One Coin in the Fountain

by Anita Charles

  She looked about her at the other passengers, and saw that more than one of them was wearing a worried expression. And there was no doubt that they had lost a great deal of altitude and one of the engines seemed to be making a most unpleasant noise, while the propeller on the starboard outer engine had stopped dead. Rose felt her heart do a kind of uneasy little descent into her stomach as she noticed it, and then immediately, she reassured herself because there were four engines. Possibly it was customary to rest an engine sometimes, and if only one of the other three wasn’t making such explosive noises, and they hadn’t started to rock and sway as if the aircraft itself had quite suddenly become possessed she would have listened to her own reassurances.

  But surely it was quite unlikely that an engine would be rested whilst flying over the Alps, and there was no doubt about it the air hostess, standing bracing herself against the door of the ladies' powder-room, was looking rather ghastly.

  As the huge aircraft swung wildly, those appallingly sharp peaks below drew nearer, and the roar of the exploding engine practically deafened them, the trim young woman in uniform managed to request:

  “Will you all please fasten your seat-belts! We’ve got to make a forced landing, but there isn’t really anything to worry about . . .!” Nothing to worry about . . .!

  Rose looked downwards, swallowed, shut her eyes, and then opened them again. She watched the green valleys rushing up at her, realizing that the pilot was doing his utmost to straighten out his machine, find some piece of level land once he had negotiated the first of those sickening peaks— it swung past even as Rose, completely fascinated, looked—and perform the miraculous feat of bringing all his passengers safely in to land.

  But Rose felt certain this was a feat he could not perform. But she felt a tremendous admiration for the supreme effort he was making just the same. And somehow she wasn’t afraid—not in the way she had always imagined she would be afraid if anything like this ever happened to her. Perhaps it was because she had been so desperately unhappy until thus suddenly diverted and the effects of the unhappiness were like an anaesthetic that had destroyed all acute sensitivity, and she merely thought how utterly strange it was that her life should end like this.

  In the way a drowning person reviews the whole of his life until the waves claim him, so she reviewed, in a brief, introspective flash, her last few weeks in Rome—Camillo and his bright blue sports car, lunches and dinners at the Villa de Lippi, Heather with a white pouch handbag underneath her arm, and wearing a powder-blue dress . . . The fountains of Rome, and particularly one into which she had thrown a coin. The wish she had made . . . Sir Laurence saying he was completely cured, and with no more illusions . . . Saying he was going back to Enderby! . . .

  She heard a child start to cry on the other side of the aisle, and the shrill note of fear in the mother’s voice as she attempted to soothe it. Another gigantic Alp slid past crazily . . .

  And then she closed her eyes again, and waited for the final crash.

  Hours later she was still very much as she had been when she started out that day, apart from the fact that one of her shoulders was badly bruised and she was dreadfully cold. Someone— she thought it was the navigator—had placed a coat about her shoulders, and she sat huddling it round her, while the freezing cold still successfully bit into every part part of her limbs, and it was more than she could do to prevent her teeth from chattering.

  Near to her there were other people, striving to keep warm—the woman with the child had a broken arm, and she kept moaning in pain, and Rose had cradled the terrified infant in her own arms, until the air hostess had relieved her of it. But the air hostess had so many tasks to perform, and was being so extraordinarily plucky about the way in which she went about them, that Rose simply had to offer to take the child again, and as she sat there with the tiny body cuddled up close in her arms, and the enormous stars dipped and wheeled above her, she was at moments complete-

  ly certain that this was only part of a nightmare.

  If it hadn’t been just a nightmare they really would have crashed, and everything would be over by now. The aircraft would have burst into flames, no one would have escaped, and when daylight dawned only their charred bodies would be found by the anxious searchers.

  But, being just part of a nightmare, they had all escaped—serious injury, that is. There were a good many minor casualties, and the first officer had a couple of broken ribs. The pilot kept going round and endeavouring to put a little heart into each of them, the medal ribbons and the captain’s indications of rank on his sleeve no longer showing, for the coat was acting as a pillow for the woman with the broken arm. Rose, when she looked at him through the star-pricked gloom and realized that he must be feeling the cold intensely, bereft, as he was, of his jacket, felt passionately thankful for his sake, as well as her own, that he had brought off a miracle, and that the only damage caused to his aircraft in landing was a smashed undercarriage.

  He approached her now as she sat with the sleeping baby in her arms, and told her that dawn wasn’t far off. And as soon as it was daylight help would reach them, and once help reached them there would be food and warm beds—and, perhaps what they wanted more than anything else, hot and reviving drinks!

  Rose watched the first pink light come stealing over the snow peaks. It was like a blush, she thought, in a bemused fashion—like a blush on the face of a very young girl. And when it spread wildly in all directions, and the sun appeared like a ball of fire, the numbness which had every part of her in its grip seemed to melt a little, and it was almost as if a feeling of hope invaded her heart.

  Later she was assisted down the mountain-side and into a car, and very soon after that she was in bed in the wooden-walled room of a little inn. She slept beneath the huge feather-filled quilt as if she had no intention ever of waking again; but when she finally did wake a rosy-cheeked daughter of the innkeeper brought her a bowl of wonderful broth which actually seemed to put new life into her, and although her shoulder was very sore and she had difficulty in dressing, once she finally was dressed she was able to insist that she didn’t need any special attention. The mother with the baby had been taken straight to hospital, and one or two elderly passengers had also received priority treatment. But Rose had been sleeping so peacefully that no one had disturbed her, and when she made her way out into the sunshine she was glad that she was still up here in the mountains, and had not been whisked away to so-called civilization.

  Here in the mountains, with all the gladness of a new day about her, flowery meadows like flowery skirts trailing down to the valley, and the shining peaks above her, she could almost blot out the intervening months and believe that she was still at Gerhardt and this was one of the trips up into the mountains they had sometimes made. In which case there would be a mistress ready to supervise everything, and she would have nothing at all to worry about, and life would be quite uncomplicated. The future would be just something that someone would take care of.

  And it was when she thought of that that she realized she was no longer living in the past, and that it was the future that had caught up with her, and which from now on she had got to cope with alone. There was no one—no one—who would have any say in her affairs, and where she went from here, and when she went, was something that concerned only herself.

  But she felt so unutterably weary, and so deathly tired still, and the gnawing pain in her shoulder made her feel a little sick. The thought that she had no one to turn to almost appalled her, for she was used to turning to someone, and this wasn’t a very good time to start standing on one’s own feet. Not when she dreaded even the thought of the future, when it seemed nothing but a barren wilderness stretching in front of her, when her heart was sick with longing for even the sound of one man’s voice—just to hear him say: “Poor little Rose!” in a lightly compassionate tone, while he smiled at her as if she was somehow very young and foolish and ought not to entertain ideas about carving out a career for herse
lf, and living in a flat in Paris.

  She stared through eyes that were suddenly so full of tears that there wasn’t any view at all of the village street, and although the sun felt hot as she sat on a bench outside the inn, her hands and her feet and every part of her was cold.

  She was cold with dread—dread of her empty future.

  A car drew up before the inn, but she hardly noticed it as the single passenger alighted and said something to the driver, who drove off as if he had received instructions to turn, or perhaps to disappear altogether. Rose only partly realized that the car was moving off again, and then she felt someone standing beside her, and a hand touched her shoulder. A voice that was ragged with feeling spoke her name.

  “Rose!”

  She looked up. The tears were still there in her eyes, and it was impossible to blink them away in such a hurry that she could see clearly, and as it was, the familiar figure that she did vaguely make out through the blur could be nothing more than a figment of her slightly fevered imagination—or so she thought.

  “Rose!” He sat down on the bench beside her and put both arms around her and held her as if she was a treasure he had recovered. “Oh, Rose!” he whispered.

  And although a man wearing a battered hat and enormously thick-soled boots with spikes in them was marshalling a couple of cows with bells jangling on leather collars round their necks through the village, and a child was standing still and watching them with interest, he started to kiss away all the tears from her eyes.

  CHAPTER XVII

  About ten minutes later Rose became aware of the child, but by that time the cows had disappeared, and so had the man with the battered hat. Sir Laurence, after striving to extract information from her as to the extent of bruising her shoulder had suffered, and whether or not she was hurt anywhere else, stood up and pulled her gently to her feet, looking into her bemused eyes.

  “Isn’t there somewhere where we can be alone. Rose?” he asked. “I can’t go on talking to you out here.”

  “There’s a little sitting-room,” she said. But she sounded like someone who was only half awake, and by no means certain that she was even half awake. “It wasn’t occupied a little while ago.”

  “Then we’ll go there,” he said.

  Inside the sitting-room, with its bowl of blue gentians on a centre table, he put her into the one comfortable chair and then stood looking down at her. The colour rolled hotly, painfully over her face and neck, and all her pallor vanished. Of course he hadn’t really kissed her—that had been just part of an hallucination following upon the utter amazement of seeing him so suddenly— and if he had, well, it was because the sight of her had probably upset him. She knew she was looking shocked and strained, in spite of her excellent night’s rest, and although she was wearing a fresh white blouse with her suit, the suit itself bore evidence of one very long night’s vigil during which it had had to make contact with the rough earth.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized, the words tumbling in painful embarrassment from her lips, “that I was being rather—rather silly—when you arrived just now! There was no reason why I should sit there

  crying in the open, because everyone has been so kind to me—”

  “Rose!” He took the seat beside her and bent over her and took hold of both her hands. It might have been the dimness of the little room, but she thought he looked grey and rather gaunt, but whether from fatigue or anxiety she found it impossible to decide. “Have you any idea what a nightmare time I’ve lived through—waiting first for news and then not certain how I was going to find you . . .”

  His eyes held an expression she had never seen in them before, and it set her weary pulses pounding sluggishly, while concern because he looked as he did tugged at every sensitive nerve in her make-up.

  “I—I can’t think how you knew . . .”

  “Then you really imagined I would go away and not—not concern myself about you anymore? Rose!” The reproach in his voice hurt her very acutely. “I had every intention of calling on both you and Mrs. Wilson-Plunkett before I finally left, but you tore away from the flat and left me so suddenly . . . Rose,” hardly able to enunciate, “why did you do it?” “Leave—Rome, you mean?” she asked faintly.

  “With nothing but a note left behind, and practically no money . . . Mrs. Wilson-Plunkett told me you couldn’t have very much!”

  “I had enough,” she whispered.

  “Of course I would have followed you to Paris.” His hands tightened convulsively on hers, and he drew them up until they rested against his chest. “I did fly to Paris that same night, and it was when I arrived there that I heard that the afternoon flight”—he swallowed—“the afternoon flight was hours overdue! Rose, can you imagine how I felt? Can you, for one single instant, imagine how I felt?”

  Her fingers trembled in his. She was beginning to believe now not only that he had kissed her, but that his arms had actually held her out there in the front of the inn as if he had lived with the nightmare certainty that the opportunity was never going to be his, and the miracle of finding her practically unhurt made him decline ever to part with her again. She was certain now that it wasn’t just fatigue in his face, and his eyes looked as if he couldn’t possibly have endured much more.

  “But the last time you saw me,” she breathed huskily, “you told me you had lost faith in everyone. I was certain you particularly meant me!”

  “Darling, I wanted to hurt you,” he told her. “You seemed to have so little belief in me—you thought me so weak—and rather despicable! You were so eager to believe that I would take back Heather—even marry Lola Bardoli! —although I had already asked you to marry me! You even thought I was willing to marry you in order to protect myself from two women I was afraid of! It made me feel—pretty sick!”

  “But—why did you ask me to marry you?”

  “Why?” He looked down at her with eyes so dark with concentrated feeling that, for the first time for weeks, the almost tragic suggestion of wistfulness that had dwelt at the back of her own large eyes seemed to vanish like morning mist when the sun touches it, and for the first time a gleam of actual hopefulness took its place and lit them.

  “It wasn’t only because—because you wanted to— take care of me . . .?”

  “I’ve wanted to take care of you, my darling child,” he told her, his voice so deep and quiet that it seemed to reach out and enfold her in a warm, protecting clasp, “from the moment I first saw you, when you no longer had either a mother or a father to do that for you! All through the five years I liked to feel I was responsible for you I had a particular desire to make you happy, and when you came home to Enderby for holidays I loved seeing you there. Before I met Heather and, for some reason, lost my head about her, I had a kind of half-formed plan at the back of my mind that when you finished with school you and I would travel about together and see something of the world . . . I had even thought out all the places we would visit, and the kind of things we would do in those places! Rome was one of them! . .

  .” He looked down at the hands he was holding crushed against his chest, and the tenderness round his mouth was like a living, breathing thing. "There was so much I was going to show you in Rome! . . .”

  “You did show me—quite a lot,” she reminded him.

  “Not nearly as much as your Italian admirers!” And then his eyes were lifted to her appealingly.

  “I failed you, Rose, because I met Heather . . . But I swear to you that if it was love I ever felt for her it died on the afternoon she left me waiting for her in the church at Farnhurst! By evening of that same day I wouldn’t have taken her back under any circumstances, and the next day, when we drove to Enderby, I was so filled with rage because I’d been so abominably used—rage and nothing else! —that I wasn’t really a safe person to be with! I even wanted to hurt you, who’d never done me any harm in your life!”

  “Then you do believe that I—never would have done you any harm?” she managed in a slightly crac
ked voice, because weariness was rushing up over her again, her bruised shoulder was aching like a toothache, and exhaustion showed plainly in her face.

  “My beloved little Rose!” He went down on his knees beside her and gathered her close in his arms. “I ought not to be talking to you like this now—I’m taking you back in the car I hired to Zurich, where that shoulder of yours is going to be looked at, and a doctor will tell me whether you really are all right— but before we leave here you must understand how much I love you! Your eyes have haunted me ever since that last night at Enderby, and when I saw you again in Rome I knew that if only I’d had the sense and waited . . .!”

  He groaned suddenly, so full of regret for the wasted weeks and months that she could almost feel it coursing through him, and her own love yearned to comfort and reassure him. She nestled against him like a tired child, and although her eyes were so heavy that she could hardly lift them to his face, she did manage to do so.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” she whispered, “so long as you do know—now—that Heather wasn't so important. . .”

  “She wasn’t in the least important,” he assured her, almost fiercely. “I only thought she was! But you— you, my adored, most precious, heart’s-darling of a Rose!—so long as I live you’ll be the only really important thing in my life! The one thing that will make my life worth living! . . . That is,” he added, so humbly and pleadingly that it almost hurt her, “if you think you can trust me, Rose? To look after you and cherish you as a man cherishes a beloved wife! If you’ll think again and then say ‘yes’ and marry me!” For answer Rose again lifted her face to his, and this time her eyes openly implored him to kiss her. She wasn’t capable just then of pretence—she hadn’t any pride, or anything remotely resembling pride where he was concerned, and he had said enough to fill her with a rapture that would grow greater as her weariness ebbed. But just then she wanted to feel the touch of his lips, as she had felt it once before—not merely on her wet eyelids, but on her quivering