They smiled into one another’s eyes.
Presently Innes asked what her plans were for the coming week.
“My own,” he admitted, “have rather fallen through. My sister has met with some domestic calamity or other — the cook is ill, and the kitchen-maid — anyhow, she doesn’t want a visitor.”
“Oh, but that’s excellent! I’m sorry for Vera, but it does fit in so well with what I wanted to suggest. Is there any chance of your motoring me down to Cardiganshire for a week-end with the Russells?”
“The Russels?”
“Keith Russell, the novelist. You met him in June, and their little daughter — Sylvie — and you thought her very pretty.”
“I remember now. A lovely, fair-haired creature, very young — rather like a Lewis Baumer drawing.”
She nodded.
“They terribly want you to go there from Friday to Monday or Tuesday. They asked me if there was any chance of getting you. Haven’t you heard from Keith’s wife?”
“I haven’t opened half my letters yet. They’re waiting for me in Jermyn Street.”
“You’ll find one from her, I think. It isn’t a party — only themselves, and a young man for Sylvie — and me. They’ve a charming house — small — quite near the sea.”
“That sounds attractive, in weather like this.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“And if you’re going to be there, my dear —— —”
“You’ll accept? How nice. There’ll be bathing, and Keith is an amusing creature — you’ll like him. The main thing is that one gets peace there — one isn’t hunted about and entertained, and forced to do things. They just talk, and sit about, and go in and out of the sea. It’s their own private sea, too — a bit of the foreshore that he bought years ago. They’ve built a hut on it and have it entirely to themselves.”
“It sounds ideal,” said Innes, who was an enthusiastic swimmer. “We’ll pray that the hot weather holds.”
The hot weather did hold.
Innes and Mrs. Bannister drove down in Oliver’s blue Daimler through blazing sunshine to an astonishingly remote corner of North Wales in the middle of lanes to which no charabancs had as yet penetrated.
The converted farm-house of the Russells, stone-built, lichen-covered, stood out agreeably against a background of high open slopes. Beyond it sparkled the line of the sea.
“It’s marvellous!” ejaculated Oliver.
Lorna Bannister felt pleased.
The Russells were not entirely of Oliver’s own world, and a shade of anxiety had mingled with her desire that they, and their background, should find favour with him. Fundamentally, she held the serene conviction that his judgment of people coincided with her own, but she knew him to be more susceptible then herself to trivial differences.
But it was all right.
From the first moment she saw that Oliver appreciated Keith Russell’s humour, his ardent vitality, his utter absence of affectation. Almost at once, the two men were strolling up and down the small, stone-walled terrace in front of the house, talking eagerly.
Lorna smiled at Anita Russell.
Keith was really her friend, but she liked the fair-haired, rather faded, domesticated wife, too, although they had never found themselves to have very much in common.
Lorna, now, talked of the garden and the wonderful scenery on the way down, and presently bethought herself to ask after Sylvie, Anita’s adored only child.
“Is she as pretty as ever?”
“Prettier, I think. You see, she sunburns brown, not red, which is so rare in a very fair person,” returned Mrs. Russell, with an earnest simplicity that made the childless Lorna want to smile. “She’s down at the beach, now. She almost lives in the water.”
“And is the young man with her?” Lorna enquired tolerantly, expecting a maternal saga on the conquests of Sylvie.
“The young man has had to leave us. Something to do with his work — he’s with Kaye and Marsh, the publishers — and he had to go off yesterday. That’s another reason why I’m so glad that you and Mr. Innes are here, it’ll be so much more amusing for Sylvie. Not that the young man is a great loss — I thought him rather dull, to be honest — but you know what a girl of that age is — always ready to be pleased, and she liked having someone to go swimming with her.”
“Oliver loves the water. He’s looking forward to the bathing, I know. As for me, I’m a very feeble performer indeed — can’t even dive.”
“Neither can I! At least I always say I can’t, because I hate it and do it so badly,” confessed her hostess. “We’ll play about in the shallows, my dear, and watch the others being wonderful. After all, someone’s got to be audience.”
Lorna Bannister agreed, serenely aware that so passive a role, however much she might become it on the seashore, was scarcely likely to be hers in any other connection.
“Here’s Sylvie now.”
A slim form, wearing a skin-tight emerald-green swimming suit and green bathing-shoes with a green-and-white striped towelling cloak hanging loosely over it, was climbing the long flight of steps that led down from the terrace to the shore.
As she came nearer, stopping to greet the two men who had paused at the sight of her, Lorna exclaimed almost involuntarily:
“Anita, she is lovely!”
Sylvie Russell was very tall, dazzlingly fair, and slender as a wand. Her small head, of a beautiful shape, was covered with short, thick curls of the palest flaxen shade. When she smiled her blue eyes crinkled, and she showed a row of small, faultless teeth. It was the type of beauty that was not likely to outlast extreme youth, but at eighteen years old Sylvie was of striking loveliness.
“How clever to have named her Sylvie! She looks like a spirit of the woods — a dryad,” murmured Mrs. Bannister.
“She is looking rather sweet, just now,” the mother agreed, making an obvious effort to keep the note of pride out of her voice. “The country — the sea, especially — seems the right background for her.”
“She certainly looks even prettier now than when I had that glimpse of her in London. Though I remember that, then, Oliver was immensely struck with her looks,” Mrs. Bannister said graciously.
“Was he?”
Something meditative in her friend’s tone gave Lorna a quick, fleeting intuition.
Mothers, she supposed tolerantly, were all alike. But for a moment she felt not very pleased with Sylvie’s mother.
Then the girl, with the two men, one on either side of her, came up and joined them.
Seen at close quarters she was prettier and more like a Lewis Baumer illustration than ever, but the critical Mrs. Bannister decided that her voice was too high and ringing, and her slang expressions far too numerous.
She wondered what Oliver thought.
There came no opportunity for finding out until after a cheerful, very talkative tea, served on the terrace, throughout which the general conversation had been maintained on the rather elementary, schoolgirl plane to which Sylvie Russell confined her remarks.
So pretty a girl could hardly be expected to have brains, perhaps, but Lorna Bannister hoped that Oliver Innes wasn’t bored. His manners were always perfect, and he was chaffing the girl gently, keeping to her own conversational level. But it wasn’t, after all, quite for this that he had come to Keith Russell’s house. Lorna could not but wish that Sylvie’s young man had remained, to take her off the hands of her seniors.
When tea was over Sylvie wanted to go down to the beach again, although she was now wearing a short, blue cotton frock instead of her bathing-dress, and a pair of tennis shoes on her unstockinged feet.
“But it’s much too soon after our excellent tea, to think of bathing,” Mrs. Bannister protested.
The girl laughed.
“That’s what mummie always says. But I always bathe just whenever I want to, and nothing ever happens to me.”
Lorna did not care for the youthful arrogance of the speech, and moreover she was not quit
e sure that she liked being thus bracketed with “mummie” — her senior by some eight or nine years. Rather ruefully she admitted that in the eyes of eighteen she and Anita Russell were probably of an age.
“Come along!” said Oliver Innes, springing to his feet. “Miss Russell is quite right, weather like this is too precious to waste. Let’s collect our bathing things and—”
“Please,” interrupted the child, “please don’t call me Miss Russell, I’m Sylvie and I simply hate being called anything else. Come on, then, and collect towels.”
She held out her little smooth brown hand, and Innes, without more ado, caught it in his own. Thus linked they disappeared, laughing and talking, into the house.
2
After dinner that night they played a foolish game, with counters, sitting all together round the polished walnut table in the low, book-lined sitting-room.
Keith Russell was very amusing, and made them all laugh. It was obvious that he and Oliver liked one another — brought out one another’s best, conversationally. It seemed rather a pity, Lorna felt, that they could not have had quiet, earnest, stimulating talk, such talk as Oliver Innes and she were accustomed to amongst their intimates. It was the presence of the child — the lovely but inept child — that made serious talk out of place.
She contrived to obtain a word with Oliver when they said good-night.
“Isn’t he — Keith — just what I told you?”
“Yes indeed, delightful.”
“You think you’ll like it? I feel terribly responsible, you know.”
“I am liking it. Every minute of it. That creek is the most marvellous place. I should like to spend at least half the day in the water tomorrow. Sylvie says there’s a wonderful pool for diving, at high tide.”
Lorna Bannister smiled, looking down at him where he stood at the foot of the stairs.
“I wish Sylvie’s young man hadn’t departed like that. I’m afraid we shan’t see quite as much of one another as we’d hoped, or be able to talk quite so freely with Keith and Anita. Even nowadays, young girls have to be considered sometimes, in rather a tiresome way. But she’s a pretty thing to look at, isn’t she?”
“Lovely. And intelligent too, don’t you think?”
Mrs. Bannister opened her eyes in an expression of astonishment.
“Oh, Oliver! Surely not.” And fearing to sound ungenerous she added hastily: “After all, why should she be? It’s quite enough to have a face and figure like hers.”
“All the same,” he said mildly, “I don’t agree about little Sylvie. She strikes me as having any amount of personality — and intelligence too. Well, good-night, my dear.”
He pressed her fingers gently and Lorna turned and went upstairs, conscious of a chilling uneasiness that followed her into her charming bedroom and comfortable broad bed.
She was to know it again, throughout the following day, until it became a definite and corroding pain, that seemed to hold her very soul in its grip, before the endless length of Sunday had been lived through.
Oliver, from the first, was fascinated by Sylvie Russell. On Saturday morning they swam together before breakfast, and throughout the meal nothing was spoken of except Sylvie’s diving. She was frankly and childishly vain of it, encouraged, as it seemed to Lorna, by her father and mother, and most of all by Oliver Innes.
“I shall look forward to seeing it,” Mrs. Bannister said, hoping to close the subject.
“Shall we go down to the creek somewhere about eleven o’clock?” Mrs. Russell suggested.
“Keith, unfortunately, has some work to do, but he thinks he can get it finished before twelve and join us, and then he’s free for the rest of the day.”
“Good!” Sylvie cried. “And this afternoon, Mummie, there’s the picnic. I want to show Oliver the Priory ruins.”
When had he given the chit permission to call him Oliver — and why?
Lorna Bannister carefully looked down at her plate, lest the question should betray itself by some involuntary look or gesture.
She was equally careful to abstain from any assumption that Oliver had intended to spend most of the week-end in her society. Nevertheless it surprised, almost shocked her, to see the child Sylvie take complete and absolute possession of him, as she might have done had he been a youth of her own age.
When Keith Russell emerged from his writing-room, with a sheaf of papers in one hand and a relieved “There! That’s done!” they were all waiting for him.
Sylvie wore the emerald-green swimming-suit of the day before. She exclaimed in admiration at Lorna’s black-and-white check bathing-dress, with its becoming little bouffant skirt, and smart bathing-cap.
“Do you always wear one? I’m afraid I never do. The wetter my hair gets, the more it frizzes,” the girl said, with mock regretfulness.
“Salt water always makes one’s hair sticky,” Lorna replied, although no trace of so unpleasant a quality could be discerned in the flaxen curls to which Sylvie had so artlessly drawn attention.
Going down to the shore Lorna walked beside Keith, who talked to her eagerly about the new book he was finishing.
Anita Russell, encumbered by a bathing-robe that she held modestly draped round her, had begged to be allowed to go her own pace and was far behind them. Equally far ahead of them, Oliver Innes and Sylvie were silhouetted against the sea and the skyline, standing still in earnest conversation.
“What do you think of my little girl?” Keith Russell suddenly demanded, in shy, proud tones.
“There’s only one possible thing to think,” Lorna replied, with her prettiest smile. “Doesn’t everybody find her quite lovely?”
“She is pretty, isn’t she?” he acknowledged. “And she’s a nice child too, though I say it that shouldn’t. Extraordinarily undeveloped still, and babyish — but it’s a fault on the right side, to my mind. Not that it can last much longer, worse luck. She’s amazingly attractive to men.”
“Is she? Is there anybody special, yet?”
He shook his head.
“I’m certain there isn’t. She’s met a good many lads of her own age, one way and another, but I’m sure she hasn’t been seriously attracted by any of them.”
Lorna found herself wondering, suspiciously, whether his words implied that Sylvie was more likely to be seriously attracted by an older man.
There wasn’t any doubt that the silly little thing was trying to captivate Oliver’s interest, and Lorna Bannister was too intelligent, as well as too honest, not to admit that she was meeting with a measure of success.
She herself was conscious, more than ever before, of middle-age. In spite of the hot sunshine, she felt chilly, and viewed the prospect of bathing in the clear green waters of the creek with a tiny inward shudder of apprehension.
It was an ideal place for bathing, a broad deep natural pool set between shelving walls of rock, running nearly a quarter of a mile before it widened out into the open sea.
Anita Russell, panting, threw down her towels on the sand and joined the others.
“Look, Lorna, it’s perfect, isn’t it? It’s deep all the way, but there isn’t anywhere you can’t pull yourself up on the rocks easily enough. And aren’t those two flat ledges good for diving?
“Very, I should think.”
Sylvie was already standing on one ledge, her beautiful slim shape shown off to perfection by the close-fitting, abbreviated swimming-suit, and opposite to her on the other ledge was Oliver Innes, laughing and calling out to her.
“Meet you, Sylvie! One — two — three — go!”
The two figures flashed through the air almost simultaneously — ripples widened on the water — and then, first the girl’s head and then the man’s, reappeared within a yard of one another.
They appeared to find the game entrancing, and repeated it again and again. Keith Russell joined them, though less expert than either, but Anita said contentedly:
“You and I, Lorna, can enjoy ourselves in a humble way and come out dir
ectly we’ve had enough. I really never care to stay in much more than eight or ten minutes, at any time of year, and I don’t expect you do either.”
Lorna emphatically did not, but she felt unreasonably annoyed at having it taken for granted.
She slipped into the pool, deliberately forcing herself to do so without any hesitation, and restraining the impulse to draw in her breath sharply as she felt the cold of the water.
“Oh, how brave you are!” cried Anita laughing. She herself sat on the rocks, alternately lowering and withdrawing one foot.
Lorna struck out.
Her swimming, as she well knew, was scarcely deserving of the name. Very slowly, and with the most ungainly of breast-strokes, she moved along in the water until she drew level with the diving-ledge. Then she pulled herself up and sat on the rocks, shivering slightly.
Sylvie Russell waved to her and screamed “Well done!” But the two men were challenging one another to a race and paid no attention to her.
She watched them for some time. Then she swam about again for a little while, in the hope of getting warmer. All that she could see of herself remained mottled, with patches of goose flesh, and she remembered bitterly the smooth, even glow on Sylvie’s arms and legs.
Youth — the most priceless gift in the world, and probably the one least appreciated by its possessors.
“I’m coming out now,” called Anita. “Aren’t you?”
“Oh, Mummie! Why, we’ve hardly begun.”
“Oh, I don’t mean you, darling. I was asking Mrs. Bannister.”
“Don’t go in yet, Mrs. Bannister,” said Sylvie amiably. “Or are you cold? Oh, well done, Oliver!”
He had executed an elaborate swallow-dive.
Funny, thought Lorna, she had never seen Oliver “show off” before.
“He’s frightfully good,” said the girl, “isn’t he?”
She plunged into the water again, making scarcely a splash, and striking out with beautiful clean, swift strokes.
Lorna Bannister, feeling chilled to the bone, made her slow way back to Anita and the warm sands. She hoped that her bathing was over for the day when, nearly half an hour later, Sylvie and the two men came out of the water.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 570