Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

  “Why didn't you come yesterday?”

  “My father didn't require me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Various things. I don't remember.”

  “Who did you speak to?”

  “A lot of people. What does it matter?”

  “But WHO? I want to know everything about—” she hesitated, “everything.”

  “Well, I told you once—I don't remember.” This domineering curiosity, this patient, shameless prying angered, then bewildered him. What would she say next? What was she up to? What did she want? He knew only two kinds of women, ladies and whores. He preferred whores because a man could get his fun out of a whore without being bound to give anything of himself except a little money. But a woman like this one, as shameless and passionate (“hot” was his word) as a whore, as possessive as the kind of girl who had a right to expect you to marry her, he had never known. He resented the helplessly passive role he had to play. Against a whore you could assert yourself by paying up and clearing out. A decent girl never put a man in a corner like this: she just sat and waited to be asked, strictly observing all the formulas and conventions which nice girls knew. He would have liked to assert himself by walking out of the house, since she apparently did not know the formulas, or anyway did not pay the respect to them that any girl good enough to be his wife would pay, but where could he go without throwing up all he valued. He kept saying to himself, “I won't marry her. I'll get a jackerooing job. I'll go to England and become a professional cricketer,” but he sat there and submitted resentfully to her exigent questioning.

  “Did you call on anybody?”

  “I suppose I did.”

  “Who? Tell me about them.”

  “I went to see a horse.”

  “Was it good?”

  “Good enough.”

  “Who owns it?”

  “Jack Bowen.”

  “Oh, isn't that Jennis Bowen's brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “Of course.”

  “She must be beautiful. Is she?”

  “They say so.”

  “But do YOU think she's beautiful? Do you?”

  “Yes, I do,” he said spitefully.

  “Oh.” Harriet's voice was small. “Oh, I wish I was beautiful.”

  He said nothing, enjoying the long, awkward silence.

  When he glanced round cautiously again her eyes were damp. He looked away quickly.

  “I know I'm not beautiful,” she said humbly, “but am I ugly? Very, very ugly? As ugly as Miss Montaulk?”

  “I've never noticed her.”

  “I wish I was so beautiful that somebody would fall in love with me as James fell in love with Jennis.”

  “You read too many novels,” Doug said sententiously, repeating what his mother said.

  “But don't you believe in love?”

  He shrugged.

  “I believe in it,” Harriet said raptly, and he could feel her rapture, like the hot waves of perfume that flowed in from the garden. “If a man loved me I'd do anything at all for him. I'd go anywhere with him. Have you read MANON LESCAUT? That's the way I'd be. Oh, you couldn't ask too much of me if you loved me—I mean one couldn't.”

  He could not listen to this without being moved. When he thought about having her as a wife and all his friends saying God knows what about her this wild talk made him feel as though he was being suffocated, but when he forgot that for a moment little wires began to tighten and vibrate in the pit of his stomach. “Say I didn't have to marry her after all.” He turned around. Their knees touched and a sharp barb of fire ran up his thighs. She lay among the cushions, limp, her eyes dilated, cheeks flushed, lips damply apart. He saw the hard nipples of her breasts take shape through the thin voile of her dress. “If she was just a tart!” Harriet's heart was beating against her throat. The way his face had suddenly relaxed frightened her, but made her happy too. Perhaps it was the sign she had been waiting for!

  But he turned away abruptly, wiped his face on his handkerchief, folded his arms, and stared out at the garden.

  Then Cabell came in and Doug went for his life. “For his life,” that was just how he thought of it, too.

  Peppiott arrived home pleased with himself. Things were going well. Cabell had come back from the drawing-room looking worried. Peppiott understood. “He wants to tell me not to bring Doug, but he's afraid to offend me. He can't afford it.” But he said to Doug, “You be careful what you're doing there. We mustn't make any mistakes.”

  “I'm not doing anything,” Doug said. His face was puffed up and red with anger. After this afternoon he felt desperate.

  Peppiott winked across the dinner-table. “Tell that to the marines, my boy. He must nearly have caught you red-handed.”

  “I wouldn't touch her with a ten-foot pole,” Doug flared.

  “Douglas!” Mrs Peppiott rolled her green toad eyes. “How can you say such things about a girl who's going to be your wife—and the mother of your children.”

  “She's not going to be my wife. I wouldn't be seen with her in. . .” He nearly said Frogs' Hollow but he was supposed to be innocent of Frogs' Hollow and all its works, so he substituted, “the street.”

  The thin glaze of amiability dried off Peppiott's face. “And pray, sir, who says she will not be your wife?”

  “I do.”

  Peppiott fingered his rat-skin whiskers. “In that case, you will explain perhaps how you propose to earn a living when you leave this house, which I shall trouble you to do as soon as I am convinced that you mean what you say.”

  “Of course he doesn't mean it,” Mrs Peppiott intervened between them hastily. “He couldn't mean it, could you Douglas? All this Papa is doing for Cabell is for you really, your future.”

  “But she's impossible, Mother. You don't know her.”

  “A little undisciplined, perhaps,” Mrs Peppiott conceded, nodded and smiled, “but we can see to that later. The poor child needs a firm hand.”

  “She's—she's—” he gulped the word two or three times before he spat it out at them, “she's hot—hot as mustard.”

  “Goodness gracious, Douglas, what ARE you saying!”

  “She's not a lady. That's what I mean.”

  “But, Douglas, what do you know about such vulgar things? Surely. . .”

  He cringed behind the soup tureen. “No, of course not. Only she's not like other girls. She doesn't seem right somehow.”

  “Fiddlesticks,” Peppiott snorted. “She's spoilt. Your mama will soon instruct her.”

  “Besides,” his mama said, stroking his hand, “do you think we would ever permit you to bring anybody into the Peppiott family who was not quite, quite proper? Her father is most intimately connected with the Felsies and her uncle was a bishop in England.”

  “What about her mother?”

  “What about her mother?” Peppiott snapped. “Her father made three thousand pounds on the stock exchange to-day.”

  Mrs Peppiott's eyes bubbled out from under their scaly lids. “Why, Douglas, you'll be a millionaire. You'll be able to do whatever you like.”

  “Will I?” Doug muttered. “You don't know what she's like. The image of her grasping old man.”

  “But I know what my dear Douglas is like,” Mrs Peppiott croaked, “and the girl who is good enough to be his wife couldn't possibly be a mercenary girl. Nothing so vulgar and sordid could interest a Peppiott woman!”

  Chapter Eight: Lady Or—?

  The next time Doug came Miss Montaulk was sitting in his place on the sofa, and there she continued to sit, her inflexible face between them, while watching him with a knowing, almost skittish eye. Twice she chuckled aloud and shook her frowsy head over her sewing. Doug was on pins and needles. The blatant immodesty of these two women shocked him, the way they showed what was in their minds, Harriet her wish to be alone with him, Miss Montaulk that she knew and more.

  Engrossed in their battle they took hardly an
y notice of him, and after a few inane words about the weather he rose to leave.

  Harriet rose too and went to the door with him.

  “Now, Harriet, where are you going?” Miss Montaulk put her needle aside and waddled after them.

  But Harriet clutched Doug's arm so hard that he winced, and hustled him into the passage. “Here, quick,” she whispered and pressed something into his hand, then scampered up the stairs as Miss Montaulk appeared in the door.

  An arch smile, implicating him in some evil conspiracy, brought wrinkles up from under the powder and rouge which gave her face its air of disillusioned and unwearying lust.

  He shuddered and fled, so upset by it all that he was in the trap and trotting down the drive before he remembered the hard little ball of paper in his hand. He opened it and read, in Harriet's thin writing.

  Don't come to the house any more. Father has set this woman to watch us. It is terrible. I'll go out of my mind if I have to put up with his spying much longer. If you climb the fence at the bottom of the garden where the camphor-laurels are you'll find me any afternoon at three. They won't think of looking for us there.

  A big H was scrawled across the bottom of the page.

  He had to read the note twice before he understood, then he crumpled it into his pocket and whipped the horses, so that he came out of the drive into the road on one wheel, as though in flight.

  She was actually asking him to meet her in secret—a girl who was supposed to be decent enough for his wife. “By jove, she IS hot!” At once he thought of all his friends, the men in his club, the racing men, the polo men, the squatters—the salt of his little world, his aspiring little world, where scandal ran like fire in the wind. “Why, that lie about Grandmother might come true.” His personal honour bridled, as though she was already his wife and had already caused him some disgrace. He pulled the horses into a trot and brought the note out of his pocket again. Yes, it was clear enough: she must be barmy or a slut. Anyway, there was this comfort in it, he told himself on second thoughts, her note would settle the wretched business. Even his mother would see what kind of a girl she was now—and perhaps he wasn't even the first!

  That idea had a queer effect upon him. Instead of making him more angry it sent a wave of hot blood to his temple and started the little wires vibrating in his stomach again. He saw Harriet lying in the sofa cushions, running up the stairs with her dress above her slim calves, felt her fingers burning on his wrist. By jove, suppose he didn't have to marry her. What about an assignation under the laurels then?

  He reined the horses and looked along the road. It was empty. He fingered his moustache, grinned, shook his head, and finally drove back past the iron gates. There were the camphor-laurels, close to the fence at the bottom of the lane dividing the garden from a banana plantation. He glanced about. You could leave a horse over there and always reach it quickly in case. . . A bit of a risk for him, but still. . . what a go for a man! “And why shouldn't I? There've been others. Just think what everybody says about her—the way she talked to old Purvis. She knows a thing or two.” Ah, but what if he had to marry her after all, after that, when perhaps he'd found out he wasn't the only one? No, no, his mother would get him out of it as she had always got him out. There'd be no more talk of marriage when she knew—she was so pure.

  For three days Harriet waited under the camphor-laurels, so still in her concentration of willing and waiting that the little green-eyes and redheads fluttered around her as though she was stone, to flee in a sudden throb of wings when at last her patience gave out and she crumpled into the white spread of her skirts and wept bitter tears. As the sun was going down across the river she returned to the house, with the resignation of a sufferer facing an inevitable, futile pain, to count the hours of yet another night.

  On the fourth day he was already there when she arrived, half-hidden behind the hedge of bougainvillea, like a rabbit ready to dash to earth at the first alarm, and skulking into himself with bad conscience. She stopped, seeing him, and went pale.

  “Look here, I don't like this,” he began, indignant out of a vanity wounded by the humiliation of climbing back fences and having to wait half an hour with his heart leaping up his throat at every crackle among the trees. “It's not right. If anybody saw me. . .”

  She had to struggle with an unexpected shyness, which made her legs wobble and her mouth go stiff, as in a cold wind. All she could do was utter an inarticulate sound of joy, a cry of relief after all her hours of waiting that sounded not joyful at all but rather sad. It startled a flight of birds out of the nearest tree and seemed, to Doug, to shriek through the sleepy afternoon.

  “I say, a bit softer, can't you?” He paused on his way from the hedge to the trees, where the shadow lay like a black wool carpet on the lawn, reluctant to leave his rabbit hole altogether. “Yelling like that—you'll have the whole pack of them down on me in a minute.”

  She glanced over her shoulders. “There's no one. She's gone to sleep in the drawing-room.”

  “Where's your father?”

  “He's not home.”

  “Huh.” He got himself, with a quick creeping movement, into the cover of a tree, took off his hat, and wiped his forehead. “I tell you this is a devil of a risk for me. What's the idea?” For the moment he had forgotten what his idea was.

  She did not reply. She turned her head away from him and gazed down at the rusted clover flowers trampled by some fury. That she was the fury, this shy slip of a girl, was inconceivable. Even to her it was inconceivable because all pain, the merest possibility of pain and anger in the world, seemed inconceivable now that by coming he had given her the sign for which she had waited so long. At last she could speak and let out the love that for years she had shackled down and starved in her heart. But for the moment she was content not to speak, even to know nothing of her joy in the lifting of a shadow from her life, as a man is content to sit down within sight of the track he has searched for through frantic hours and to be free a while of any emotion, even thankfulness.

  When she did answer him, saying in a low voice, “I wanted to see you alone,” it was without knowing that she had spoken. Her eyes were intent on the swift flight of the little birds, which she seemed to be seeing for the first time, and she thought to herself how pretty they were, how pretty their thin, quick little legs and clean white beaks, how fair and good the whole world. Her voice went on speaking, with ventriloquial remoteness, and she listened to it with surprise. “I waited and waited. I thought you'd never come.”

  “I was too busy.”

  “I counted a million million seconds,” Harriet said, “and all of them years.” She sighed, and to her the whole garden seemed to sigh in sympathy, a long suspiration of leaves and flowers in a gust of breeze from the river which saturated the air with scent of honeysuckle. With the egotism of the happy lover she saw the world remade to be the perfect mirror of her mood. Never, never again would there be storms or night or wild winds—only, for ever and ever, this serene afternoon enclosed in the misty-blue summer sky, a wall of luminous flowers and leaves, and a river flickering glassy nipples of sunlight. “Of course, I knew you'd come.”

  “If I'd had any sense. . .” He craned his neck round the tree to find out how far they were from the house.

  “Yes, I was sure,” Harriet said.

  “How were you sure?” he said. She was too sure, too damned sure. Again he had that fantastic fear of being swallowed up by something in her eyes. “She's a bloodsucker like her old man,” one of his friends had said. Yes, by jove, that's just what she was. He wasn't given to flights of superstitious fancy, but he felt uneasy watching her take it all so calmly, so assuredly, and saying, with a secretive little smile, “Oh, I knew. You always know when you're in love. It wasn't doubting you made the time so long but just because you weren't here. Didn't I kiss the ground where you're standing now—because I knew you'd stand on there soon. I KNEW.”

  He pumped up an awkward gallantry. “You need
n't have wasted them on the ground.” But the mood left him at once. The enormity of his danger here in old Cabell's garden was beginning to dawn on him, and the wires vibrated no more in his belly. This sort of thing was a durn sight safer in Frogs' Hollow. Still, he could not quite bring himself to make a bolt for it, scrambling over that fence like a fool in front of her. Besides, a man would kick himself after: a girl didn't throw herself at your head like this every day of the week. He moved away irresolutely and picked up his hat, wiped a patch of dust off the nap on his sleeve. When he looked around she was standing beside him, smiling up into his face with an expression of happy surrender. She put her hands on his shoulders and drew herself close till he could smell the sun heat in her dress and feel her quick breath, coming from half-open lips, on his cheek.

  “There,” she said, vexed. “I knew I wouldn't be able to reach you even on tiptoes.”

  He averted his face in a youthful, gawky shame of being so intimately handled by a girl, but she slipped her hands round his neck, laced her fingers, lifted herself off the ground, and kissed him. Her lips were as hard and naïve as a child's. For a moment she pressed her cheek against his, then lowered herself and knelt at his feet with her breast against his knees.

  “I say!” he protested, and grabbed at his tie, which she had knocked skew-whiff on its column of starched linen. “Get up, can't you. Someone might come.”

  “Let them. You're not frightened, are you?”

  “Not exactly—no.”

  “You're not even frightened of HIM?”

  “Your father? No—but all the same. . .”

  “Oh, how can I ever be grateful enough. If only I was more beautiful.”

  “Grateful for what?” he asked nervously.

  “For things I could never count up. Because of you just existing. And because you've saved me, yes SAVED me.”

  He did not understand this at all. For that reason it scared him more—but particularly because it sounded mad and exaggerated. He felt as though he was sober and sensible in the company of a wild drunk who had taken the reins from him and flogged the horses towards a precipice while assuring him that the air would support them. He did not pause to analyse his emotions so precisely. They summed themselves up for him as a doubt, once more, of his ability to get out with his life if he let this girl, whom neither shame nor propriety could restrain, drag him down into the vortex behind her eyes. He could feel hot waves of emotion throbbing into his thighs where her breasts crushed themselves against him, stirring him deep under the skin, deep under the layers of his mind where he could enjoy life and master it, enjoy her and master her as he had intended, by giving no more and going no farther than any common sensible fellow would.