by Jane Arbor
Yet through it all, and even more clearly since, Kate had realised that the real sickness of their love affair owed little or nothing to the names and accusations which their quarrel had bandied that night. Hester ... Dennis ... and, too absurdly! Conor Burke—the names of all three were mere irritants; signs, not causes of a withering, a loss of heart which had already begun for Basil before he had ever heard of or met one of them.
He was not—yet—in love with Hester Davenport. And he could not possibly believe his own sour taunts of Kate with regard to Dennis or that ludicrous scene with Conor Burke. No, as far as he was concerned the rot had set in in the very moment of their parting in London. He had loved her earlier and loved her still when he had whispered a chroi as they kissed that night. But from then on he had had neither the strength nor the trust to continue to love a Kate who, in the words of a song of her mother’s day, had “gone away too far; stayed away too long”.
He had admitted as much on Slieve Creochan; in her secret heart Kate had known it before that, and his letter confirmed it.
It addressed her as “Kate dear” and at its end called her so again, with his hopes that she would be happy. It repeated no reproaches and made no new ones. But it was redolent of his relief to have escaped from deadlock, and this time there was no cunningly hidden “I love you” for her searching out.
She had known there could not be. If there had been, it would have been a lie ... Even the letter was a postscript which need not have been added. For their love affair had died beyond recall in the moment when Basil had not cared enough to raise either voice or finger in protest at finding her in Conor Burke’s arms. Before that it might have been saved. But not since.
Meanwhile life continued and had to be lived, with people looking on and being kind in their fashion.
Bridie had not needed telling. She had wanted to stay longer with Guy, but she had not questioned Kate’s ruling that they were leaving as soon as Basil was ready to take them, and the tension in the car on the way home had not escaped her. The next morning, though she kept Kate under quiet scrutiny, she left her compassion to get through on their sisterly wavelength, allowing herself no curiosity until Kate broached the subject first.
Then she nodded with sad wisdom. “Somehow I had guessed you were at outs,” she said. “Even at dinner when Basil was mad over Hester’s suggestion that you might be attracted by Conor without knowing it, I got the idea he wasn’t as het up as all that. Not as—as silly jealous as I’d have wanted him to be, if I’d been you. I suppose it is Hester for him? I know Guy said—”
But Kate, not wanting to hear Guy Davenport’s assessment of Hester and Basil, said No, not really, she thought. Or not yet. And she wasn’t blaming Basil. It was simply that they had both been wrong in thinking their own affair could thrive on indefinite separation. It couldn’t, as they had proved. They didn’t come in that kind of stuff—
“You mean, don’t you, that Basil doesn’t?” put in Bridie shrewdly.
Kate winced. “Perhaps,” she admitted, adding in the jargon their generation understood, “Anyway, it’s just one of those things—” and being grateful when Bridie accepted that without needing to hear more. Particularly of a roughshod assault which Kate herself hoped she was going to forget...
Dennis did not hear of it either. But to Dennis’s experience of loss and desolation Kate found she could open the floodgates of her own. Dennis knew what it was like—that weight upon the spirit on waking, that dread of the dreams which sleep might bring. Dennis had been through it all, and their fellow-feeling for each other’s pain was an anchorage to run to when the slow hours of healing and forgetting took far too long to pass.
The sympathy which was least expected and the most heartwarming was her father’s. She did not realise that, absent as he appeared, her feeling for Basil had not escaped him, and that he knew very well her unhappiness went deeper than that of an ordinary parting.
At first his commiseration took the form of distraction for her thoughts by inviting her to criticise and advise him on his latest thesis and even spurring himself to show interest in her own reading of manuscripts for her employer. Kate loved him for both efforts and found their tribute enough until one evening when they were alone together he suddenly said, à propos of nothing, “So that young man of yours was only hanging up his hat until it suited him to take it down and be off again, eh?”
Kate nodded. “Yes, though it wasn’t quite like that—”
“And he has you destroyed with his going? What was it that came between the two of you?”
She told him and he heard her out. Then he said,
“I have it now. Though you believed you had him bound to you, he wasn’t equal to waiting for you, and you apart from him only this two months or three yet?”
“That’s about it,” she agreed wretchedly.
“And you’re mourning him, so? Ah well, you think you have cause, and while you’re at it you’ll listen to no voice that tells you you haven’t. But have you thought, Kate acushla, that if you hadn’t magic enough for him to hold him to you this short while, you might have found yourself far short of it in a lifetime of marriage to him?”
At that—the truth, and she knew it—she nodded dumbly, the swelling ache in her throat intolerable. Then suddenly she was on her knees by his chair, her face hidden in the rough tweed of his coat, and she was sobbing the painful desolate tears she had not shed in front of Bridie or of Dennis or alone.
He let her cry, only smoothing her bowed head with a gentle hand until all her tears were spent, and she was grateful for his knowing she was not yet ready for his old wisdom, but only for the understanding she had not realised he had for her.
It was not until another day that he mentioned Basil again. Then, as before without preamble, he said, “You know, Kate, if it was the want of a sweetheart that took you to London, maybe you could have done better to look nearer home than for one who could only love you there, not here. And when you’re looking again, it could be that you ought to remember that.”
Controlled now, she smiled. “I’m not looking, Father,” she said.
He accepted that. “Ah well, time enough. Men enough too for your choice, I daresay. Dennis now, the unfortunate man—could you think of him in such a way?”
She shook her head. “Dennis isn’t thinking of me,” she said.
“Then”—and she could guess the amount of adjustment the offer cost him—“would it help you to be out of this for a while—away on a trip to Dublin or to your cousins in Castlebar, maybe?”
But thanking him, Kate said no. Mere mileage and change of scene wouldn’t help, she knew, and for all its association and its counter-irritant in the shape of Conor Burke, she would best live down her memories of Basil on the Lake, among her own people.
During those weeks she wondered that her father did not notice that Bridie was unhappy too. For as Kate had foreseen, the Davenports’ interest in the Lakestrand waned after Basil’s departure, and her heart ached for the rise and fall of Bridie’s hopes of seeing Guy every time she went there on her job.
Once Bridie suggested piteously, “Should I write to him, do you think? I don’t mean soppily—just a friendly letter to say I hope he’s all right?”
But Kate, hating the task, advised that if he wanted to see Bridie again, Guy was entirely equal to driving over from Cork, of using a telephone or writing a letter himself—all sober truths which, in Bridie’s place, she knew she would have rejected, continuing to hope while there was a shred of hope to cling to.
Then, with a development in Bridie’s job, the girl’s spirits visibly rose.
For some time, she reported to Kate, she had been telling Conor she could buy flowers better and more economically in person than those the hotel was getting on standing order from the Cork market. It would mean earlier than crack-of-dawn rising for her, but look at the buying experience she would gain! she urged. With the result that Conor had bought a light van for the transport of
her purchases and had agreed she could go on trial as his buyer from her next duty day onwards.
She took her new responsibility very seriously; at home her talk became mostly “shop”—of consignments and dealers’ tricks and fluctuating prices, and if she pined for Guy Davenport in those days it did not show. She was being healthily cured of him, Kate believed thankfully, without an inkling then of the rude shock which was to prove her wrong.
It came in the form of an early afternoon telephone call from Conor Burke on a day when Bridie had gone to Cork as usual in the morning.
The telephone said brusquely, “Kate? Conor here. Is Bridie by chance at home?”
“At home?” Kate echoed blankly. “Why should she be yet? It’s Tuesday—her day for Cork and your flowers. Isn’t she there with you then?”
“She is not.”
“Not?”
“Would I be asking after her if she were?” Conor retorted. “Normally she is back here by half-ten or eleven at latest, as you know, and she hasn’t showed up yet. I waited, thinking she might have been late leaving Cork and had stopped in for lunch at home with you before coming on. But if you haven’t news of her—”
He paused, and it was Kate who supplied his unspoken thought.
“You mean she—she must have had an accident?”
He agreed, “That could be the way of it, I’m afraid. For if anything less had kept her, she would surely have phoned.” He paused again, then added, “Anyway, I’ll ring the Civic Guards at Cork and at one or two places along the way, and call you back. Don’t alarm the Professor yet, will you? Because if—”
But there he checked for so long that, in the belief he had rung off, Kate was about to hang up herself when his voice came back on the line.
“You still there, Kate?” he said. “All right. Crisis past. I’ve a view of the forecourt from here, and when I cut out a moment back, I’d just seen Bridie drive in.”
“Thank God!” breathed Kate. “She’s all right, then, I suppose?”
“Well, I watched her get out and she looks to be all in one piece and so does the. van. She’s unloading now and my mother is out there with her, fussing over her like a broody hen.”
“But you’ll see her too and find out what has made her so late?”
“I will,” he agreed. “I could bear to know myself. So will you care to hang on while I go out to her and report back?”
“Yes, do that if you will. Or no—Conor—?” In her need to keep him before he put down the receiver she used his name for the first time since his taunt in the Hallorans’ shop and, considering their last passage-at-arms, surprised herself with the ease with which it came to her lips.
He had heard it and was waiting. “D’you mean you’ll not hang on?”
“No, I will. But let Bridie come to the phone herself, will you? I’d like to speak to her.”
While she waited Kate looked at the suspicion which had sprung to her mind, and did not like it at all. But it was Conor who presently returned to the telephone with Bridie’s message that she had to make up lost time now and that she would rather leave her explanations to Kate until after she got home.
Kate asked, “But she has explained herself to you?”
“She has. She got an unexpected invitation out to lunch and she accepted. Fair enough,” said Conor, and rang off.
Dealing with the flowers for the whole hotel was a long job, and Bridie’s homecoming was later than usual by several hours. Fortunately Professor Ruthven had walked into the village for tea and an evening’s chess with a friend, and Kate was alone when she came in, clearly none too sure of her reception.
Kate decided on a short sharp thrust of attack. “Why didn’t you ring Conor to say did he mind your taking time out to stay in the city for lunch with Guy Davenport?” she asked.
Bridie looked startled. “How did you know it was with Guy? Was it Conor who told you?”
“No, but it wasn’t too difficult to guess that you would hardly put us in such a flat spin about you for anyone less than Guy. Why didn’t you ring the Lakestrand, Bridie? Or me?”
Bridie made a business of unknotting her headscarf. “I did try Conor once, but both his lines were engaged. And—well, I knew if I rang you, you would only have wanted to argue about it.”
Kate shook her head. “Darling, even if I had, you should know why. But forget it now. I suppose you met Guy by chance in the street?”
“On the quay. There’s a place where I usually have a coffee when I’ve finished in the market, and I ran straight into him as I was coming out.”
“And—?”
“Oh, it was wonderful, Kate! He was absolutely thrown at seeing me, he really was. He said he’d been salmon-fishing, or he’d have got in touch. Then he pretended to think I oughtn’t to be in Cork on my own and asked me to lunch with him. I said I couldn’t—just look at my clothes, and I must get back. But he said he knew a good pull-in for carmen where it didn’t matter how anyone was dressed, and as long as I got the flowers done, wasn’t the time I did them my affair, give or take an hour?
“So I gave in, and he was codding me about the good pull-in; it was really a super little Chinese restaurant, and we took a long time over lunch and he was sweet to me. And then—well, then I had to come home,” Bridie finished flatly.
“And does he want to see you again?”
Bridie turned away. “He said he’d love to, but he’s going to England for a while very soon. Hester is in London already, and I think, Kate, she and Basil are seeing a lot of each other. Or so Guy says.”
“Are they?” said Kate levelly, though expecting to hear next that Guy had reported to Bridie on that scene on the terrace of which he would surely have heard from Hester or Basil. But Bridie did not mention it, and Kate could only conclude, thankfully enough, that her affairs were by now so much insignificant past history in the Davenports’ sophisticated world.
During the next week or two she supposed Bridie’s increasing lift of spirits must arise from the promise she had managed to conjure from her hail-and-farewell meeting with Guy. Would they be seeing each other again when he returned from England? she asked Bridie once, and when the girl said she hoped so, Kate accepted that at its face value, not recognising it for the tacit evasion which it was.
She was to learn to her cost on a day when a friend of Professor Ruthven’s, as dedicated as himself, had driven him to Cork to read a paper to the Munster Folklore Society and to stay the night in the city. It was also Bridie’s day for Cork, but she went much earlier, leaving Kate free for the job she had promised herself of repainting the shabby front door and windowsills.
On Tuesdays and Fridays Bridie’s return was something of a moveable feast. Occasionally she would be home in time for lunch; more frequently she took it at the hotel and on fine days would then stay on for a swim or to join a tennis four. So that Kate, absorbed in scraping old paint all the morning and “washing down” all the afternoon, saw nothing amiss about her long absence until, with Conor’s arrival, the full shock of its cause was thrust upon her.
She was still on her ladder when she heard a car on the ride and turning, saw that it was Conor’s—the only time, so far as she knew, that he had come to the house, except on the night he had insisted on driving her home.
He braked, was out of the car and at the foot of the ladder in a stride.
“Come down out of that, will you,” he said, making an order of it. “I’ve news of Bridie that you’ve got to hear.”
“Of—of Bridie?” Warned by his urgency, Kate stayed where she was, needing the ladder for support. Then, apprehension making cotton wool of her limbs, she came down, missed her footing on the last but one rung and was unceremoniously lifted clear by Conor’s strong hands.
She faced him. “What about Bridie? She’s not—hurt?”
“She is not.”
“But it’s more than that she has stayed over in Cork again? It’s—worse?”
“It’s worse,” he confirmed. �
�Not unmendable, though, if we stir ourselves. The Professor is away from home today, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he’s in Cork until tomorrow.”
“And we’re for Cork too in a hurry, you and I.” Conor looked her up and down. “Leave what you’re at now and come as you are. You can have five minutes to use a comb and to wash your face—it needs it. And bring a coat with you. You may be late back.”
Kate made no move to obey. “But—but Bridie?” she begged. “What is it all about? Why do we have to get to Cork in a hurry?”
He turned back to the car and spoke over his shoulder. “You can hear as we go. We have to head the child off from the foolishness she’s at, and it’s in Cork that we must do it. Now get that coat, will you, and don’t be all night about it.”
She ran then, did the minimum to her begrimed hands and face, pulled a comb through her hair and snatched up coat, bag and headscarf. She found pencil and paper, wrote quickly, and as she left the house pushed the result halfway through the letter box so that it could be seen from outside.
“What was that?” asked Conor as she took the seat beside him.
“A note to Dennis Regan. He was coming to supper.”
Conor nodded without comment, then took from his breast pocket an envelope addressed to him in Bridie’s writing. “If you read that you’ll have the most of it, and when you have it read, we can maybe tell each other the rest.”
Kate unfolded the sheet of paper in the envelope and read—
“Dear, dear Conor,” Bridie had written,
“If I had gone home for our own car, Kate would have asked questions, so I’m afraid I had to take the van. But it will be in the airport car-park, paid for for the night, and the price of the petrol I shall use will be in that slot under the dashboard.
“Tell Kate, please, as soon as you get this, which won’t be until it’s too late to stop me. I’m flying to England, Conor, but don’t let them—Kate and Father—worry about me or try to bring me back. I know I’m under age, and they could. But don’t let them, please. Because I shall be all right, really. I have the address of a hostel where I can stay—I got it from an English newspaper. And I’ll write from there. Thanks to you, I have money enough until I get a job in a flower shop, and I have clothes for a week. If they will, they can send my other things on.