by Jane Arbor
“And he not taking anything for himself from the price we ask,” put in her husband. “He calls it a ‘service’ to the tourists when it’s really a service of kindness to us that he means. Ah, it was a good day for the Lake when he came to it and bought the Lakestrand from the shiftless Mc’Donans that were good for stabling a man’s ass and putting a pint before him on the bar but for nothing much else, and not a scattered penny of extra trade for their neighbours.”
Kate agreed. “Yes, I’ve no doubt the Lakestrand has made more trade for everyone. It’s simply that Father hates to see the changes on the lake itself.” She wished the Hallorans well with the new venture and went out to the car, wondering as she started it how she and Bridie had accepted its current good behaviour without question as to who had brought it about. Or had Bridie known and had held her tongue?
At home the telephone was ringing and no one was answering it. Kate switched off and flung headlong into the house, snatching up the receiver to hear—of all heady surprises!—Basil’s voice on the line.
“Kate, is that you?” (No endearment, of course, because it might have been anyone else.)
“Yes ... Yes! Basil—darling! Where are you?”
“Suppose you guess?” he teased.
“I can’t. D’you mean you’re this side of the water? Not—not Cork?”
She heard him chuckle. “The same,” he said.
“Oh, Basil! Without warning me, letting me look forward?”
“There wasn’t time. I flew over at the shortest notice. But I’ve enough business to keep me for several days and so I’ve risked your father’s wrath and booked in at your Lakestrand, which seems to be making quite a name for itself in this city. O.K.?”
“Ye—es. Though if you had rung before you booked, you could have come to us instead. Couldn’t you cancel now and still come?”
There was a beat of pause. Then, “Not so easy, darling,” Basil said. “You see, I shall need to double back here every day—away early and back late—and if you remember, we did agree that if I came I shouldn’t foist myself on to your hospitality?”
“Yes, but that was before—”
“—Before you knew the extent of this Montague and Capulet business between the Ruthvens and the Burkes? But you aren’t immured prisoner in an ivory tower? You’re merely unpopular if you patronise the hotel? It hasn’t been pronounced out of bounds?”
“Of course not. Bridie even has a part-time job there. But—” Kate broke off, stifling disappointment. In her daydreams of his promised visit she had always seen him dumping his bag in the hall, being shown to his room, being introduced to her father and Bridie and the domestic animals and sharing meals she had cooked and even helping with the washing-up while they talked ... and talked and made love whenever they were blessedly alone together.
She caught back a sigh lest the receiver should magnify it. “All right,” she said. “I’d have loved you to come here, but we can still meet very soon, can’t we?”
Basil said, “Tonight, no less. I’m planning for us to dine. You can?”
(Did he imagine she must consult her engagement-book?) “Lovely,” she said. “Will you call for me here?”
At that there was another small pause before he mused, “Well, that could be difficult. I shall be very tied up here until the moment I can leave, which may be late. So if you could meet me in the hotel lounge, say, at—?”
They agreed on a time and each kissed their fingertips close to the mouthpiece by way of au revoir. Kate added a whispered, “Till tonight, a chroi—” But the answering silence told her she had spoken to a dead line. Basil had already rung off.
The rest of the day was merely an entr’acte to the evening in prospect.
Kate washed her hair, gave herself a manicure, went into conclave with Bridie as to which dress she should wear—deciding on a sleeveless sheath in green-and-silver shot jersey—accepted Bridie’s offer to chauffeur her on the outward trip, since Basil would bring her home, and explained to the Professor who Basil was.
“But what is he doing at the place across the Lake?” Charles Ruthven wanted to know. “You say he has come to see you and you know him well, so how is it he isn’t coming here as our guest?”
It was a question which Kate found strangely difficult to answer. Silly of her, she supposed, to have gained the impression that Basil had deliberately forestalled an invitation to her home; even sillier to distrust his motives—to wonder whether he feared that to stay with her family might commit him too closely before he was ready to ask her to marry him. Basil wasn’t like that ... Aloud she gave her father Basil’s own good reasons for putting up at the Lakestrand and escaped further questioning by promising that she would ask him to lunch and to spend the day if he were able to stay over the weekend.
Their rendezvous was for half-past eight. Bridie, still in working jeans and shirt, claimed she could not meet Basil so; she would doll up and do Kate credit when he came to lunch, she promised. So Kate entered the hotel lounge alone and, looking round for him, saw to her joy that he was there before her.
At first he did not see her, since his back was to her. He was talking to and laughing with someone whom his figure obscured from Kate’s view, and she felt a prick of dismay.
Basil was the complete extrovert, liking people so much and so genuinely that in any roomful of strangers he would be in conversation with one or more of them within minutes. He was a “man’s man”, which explained much of his spectacular success. But tonight Kate grudged him the quality; grudged even the very little time it might take them both to ease free of his latest acquaintance, so that she could have him to herself.
Still without his seeing her, she threaded her way towards him. His companion—a woman—moved, looked straight at Kate ... through her ... then back at Basil, and went on talking.
Kate halted dead, some inner sixth sense telling her this was no chance contact of Basil’s. He and this girl knew each other well. But how? Why—? Then Basil turned and saw her and came forward, both hands outstretched to take hers.
“Kate—darling! And I thought I should always know when you came into a room where I was!” he greeted her. As he bent to brush her cheek lightly with his lips, she was fleetingly aware they were watched—beyond Basil’s shoulder Conor Burke’s bulk loomed briefly as he crossed the lounge. Then Basil’s hand went beneath her elbow and he was introducing the other girl as Hester Davenport.
She was petite, her figure, features, hands and feet in beautifully modelled miniature; her lightly lacquered ash-blonde hair layered back from a deep widow’s peak and her eyes were a pale grey beneath their thick fringe of lashes. She seemed about Kate’s own age, but was so much her opposite, so little Basil’s “type” that Kate’s momentary resentment of their apparent intimacy faded as they shook hands.
Basil introduced her, “Here’s my sweet Kate, Hester. Now was I exaggerating when I said she was lovely enough to advertise Eire on a poster?”
“In a colleen bawn shawl and a creel of kelp on her back? Good heavens, no. Green-eyed Susans with black hair come two a penny in these parts. But I do agree she ought to model. Have you ever done any?” Hester Davenport asked Kate.
Feeling slightly like an exhibit being appraised at a fatstock show, Kate said she hadn’t, and saw the other girl’s brief interest in her switch back to Basil.
“Where is Guy, do you suppose? A few miles back he was only just behind us, wasn’t he? Surely he can’t have broken down?” she asked, the question telling Kate’s surprise that apparently she and Basil had driven out from Cork together.
Basil laughed. “In a brand new E-type? Hardly likely. He’ll be along. Meanwhile you ought to put Kate in the picture on yourself and Guy, Hester. Because this is the first she has heard of you.”
“Yes, well—” Hester turned back to Kate, “Guy is my brother, and our father is managing director of Ghenty’s Steel—Mr. Kent’s opposite number in this merger. And when Basil told us about you, he sugges
ted it might be a fun thing to do—to make a foursome for dinner out here. So he drove me and Guy brought his car, to take me back. I hope making a party of it is all right with you?”
“Of course. Nice.” But Kate’s smile was wan and she avoided Basil’s eyes, lest he read the blank dismay in hers. (He had suggested the foursome? On their first evening together for weeks? Oh, surely, surely not!) She heard Hester’s doll-like titter, “Let’s hope too that Guy hasn’t got lost. Because in that case, I’m afraid it’ll be Basil who’ll be beating back to Cork with me in the small hours!” Then a man—presumably the missing Guy—joined them, and was ordered to explain his lateness.
He was about thirty, easy-limbed and handsome in a conventional way. From their conversation later at dinner Kate gathered that neither he nor his sister worked; that both did the social round of Cork and Dublin pretty thoroughly and that he enjoyed many London contacts as well. For the moment he was making high drama of his story—no, he hadn’t lost his way, hadn’t stopped for a drink, but had been held up behind a drove of cattle in Morah Beg and she was a fair way behind the other two. And then, as he had turned in to the forecourt, he had been nearly run down by another car—
“You—run down? By what, for goodness’ sake? A Silver Cloud?” scoffed Basil.
“On the contrary, by a model straight out of the motor-veil and goggles period, driven by a honey-blonde in trews and a shirt that had seen better days. A trifle redolent of the farmyard, but dewy young and very sweet withal.”
“How do you know she was sweet?”
“Because we locked in a mild embrace. I mean, our care had, so we both got out to assess the damage. There was not much harm done and I gallantly took the blame, and we exchanged a bit of chat and told each other our first names.”
“What was her name?” asked Hester.
“Now what would it be but Mary Ellen or Pegeen or Bridie, do you suppose? In fact it was Bridie, and she works here as some kind of a flower-girl, I gathered—”
“Bridie?” put in Kate. “Why, that must have been my sister. She drove me over from home and would have been on her way back, I suppose.”
“Your sister?” From the slight curl of the other girl’s nostril Kate gained the impression that through Bridie she herself had lost caste.
“Bridie meant she does the flowers for the whole hotel and she designed those set-piece decorations in the hall,” she told Guy Davenport, and then found herself telling him about Bridie’s ambitions while his sister monopolised Basil’s attention.
And that was largely the pattern of the rest of the evening. Not until the other two had left was she alone with Basil, and then it was too late for anything but for him to drive her home.
In the car she could not resist a protest. “This foursome with the Davenports wasn’t really your idea, was it?” she asked.
“What do you think, honey?” His hand left the wheel to find hers and squeeze it. “It was Hester who blew into her father’s office and suggested it. And you understand this merger of ours is in a dicey stage, so that I’ve got to be nice to everyone concerned until it’s gone through?”
(Even on one of our very few evenings together?) But she resisted the sourness of that to agree. “Yes, I see. You couldn’t really help it, could you?”
“Especially not, since we were their guests, not they ours. Which makes for another difficulty—I shall have to ask them back. However, tomorrow is another day for that... What did you think of them? Guy is a bit of a playboy type, isn’t he?”
“And Hester is pretty glamorous.”
Basil shrugged. “They don’t come more so. But you know my reactions to mere glamour—or you should.” The short journey was over as he spoke. He cut the engine and the lights and turned to her, eager to take her into his arms.
Momentarily she held him off. “You’ll come in? Father may still be up,” she told him.
He grinned. “Is that meant as a warning or an inducement? But no, it’s time you got your beauty sleep my darling, little as you need any. Let’s keep things more private than we’ve had them tonight yet. Come here—”
To obey, she had only to turn to face him and he did the rest. He drew her to him, and as they clung together and kissed and murmured their private love language their nearness was as reassuring as ever. It was only the thread which ran between them when they were apart which had rubbed a little thin on their separate contacts, thought Kate.
Probably. Basil found her preoccupation with her home affairs as tiresome as she found his with the Davenport sister and brother. And that was more than half business, she scolded herself. It took nothing that mattered from her, for as soon as they were alone together their oneness was complete. He was hers and she was his and, little enough time as they had immediately before them, there would still be other hours, other intimate evenings which they need not share with anyone ... anyone else at all.
In that hopeful conviction, however, she was wrong. The next day Basil rang up late to say that he was so tied up that he must stay over in Cork for the night, though once he was over the present hurdle his time should be more his own. So he would be out the following evening and would call for her, and if it was all the same to her, Guy rather wanted to come along too.
“Guy Davenport? What on earth for?” Kate’s echo was blank with dismay.
Basil laughed. “In order to pursue matters with Bridie, I gather,” he said.
“With Bridie?”
“Darling, d’you realise you’re echoing back like an Asdic system?” Basil teased lightly. “Yes, with Bridie. He seems to have taken a beeline in her direction, and I daresay that by now you’ve had her reactions to their meeting last night?”
“Oh yes, she’s told me her version, of course, and said how nice he was about her appalling bit of driving.”
“But you didn’t know he went out to the Lakestrand again this morning in the hope of seeing her, and did?”
“No.” Kate paused to grapple with the implications of that. Then, “But, Basil, it’s all rather fantastic! She is so young and he’s so—well, man of the world, not her type at all!” she protested.
“As if one could ever say whose type is whose!” Basil countered. “Besides, if, as far as you know, this is the first time Bridie has been dated, isn’t it as well that it’s to be under our mature eyes—yours and mine, darling? Because that’s Guy’s idea—to take her over to the Lakestrand for dinner with the three of us, if your father will let her go.”
“He may, I think, as she will be going with me. Will it be just the four of us? Hester Davenport isn’t coming too?”
“No, she has something else cooking.”
“And you will be at the hotel over the weekend, so that you can lunch here and meet Father properly? Dennis Regan too; he often drops in for a meal on Sundays.”
Basil promised, “I’ll be there. I can hardly wait. And don’t worry that we can’t have a bit of téte-a-téte tomorrow night. Guy will have his own car, so he can see himself home, and I daresay the idea is that we ditch him with Bridie for a while during the evening.”
Basil rang off then and, none too sure that she cared for the thought of Bridie “ditched” alone with someone of Guy Davenport’s apparent experience, Kate went to sound her reaction to his invitation.
“You hadn’t said you had seen him again today,” Kate accused gently. “Did he say anything to you then about wanting to ask you out?”
Bridie blushed. “Oh yes. But of course I told him Father would never let me.”
Well, I’ll ask him, if you really want to go. Do you?” enquired Kate.
“Oh, Kate darling, of course! I mean, I know I should have told you he was out here again. But I thought you’d never believe he came to see me, though he did, you know. All that way out from Cork—imagine!” Bridie marvelled, and then worried, “But if Father says I may go, what am I going to wear, Kate? And my hair—! This Alice-band thing is all right for every day, but it makes me look so babyish!”
That was the keynote of a toilette which, the next evening, took far longer than Kate’s to achieve. Bridie’s nails must be lacquered; she experimented with eyeshadow and demanded Kate’s approval of the scraping of her pale gold hair into a perky topknot at the crown of her head. The final effect was all she asked; now she looked “grown-up”, she claimed, and Kate had not the heart to wonder aloud whether, in the process, she might have destroyed some of her attraction for Guy Davenport.
As a party the evening could be counted a success. As time alone together for Kate and Basil it could not. At dinner Basil’s expansive friendliness roped in the group of young people at the next table, and by the time they agreed to join up for dancing it was an affair of gay backchat and bandied Christian names all round.
It broke up at midnight when the band stopped and the residents drifted off to bed or to the bar. When Kate looked round for Bridie she was not to be seen, and Basil said Guy had also disappeared some time earlier. “Probably to take her home,” he added. “You’ll find her there before you, like Cinderella.”
Kate laughed. “Which I suppose makes me one of the ugly sisters?”
“When you’re anyone’s ugly sister, that’ll be the day!” he grinned back. But for some reason, on their way home, he chose to tax her about Dennis Regan.
“From your letters you seem to be seeing a lot of him,” he said. “Does he just drop in on you whenever he pleases?”
“More or less, yes. He brings his mending for Bridie to do, for she can turn even a darn into a work of art. And now and then I go out to the Island and set him up with a day or two’s cooking.”