Dear Intruder

by Jane Arbor

  She had decided to take the logical course of going out to tease them for unpunctuality when the door opened behind her. Her fingers slipped into a little crash of discords and she turned to see that Dion—alone—stood on the threshold.

  He shut the door slowly and came forward until he was quite close to her. His eyes were hard and searching and his wry mouth, not made for grimness, was grim now. Very formally, as if they were strangers, he said, ‘I’m sorry Jenny and I are so late. But she’s gone to bed now and she doesn’t want you to keep supper for her.’

  ‘She must have something! I’ll go and see—’

  ‘She told me to ask you not to go to her to-night. She—doesn’t want to see you.’

  On the defensive and really frightened now, Bridget protested, ‘That’s absurd!’

  ‘She doesn’t think so. You see, while we were out to-day she had a letter from Gordon Trent. Her first since he returned to England and, according to it, it’s to be her last.’

  Unguardedly Bridget explained, ‘He’s written to her? But he promised—’

  ‘Whatever he may have promised you,’ Dion cut in, ‘he has broken it to write to Jenny to tell her that, finding himself in too delicate a position between the two of you, he has decided to break his contract with Cion Eigel and won’t be coming back. He implies that, loving and respecting her as he does, this hurts him more than it does her, but because of you he thinks it best, and trusts she’ll understand. He adds in a rather characteristic postscript that it has been “nice” knowing her anyway!’

  Aghast at the man’s clumsy cruelty, Bridget muttered almost to herself, ‘I thought at least he could have been trusted not to hurt her so. There wasn’t any need—’

  Dion pounced, ‘Nor any need for the ungentlemanliness of implicating you, I suppose? Nor for destroying Jenny’s illusion of your loyalty to her? A “loyalty” that doesn’t seem to have blinked at taking from her what you wanted for yourself.’

  All colour drained from Bridget’s face. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think you know. Otherwise there’d be no “delicate situation’ for the fellow to extricate himself from. No situation in which, finding he couldn’t escape from your tenacity, he decided to cut away from you both!’

  ‘My tenacity? Did he say that?’

  ‘His choice of word. I’m quoting him,’ said Dion drily.

  ‘Implying that I—? That—that advances to him came from me?’

  ‘Well I wouldn’t hold a brief for the strength of his feelings, but he was obviously feeling cheated of Jenny, and you could hardly expect him to have regard to your modest sensibilities. Bridget’—Dion came a step nearer and looked down at her as she leaned back against the piano keyboard—‘I’ve got to say this, whether you like it or not. I think the man is a cad. I’ve always thought so. And I wouldn’t listen to a word of this if Jenny hadn’t to be convinced that it isn’t true—if it isn’t. But she thinks the evidence piles up. And, I confess, so do I...’

  ‘What does Jenny believe?’ asked Bridget quietly.

  ‘That you deliberately interfered between Trent and her for your own purposes. Not difficult, she thinks, to guess what they were. She says you deliberately misled her to believe you didn’t care for him, but you made it too clear you didn’t want them to be thrown together over the Rowan Castle job; and when they had had a trivial quarrel you made a great deal of it and begged her not to be the first to make it up.’

  ‘And you? What do you believe?’

  ‘Do you want the truth?’

  ‘Please—’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t go as far as your ungallant suitor and accuse you of making all the running. But on the face of it you’ve never appeared—unwilling. Anyway, for Jenny that night of my TV thing was a turning point. You and Trent were alone together on both journeys for hours, and after that he never made any attempt to see her again. Can you—or can’t you—deny that something vital did happen between you and him that night—a final move which snatched him from Jenny and which you had engineered?’

  Bridget moistened her dry lips. ‘I don’t deny it,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t?’ His stare was incredulous and newly hostile. ‘You intentionally set about separating them, and that night you succeeded?’

  ‘Yes, I did. But not in the way you mean...’

  ‘Not in the way I mean! As if there were any two ways about that sort of meanness between one woman and another, except in the degree of cleverness with which it’s done! And having despatched Jenny, I suppose it won’t take half as much skill to overcome his present rather defeatist attitude? And perhaps, with Jenny still on the scene, it suits you well enough not to have him at quite such close quarters as Cion Eigel? There are plenty of other rendezvous, after all—’

  At his misjudgment of a motive he hadn’t given her a chance to explain Bridget’s hostility leaped to match his. ‘You make no margin for error, do you?’ she said coldly.

  ‘If there is any, Jenny would be glad to know!’

  ‘Jenny wouldn’t understand...’

  ‘You’re right, she wouldn’t. And neither do I. Now say it’s no business of mine and I’ll agree. But Jenny made it so.’

  ‘Neither of you has a right to judge me unheard. I know he never cared for her!’

  ‘If that’s true, who should be in a better position than you to know it? And if it isn’t, I daresay it wasn’t too difficult to make yourself—as well as that spalpeen—believe it?’

  The level, measured cynicism, clearly intended to rouse her further, beat only emptily against the barrier of Bridget’s gathered pride. Now, think what he might, she would not give an inch! She turned away. ‘This is an argument that’s only embittering us both,’ she said wearily.

  ‘Right again. It is,’ came his clipped agreement. ‘And as it’s likely to trouble our silence as well as our words, perhaps we’d better keep our distance.’

  ‘That isn’t going to be easy.’

  ‘Easy enough. I can leave for Aran to-night instead of a fortnight’s hence.’

  ‘Perhaps that might be best.’ Nothing of her blind despair at the realisation that this time he would not return to Tullabor was betrayed in Bridget’s tone. She took a step past him towards the door and was utterly unprepared for the swift movement with which he caught roughly at her shoulders and turned her about to face him.

  She made of her very rigidity within his grip a disdainful ‘What now?’ But she had not to wait to know. She had time only to notice the pulse that throbbed knottily in his temple and then, for the second time that day, his lips sought hers.

  The first time there had been an understanding, a tenderness born of their companionship which had not been altogether spoiled even by the knowledge that, indulging it, she had wronged Tara. But in this hard pressure on her mouth there was nothing, Bridget felt, but a statement of insult with which to leave her betrayed, stripped, while he remained untouched.

  He let her go a second afterwards and it was he, not she, who left the room first. She heard him go to his study and then upstairs, and knew instinctively that he would contrive that they would not meet again alone before he left.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The next morning, if only to escape the vague sense of doom which brooded over her dreams, Bridget deliberately dragged herself awake to face what the day held.

  Dion had gone. That was her first conscious thought as last night’s memories flooded back.

  He had fetched his car from the hotel garage and had put into it a single suitcase and some of the loose luggage with which he had arrived. He had seen her again to hand her a cheque, to tell her that he would arrange about the rest of his things, and to ask her to say good-bye for him to Jenny and the children. He did some telephoning, though she did not know if he had called Tara. It was nearly dark before he left to drive through the night to the Atlantic coast, and with her last sight of the old tourer racketing away down Tullabor street, it was as if its winking tail-light carried a
mocking signal of finality for her.

  The door of the garden-room—always inexorably closed when Dion had been working—had been flung wide and he had evidently made an effort to tidy the room before leaving. The effect was so alien, so utterly empty of Dion’s personality, that she had had to swallow hard against the rising ache of tears in her throat. Plenty of his belongings still here, yet nothing of him. And the only thing which marred the unaccustomed orderliness about her was the spool of film which lay on the floor beside the waste paper basket and which mechanically—because tidying behind Dion had become automatic—she stooped for, only to realise why it was there ... She had weighted it in her palm, feeling quite certain that its abandonment had been deliberate. For that afternoon, watching Dion remove from his camera and seal the complete film of his snapshots of her, she had noticed him write something on it, and the day’s date was written on the spool she held. So probably only his angry, uncertain aim had kept it earlier from the oblivion of the waste paper basket, and there had been wry, bitter satisfaction for her in dropping it there herself.

  But now to-day she must face explaining his abrupt departure and continued absence to Kate, to the children. Not to Jenny, though. For Jenny knew all there was to know already. Or almost all.

  Jenny ... Harsh memories of last night there too. Upon her resolve that no more shielding of Jenny from the truth was possible she had gone straight to her from the garden-room, knowing that there could be no tempering, no smoothing over of what she had to say.

  The telling had not taken long. And when Jenny, utterly abandoned to her grief, had turned to her to sob out her humiliation in her arms, she had held her in silence, leaving her to the luxury of tears.

  Perhaps it was a hopeful sign that Jenny had seemed to mind her humiliation at Trent’s hands as much as she cared that she would never see him again. And her remorse about Bridget was complete. Through her sobs she had gasped, ‘You see, for weeks I’d been fighting against believing that you were turning me against Gordon because you wanted him for yourself. But it looked like that. Then, when we’d had that quarrel, you did everything to dissuade me from making it up with him, and that was when I thought I knew. You’d let him take you to Dublin that night, and I was foisted on Patrick both ways...’

  ‘You chose Patrick,’ Bridget reminded her. ‘I was proud for you that you had enough spirit to rebuff Trent. But I was afraid it might not last.’

  ‘As much as anything, it was to try to get proof about—about you and him,’ Jenny had admitted shamefacedly. ‘And after that night what was I to think? He never willingly spoke to me again.’

  ‘You did see him again then?’

  ‘I had to. On the last day of term I waited for him in the corridor outside Mr. Steven’s study. It was the only place I could be certain of seeing him alone. But when I asked him what was the matter he only said, “You’d better ask Bridget.”’

  Above her bowed head Bridget had said wearily, ‘You forget that I’d never made any secret of the fact that I disliked the man. Wasn’t that enough?’

  ‘I—I sort of argued that lots of love-affairs begin with two people heartily disliking each other!’

  ‘Oh, Jenny, as if I’d keep up the fiction of my dislike in order to deceive you as to my real feelings! But it was all these fears and suspicions of me that you confided to Dion to-night?’

  ‘I hadn’t meant anyone to know, not even you. But when Dion came to meet me he must have seen that I’d been crying, and you know how gentle he is with anyone who’s in trouble. Before long I’d told him everything.’

  ‘If only you’d taken Trent’s advice and asked me, I would have told you the truth. Only I confess I was afraid, Jenny, that you’d hate me for interfering and would never forgive me for having known all along that he’d just been laughing at you, as it were. But I suppose it was too much to hope, as I did, that perhaps I need never tell you. Or if I ever did, that by then you’d have found somebody else and wouldn’t care.’

  Jenny had raised her head slowly. ‘Somebody else? There couldn’t be...’

  ‘What about Patrick?’

  ‘Patrick? After Gordon? He’s only a boy!’

  ‘Well, what are you?’ At last Bridget had ventured to shake her gently, chidingly, and to get an answering watery smile for her pains. ‘And Patrick is awfully fond of you, you know. Has he asked you yet to stay with his people at Black Rock? He meant to, I know.’

  ‘Yes, he did ask me,’ said Jenny listlessly.

  ‘And will you go?’

  But Jenny had not wanted to promise, and Bridget hadn’t pressed her. And Jenny had said, ‘I still don’t understand why Dion went off like that. Why did he?’

  ‘You had made your accusations of me pretty convincing,’ Bridget had reminded her.

  ‘But surely you told him the truth too?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘He was judging me on an issue that had nothing to do with him.’

  ‘Did you tell him so?’

  ‘No. I was too angry, and when he said he would leave, I thought it best to let him go.’

  ‘But you can’t! Not Dion—he’s our friend! He must come back. If you’re too proud to ask him, I will...’

  ‘No, Jenny—please. You’ll do nothing of the sort.’ Bridget had hated the sound of her cold, authoritative tone. But somehow she had had to command Jenny’s silence. For now in the grey dawn she faced the truth.

  She had let Dion go, not so much for angry pride’s sake as for fear of herself. For fear of the enduring hunger to feel his arms about her again, though not in last night’s embrace which had been more of an assault than a caress. That was why she let him go. To ease the way to forgetting him. While he walked with Tara, she must learn to walk alone.

  The children accepted Dion’s departure equably enough. Before his present mission to America their own father had come and gone unexpectedly and frequently overnight, and they had no reason to question that their adored ‘Mr. Dion’ would not return as suddenly as he had gone.

  This belief was borne out by Kate, who reported that Dion had told her he was off and that she had said he must be mad to be going among ‘thim island savages’ weeks before he need.

  In any case, Dion’s cheque covered his occupation of his rooms until the end of September, and as Bridget expected he might not want to collect his things before then, there was a respite of several weeks before she need tell Kate or the children that he would almost certainly not return.

  In anticipation of the Stevens’ departure for the coast Patrick Byrd had gone home at last. But before he went he had pressed his invitation to Jenny and she had agreed to go to Black Rock early in September. Thereafter he rang her up almost daily, and Bridget believed she looked forward to hearing the telephone ring and to the thrust-and-parry of the long flirtatious conversations he held her to. Once Bridget overheard her protest, ‘No, Patrick, you must ring off now!’ and then laugh in quite her old, bubbling way at his reply. Thanks to Patrick, Jenny’s scars were beginning to heal.

  Still Tara had given no sign of the friendship which she had offered and accepted so easily. Since the end of term there had been no reason why they should meet except at each other’s invitation, and Bridget felt she had done her part by ringing up—at short notice certainly—once to ask the other girl to tea and once to join a picnic for the children. But on both occasions Tara had been out and had made no move herself since.

  Then, on the day before she was to leave for Clare with her parents, she came over. Jenny had taken the four children to a film matinee in Ardvar; Kate had ‘stepped across’ to help with the wedding preparations of a niece of Miss O’Hanlon’s who was to be married from there, and Bridget was alone.

  There was nothing starry-eyed about Tara to-day. She was as moodily restless as at their first meeting.

  In answer to Bridget’s question as to why they had seen nothing of her for so long, she said impatiently: ‘Yo
u must have realised that I wasn’t particularly anxious to see more of Dion than I could help. I’ve still got some pride! It was a relief when I heard from Patrick that he’d gone out to Aran already. But even coming to-day wasn’t easy.’

  Quite bewildered by the reference to Dion, Bridget asked, ‘Not easy, Tara? Why shouldn’t it be?’

  Tara shrugged. ‘You could have been laughing at me—or pitying me. Dion at least didn’t laugh. But he bent over backwards in his efforts not to hurt my feelings, which I minded almost as much...’

  ‘Tara dear, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do explain!’

  ‘There isn’t anything to explain, except what you must know already—that Dion isn’t in love with me any longer, if he ever was. I suppose I’ve got to believe that you meant well when you said you were sure he was, but you must know by now that it wasn’t true!’

  Bridget said quietly, ‘I was quite sincere when I said it. You must believe that. And since then there’s been nothing to make me think differently. Nothing at all.’

  ‘You’re not a very good judge, are you?’ retorted Tara. And then, as if she realised the unnecessary rudeness of that, ‘Not your fault, really. I was only too ready to snatch at the chance, and I rushed my fences when that letter turned up. As soon as I took it away from Trent I saw that the only words on the paper—“Dearest Tara, Last night was—” had really been written by Dion, which confirmed, I thought, what you had suggested.’

  ‘And didn’t it? A man doesn’t call a woman “Dearest” unless he does love her, surely?’ Bridget made herself reply.

  Tara shrugged again. ‘Perhaps not, but he never completed the letter, remember. When he took me home that night he told me that the impulse to write it was over three years old, and though he was as gentle about it as only Dion can be at times, I was left in no doubt that he’d known for a very long time that he’d never loved me in the way you meant. It was pretty humiliating hearing, you may imagine, besides leaving to wonder, “What now for me?”’