The second collection of 3 great novels by Mary Burchell

by Burchell, Mary

  Is it something to do with my inner awareness that it's Stephen with whom I want to be? she asked herself. Does he know that something is different in me, and feel that he, too, must draw farther away?

  She valued her friendship with Lin—she had always done so—and now it seemed that because they were living in the same flat and were, in the purely technical sense, married, they had lost their happy, easy intimacy.

  rm going to talk quite frankly to Lin about it, Thea suddenly decided. It's ridiculous if we can't be candid with each other. I think I ought to have told him about Stephen,

  too. I've got to decide whether Fm really Just filling the time as decently and painlessly as possible until Stephen comes home—in the hope that somehow we can marry then—or whether I have to give up all thought of that and make some other life for myself.

  She was so full of the idea of a heart-to-heart talk with Lin that it irked her to think he would not be in until the evening. The whole of a long summer day lay in front of her.

  And suddenly she decided that she was not going to spend it either in the flat or in town. Everything to do with that part of her life made it so difficult to think things out clearly—to get back to the carefree, objective way in which she had always been able to regard her affairs in the old days.

  Fm going into the country for the day, Thea decided. And because she had very little knowledge of the country round London, she decided to start from the one place she knew well—the station nearest to where the Dorleys had lived.

  / might even go and have a look at the house, *' she told herself once she was in the train, speeding away from the noise and heat of town. Even if it's shut up, there will be the garden to see. And she rememSered with a pang how Mrs. Dorley had so kindly promised her happy times m the garden when summer came.

  She was the only passenger to alight at the little-used country station, and the languid porter seemed astonished to have to collect even one ticket at this time in the day.

  She walked out into the village and along the almost deserted main street. But the solitude suited her mood. She thought: / will walk out and look at the house and garden, and then I'll eat my sandwiches in the wood where Stephen took me that first day. I might even sit and eat them in the garden, if I don't feel too much like a trespasser who might be prosecuted.

  It was all very peaceful and beautiful, and in these surroundings it seemed to Thea that she had exaggerated her personal problems to an absurd degree. She would talk to Lm that evening, and they would somehow find their old, happy relationship again. A relationship that was all the more important to her since she had lost her companionship with Stephen, at least temporarily and possibly forever.

  The field path brought her out into a wide country lane, less than a hundred yards from the house, and the moment she caught sight of the house she realized that she was indeed m luck. The upper windows were open, curtains fluttered in the breeze, and a lazy little plume of smoke wound slowly upward from the kitchen chimney.

  Evidently this was Emma's day for visiting tne place and "opening it up.'* That meant that she could stay quite a while, and perhaps hear news of Stephen and his mother that her own scanty information haa not covered. If Emma's sister lived fairly near, she might even be able to stroll over and see Darry.

  Thea quickened her footsteps and almost ran up the short driveway to the front door. The door stood open and, rapping with her knuckles on one of the panels, she called: "Emma! Emma, where are you?"

  Emma emerged from the kitchen immediately, beaming with gratified pleasure and surprise.

  "Why, Miss Thea, this is nice," she said heartily, and Thea saw she either knew nothing of her marriage or just chose to ignore her new status.

  "Wasn't I lucky to find you at home!" Thea wrung her hand. "It was just chance. I suddenly thought it was too lovely a day to waste in town, and came out here on the spur of the moment."

  "And how are you now. Miss Thea? You look blooming enough, I will say that. But come and sit down and I'll get you some lunch. I've been wondering this great while when you were coming. You don't look as if you'd just left hospital."

  "Oh, I haven't, Emma. I left hospital nearly three weeks ago. You see. I... I—oh, there's sucn a lot to explain."

  "I daresay there is, but time enough to do that when you've had lunch," declared Emma, who subscribed to the theory of"first things first."

  "Oh, don't bother about lunch," Thea said. "I've got some sandwiches and I'll eat them in the garden—or in the kitchen while I talk to you. I don't expect you have much in the place just now."

  "I have that, Miss Thea," Emma exclaimed rather indignantly. "Darry and me do ourselves well, just as Mrs. Dorley said we were to."

  '*0h, you haven't got Darry here, have you?" Thea cried delightedly.

  "Why, of course I have." Emma looked surprised. *'He*s in the garden this minute, sleeping oiF his dinner and getting ready for his tea."

  "Do you mean you Ve brought him here for the day with you?" And then, as she saw Emma's astonishment deepen, *'Oh, of course! How silly of me. You're back here now. I somehow imagined you were away for a good while and that you would still be away. How is your sister, by the way?"

  "My sister, Miss Thea, dear?" Emma spoke with something like alarm as well as astonishment. As though she thought rd had a bat on the head instead of a crushed hand, thought Thea.

  "Why, yes, Emma. The sister you went to nurse. It was a sister, wasn't it? When you closed the house, you know, and-"

  "Closed the house?" Emma was indignant now. "I never closed the house, Miss Thea. Mrs. Dorley's instructions were to keep the place open and look after Darry, and no sister'd make me do other if Mrs. Dorley had told me just that. I haven't got a sister, anyway, and I don't know what you mean, Miss Thea."

  Thea groped for a chair and sat down.

  "Just a moment," she said slowly. "Let's get this right. You haven't been away from the house—I mean, not to stay away—since Mrs. Dorley left?''

  "Certainly not, Miss Thea. Not one night."

  "Then when Mr. Varlon came down to see you, just after my accident—"

  "Mr. Varlon hasn't been down here. Miss Thea, since you came with him that day."

  "Not-at all, Emma?"

  "No, Miss Thea. Not at all"

  CHAPTER NINE

  For a whole minute Thea could find nothing to add to her bewildered inquiries.

  Emma, on the contrary, appeared to have accepted the fact that rather wild talk might be the natural accompaniment to any form of convalescence. She reverted to what she considered the really important matter of the moment.

  "Til get your lunch. Miss Thea, dear,*' she repeated, and the *'dear'* was the sole indication that she thought poor Miss Thea was just a little queer after her illness.

  "Can I come into the kitchen with you while you get it?" Thea asked, with the vague idea that further questions might elucidate the mystery.

  "You come along," Emma said kindly. And Thea followed her into the big red-flagged kitchen, and sat in the basket chair that Emma seemed to think proper for her state ofhealth.

  "Emma—" she watched Emma going busily to and fro— "you said you'd been expecting me for a long time. I suppose you mean that you had a letter from Mrs. Dorley saying I would come here from hospital."

  "Yes, Miss Thea. And many's the time I wondered when you'd come. If I'd known which hospital you were at, I'd have come to see you, if it wasn 't too far. But I thought— anyway she'll turn up when she's ready, poor child. Because Mrs. Dorley wrote that she'd sent a letter to you, too, telling you to come."

  "Yes," Thea said. "Yes, she did. And I-I'd have loved to come. But there was some misunderstanding. Mr. Varlon thought ...." She hesitated.,"Mr. Varlon had some idea

  that you were not here any longer and that the house was shut up."

  "There's men for you!" Emma remarked with good-natured contempt. "Can't get the simplest thing right, but always making muddles. Well, I don't know where he go
t that idea, Miss Thea, because no word have I had with him since you said good night to me and went off with him that evening—nearly to your death," she added severely.

  Thea joined Emma at the kitchen table.

  "It's more companionable for you this way than having it by yourself in the dining room," Emma explained.

  "Why, of course! Oh, Emma, how lovely it is to be back," Thea said with a sigh.

  "And when are you coming here to stay?" Emma wanted to know. "Now you've cleared up the misunderstanding, you'd better come down here as Mrs. Dorley said. She generally knows best."

  " Oh, but— " Thea put down her knife and fork and stared at Emma with something hke dismay "—I can't, you know. I'm married."

  "Married, Miss Thea!" Emma was thunderstruck but congratulatory. "A little bit of a thing like you married! And you've been half an hour in this house and not seen fit to mention it. Why, where are my own eyes, though? I see now you've got a ring—two rings—on the right finger. Well, this is news. Is he a nice boy? But of course you '11 say he is. Married now? Who'd have thought it? And what's his name. Miss Thea, dear?"

  Thea cleared her throat slightly and said, "It's Mr. Varlon, Emma."

  It was Emma's turn to put down her knife and fork. But she just dropped hers with a clatter.

  "Do you mean—Mr. Lindsay Varlon, Miss Thea?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "Well, I never," Emma said, but with a wealth of expression that said volumes more than her three words.

  Slowly and rather embarrassedly Thea went on with her meal.

  "You don't sound exactly as though you approve, Emma."

  "I wouldn't say that," Emma returned hastily. "I'm sure you know your own business best." But her tone indicated

  that she thought Thea could hardly have managed her own business more disastrously.

  *'He*s been wonderfully kind to me," Thea said carefully. And thought of the lie he had told her about Emma. The lie that had finally forced her to see that there was no alternative but to marry him.

  Why had he told that lie? But she would have to think of that afterward, because now Emma had recovered her full powers of speech and was asking all sorts of questions.

  So with as natural and carefree a manner as she could achieve, Thea explained about the wedding from the hospital. This met with Emma's romantic approval, and she said that *'seemingly Mr. Varlon knew how to do things the right way.'*

  Thea agreed that Mr. Varlon did.

  "What will Mrs. Dorley say? And Mr. Stephen, too. He won't be too pleased. Miss Thea. Not if I know the signs," Emma said delicately.

  "I've—written to them, of course, and explained."

  "And what did they say?" Emma wanted to know.

  "I haven't heard from them yet. But I'm expecting to hear any day."

  "Well, there's no question of your coming here now to live," Emma said regretfully. "You've got your own place, I suppose. Miss Thea?"

  "Yes. At least, Mr. Varlon already had a lovely big flat in Westminster, and we live there, of course."

  Emmapressed her to stay all the afternoon. But, suddenly restless, Tnea found herself declaring that she would have to go back. After all, Lin might come home early that afternoon, and the sooner they had all the cards on the table between them, the better. If she thought too long about things, she might be nervous—indeed, already disagreeable little tremors shook her when she tried to visualize herself accusing Lin of lying.

  So, though she stayed to help Emma wash up, and then a little longer to nurse Darry and hear what news there was of Stephen and Mrs. Dorley, by three o'clock she was bidding Emma goodbye once more.

  Then Thea started off back across the fields, and at last she was alone, free from the demands of natural-sounding conversation, so that she could examine the extraordinary

  thing which Emma had told her, and try to decide what it impfied.

  Very carefully, she reconstructed to herself the scene when Lin had so coolly informed her that the Dorleys' home was no longer open to her.

  He had already asked her to marry him, and she had accepted—she remembered that. In fact, she had thrown her arm around his neck and kissed him.

  And then, suddenly, she had remembered the possibility of going to Emma—remembered that it offered an alternative to marrying Lin. And she had spoken about it at once, more because she was sorry for him, in his position of feeling he almost had to marry her, than because she saw in it a blessed escape.

  But she had made it perfectly clear—she was sure she remembered this—she had made it perfectly clear that she would be quite happy to go to Emma.

  And then he haa stated quite coolly and circumstantially that this was impossible, and even added an entirely fictitious conversation that he was supposed to have had with Emma.

  All the way through the fields, and as she walked up and down the deserted little country platform, waiting for her train to come, she tried to make sense of it.

  Apparently he wanted to force her into marrying him.

  But he had never displayed any signs of an undying passion for her. In fact, nowadays he hardly ever kissed her and seemed amiably remote from her.

  Then why want to marry m^.^Thea asked herself

  At Waterloo she discovered that she had a great disinclination to go home, after all.

  Probably Lin would not come back until the early evening, and there she would be, waiting and waiting in the flat, growing more and more nervous. Much better to go and have tea out somewhere, and try to take her mind off what was worrying her.

  As a rather weak compromise, she telephoned from a public call box, and ascertained from Donkins that Lin was not yet home. Then she took a taxi to Park Lane and went intoGunter's.

  The ground floor was nearly full, but she found a table, and for a while she even persuaded herself that her atten-

  tion was distracted by several parties of schoolchildren, evidently on holiday and making the most of unlimited cakes and ice cream.

  But her interest began to flag. And then, just as the familiar problem was beginning to creep back into her mind, a well-known voice exclaimed:

  "Why, hello, Thea! Have you been lucky enough to get a table? And may I join you?"

  And the next moment she found Geraldine, in a deceptively simple but perfectly cut navy and white dress, sitting down opposite her.

  Thea made a heroic effort to rise to the occasion. She recollected the last time they had met—at her wedding—and the rather gauche way she had snubbed her famous cousin. This time she would be very good-natured and unruffled and casual.

  So she smiled at Geraldine, somewhat fortified by the knowledge that she was almost as well dressed as her cousin these days, and said, '* Why, how nice to see you, Geraldine. I've been meaning to ring up and ask if it would be convenient for me to call in and collect my luggage one day.*'

  "Any afternoon you like," Geraldine said affably. "How is married life?"

  "Well, don't you think I look a good advertisement for it?" Thea smiled back just as affably.

  "Ye-es." Geraldine studied her with a critical air that Thea found difficult to sustain.

  "How is the new production going?" Thea rushed rather hastily into another subject. "Your first night is next week, isn't it?"

  "Um-hm. It's going to be all right, I think. But this stage is always hell. It will be, now, until the dress rehearsal is over."

  "I think Lin got seats for the first night."

  "He's not producing it, you know," Geraldine said carelessly.

  "No. I know that—of course." Thea found she greatly resented the implication that Geraldine might know more about her husband's activities than she herself did..

  She had never thought of Lin just as "her husband" until

  that moment, and was surprised that the phrase sprang to mind on this day, of all days.

  "How is Lin?"

  Geraldine *s question caught her curiously off her guard.

  "Oh, he-he's all right."

/>   "Also enjoying married life?" Geraldine smiled maliciously, while she studied her face in the mirror of her gold compact.

  "He seems to."

  There was a slight pause, which made Thea uncomfortable though she was not quite sure why. Then Geraldine snapped her compact shut and said conversationally, "You know, none of us can understand how you did it."

  "How I did what?" Thea asked coldly. "And who, incidentally are'us?* "

  "Why, all the theater crowd who thought they knew Lin as well as they knew themselves. Not one of us ever imagined him marrying. *'

  "No?" Thea said politely, and longed to add that he had apparently gone to quite extraordinary lengths to ensure that he married her.

  "What was it, Thea? Glamor?" Geraldine's pretty mouth twisted with contemptuous unbelief "Pathos? brains? Or just plain good luck?"

  "Tm afraid you'll have to allow me the pleasure of leaving you guessing," Thea retorted, and was pleased to find that the coolness of her smile could hardly have been improved upon by Geraldine herself.

  Again there was a short silence, while Geraldine regarded her young cousin speculatively.

  "My guess is that he found your ingenue type rather new and piquant," she said at last. "And since he knew you were not tne kind to fall for an affair, pure and simple (or should one say, impure and complicated?), he made it into a legalized affair and called it marriage."

  "Oh, be quiet, Geraldine!" Thea had forgotten that she meant to be affable and suave. "What odious things you do say."

  "Particularly as they have a ring of truth in them?" Geraldine suggested.

  "I don't see why I should sit here and have you try to dissect my married life with dirty instruments," Thea said

  sharply. "And since I believe you literally aren't capable of any other type of conversation, I 'm going."

  And summoning her waitress, Thea paid her bill, aware all the time that Geraldine watched her amusedly, and even noted that her hands trembled a little as she fumbled for change.