by Sara Seale
“Yes, thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry, Raff, to have caused so much trouble.”
“So you should be,” Marcia .observed with dulcet reproach.
“Well, Judy, now that your adventures seems to have had a happy ending, we had better leave you to sleep. Do you want to say goodnight to Noel?”
“No, why should I?” Judy replied, with difficulty preventing her eyelids from closing with the fatigue that had settled upon them.
Marcia shrugged, and her eyes met Raff’s with amusement.
“I only thought you might like that bedtime story he promised you earlier,” she said. “He would have come up to bandage your ankle, you know, only—well, he thought you were a little overwrought and emotional and might expect too much of him—isn’t that so, Raff?”
Raff’s face seemed to be a frozen mask in the shadows, but exhaustion lay too heavily upon Judy for her to care any more.
“You,” she said with untroubled clarity, “are a bitch...” and closed her eyes.
III
She spent the next day in bed, glad that Raff has issued the order, but disappointed that he never came himself to inquire for her. The events of the day before were a little confused in her mind now, though she dimly remembered calling Marcia by a rude name before she went to sleep.
Noel looked in on her after luncheon, but she pretended to be asleep, and presently Marcia came with a basket of fruit which she said Raff had brought back from Knockferry.
“Did he go especially to get them?” Judy asked her, feeling soothed by the fact that he had thought of her even though he had not come to inquire.
“Naturally not. He had to make arrangements for the car you so successfully ditched, and he wanted to see his lawyer, I believe,” replied Marcia coldly. Then she smiled as if remembering she wished to be pleasant and settled herself by the bed with cigarettes and a box of chocolates.
“He didn’t forget me either, you see,” she said, offering the chocolates. “Have one.”
“I’m afraid,” said Judy, accepting a chocolate gravely, “that I wasn’t very polite to you last night.”
“No, you called me a bitch, darling, but no doubt I deserved it.”
Judy was puzzled. Of late Marcia had not troubled very much to make herself charming, and she mistrusted the change from yesterday.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Whatever I thought, I shouldn’t have said it aloud.”
“Excellent for releasing the subconscious, my dear,” Marcia replied cosily. “It never does to bottle things up—that’s why I’m often unpleasant, I expect. By the same token, did you do some unbottling to Raff last night after he’d pulled you out of the ditch?”
So that explained it, thought Judy, with a faint smile. Marcia, just as her brother had, wanted to find out what Raff had been told.
“You mean about the furniture?” she said with a clear, level look.
“I know nothing about the furniture,” Marcia snapped. “And if Noel’s been up to anything tricky I don’t want to know anything about it.”
“Then what did you want to know?” Judy inquired politely. It was, she supposed reluctantly, very possible that Marcia herself had had no direct part in her brother’s dealing with Grogan, that with her own ends in view she would have taken care not to be involved in anything questionable.
Marcia ate another chocolate, forgetting to share the box this time, then lit a cigarette and leaned back comfortably.
“Oh, just idle curiosity,” she said. “You have your attractions, Judy, I’ll give you that. I just thought—well, men are susceptible creatures, aren’t they?”
“Are you imagining Raff is?”
“I wouldn’t know, except where I’m concerned. I thought you could tell me.”
“If you’re sure of a man yourself, Marcia, the question shouldn’t arise,” Judy said gently, and the older girl gave an impatient flip to her cigarette, scattering the ash over the sheet.
“I’m not, damn it!” she said unexpectedly. “Raff admires me—I can even rouse sparks if I set my mind to it—but all this Kathy business has me confused.”
It brought her down to a human level to admit to confusion, Judy thought, and said prosaically:
“That was all a long time ago and she was very young. A man doesn’t mourn the dead for ever if he’s normal.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of wish fulfilments, father fixations, and what have you?”
“Of course. But I don’t see—”
“Oh, Judy, be your age! You must know by now that you remind him of the wretched girl—he even took a dislike to you at first for that reason.”
“You’re going to marry him, aren’t you?” At last she could ask the question that teased them all.
“I don’t know ... yes, of course—of course I am. I’m just talking nonsense.” Marcia fell silent, suddenly brooding.
“Be pleasant to the girl for a change. She can be dangerous to us both,” Noel had counselled earlier in the day, but she was not concerned with her brother’s peccadilloes; she had things to find: out for herself.
“I bet he made love to you, for all that,” she said, with her sophisticated little smile of worldly tolerance.
Judy considered the question, untroubled by the older woman’s curiosity. Could that brief little interlude at the crossroads be described as making love? She would like to think so, but honesty forbade it He had taken her in his arms to warm her; he had even kissed her with a tenderness which still lingered in her thoughts, but she had been distressed at the time and not very discreet; he would have done as much for a child.
“No, I don’t think you could call it that,” she said slowly, and Marcia’s eyes narrowed.
“But he made a pass—kissed you, perhaps?” she said. Judy looked at her and to her surprise, felt compassion. Marcia’s standards were like her brother’s, bound up with clichés and the more obvious reactions; there was little depth in either of them, she thought, and they looked for none in others.
“Yes, he kissed me,” she admitted. “One kisses a hurt child, you know, to take away the tears.”
“Were you crying then?”
“I expect so.”
“And the good, puritanical O’Rafferty dried your tears!”
“Oh, Marcia!” Judy felt she wanted to laugh and weep at the same moment. “Can’t you understand that there can be tenderness between two people without passion, without tricks on one side or the other? There must be so many different expressions of affection.”
“I only know one,” Marcia replied. “Men are all alike, whatever excuse they like to wrap around their primitive urges. Your maiden-aunt notions of affection and hurt children and what have you all boil down to one thing in the end.”
“I don’t think you can understand Raff very well,” Judy said gently, and Marcia laughed with the old assurance.
“I don’t need to, darling,” she said. “Under that apparently indifferent manner he’s just a man like the others, as perhaps you’ve found out for yourself. Don’t think I grudge you your little interlude, my sweet, you probably haven’t had much fun in that direction—but lay off this Kathy stuff in future, will you?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I think you do. I’m paying you a compliment, really, by recognising you as a possible danger to my own plans. I’ll admit I hadn’t given you a thought until lately as a serious rival, but Raff’s a queer one—I don’t want any slip-up now.”
Judy eased her bandaged ankle under the bedclothes and stretched her thin body back on the pillows. It was very strange, she thought, that Marcia, so lovely and poised, so much older in experience, should be offering equality of standing, however grudging.
“Marcia—what do you really feel for Raff?” she asked. “Do you love him?”
“Of course I love him. I want him!” Marcia said arrogantly.
“It’s not the same thing—loving and wanting.”
“How should you know?”
; “I don’t know, but I do. To want and not be prepared to give is surely a denial of something fundamental.”
“Claptrap!” Marcia said, and lit another cigarette. “Where have you learnt such corny ideas, darling? Every woman gives—herself, if nothing else.”
“But you wouldn’t be giving yourself,” Judy replied, her eyes on a shaft of sunlight, watching the dancing motes. “Your body, of course, but not yourself.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“I mean, I suppose, that one’s real self has to merge to an extent in the other person’s. You don’t care for Slyne and it’s Raff’s life. How will you adjust yourself?”
“I shan’t try, my dear. Slyne has little marketable value these days, I suppose, but sell up the contents and we’d be in clover for a time.”
“Raff would never sell.”
“I think he would—-to please a wife who expected something a little more from life than being buried alive in the mouldering ancestral home.”
“If he did,” said Judy, “he’d be selling his birthright—and that would be a very foolish demand to put upon him.” Marcia got up and stretched luxuriously like a cat, reassured by the reflection of her own lovely body in the mirror.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve read me your little lecture, now I’ll deliver mine. I don’t go in for sermons, darling, so just take it as a friendly warning. Because you’re being kept on here for a time, don’t try to make trouble for any of us. We could make some for you, too.”
“You’ve done that already, haven’t you?” Judy replied wearily, “making out that Noel and I were having an affair.”
“And weren’t you?”
“You know very well we weren’t. You’ve told me often enough that I wasn’t your brother’s cup of tea, and so, from time to time, has he.”
“True,” said Marcia carelessly. “But what other distraction was there for him? Miss Botley’s a little long in the tooth for fun and games!”
“I don’t care,” said Judy, suddenly disdainful, “to be taken for one of those girls Noel’s always talking about. I don’t care at all for the fact that Raff was given the wrong impression.”
“You can hardly blame him. I gather he surprised you at some awkward moments,” Marcia said lightly, and then looked thoughtful, remembering that the only time she had seen anything approaching jealousy in Raff’s eyes had been on Judy’s account.
“Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to try to cast doubts on your high moral standards, after all,” she said, and Judy looked at her with eyes that seemed suddenly very green.
“Did you do it deliberately?” she asked, and Marcia gave her a conciliatory smile.
“Not really,” she said. “Noel can’t resist making mischief, of course, and he likes to take a rise out of Raff sometimes.”
“And you?”
“I? Well, I wasn’t going to have you putting a spoke in my wheel without putting one in yours, was I?”
“I never tried to do that, Marcia.”
“Didn’t you? Well, all’s fair in love and war, so they say, and you are a bit in love with him, aren’t you?” Judy regarded her gravely.
“If I am, then that’s my own private cross,” she said, and Marcia raised sceptical eyebrows.
“I suppose, at your age, you would talk about bearing crosses,” she observed with a yawn. “Just a schoolgirl crush, my dear. You’ll get over it.”
“Marcia—don’t hurt him,” Judy said softly.
Marcia smiled a little mockingly and picked up her cigarettes.
“I’ll leave you what’s left of the chocolates,” she said, and went out of the room.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I
IT seemed to Judy that after this episode the relations between them all seemed subtly to alter. Raff was withdrawn and detached from them all, and was much away from home, visiting his lawyers in Knockferry, or concerning himself with his tenants to the exclusion of his business with the affairs of the house.
Judy’s ankle was almost well now, for it had after all been no more than a severe wrench, but, on Raff’s orders, she kept her feet up in the afternoons, and was lying now ™ the Grand Saloon, where Noel found her.
Stall feeling like a dog with a bone?” he teased. “And why do you spend your afternoons in here? To be sure we don t make away with your precious tallboy?”
“No,” she replied, refusing to rise, “but I have to sit somewhere, and the sofa’s comfortable in here. Doesn’t it strike you that Raff is worried?”
“Not particularly. More annoyed, I should say, by the impression that his artless little secretary has a weakness for his manager. Dog-in-the-manger, wouldn’t you think since his intentions are feed on Marcia?”
“How you love to make mischief. Noel. Why can’t you leave me alone, if you’re so sure that Marcia’s getting what she wants?”
He shrugged.
“Force of habit, I suppose. You used to rise so beautifully at one time. Getting back, though, to these visits to the lawyers, which seem to disturb you unduly—hasn’t it occurred to you that it might be a matter of marriage settlements?”
“No,” she said, and wondered then why such an obvious explanation had not struck her. “But there’s nothing definite between them, is there?”
“I wouldn’t know—Marcia’s very cagey—but Raffs the type of man who would approach his nuptials with old-fashioned correctness, don’t you think? Dowry for the bride, trust funds for the hypothetical brats; I only hope he doesn’t tie things up too tightly, for poor Marcia’s sake.”
Judy’s eyes travelled instinctively over the room, assessing the beautiful furniture, the tapestries and period panelling in terms of cash value.
“Will she really try to get him to sell up, once she’s married to him?” she asked a little wistfully.
“She’ll have a jolly good shot, if I know my sister. Permanent stagnation amongst the pigs and praties won’t suit her at all!” Noel replied, and gave her a glance of mingled mockery and conciliation. “Pity he couldn’t have fallen for you, isn’t it, my sweet? You’d be quite happy bowing to the claims of house and tenants alike for the rest of your life, wouldn’t you?”
“I haven’t thought about it,” she said a little stiffly, and he grinned and pulled her hair.
“Liar!” he retorted amiably, and went out of the room.
The Maules too had altered, she thought uneasily. Marcia’s tongue was less sharp and her manner more conciliatory, as if she knew she could afford to bide her time before ridding herself of Judy, when the suitable moment offered. Noel, whose idle attentions had become a habit, she thought, was pleasant enough on the surface, but between all three of them there lay the unspoken knowledge that they shared a secret which only Judy’s affection for Raff kept her from revealing.
It seemed that their two regular residents were also aware of impending changes. The Colonel and Miss Botley took it in turns to visit the Grand Saloon while Judy was still lying up, and although Miss Botley asked inquisitive and often impertinent questions, the old soldier was too conventional to pry directly, though he doubtless acquired his information by other means.
Miss Botley was more difficult to remain on terms of mutual respect with, for she probed shamelessly, and no amount of polite snubbing could deflect her.
“I shall not, of course, stop on here,” she said. “And a little bird tells me that you too will be leaving shortly.”
“What little bird?” asked Judy innocently, but she wondered whether it was Marcia or Raff who had intimated that her services were about to be dispensed with.
“Never mind!” Miss Botley replied archly, patting her blue curls.
“I have a little suggestion to make, my dear. When I leave, how would you like to come with me as my companion?”
Judy stared at her in fresh astonishment.
“But I’m trained as a secretary, not a companion,” she said a little helplessly. “Besides, I would like to get another post in Ire
land if I do leave.”
“What does it matter what you’re trained for?” Miss Botley said sweepingly. “As to remaining in Ireland, I should be quite agreeable for a time—but somewhere with more modern comforts than this place. Dublin, perhaps, or a good hotel, if it’s to be found, in one of those beauty spots like Killarney. Think it over, my dear.”
“I’ll do that, of course,” said Judy politely and, touched by the unexpectedly eager light which came into the inquisitive, rather prominent eyes, added gently: “Why have you stayed so long, if you don’t care for the place, Miss Botley? It must be lonely living by yourself in hotels.”
Miss Botley sighed, and fidgeted with the floating scarves she always wore.
“Yes, it’s lonely,” she confessed, without any of her usual aggressiveness. “But when you get to my age, Judy nobody particularly wants you. This place seemed as good as any other until I discovered how extraordinarily feckless the Irish can be in managing their affairs and the comforts of others, and I stayed on, perhaps, because you came here and I liked you, and I could see at once that you were not going to be happy here.”
“But I’ve been very happy here,” Judy said. “It’s just that—well, there may be changes at Slyne, as I don’t doubt you have guessed, and—well, I’d just be redundant, that’s all.”
Miss Botley tossed her head.
“Oh, it’s been obvious that Miss Maule means to catch Mr. O’Rafferty—more fool he! Men never see beyond the length of their own noses! If they’re not being deceived themselves, they’re deceiving others, so I suppose there’s no need to be sorry for them.”
She and Miss Doyle evidently shared a point in common, thought Judy, beginning to feel a little hysterical, and it was a relief when Raff walked in unexpectedly, and Miss Botley, with a slightly heightened colour, hastily withdrew.
“Who’s been deceiving who?” he inquired. “From the glare she gave me I imagine she must have meant me.”
“I’m the recipient of everybody’s confidences while I’m lying here,” Judy answered, evading the question. “She’s not a bad old thing really, Raff—just lonely.”