauntless determination.
“Good-morning, Mrs. Moon. Well, Buck — good-morning.”
“Hallo,” said Buckland amiably. “Looks jolly in the water this morning, doesn’t it?”
“Very delightful. But I hope you’re not going in this moment, are you?”
Buckland looked down at Angie. She immediately rolled over on her front, raising her legs in the air and letting them fall again in a slow, rhythmic movement.
“What about you, Angie?”
“I’m going to sleep,” she announced, laying her face in the curve of her arm.
Mrs. Wolverton-Gush wrenched at her opportunity.
“I mustn’t disturb you. And, as a matter of fact, Buck, I want you to tell me about this day at Monte Carlo. I fancy Miss Challoner might like to join in. She was saying something about going there the other day.”
She moved away as she spoke, and Buckland followed her.
Angie did not look round.
(6)
“... And so,” said Mrs. Wolverton-Gush, “you can take it straight from me that you’re going the right way to lose a soft job.”
She was much less genteel, both in enunciation and vocabulary, with Buckland than she was with her employer, or anybody else whom she suspected of underrating what she thought of as her claim to good-breeding.
Breeding, good, bad or indifferent, meant nothing whatever to Buckland, she knew very well. Her inborn shrewdness told her that he would pay attention only to the plainest and most direct statements of fact.
He received her announcement exactly as she had expected: with a sharp glance at her, as if to see whether she really meant it, and then a frank exclamation of annoyance.
“Hell! Did she put you on to tell me so?”
“Certainly not. Mrs. Romayne is perfectly capable of telling you anything she wants to herself — —”
“That’s true,” Buck ejaculated, with a rueful grin.
“But I can see for myself that she’s not going to stand for your going on as you are at the present moment. Why should she? Here you are, having a free holiday, for that’s all it is, at her expense, and all you’ve got to do in return is to drive the car, and keep an eye on the boy when he wants it, and make yourself decently agreeable to Coral. If you can’t do that, Buck, you’re a greater fool than I take you for.”
There was a long pause.
Mrs. Wolverton-Gush, with a recrudescence of gentility, hoped that it would be unnecessary for her to speak more plainly. She sat looking straight in front of her.
“Hell,” said Buckland again, this time thoughtfully. “I suppose I’ve been a fool. God knows it wouldn’t suit me to get the chuck just now — jobs aren’t so easy to come by.”
“Certainly not jobs like this one.”
“I’m not the gigolo type,” said Buckland curtly.
“Nobody ever suggested — —”
He stopped her with a rough gesture.
“You know as well as I do that’s all it amounts to.”
“Very well, then,” said Ruth Wolverton-Gush grimly, “if that’s all it amounts to, you must put up with it. People without money, nowadays, have to take what they can get, and be thankful for it whatever it may be.”
Her mouth closed in a hard line over the words.
She had testified to the only faith she held.
CHAPTER X
(1)
“Can I go to Monte Carlo too?” said Gwennie, her tone suggesting a threat rather than an appeal.
“I’m afraid not, Gwennie.”
“But, mummie, Olwen is going.”
“I don’t know that she is. And in any case — —”
“Daddy said at breakfast this morning he’d take Olwen.”
“Olwen is a great deal older than you are.”
“She isn’t twenty-one, so she won’t be allowed to go into the gambling-place any more than I would be, so what’s the point of her going any more than me?” said Gwennie, with her usual devastating power of grasping the essentials of any situation.
Mary Morgan gazed at her rather helplessly.
Gwennie, very straight and sturdy in her short yellow bathing-drawers and yellow cretonne hat, gazed back at her parent with undeviating, unwinking directness.
Mary — one of whose weaknesses it was that she applied to the upbringing of her hard-boiled youngest child methods of reasonable persuasion that had proved successful with the gentler Olwen and David — perceived that there was to be a struggle.
Gwennie was intelligent enough, her mother knew, to understand that she had no real hope of gaining her point — but it was quite evident that she had made up her mind to relinquish it as dearly as possible.
“I don’t think I shall be going to Monte Carlo myself, darling. You and I and David can do something else instead.”
“I don’t want to do anything else. I want to go to Monte Carlo.”
“Gwennie, it really wouldn’t be much fun, even if you did. It’s just a town like St. Raphael, only larger.”
“Everybody else is going. Dulcie is.”
“I thought you didn’t much care for Dulcie.”
“I simply loathe her. That’s why I don’t like her to go, and me not.”
Confronted with this fresh evidence of Gwennie’s lack of principle, Mary felt more helpless than ever.
She was toiling slowly up the avenue towards the Hôtel d’Azur. Mervyn and the elder children were far on ahead. It was like Gwennie, she reflected, to launch her attack exactly in those circumstances and at that moment. It was far, far too hot for the exercise of parental firmness.
She tried to effect a diversion.
“I wonder what we shall have for déjeuner to-day.”
“Poulet and watercress,” said Gwennie promptly.
“Cresson.”
“Waterc
ress. I asked Henri and he told me. And no pudding, only cheese and fruit, but to-morrow there’s going to be ices.”
“Well, that’ll be very nice.”
Mary was panting slightly from the ascent. They rounded the last sharp bend, and were within sight of the steps.
“I do so want to go to Monte Carlo to-morrow.”
“You’re not going, Gwennie. Make up your mind to it like a good child.”
Mary hurried up the terrace steps, not looking round. There were several people on the terrace as usual, and she hoped that one or other of them might call to Gwennie as so often happened, for she was a child with whom strangers invariably made friends.
“Bonjour, ma petite fille.”
“Bonjaw, m’seu,” returned Gwennie mournfully.
“Ça marche, ce matin?”
Gwennie replied to monsieur Duval’s pleasant enquiry by thrusting out her under-lip and looking at him piteously out of suddenly tearful blue eyes. Both the Duvals immediately broke into compassionate shrieks and exclamations. In less than a moment, it seemed, Gwennie was the centre of quite a large group of interested people.
Mary, at once exasperated and amused, went on into the hall.
Only Mr. Muller was sitting there, reading an American newspaper.
It was his courteous custom invariably to stand up whenever any lady whom he knew went past, and he did so now.
Mary felt obliged to stop.
She rather liked Muller, who contrived to make his silences intelligent ones, and whose very dark blue eyes held an extraordinarily attentive expression, as though he were always observing.
“Are you going to join the Monte Carlo expedition to-morrow?” asked Mary.
“Why, no, Mrs. Morgan, I am not. Monte Carlo is a place I’ve visited a good many times, and I shall probably be doing so again when my wife and family join me here, and I think it can very well wait till then.”
“I’ve been there once. I didn’t like it much,” Mary confessed.
“It’s a place to see once,” Mr. Muller judicially observed. “But there’s nothing to it, unless a person wants to gamble. All this” — he waved comprehensively at the blazing blues and reds outside— “is seen to better advantage here than it is there. Though it’s a lovely drive along the coast, of course.”
“My husband is going to take Olwen. He doesn’t specially care about going into the Rooms.”
Muller gazed at her with his most considering expression.
“You and I will have the Hotel more or less to ourselves, then, to-morrow. Courteney is very determined to collect everyone he can.”
Gwennie walked into the hall, rolled a baleful eye at her mother, and marched upstairs, trailing her bathing-cloak behind her.
“Your daughter looks somewhat ruffled,” suggested Mr. Muller mildly.
“So she is. She wants to go to Monte Carlo, and I’ve told her she’s got to stay behind, and David too.”
“Isn’t that too bad! Would it ease the situation at all, Mrs. Morgan, if I asked you and the children to honour me to-morrow with your company in a drive? We might find some place along the coast that you haven’t yet visited, and have a bathe, and a picnic tea, and then dine early and drive home afterwards. Most of the hotels provide quite a nice dinner, I believe.”
“They’d love it,” said Mary. “And so should I,” she added very truthfully.
“Well, then, we’ll consider that’s settled.”
She smiled at him gratefully, and went upstairs feeling oddly exultant.
At home she scarcely ever went anywhere at all, excepting to very dull local functions, and she could not remember ever, since her marriage, having been taken out by any man but Mervyn.
Mary felt slightly alarmed by her own feelings of excited anticipation, and joyful sense of having received a compliment.
She told herself that it was absurd and that she ought to be ashamed of herself for her childishness.
But the feeling persisted just the same.
Uncoiling the plaits of her fair hair she brushed it with unwonted energy in front of the looking-glass, and presently found that she was mentally debating the possibilities of displaying those shining lengths in the presence of Mr. Muller next day.
“Well!” said Mary to her own reflection in some astonishment. With the exclamation, and a vigorous re-coiling of her hair, she supposed the unhallowed impulses of her imagination dismissed by her refusal to dwell upon them.
Mary Morgan for many years had successfully evaded facing facts. Her childhood had been an unusually happy one. She had been brought up in a mountain village in South Wales, where the only large house was her father’s. Life had followed a very simple, recurrent pattern through nursery and then schoolroom days at home, occasional visits to relations, school for the two boys, and a kind, faded, permanently installed Mademoiselle for Mary and her sister, the chief excitements of the year centering in the hunting-field in the winter, and the Saturday village cricket-matches, captained by the children’s father, in the summer.
At eighteen, Mary had come out in a mild and unsensational way at the Hunt Ball, and had then led very much the same life as before, except for occasional dances at Christmas, to which she and her parents drove in the closed carriage any distance from five to fifteen miles. When Nesta, two years younger than Mary, was also grown-up, they had to take it in turns to go to dances. On one occasion only had their father been persuaded to give a dance for them at home.
Mervyn Morgan had come to the dance, as well as every other young man they had been able to collect from the neighbourhood, but Mary had not been specially interested in him, although they had danced together.
At that time she had secretly cherished a romantic, schoolgirl ideal of the man that she was to marry. A blend of Rudolf Rassendyll and Mr. Harry Fragson, whom she had once seen and heard at a Drury Lane pantomime. It was all vague and foolish and immature. Mary had never been in love, no one had ever made love to her. She supposed that she would marry, because it had always been taken for granted that this was a girl’s natural destiny. The two unmarried Misses Jones at the Rectory, the five Misses Williams on the other side of the river, the Misses Lloyd, aunt and three nieces, at Plas Lloyd, were all elderly. It never even occurred to Mary and Nesta that any of them could ever have been young at all. There could be no connection whatever between themselves, young and pretty and happy, and these numerous spinsters. They took it for granted that some day they would fall in love, and be married, and have children. Meanwhile, impressions were accumulating — happy, unrealised, unformulated, and destined to return to Mary’s mind again and again throughout her later life in a series of disconnected recollections ... the garden with clumps of mauve Michaelmas daisies, drenched in dew ... the waterfall below the lodge gates swollen to a brown, foaming torrent by the heavy autumn rains ... a white mist swirling up the valley, and the tops of the larches hidden in cloud ... a brakeful of village cricketers stopped outside the “Sloop Inn,” and the sound of the Welsh voices breaking into part-singing: “Wait till the clouds roll by, Jennie.”
It went on, unchanging and seeming unchangeable, until the time of the war.
Mary’s elder brother had been killed within a year from the declaration of war.
Nesta, after training in a London hospital, had gone to France and married a Canadian officer. Mary went to work on the land, but came home when her second brother was taken prisoner. They were unable to get news of him for a long while, and Mary accompanied her parents, one or both, on piteous and restless journeyings to and from London.
The months and the years seemed endless, but they went by.
The war was over, and reconstruction began. Everyone was much poorer, and nearly everyone seemed to have grown much older. Many had not returned, even of those who had survived the fighting.
Mary’s remaining brother married a North-country girl, whom none of them liked very much. She had some money, and the old people decided to give up the place to her and
her husband.
They found a small house outside Chepstow, and talked of settling there, but wanted to go first to Canada and see Nesta and her husband and child living in Hamilton, Ontario.
It was then that Mervyn Morgan asked Mary to marry him. He said that he had meant to do so for a long while, but had deliberately waited until the war should be over. He told her that he had been in love with her for years, and should never care for anybody else. But it was because he had known the old life, and had so often ridden with her brothers in childhood, and could remember Mary and Nesta playing together in the larchwoods, that Mary fell in love with him, and accepted him.
She was not introspective enough to realise that, all the time, she was nursing a vague hope that marriage with Mervyn would bring back the old vanished days.
To a certain extent it did so.
The house to which she went as Mervyn’s wife was one that she had always known, within a few miles of her home.
After her children were born, it made Mary intensely happy to see them in the surroundings that her own childhood had known. She sought to recover, through them, the past. Although her youth was gone, she still, to a large extent, lived in it, protecting herself from the full pain of disillusionment.
Her affection for Mervyn was deep and enduring, although he never woke her to passion, and she accepted without question his assurance that she was naturally frigid, and that most decent women were the same.
Neither of them had ever fallen in love with anybody else.
They were poor, and the three children cost them every penny they could afford.
The holiday in France had been Mary’s last bid for adventure. She knew that Mervyn thought it a wild extravagance, as indeed it was, but the money was hers — an unexpected legacy — and she allowed him to invest two-thirds of it.
She wanted warmth and colour, and a change of atmosphere, and an outstanding memory for the children.
And, without being aware of it, she wanted romance.
(2)
The departure for Monte Carlo was well staged by the experienced Mr. Courteney. Knowing well that he could not hope to control the movements of his party unless they all kept together, he had persuaded Mrs. Romayne and Hilary Moon, who alone were the owners of motor-cars, that it would be less tiring and much pleasanter to let themselves be driven in hired ones, for which he would arrange.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 399