by Jane Arbor
So this was it! It meant that Hope’s own crucial bridge had to be crossed at once, and she felt sick at heart at the prospect. And something of her depression must have come through when she told Barbara about the edict, for Barbara offered to break the news to Craig herself.
Hope thanked her, but refused. Craig would probably be difficult, but that she had to face.
‘Well, don’t tell him baldly at the office,’ Barbara suggested. ‘Let me ask him to dinner on Sunday night; afterwards I’ll make myself scarce, putting Crispin to bed, and with Craig mellowed by a good meal and a punch or two, you can tackle him then.’
But Hope insisted that it was an office affair and must be dealt with in office hours. Craig would almost certainly make difficulties, but he would have to accept that she must go. And anyway, she wasn’t afraid of him. What made Barbara think she was?
Throughout a restless night she was rehearsing the interview. She would say this; Craig would reply that. He would be obstructive. She would have to be firm. Firm? Impersonal? Keeping her distance, as he would keep his?
While they talked, just a desk’s width between them, and presently half the world—?
She decided to postpone the ordeal until the end of the day, so that after it they could part naturally for the night as usual. All she counted on was that they should be alone together in the office at going-home time, and they were. But the announcement which she had come to describe to herself as an ultimatum had about as much impact and explosion as a damp squib.
For to the news that she was expected back in England after Easter, and that between now and then she proposed to undertake the work she had come to do—the training of a secretary who would take her place, Craig said mildly, ‘Yes, well, this was to be expected. Have you anyone in mind who could measure up to the job?’
This was a point which Hope hadn’t expected to reach until after much argument, and perversely she felt almost cheated of a fight. She mentioned the senior clerk in the outer office. ‘There’s Nicola St. John,’ she said. ‘What about her?’
‘The one with her pigtails pinned to the top of her head, as if she were about to take a bath?’
‘That’s the one. She’s going to night-school, learning book-keeping, and she’s very keen to get on.’
‘They all say that when one asks them what makes them think they can handle a job. What makes you think she’s equal to it?’
Hope told her impressions of Nicola—that she was intelligent and adaptable and well-mannered—and looking Craig straight in the eye, added, ‘She also qualifies in one respect which I believe you find essential.’
He looked interested. ‘Indeed? And what’s that?’
‘She has a steady boy-friend, so I imagine she’s proof against the kind of infatuation against which you thought you had to warn me.’
‘Without your needing warning, of course. But tell me, how long have you been storing up that one to throw at me?’ Craig asked.
‘I hadn’t stored it up. It had just occurred to me as a facet of Nicola St John which I thought would appeal to you.’
‘As it does,’ he agreed equably. ‘Astute of you to realise it. All right. In the morning, ask her to come to see me, and you can start work on her after that. I take it that you mean this as your notice to me?’
‘Yes, please,’ said Hope, signing a private doom with the words.
‘I thought so, and I accept it.’ He took a bunch of keys from his desktop and stood up. ‘Meanwhile, just now I have a job for you which isn’t strictly in your line of duty. Bring a notepad with you, will you? We’re going up to the House.’
In his car on the way he explained that Victoire’s houseman and woman had left that morning, but would be coming back to pack some things to be sent after her, working from a list which he proposed to dictate to Hope, and which he would leave for their guidance.
He unlocked the front door and led the way into the cool elegant hall. Dangling the keys from a forefinger, ‘Have you ever seen over the whole house?’ he asked.
‘Just the drawing-room where you brought me to the party, and Crispin’s little suite and the kitchen where the three of us had lunch,’ said Hope.
‘None of the rest down here? Nor the main rooms of the first floor? Well, this is the library—’ he crossed the hall to open a door. ‘And this, the main dining-salon, and this, a smaller one for family meals.’ He waited while Hope looked round admiringly, touching the sheen of antique furniture and treading rich rugs and marble underfoot. They went side by side up the great curve of the main staircase and into and out of rooms aglow in the evening sunlight and finally into a long gallery, neither a living-room nor a bedroom, but a showplace for fine glass and tapestries and portraits, some of them dark with age.
Craig pointed to them. ‘The de Fayes, male and female, from the seventeenth century on. This one, the first de Faye to own Belle Rose, and the builder of the house. This, his second son who inherited; his eldest died young of yellow fever. Crispin’s great-great-great-grandfather, who married three times; and here, his grandfather and his mother, Roland’s first wife. Roland himself isn’t here. As you can see, the de Faye men postponed getting themselves painted until they were pretty rotund and showed off lace and leather and good cloth to advantage, and Roland didn’t live to see that day. But they had their women painted while they were young and as beautiful as they were going to be.’ As if in answer to a question Hope hadn’t asked, he added, ‘Victoire isn’t here. She’s made a special grievance of Roland’s not having arranged it while he was alive, though I doubt if he would have been in a hurry, had he lived.’
‘He wouldn’t? Why not?’ Hope asked.
‘She was never the wife he deserved, and he had admitted his mistake before he died, which was why he gave me the guardianship of Crispin, whom she has always resented, and almost hated when she learned the contents of Roland’s will.’ Craig crossed to one of the deep windows. ‘What do you think of the view from here? It’s rather special, I’ve always thought.’
It was. It was possible to see the full extent of the gardens, the lawns ringed about by flowering shrubs, with terraced levels dropping down to a glimpse of water, an artificial pool, on the far bank of which a group of coconut palms made of their high fronds a filigree pattern against the sky. The backcloth to the scene was the dark mass of a small banana grove—the whole a study in greens and browns and colour, gently stirring at the impulse of the evening wind.
Standing beside Craig, Hope heard him saying, ‘I don’t think Victoire will come back this time.’
‘Not come back?’ Hope queried. ‘Surely—?’
‘No. I’d say the next thing we shall hear of her will be that she’s marrying again.’
‘But this is her house! She can’t just abandon it!’
‘It’s not hers. It’s Crispin’s. The estate is entailed to him, and the house goes with it.’ Craig paused. ‘I suppose you’re set upon going back to. England when you leave the office? You wouldn’t consider the job of caretaker here instead?’
‘Caretaker! Here?’ Hope wagged a finger downward towards the floor by way of emphasis. ‘Caretaker of this house?’
‘Well, perhaps in a French island, chatelaine sounds more elegant—no?’
‘But the idea is absurd! I couldn’t—how could I? You mean—keep it open for Crispin while he’s away at school? But how could I possibly manage a house this size and of this elegance—alone?’
If it hadn’t been for the seriously intent look on Craig’s face she wouldn’t have asked even so many questions; she would have known he hadn’t meant his own. But next he was saying, ‘I wasn’t suggesting you should take it on alone. In fact I propose to move in as locum tenens for Crispin myself.’
Hope moved her head bewilderedly from side to side. This was an impossible exchange—utterly cloud-cuckoo!
She said faintly, ‘You propose to? Well then—?’ and left it there.
‘Well then?’ he echoed in mimicr
y. ‘Well then—what?’
‘Well then—if you do that, you’ll have Barbara. You mean you’ll live here?’
‘As Crispin’s tenant, yes.’
‘After you’re married?’
‘I’d hope to.’
‘Married to Barbara? Then you couldn’t need me around as caretaker or—or anything else.’ She turned away abruptly. ‘Let’s go. I don’t find any of this funny, I’m afraid. And I’m surprised that you should.’
Craig said, ‘Then you can hold your surprise. For I don’t.’ He caught at her wrist and turned her roughly. ‘I’m serious, Hope. I am going to live here, and I do need you here with me. You. Not Barbara, nor anyone else. You. Just you. Listen, I’m asking you to marry me, ice-girl mine. And if you find that funny, then!’
She stared, wide-eyed. She wasn’t hearing this, was she? From Craig—the aloof, the beloved out-of-reach, the not-for-her? She faltered, ‘But this isn’t fair. You’re going to marry Barbara, and I’m—I mean, I’ve tried to be glad for you. When you told me, I—’
‘But what did I tell you?’ He had taken both her hands now and drew her close to him. ‘If I remember, I asked you what you would say if I told you I had thoughts of proposing to Barbara.’
‘Well?’
‘But that was a trick question, my heart, designed to trap. And Barbara’s idea, not mine.’
‘You’re saying’—Hope worked it out wonderingly—‘that you weren’t really meaning to ask her? Just—?’
‘Just testing your reaction. When I told Barbara what I’ve come to feel for you, she said she’d already guessed, and that if I was afraid to chance my arm—as I have been—I’d be bound to find out whether you cared in return if I sprang it on you that proposing to her was in my mind. No girl, she said, could hide her shock if the news meant anything to her emotionally. We agreed I mustn’t claim anything definite between us, or you would ask awkward questions later about what had happened to our romance. So we’ve kept you guessing, and all I asked you at that time was, What would you say if—? and waited for the result.’
‘And—and what was the result?’
‘I wasn’t sure. Shock? You didn’t appear to have flickered an eyelash, and within seconds you were wishing Barbara and me joy of each other. But there was still something—something in the way you seemed to “protest too much” when I pressed you. And somehow no spontaneity. If you were really glad, I’d have expected you to bubble a bit—wanting to know the hows and the whys, and asking about our plans. Instead, after saying in so many words that you were glad about it, you seemed to want to get it out of the way. And so, either A—you were genuinely glad. Or B—you possessed the poker-face of all time. I reported to Barbara that I couldn’t decide which; she refused to believe that if you were shocked, you could have hidden it, and that if we kept you guessing for a while, sooner or later the questions you asked would—how do the politicians put it?—“declare your interest”.’
‘And you agreed?’
‘Only to go along with her daft scheme while I chose my own time for asking you to marry me, confessing all this first, as I knew I would have to. And then what happens? I don’t even get to choose my time. You force it on me by calmly giving in your notice! Upon which I had to do some deadpan face work while I thought fast and laid my plans to lure you here. To ask you—To beg of you—But I’ve told you what—’
For Hope, disbelief and a kind of precarious wonderment was gradually turning to an awed acceptance of the humble honesty of his pleading. Against all likelihood or apparent reason, he was offering her a sweet unlooked-for power with him; she could dare to believe he actually wanted of her all that she had to give. A little drunk with the heady knowledge, she ventured to tease him, ‘What a lot of trouble we’d all have been saved, if only you’d questioned that second alternative of yours!’
His flecked eyes sparked and the ‘dark’ voice of her early mental picture of him said, ‘You’re telling me that if I had—?’
Teasing still, ‘Who knows? After all, even Barbara couldn’t guess the amount of training I’ve put in at not “flicking an eyelash” of emotion in your direction!’
He recoiled. ‘You’re throwing that in my face again!’
‘You had underlined it. “You have been warned”, you said.’
‘I deserved to have my tongue cut out! But I was so tired of the starry-eyed hero-worshippers I seemed to collect and how could I have known how you were going to grow into my thoughts and my life with every day that passed? Didn’t you realise how I resented that ladder-climbing executive type of yours? Obviously not, for you left it to Barbara to tell me that he’d gone back to England with his career Coming First with him. But I kissed you, didn’t I? Didn’t that tell you anything at the time?’
‘Only that it was the custom of the country, after I’d seen the green ray.’
‘And you believed me—of that kiss? Oh yes, I had the “custom” story ready, in case what I was trying to say to you didn’t get through. When I thought it had—when you melted a little, seemed to want me ... like that; want me as I wanted you, I thought I needn’t use the story and we could go on from there. But then you froze again—’
‘I had to freeze; I dared not let myself think you were in earnest. There’d been nothing between us to let me hope you were.’
‘And, fool that I was, I let you get away. But I did send you back to Barbara, knowing, that she could blow my phoney bit of folk-lore out of the sky. Upon which, I kidded myself, you might be tempted to ask yourself why I’d really kissed you like that, and begin to be curious about the answer.’
‘But I did believe I had to be kissed, as a kind of forfeit thing on seeing the ray. And that night I didn’t tell Barbara I’d seen it with you.’
‘Obviously, or she would have put you right. But why didn’t you tell her?’
Hope admitted, ‘A little, I think, because I wanted to hug to myself the memory of your kissing me; to—treasure it. And also because, though you weren’t seeing Barbara any longer, I thought she was still in love with you, and that hearing you’d kissed me, even so trivially, might hurt her. And when I did tell her, after you’d come back to her, all she said about the kiss was that it was an age-old thing. Even then she didn’t tell me the truth.’
Craig laughed. ‘The devious wench! Though, come to think of it, if kissing isn’t age-old, what is?’ He bent to put his lips lightly upon Hope’s. ‘That’s to be going on with—And Barbara has never been in love with me, you know. Nor I with her. She loved Nelson too much to be able to let any man take his place with her. In time she may be able to, but not yet. Meanwhile, she’s picked up her threads alone, and she is content in her fashion. As for my loving her—no, except as a dear, dear friend. She has never had the other kind of magic for me, as you have.’
‘You kiss her too.’
‘Is that Demon Jealousy lifting its head? I trust it is. So yes, I do kiss Barbara; it says “Hello there” and “See you later” to her for me. It’s a habit I got into before Nelson died, and afterwards I knew I mustn’t stop giving her matey little kisses like that. She was going to be kissed so seldom in any way in future. Point clear?’
‘Y—yes. Though one night she was in your arms, not just—matily. I was coming back from a walk after she’d asked me to leave you together, and I couldn’t help seeing you.’
‘Ah—the day she’d received the first of Victoire’s billets-doux, and she was terrified about not involving me in scandal, if people were really making it. So she refused to see me again until they stopped, and that night she was breaking her heart for shame. I comforted her in the only way I knew. And you know the rest. How you began for me as a voice on a telephone, and then showed up as a kind of Galatea figure who refused to come alive to any invitation or even to a touch—Hope, your name? Well, let me tell you that you’ve been my despair for a lot too long, and what do you say to that?’
‘I—don’t know.’ Gently Hope loosened her hands from his gr
asp and laid them on his breast. ‘I’d rather show you,’ she said.
‘Ah—’ He drew her closer, his hold an exquisite, breathtaking pain as his lips demanded the promise of hers. For Hope the world seemed to mist out hazily. Just now there were only Craig and her mounting need to convince him that she wanted him as he wanted her—with passion and delight and an awareness of giving and taking equally; totally sharing; nothing of herself too much to offer him, nothing of him too much to accept as his gift.
Their hungry, urgent kisses said it all, contenting them for the time being, knowing they had a whole future of fulfilment before them—the surges of desire, the quiet, everyday hours of companionship, even sometimes the stormy clash of wills, but always, always the sweet safety of belonging in marriage—the ultimate dependence of each upon each.
At last, on a long, reluctant breath, Craig held her off, though continuing to study her face, feature by feature, her body, line by line.
‘No Galatea, thanks be,’ he murmured. ‘No ice-maiden, no robot. And mine, really mine? Since when?’
She searched her memory and told him—of the ache of envying Barbara, while still loving her for her courageous self; of fears and fantasies which he was only too eager to match with his own doubts.
‘I thought—’
‘You put up a perfect smoke-screen—’
‘I tried to hate you when I believed you’d deserted Barbara—’
‘Tina told Victoire, who passed it on to me, that you and Perse had something going for each other—’
The sinking sun withdrew its golden light from the gallery while they talked. Close, elbow to elbow, they leaned on the windowsill, watching the world darken outside, as they discussed practicalities, made plans and looked ahead.
At one point Hope said lightly, ‘I thought you brought me here to make an inventory for you?’
He laughed. ‘Any excuse to get you here to myself and “show” you, as you put it.’
‘And the list?’
‘There never was any list to be made.’