“What I was really wondering,” said Lady Ashton, in the seclusion of Miss Beckwith’s own sitting-room, “was whether Richard ought to go up and see the girl’s aunt. They’re her guardians, I presume, and they’ll want to know something of the affair before the engagement takes place.”
“That sort of thing isn’t done quite so much nowadays,” Miss Beckwith reminded her. “A great many girls live in complete independence—like Grace Mather’s daughter, you remember. She had a flat in London, and Grace knew nothing of her engagement until an entire stranger called on her and informed her he was to be her son-in-law. You remember the one, don’t you? He went down in the Fleurette some years later, poor fellow. Rae’s aunts may have some control over her, but one doesn’t really know. Has Richard met them?”
“No—I asked him. He knows that they’re staying at the flat, but he hasn’t met them. Should I speak to him, do you think? I could begin by asking if Rae’s aunts had any objection to his paying her attention—no, that sounds too old-fashioned, I’m afraid.”
“Much. As I say, these things nowadays are entirely the affair of the two most concerned. I don’t agree that it is right—I think they want older and wiser heads behind them. Poor little Lady Gervaise used to say that she would never have got into such a hopeless tangle if her father had been alive at the time of her engagement. He would never have allowed that man in the house. What a dreadful fellow he was, Dorothy—do you remember?”
“Yes. You described him as flashy, and you were quite right.”
“Yes. What a great relief it was when he went down in that Italian ship. They say he was the only British passenger on board, so it really looked providential, in a way. No, Dorothy, it’s a pity, but I don’t think you can say very much. If you talk to Rae, you might find that you embarrass her a great deal, and if you talk to Richard, he’ll answer you with great seriousness and go on just the same as before. He’s behaving exactly as he always behaved; one never knew how to take him and one never will. If Rae is to marry him, she can’t expect other people to interpret his moods or his behaviour; she must come to her own conclusions. I’m sorry for her—at least, I would be if I thought she was really in love with him, but she’s an unreadable girl and one can’t really tell. The only help you could give would be to tell her whether Richard is serious or not—and she probably knows that far better than you do. You’d much better say nothing.”
Upon this, it was decided to leave matters as they stood.
Judy was the only one who spoke of the affair to Rae. She brought Mr. Ferris over for the last sitting and, before driving away again, sought out Rae in the garden and opened with her usual abruptness.
“Where’s Richard?”
“Cleaning the car,” said Rae. “I’ve promised to go and watch him doing it.”
Judy stared at her for a moment.
“Rae,” she said, “what’s going on? I mean, I can see what’s going on, but I can’t see where it’s going to.” She broke a twig off a nearby shrub and pulled it slowly to pieces. “I don’t understand Richard—nobody ever did— but I thought I understood you, and now I find that I can’t see through you, either.—Do you love him, Rae?”
“No,” said Rae quietly.
There was a long silence before Judy spoke again.
“I see,” she said at last. “Well—thanks. You’re a nice girl, Rae, and if he does anything to hurt you”—Judy snapped the twig viciously in two—“I’ll—”
“I don’t think he’ll hurt me.”
“You sound almost too sure.”
“He hurt me once,” admitted Rae. “When I came down here and you met me and told me that he wasn’t here. . . . It shook me, but that was just what I needed. It shook me out of what I’d imagined was love. And it made me think, and it also made me take a clearer look at myself—twenty-one, sensible and level-headed, as a rule, but falling in love with someone who didn’t seem to have quite the same feeling about me.”
“But—”
“It wasn’t pleasant,” went on Rae, “but the point is that I faced it and it did me an awful lot of good. And when I say that Richard can’t hurt me now, what I mean is that nothing—I’m sure—will ever be as hard to stand up to as those first few days I spent here. A thing like that doesn’t seem to have much point at the time, but when the shock dies down a little, you find that you’re left with a wariness —a—a sort of guard. You’ve been knocked down once but you can see that whatever it was that hurt you, doesn’t hurt you any more. That’s badly put, but that’s how I feel. I like Richard; he’s the sort of person a girl can’t help liking, but most girls would have known that he was the kind of man you don’t allow yourself to take too seriously.”
During the silence that followed, Rae examined this reasoning and found it very sound. She had opened her heart too wide, and too soon; now she had closed it securely against Richard’s undeniable charm and appeal. She was glad to find that she could even acknowledge, with coolness and detachment, that he had great personal magnetism; this was a feeling, she told herself, that someone might have on handling a snake whose fangs had been removed, there was fascination, but no danger. No danger whatsoever.
“If you imagined you were in love with him,” said Judy, “then I don’t think you should have let a side-step in Rosanna’s direction make any difference. People can be too forgiving; I thought when you took it so quietly—coming down and finding he wasn’t here—that it meant you were going to let him off too lightly. But if you’re going to write him off completely just because he got tangled up with Rosanna for a while, then I think that’s almost worse than—than—”
“I didn’t say I’d written him off, Judy. I said that I wasn’t going to lay myself open to any more—shocks.”
“Well, I’m all mixed up,” said Judy. “I wanted you to like him a lot, and you did, and I was sorry. Now I want you to like him a little, and you won’t—and I’m still sorry.”
Rae smiled.
“Never mind about Richard,” she said gently. “Can you—”
“Oh Rae!” burst out Judy, “can you believe that we sat over breakfast that morning so happily, full of plans and looking forward to his coming home? And now look. Richard proposing to you in broad daylight several times a day, and making everybody feel uncomfortable, and you taking it all with complete calm—and me stuck with that Edward ever since he came down here, listening to him struggling with one word at a time—”
“I like Edward,” said Rae. “If you’d only give him a chance to talk—”
“A chance! I sit for hours and hours, just waiting for him to finish off a sentence!” protested Judy.
“But you frighten him. When he’s not with you, he can be just as fluent as anybody else.”
“The only time he’s fluent,” said Judy, “is when he gets on to his poems. It’s odd, but he can sit and rattle those off without a hitch. You should hear him recite:
‘Little Tommy Tucker
Gave his nurse her supper
Quantities of arsenic
On brown bread and butter’
By the time he’s got all his poems worked out, he’ll be a public speaker. Especially with me to practise on permanently.”
“Permanently?”
“Practically,” said Judy. “You know that empty flat on the same floor as ours? Well, he’s taken it for the rest of his leave. So he’ll be over every evening of our lives, reciting his nursery rhymes.”
“I shan’t mind,” said Rae. “Will you?”
Judy shrugged helplessly.
“He won’t mind whether I mind or not,” she said. “It’s funny, Rae—nothing gets through his skin. Nothing at all. When I give out a stream of directions—clear directions—as to how he can get away from me and stay away from me, he looks at me admiringly and says, ‘How fluent you are.’ He makes plans just as though I weren’t there—he’s drawn me pictures of the view from our house in a place with a frightful name like Wirraperropper or something equally d
arkest-Africa. He wants three boys and a girl, and he says his aunt’ll come out and take care of them—she’s good with children. He listens to me when I interrupt, and goes on from where he left off. He talks to all the Art students, and they think he’s wonderful because he can sketch bull elephants or something better than they can. He’s there all the time—whenever I look up, he’s part of the landscape, outdoor or indoor. So you see it makes no difference having him in the flat opposite; if he hadn’t taken it, he’d have moved in with us.”
Her voice trailed into hopelessness, and Rae looked at her with a smile.
“By the way, Judy,” she asked, “did you ever succeed in finding out what his surname is?”
“Yes,” said Judy bitterly. “Leech.”
Rae walked to the garage and, seating herself comfortably on an upturned box, watched Richard idly as he gave the final touches to the car. He looked up and gave her a friendly grin.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” he advised. “There’s plenty to do; there’s the windscreen and all the windows and all the inside.”
“Go ahead,” encouraged Rae. “I’ve lots of time to watch.”
She found him pleasant to watch. He was absorbed in his task, and seemed to have lost, for the moment, his provocative manner. He was in his shirt-sleeves; there were smudges on his face, and his hair was disordered, giving him an unusually boyish look. He worked busily, saying little, but as the minutes went by, Rae found that the wariness which she wore as a shield during all their encounters was slipping from her, leaving her curiously relaxed. This was how she had always wanted things to be between them, she told herself with a stab of regret: quiet, pleasant and comfortable.
“Judy gone?” he asked after a while.
“Yes. I think she’s rather tired of shuttling Mr. Ferris backwards and forwards.”
“Won’t be for long,” commented Richard. What do you think of the picture?”
“I—I don’t really know. I’m not really a judge.”
“Of pictures?”
“Of anything.”
“That’s pretty sweeping, isn’t it? I would have said that you’d done a good deal of judging lately. You’ve judged my character, for example, to be philandering, unstable, volatile, untrustworthy, and altogether unsubstantial.—Haven’t you?”
“I don’t think so. I haven’t had that much time!”
He wiped his hands on a clean rag, threw it aside, and came over to sit beside her.
“I’d give a lot,” he said, “to know what you really think of me—or if you ever do think of me.”
“I used to.” Rae smiled at him. “I used to think about you a great deal before I met you.”
“Before you—”
“Before you came home. I lived with your photograph, you know. It was rather a good photograph.”
“You can’t go by photographs,” said Richard. “They stay in their frames, for one thing, and never come to life. You can invest them with any kind of personality you like; you can even grow to depend on their steadiness of character. You can’t blame them, can you, if they come to life and spring a few surprises?”
“I’ve never blamed you for anything, if that’s what you mean,” said Rae quietly. “Nobody’s done any blaming—except perhaps Judy. Judy’s a darling, but she’s—she’s impulsive, and she always says what she thinks. You’d be silly, and so would I, if we pretended that we hadn’t known how anxious she was to—to throw us together, if that’s what it’s called. I don’t suppose you wanted to be thrown any more than I did. But I enjoyed meeting you, and going out with you. I even enjoyed being made love to—or hadn’t you noticed?”
“Yes, I’ve noticed.”
“If you’re really going to be honest,” said Richard, “then why not admit that you might have fallen in love with me, and stayed in love with me, if only I hadn’t spent that weekend up in Town with Rosanna instead of spending it down here with you? That’s really the trouble, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think there’s any trouble—any serious trouble. I thought, at first, that perhaps you should have been here when I arrived, but that was because I was only looking at it from one point of view. There were others—such as the fact that Judy was down here, so that I wasn’t being left entirely on my own. I didn’t suppose—when I thought about it—that you’d really counted on spending the entire time down here with me!”
“Go on,” said Richard quietly.
“And about Rosanna—”
“Well?”
“It’s difficult to explain. It wasn’t—jealousy I felt when Judy told me about her. It’s something a man can’t perhaps understand very well. . . .You see, I know Rosanna pretty well. I had the room opposite hers for two whole years, and I know how she feels about things, and how she behaves—and that makes it hard for me to accept the fact that a man can get an equal amount of pleasure from my society and from—Rosanna’s. I don’t think my feelings were hurt, but I’m certain my pride was!—Is that honest enough?”
“You believe, do you, that an evening with you, and an evening with Rosanna, add up to the same thing?”
“I don’t know. I only know that there are countless nice girls in London—pretty, gay, amusing. You can meet them at any time. I know heaps of them, and you could take any one of them out for six days of the week and I’d be happy to go out with you on the seventh. That’s the kind of competition I can understand and—and tolerate. But competition with Rosanna is something that I’d rather not let myself in for.”
“All right, let’s all be honest,” said Richard. “I love you. The garage isn’t the place to tell you so, but it’s as good as all the other places I’ve had to say it in lately. I love you.— Do you believe me?”
“No.”
“Then how do I get you to believe me? Do I crawl about looking submissive until my week-end with Rosanna fades out of your mind? Do I sign a declaration to the effect that it was a ghastly mistake and not to be repeated? Do I spend the rest of my leave struggling to get back to the kind of terms we were on when we were in London? If you love people, Rae, you have to take them on trust!”
“If you love them,” agreed Rae.
“Look.” Richard got to his feet and pulled Rae to hers. “I’m twenty-six, and for almost all my life I’ve been given a pretty free run. We all—all four of us—brought ourselves up, and I think we did it not too badly. Mother’s not a disciplinarian, as you’ve probably gathered by now; we’re all the walking, talking results of her system of letting things work out for themselves. You know Judy; you live with her, and you know that she’s noisy, she’s untidy, she insults people whenever she feels like it, she doesn’t do a stroke of work, and she’s completely and utterly self-absorbed. You know all that, but you manage to live with her and to like her.”
“I—”
“Wait a minute. I’m her brother, and I’ve got all her charming characteristics and a few of my own thrown in. Why can’t you apply to me—and to my failings—the same patience and tolerance—and love—that you show her? Why, knowing Judy, did you set a high standard for me? Why can’t you allow yourself to see me as clearly as you see Judy—and still like me? I hurt you, Rae, and I’m sorry. I’m damnably sorry. I loved you and I hurt you, and— being the kind of man I am—I’ll hurt you a good deal more. I’m sorry I made love to you in what you thought was a headlong manner. At least, I’m not sorry. Don’t you know what you’re like, Rae? Don’t you? Coming home and expecting as I did, that Judy’s friend would be a self-confident, sophisticated little piece like Judy—can’t you see what effect you’d have? You’re soft and sweet and terribly foolish and appallingly vulnerable, and you get round a man’s heart and cling there so that he couldn’t get you out even if he tried to. I know that I’ve got an insufferable manner and that I don’t like people to know what I’m thinking or feeling—but can’t you see what I’m thinking and feeling, even when I try not to let you? Can’t you, Rae?”
She looked into his eyes and saw a
trouble and a purpose she had never seen in them before. His arms were round her, and she found it sweet to allow herself to yield to them. She leaned against him, and in a little while felt his lips against hers and heard his whisper.
“Try to love me, Rae, my sweet!”
She had loved him, without trying. She remembered how swift and how easy it had been. But she remembered also the days and nights she had spent at his home on her arrival, lonely, bewildered and bitterly humiliated. She had come to Thorpe full of confidence in him and in her own heart and he had….
“Will you love me, Rae?”
She gave a tired little sigh.
“Oh, Richard I don’t know! Once is enough. . . .”
Chapter 15
Thursday was wet, but Judy telephoned in the morning to say that she and Edward would come over to lunch. The students were to visit a beauty spot some twenty miles away and Judy would be free at the end of the morning.
The rain became heavy during lunch, and indoor amusement was plainly indicated. The four younger members made their way to the old playroom upstairs and, after trying several wireless programmes and finding themselves dissatisfied with each, switched off the radio and settled down to a large jig-saw puzzle depicting a country scene under an incredibly blue sky. Rae and Richard spread the pieces on the floor and began to sort them; Judy helped them, and Edward sat in a corner with a book of nursery rhymes and an expression of intense concentration.
It was into this peaceful scene that the General, putting his head round the door, dropped a bombshell.
“Telephone for you, Richard,” he said.
“Thanks, sir. Coming.” Richard stirred lazily. “Did you ask who it was?”
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