Natalie stood for a moment where she was, all her resolution required not to keel over as an agonisingly sharp pain in her left ankle made it impossible to set that foot to the ground. Then an elderly woman came up to her and took her by the arm, all the while pouring out a flood of German, expressive of sympathy with Natalie and fury with the vanished cause of the trouble.
‘I can’t—walk——’ stammered Natalie. Then she repeated that in halting German and the woman said sympathetically, ‘Engländerin!’ and clicked her tongue, as though that made the dilemma even worse. Which, of course, in a way it did.
‘I can’t just go on standing here like a stork,’ thought Natalie, and laughed weakly at her own thoughts, thereby evidently suggesting to her anxious companion that she might lapse into hysterics.
‘Ah!’ The German woman gave an exclamation of relief, as a tall, fair-haired man came into view, and she called to him to come to their assistance.
He came at once, answered her in fluent German and then, having gathered that the poor injured young lady was English, he said, ‘Well, that’s all right. I’m English too. At least, English-speaking. Here, let’s get you to a seat.’ And without much apparent difficulty, he picked up Natalie and carried her to a nearby seat under the trees and set her down there.
The German woman, evidently feeling that Natalie was now in good hands, said something about being late already, gave the younger woman a pat on the shoulder and took herself off.
‘What happened exactly?’ the man wanted to know. And when Natalie had explained he said in a concerned tone, ‘It isn’t broken, is it?’
‘Oh, no!’ she cried, dismayed at the thought of all the complications that would involve. ‘No, he caught me a crack with one of his pedals, I think, and I wrenched my ankle as I tried to regain my balance. It—it will be all right in a minute or two, I expect.’
‘It won’t, you know.’ He looked down at her swelling ankle, and then up again into her face, and she thought what remarkable eyes he had. Clear grey, astonishingly well set in a suntanned face and unexpectedly fringed with thick black lashes. ‘Sit there for a minute,’ he told her, ‘and then I’ll see about getting you back to wherever you’re staying.’
‘It’s very kind of you.’ To her surprise, her voice actually quivered slightly, partly from pain and shock and partly because it was a long while since anyone had volunteered so naturally to look after her. ‘Do—do you live here?’ she added, quickly covering her emotion with a conventional question.
‘No, I’m here for only a couple of days,’ he explained. ‘I came to hear a concert, as a matter of fact, because——’
‘The recital last night?’ Her voice lightened on a pleased note.
‘Yes. Were you there?’ He looked interested.
‘I was.’ She smiled. ‘How did you like it?’
‘Immensely, of course.’ He was pleasingly emphatic about that. But then he went on, ‘The old boy’s a sort of miracle. He can still pull out most of the stops, though he must be sixty if he’s a day.’
‘He is fifty-four, as a matter of fact,’ Natalie stated coolly. ‘I should know. I’m his daughter.’
‘Oh, lord! I’m sorry.’ He looked taken aback, but rather amused too.
‘It’s all right.’ Her tone was still cold. ‘The public often make mistakes like that. What they don’t know about famous people they tend to invent.’
‘No doubt you’re right,’ he agreed, ‘but I wasn’t deliberately inventing, you know.’
‘I’m sure you weren’t,’ she replied quickly, suddenly recalling how kind he had been to a complete stranger. ‘I think I’m being specially touchy at the moment. You see’—afterwards she supposed it was just because they were complete strangers that she took him into her confidence in such an inexplicable manner—‘you see, his age has just been called in question over an important piece of casting. He’s been put aside for some unimportant young tenor about half his age and probably with a tenth of his artistry.’
‘I—see,’ said the young man. Then, glancing down at her ankle again, he exclaimed, ‘I think I must get you back to your hotel as quickly as possible now. You should have a doctor to see that. You sit here and I’ll go to the gate and get a taxi. The man can drive along that main path as far as this seat, then I can easily carry you to the taxi and see you to your hotel.’
‘I hate to bother you so much——’ she began. But he assured her it was no bother at all, and, since there seemed no alternative, she watched him go with some relief, feeling glad that her aching ankle would soon have some attention.
He was back with the taxi before she had time to wonder how long he might be, and made remarkably little of carrying her that short distance again.
‘I thought it was only in books that men hauled about well-built women with such ease,’ she said, as he installed her in the taxi and got in beside her.
‘Well, you’re not exactly hefty,’ he assured her. ‘And anyway, it’s something of a trick, really. I’ve had some stage experience, and it’s one of the things you learn, you know.’
‘Have you?’ she glanced at him with interest and would have liked to ask a few more questions, but within the space of a minute or two they were back at her hotel, he had carried her in and set her down in a chair in the foyer, and was looking round for someone to whose care he could consign her.
The head porter came hurrying forward.
‘I don’t know how to thank you.’ For a moment longer Natalie refused to have her attention deflected from her kind rescuer. ‘Please will you tell me your name?’
‘Oh——’ he took the hand she held out to him and looked down at it. Then with a rueful smile he said, ‘I hate to tell you, but I’m afraid my name is Laurence Morven.’
‘Oh, no!’ She was quite unable to hide her dismay.
‘Does it matter?’ He looked amused, but also a little stung.
‘I’m—afraid—it does,’ she said confusedly. And then; as she saw with horror that the door of the lift was sliding open and that her father was about to emerge—‘Go now! Please go—now!’
Her tone of dismissal was so final that he dropped the hand he was still holding, shrugged slightly and then turned and went without a backward glance.
She was still finding it difficult to hide her agitation when her father came up to her, full of kind inquiries and concern, as was his wont when anything went seriously wrong. Immediately and effortlessly, he mobilised all the resources of the hotel. And before Natalie had time to consider the full implications of her meeting with Laurence Morven, she had been conveyed to her room, examined by an excellent doctor, and had her injured ankle dressed and braced with such efficiency that there was every likelihood that she would be able to travel home to England the next day as arranged.
‘I’m sorry I had no opportunity to thank your kind rescuer,’ her father observed. ‘It was a pity you didn’t at least get his name, my dear.’
‘I was a good deal agitated,’ Natalie said, hoping that this not very white lie might be forgiven her.
‘Well, of course, of course.’ Her father actually patted her head, as though she were a very dear child—as basically she was in his sight. Then a maid was summoned and, under Natalie’s able direction, she completed the packing.
After that she and her father and Charles had a quiet dinner together in their apartment, and presently Natalie went to bed.
Only then could she give up her thoughts completely to the extraordinary encounter in the park. At first, as she lay there turning over the events in her mind, she found it an almost unbelievable coincidence that Laurence Morven, of all people, should turn up in exactly the town where she and her father should happen to be, and that she should run into him like that.
But then of course, as he himself had said, he had come specifically to hear her father. And, given that basic situation and the relatively small size of the town, she supposed it was something to be thankful for that he had not actually booked
in at the same hotel. Natalie shuddered at the thought. At least he was likely to be in the district where the one or two good hotels were situated, and what was more natural than that he should go walking in the small park, just as she had done?
Until she had asked him his name she had so keenly enjoyed their small encounter! Not the accident which had prompted it, of course, but the introduction into her somewhat limited circle of an attractive, totally unknown man not so very many years older than herself. Usually her contacts were confined to people who had a direct bearing on her father and his career—conductors, managers, a few favourite colleagues, agents—even Charles. They were all chosen because they impinged in some way on her father’s affairs.
And then, almost for the first time, there had been someone solely interested in her. Even gratifyingly concerned about her. Oh, why did he have to turn out to be embarrassingly concerned with the operatic world? Why, at least, could he not have been a baritone or a bass—or even a producer? Though as her father thought poorly of most modern producers (frequently with good reason, one had to admit) perhaps that also would not have been a very happy choice.
For a moment she felt more frustration and resentment than she had ever felt before about her peculiar position. It had been all very well for her mother to be happy as a sort of extension of her father’s career. She had married him—by choice—and loved everything about him, faults, weaknesses and all. Whereas Natalie——
‘But I do love him! I do!’ she thought remorsefully. ‘I’d do anything—well, almost anything—to preserve his happiness and wellbeing.’ But to be an extension of even the most beloved parent’s career is not the natural wish of any high-spirited girl. And Natalie, when she was not busy just being the daughter of Lindley Harding, had a good deal of natural spirit.
‘Anyway, I could have liked Laurence Morven,’ she thought, surprised at her own certainty of that. ‘It’s almost treachery even to think it, but I—could—have—liked him a lot.’
And on that odd conviction she fell asleep.
The journey home next day was accomplished without any real difficulty. The drive to Frankfurt and the flight to London put little strain on her weakened ankle; and, once they arrived at Heathrow there was her father’s chauffeur, Roberts, with the car, to drive them to their charming house in Westminster.
‘Very pleasant to be home again,’ observed her father, going round lightly touching one or two of his favourite possessions. ‘Dear me, why do people write so much?’ He glanced distastefully at the waiting pile of letters, though he would have been the first to be hurt and put out if his fan mail had dwindled.
‘Shall I see to those?’ asked Charles, just as though he did not always do just that.
‘Please do,’ replied his employer, also speaking as though he himself usually shouldered that burden. ‘Natalie will attend to the personal ones, no doubt. Except——’ he had been riffling through the pile while he talked, because the vein of frank curiosity, which was part of his rather naïve make-up, entirely prevented him from really ignoring anything so thought-provoking as a pile of unopened envelopes.
‘Ah! Quentin Bannister’s writing, if I’m not mistaken!’ He had a splendid memory for anything that interested him, and an equally splendid forgetfulness for anything that bored him, and Quentin Bannister, that well-known conductor, pianist and man of music, was an old friend of his.
He took his letter to the window and spent what were obviously some enjoyable minutes perusing it. Then without looking up, he said, ‘Have I any engagements next week, Charles?’
With a brief glance at a big desk diary Charles was able to inform him that he had a relatively free week ahead of him.
‘Good! Then I shall go down to Sussex for a few days. It’s too long since Bannister and I had one of our fruitful discussions. Shall you come too, Natalie?’
‘Not unless you specially want me. There are several things I’d like to clear up in town.’
‘Really?’ He was faintly surprised, evidently, that she could have anything much to do outside his own orbit. But he murmured something about ‘dentist’s appointments and that sort of thing’, and Natalie said nothing to undeceive him. For suddenly it had come to her that what she wanted more than anything else was a few days on her own. Not to do anything specific, but just to belong to herself, and in some undefined way take stock of her life.
Later she was to wonder if something outside herself had prompted that unexpected decision, because when she was glancing rapidly through some of the newspapers which had come while they were away, she saw with a shock of startled surprise that Laurence Morven was singing at Covent Garden the following week.
Natalie usually kept track of most things that were happening in the major opera houses and could not imagine how she had missed this piece of information at an earlier stage. Then she saw, in a gossip paragraph on another page, that he was replacing another singer who was indisposed in Andréa Chénier—‘The rôle in which he made something of a sensation in San Francisco earlier in the year.’
‘With Father out of London, I could go,’ was her first thought, followed only a moment later by, ‘if I wanted to, that is!’
But of course she wanted to! Curiosity alone—combined with other promptings which she did not specify to herself—absolutely dictated that she should go. Besides—she suddenly took refuge in the thought—was it not almost her duty to go and hear for herself if this new upstart tenor could in any way, absurd though that idea might be, threaten her father’s position?
‘Father himself wouldn’t want me to go, of course,’ she thought. ‘He’d regard it either as vulgar curiosity or—or a sort of treachery. But he need never know. And it might be very useful at some time or another that one of us should have first-hand knowledge of what he’s really like.’
From that point it was not difficult to convince herself that she was pursuing her father’s best interests in going to a ticket agency—in preference to the Opera House box office where she might well be recognised—and buying a ticket for Andréa Chénier on the night of Laurence Morven’s proposed London debut.
During the following week Natalie never once heard her father refer again to the casting of Beverley Caine’s new opera, but she found the score open on the piano, when she came in one afternoon, and she could not doubt that the subject still caused him the bitterest disappointment and affront.
He seemed in good spirits, however, when he was ready to depart to Sussex on the Monday morning, and even at the last minute, he said to Natalie, ‘You’re sure you won’t come too? The Bannisters would be happy to see you, even unexpectedly.’
‘No, thank you—really. I’ll quite enjoy a few days on my own.’
‘I can’t imagine what you’ll do with yourself,’ he replied in all sincerity. ‘Funny, secretive girl you are sometimes, aren’t you?’ And he kissed her with real affection, which made Natalie feel quite ridiculously deceitful.
The sensation lingered with her until she heard the car drive away, at which point she saw her reaction for the absurd thing it was. What could be more harmless than for a girl to enjoy a few days on her own, even if it did involve going to the opera on Thursday in circumstances of slightly unnatural secrecy?
Even to Charles she said nothing of her intention, although on the Wednesday morning he mentioned Laurence Morven’s coming debut and showed her a photograph of him at the dress rehearsal of Andréa Chénier.
‘Rather a fine figure of a man, isn’t he?’ observed Charles judicially. ‘Quite a good mixture of the poet and the patriot. I wonder which line he takes, vocally speaking.’
‘Perhaps he combines them in his singing too,’ Natalie suggested.
‘No one ever does,’ replied Charles knowledgeably. ‘If the voice is beguiling and lyrical, he’ll go all out for the poetic side; if it’s heroic and has got a touch of real metal, he’ll be the patriot. That’s why every tenor loves the part. That—and the fact that no costumes are more becoming t
han those of the French Revolution period. I almost wish I were going, but I’ve promised to take my sister and her husband to the theatre tomorrow evening.’
Natalie said she hoped he would enjoy the theatre, but added nothing about her own plans for Thursday evening. Instead, as her ankle was now almost fully recovered, she took herself off to do some enjoyable window-shopping, hardly admitting even to herself that in fact she was going to look for a special dress for a special occasion.
It must be slightly less formal and glamorous than the dresses her father liked her to wear when she attended a performance as his daughter. Something that would not look out of place in the inconspicuous seat she had obtained, well out of range of observation by anyone she knew in the operatic world.
She found exactly what she wanted. Very simple, very expensive—but she paid the price without wincing, for she realised that the dress was the exact colour of her eyes and, as the saleswoman said, ‘it did something for her.’
‘It’s silly, really,’ she told herself on the way home. ‘What does it matter how I look, since there isn’t going to be anyone there to take note of me?—I hope.’
But even if she is deliberately seeking to be inconspicuous, there is not a girl born who does not feel a slight lift of the heart when she glances into the mirror and sees herself looking quite lovely.
Natalie dressed in good time on the evening of the performance, still telling herself that it wasn’t a particularly important occasion. There is always a certain aura of excitement about the advent of a new tenor of good repute, of course; but apart from that, Laurence Morven was of no real interest to her. Almost no interest.
There was the fact that he had made an unfortunate impact on her father’s career, it was true. But she was not going to hold that against him. She was neither for him nor against him. He was just a new tenor.
She found her way to her seat without running across anyone she knew, but when she sat down she found to her vague disquiet that the next seat was occupied by someone who was oddly familiar. A woman well past her first youth, but with considerable charm and an air of smiling alertness which was very attractive.
Elusive Harmony (The Warrender Saga Book 10) Page 2