by Jane Arbor
“Even though it’s the next best thing to being with someone you love?”
“To me, it’s so far behind that, it isn’t in the same street—” He broke off to look up at the threat of the lowering sky. “We’re going to get wet if we don’t go back, d’you know that?” he added.
He helped her to her feet and kissed her again before they set off downhill. But they did not beat the rain, which drove relentlessly at their backs as they scurried before it.
They were at lake level and nearly home when Basil panted, “Well, thanks be for the combustion engine. At least we shan’t have to face this lot this evening.”
Kate tucked a dripping strand of hair back under her headscarf. “I shan’t be out this evening. I suppose you mean on your way back to the hotel?” Her heart sank at the thought. For when, after that, would she see him again?
He corrected gently, “I mean on our way to the Lakestrand. You’re dining there with me, darling, and I’m not taking No. Guy and Hester are coming out and we’ll take Bridie and make a party of it. Your friend Dennis too if he cares to come.”
“Oh, Basil—!” Kate halted in her tracks. “You said—That is, I thought you were spending the whole day with us. We’ve laid on roast duckling for supper and—and everything!”
Basil halted too, his face stubborn. “But I’ve asked the Davenports. You know I owe them a dinner, and on my last night aren’t you and I entitled to a bit of whoopee? Anyway, you haven’t cooked the duck yet? It’ll keep?”
“Of course. But that’s not the point. I’d expected that at least we should have your last evening alone together.”
“By the grace of your father and Regan and Bridie all exercising exquisite tact, I suppose? If you’ll come to the Lakestrand, we shall still be together.”
“Well then, the real point is that I’m none too keen on sharing your last evening with the Davenports,” Kate said, beginning to walk on.
“But I can’t head them off now, and is it very fair of you to deprive Bridie of a party? Besides, you could appreciate that I want to take you out on my last night.”
At that Kate gave in with as good grace as she could, and was to be partly rewarded by Bridie’s delight at the plan. When they reached the house they found her alone, Dennis having “gone all restless and depressed” and having made the closing-in weather his excuse for returning to the Island, she told them.
When the three of them reached the hotel the Davenports were there before them, and from the moment of Hester’s greeting Basil as if he were her savior from unbearable ennui, Kate’s enjoyment of the evening was doomed. She ought, she supposed, to have enough flair and know-how to assert her own claim to him, but she was no match for the other girl’s bland assumption that she, not Kate, was the First Lady of the party and that Basil, as host, had the greater obligations to herself.
At dinner, when she took the seat at his right hand with Guy on her other side, the three facing outward to the room and Kate, side by side with Bridie, with her back to it, Basil’s raised brows and small hand gesture signalled his dismay to Kate. But he did nothing to alter matters and throughout the meal Hester proceeded to hold court—there was no other word for it.
Sunday nights at the Lakestrand were different in that dinner and dancing were open only to residents and their guests, not to the influx of non-residents which filled the public rooms on other nights of the week. Conor Burke and his mother themselves dined in the dining-room and were there that night, a little across from Basil’s table.
Bridie, radiant and slightly flushed from the champagne pressed upon her by Basil, turned to wave to them, pointing them out to Kate. Hester at once sat up and took bright notice.
“Who? Where? Oh—Big Host himself and his respected mama? Now can anyone tell me”—she rested her chin in her hand and regarded the far table thoughtfully—“how an attractive, masterful hunk of male like that should be going begging in the marriage market? Because he isn’t married, is he? So haven’t the girls around here any eyes in their heads? Or is it that he’s so wedded to the hotel big business that he doesn’t even notice them standing in line?”
“He’s wedded, all right,” said Bridie. “After he took every course there is on hotel management he went into the kitchens of a London hotel and learned the whole job again from there up. He says there’s a huge future for hotels at Irish beauty spots, and that it’s high time the world realised we’re on the map and that we’re not a ‘poor distressful country’ any longer.”
Hester turned a kindly, indulgent eye upon her. “My word! Quite the little disciple!” she mocked gently, and then to Kate, “What about you? Are you as sold on the man as Bridie is? Or since you came back to Na Scathan have you been otherwise engaged?”
Ignoring the subtle sneer in the last question, Kate answered the first. “Conor Burke? I’m afraid I don’t know him as well as Bridie does,” she said.
“Meaning you don’t much like what you do know?”
But before Kate could answer Basil put in, “You should understand, Hester, that Kate finds herself between the devil and the deep blue sea in the matter of Burke, with Bridie continually singing the chap’s praises in her one ear and Professor Ruthven fulminating against him in her other. You can’t blame her for being non-committal—it depends on the company she’s in!”
“I see. But how do you know she hasn’t got a love-hate thing for him of her own that she daren’t admit to in front of you?” mocked Hester. At which Basil’s dark threat of, “She’d better!” evoked laughter from the others and the subject changed.
They adjourned to the lounge for Irish coffee, watching the ritual of its preparation and serving from the waiter’s trolley and sipped the heady mixture of syrup-sweet black coffee, laced with a dash of whiskey and topped by a swimming blob of cream, with varying degrees of enjoyment.
The men agreed it was a “sissy” use of good whiskey; Hester criticised the proportions; Kate marvelled, as always, that the same thing served in London never had the same taste as the home-brew, and Bridie, who had not sampled it before, pronounced it with teenage candour as “stinking” and asked instead for cafe-au-lait as ‘au lait’ as the waiter could make it.
Gradually the lounge emptied in favour of the dance-room adjoining the bar and giving on to the lakeshore by way of an open-sided terrace along its length. On fine nights the glass dividing wall was folded back, making the terrace an extension of the dance floor. But tonight, after the dim, lowering day, it was merely softly lighted and left to its private shadows.
Tonight the comparatively few people dancing were well paired as to numbers, a circumstance which made any lone sitter-out more conspicuous than usual. As, to Kate’s intense chagrin, she was to find.
When their party was not dancing they made a whole. But Bridie was eager to dance all the time and Guy was only too ready to indulge her. When Basil partnered her, Guy danced with Kate. But that was seldom, and for the rest Hester’s continuing tacit appropriation of Basil left Kate as a wallflower far too often for her own comfort.
Moreover, when occasionally they danced together she was both too proud to assert her claim to Mm and too conscious of Hester’s superiority as a dancer.
The other girl had every latest step at her command; she was gay and tireless in experiment, and Kate, who knew how Basil admired expertise of any sort, did her best to believe he was merely sharing the reflection of Hester’s glory as the most arresting figure in the room.
Yet, shocked to the core to realise it, she knew she was despising him as much as she despised her own jealousy of him. Whatever his reason, his neglect of her for Hester was her first glimpse of feet of clay she had not known he possessed. At dinner he had pretended he could not help himself. But he surely could now. If he wanted to—Now a single word, one masterful, possessive gesture in her own direction could put everything right between them. But her instinct told her he would not make it tonight. And tomorrow he was going away...
She to
ld herself she had only agreed to come for Bridie’s sake, and Bridie at least was making the most of the evening. But as, for dance after dance, Basil and Hester stayed on the floor, clapping for encores, or re-turned briefly to their table until Hester invited, “Let’s try that step again, shall we?” Kate’s alert half-smile became more and more mechanical and she wished she had the nerve for the way of escape the odd-man-out had—to adjourn to the bar alone.
Then suddenly she heard a perfunctory “May I?” at her elbow and Conor Burke’s massive hand was on her back, propelling her to her feet. His arm went about her; he steadied her for a moment, waiting for the beat, and then they were launched on as bizarre a tango as she had ever been partnered in.
The man danced as he walked—aggressively, hugely, his progress that of a juggernaut not to be denied. His hold was as compelling as a bear’s hug, his guidance of his partner as imperative as his steps were original. At first Kate, tensed for looming collision, could only follow blindly and very badly. But gradually, as her feet and body sensed the individual rhythm which his demanded, she found herself relaxing and yielding to a dominance held over and about her like an enforced umbrella.
Though she would have liked to refuse a second dance, her sore, rejected mood had been soothed by his brief protection, and she willingly complied when his massive gathering-in gesture indicated that was what he expected of her.
Their progress was too purposeful, too dedicated, to allow of much conversation. But towards the end of that dance he stopped by a door which gave on to the terrace, lifted its high latch and made of his raised arm an arch for her to pass under.
Fleetingly Kate looked back, saw Hester and Basil strolling off the floor, then went ahead of Conor on to the terrace.
There were chairs there, but they walked together to the far end where there was a parapet of a height for elbows to rest upon and where the lake could be seen reflecting the stars in a sky wiped clean of the rain cloudy which had obscured it all day.
As Conor offered cigarettes and flicked his lighter for Kate’s, she asked lightly, “Tell me, do you always dance like that?”
“Like what?”
“Rather as if the floor were the size of a skating-rink and you and your partner were the only people on it.”
“If you mean do I take all the space I need, yes. And we didn’t run anyone down, did we?”
“Oddly enough, no, we didn’t.”
He dismissed that. “Nothing odd about it. Just efficient navigation on my part and a fair compliance on yours. But only fair, mind you. You’d do a power better if you relaxed more. However, we’ll take care of that. Next time you’ll put shutters over those eyes you have popping at the back of your head and you’ll go where I please to take you.”
Kate shifted position, putting more distance between them. “I’m afraid there may not be a ‘next time’ tonight,” she said. “I’m with a party, you know, and as we shall be leaving before long, I don’t think I ought to go off at another tangent before we do.”
A small silence. Then, not looking at her, but far across the lake Conor said, “With your party, but not noticeably of it, were you?”
“Not of it? What do you mean?”
He turned then. “I think you know,” he said to her profile. “You had time enough alone to give thought to it, surely?”
Under cover of the darkness Kate flushed. How dared he! Aloud she said, “I agree I was alone when you asked me to dance. But in a party of two men and three girls, one of them is bound to be sitting out some of the time, isn’t she?”
“But not the same one all the time. What’s more, a host who makes a party that shape should never make another, unless it’s no matter to him that one girl is left to dangle until some other man rescues her.”
“I hope you didn’t feel compelled to rescue me?” she retorted.
“And if I did, it wouldn’t be the first time. Haven’t I already been called on to chauffeur you from airports, to scrape you, as it were, from beneath my chariot wheels—?”
“If you’re making a list of your knight-errantries towards me, don’t forget your tinkering with my car unasked, will you?” Kate cut in.
“Putting it back on the road for Bridie’s sake as much as yours,” he corrected mildly. “But to return to this evening, did you really expect that I wouldn’t feel pity for you, sitting there alone and drooping, like the Lady of Shalott in her tower?”
“Pity?” exploded Kate. “And I was not drooping! I—”
But there she stopped, surprised into silence by the abrupt lift of his head and her loss of his attention as he stared down the length of the terrace beyond her.
Turning herself, she saw what he saw—the two figures silhouetted against the lighted background of the dance-room and, turning back again, felt without seeing the approach of Basil and Hester, linked arm-in-arm close and laughing together. A few yards more and they would be sharing the view from the parapet, and already Kate’s imagination could hear Hester’s false, arch pleasantries at finding her out there, tête-à-tête with Conor.
But she had reckoned without Conor. As soon—or so it seemed to her—as the other two had full sight of them, he lunged towards her, swept her into his arms in a powerful gesture and kissed her upon the lips with deliberate, demanding passion.
He took his time. His grip was iron, his bulk a hard, taut resistance to her inadequate struggle to free herself, and the long kiss held her mouth prisoner to his until she gave in and was momentarily still, her one coherent thought of Basil—what he would think ... say ... do—How could she have foreseen the shaming reality? That, when the other man at last released her, Basil would halt, look at her unreadably and then do nothing ... nothing at all but turn on his heel and, a possessive hand beneath Hester’s elbow, go with her down a near flight of steps on to the lake shore.
The darkness swallowed them and Kate turned furiously upon her companion. “You—! Wh-what did you do that for? Why—?” Mortification and anger choked her. At that moment she could not have said whether she despised him or Basil the more.
He did not tell her why. Instead he asked his own question of her. “Don’t you know, Kate?” he said.
Her indignant eyes met something inscrutable in his. “Of course I don’t,” she snapped. “How should I? It seemed to me you deliberately waited until you could be sure they—they saw you. Well, didn’t you?”
“I did,” he agreed.
“But why?”
“You insist you don’t know why?” When she did not answer he went on, “Ah well, then suppose we agree it could have been because I thought you were sadly in need of—now what’s the latest word they have for it?—a status symbol to support you?”
Kate begged, “For goodness’ sake, must you be so—so cryptic? I—in need of a status symbol? Are you saying you—” she paused to work it out—“you kissed me ... like that, as if it meant something, which it didn’t, for the same reason you thought you had to ask me to dance—because you had the colossal nerve to—to pity me?”
He shook his head. “You haven’t the right end of it at all, woman dear. I asked you to dance because I pitied your moping. But this other—well, that is your man down there, isn’t it? And you’ve maybe heard of the law of supply and demand that stimulates any market?”
“Of course I have. But—”
“Well, there you have it. The keener the competition, the higher prized the article. Vice versa, the thing no one values, no one wants. So, for the lack of a better reason for my kissing you, wasn’t it a good, healthy thing for that one to see for himself that you have higher store for others than he seems to have set on you tonight?”
Kate stared, questioning her own hearing. “You’re saying you did it with the misshapen idea of raising my—my prestige?”
“Well, considering the loggerheads we were at, you wouldn’t suggest we were driven by a mutual need at that moment, would you?” he countered.
“I certainly should not. But havi
ng done it perhaps you’ll tell me what good you think it did, where it got both of us?” she demanded icily.
He fingered his chin thoughtfully. “I know very well where it should have got me—flat on my back from the force of that fellow’s fist to my law,” he said.
The worst of it was that Kate’s deep chagrin of heart knew it too—knew it and perversely blamed the wrong person for it. In as distant a tone as she could achieve she said:
“Well, don’t apologise, will you? But before I go, may I give you some advice?”
“Do,” he urged. “What is it?”
“That the next time you’re moved to kiss someone by force in the notion of raising their morale or boosting their value, you should rein in and ask yourself just how muddled your thinking can get—”
She turned then and left him, ignoring his gesture towards a non-existent forelock and his mock-obsequious, “Thank ye, lady—I’ll remember it,” with which he let her go.
CHAPTER FIVE
When Basil’s letter came it was postmarked London, and before she opened it Kate knew that it would merely underline their ending, needing no answer from her.
For they had said all there was to say, spent all their rancour, during the hour when Bridie had left them together in the car after Basil had driven them home from the Lakestrand.
Of the rest of the evening Kate’s only clear recollection was of the long anti-climax of wait for Basil and Hester to return from the shore. When they had, and Kate had told Basil she wanted to leave, Hester’s parting from him had been a perfunctory thanks for his hospitality and a “See you—” which to Kate had sounded over-casual until she had realised later that Basil had already planned to spend his last night, not at the Lakestrand, but in Cork at the Davenport home.
So they had had their hour—of spilling bitterness, of pent-up groundless jealousies, of charge and countercharge—every hostile word they flung at each other taking them further and further apart until both knew there could be no going back.