by Ann Bridge
Richard was considerably touched by his chief’s percipience.
‘That will be all right—she wasn’t expecting the old case back till tomorrow, anyhow,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave this down here tonight, and take it home at lunch-time.’
‘That’s right—keep the whole thing more at a distance. My goodness, I am glad she is going home!’ Sir Noël said fervently. ‘We shall all miss her frightfully, of course, but I shall be thankful to get her away.’
Next day at lunch-time Richard took the new case home with him; he took off the wrapping-paper and left it in his study; then he went to find Hetta. She was in her room with Speranza, packing.
‘Did you bring my case?’ she asked at once.
‘Yes, it’s in my study. Come and have a drink, and I’ll give it to you.’
‘Oh——’ she hesitated. ‘Could you perhaps bring it here? There is so much to do.’
‘No, darling, come along—you’ll pack all the better after a drink.’
Laughing, she gave way and went with him. After taking a sip of sherry she went over and picked up the case, turning it to examine the place where the smear had been.
‘Oh, they have done this very well,’ she said. She took the keys, on their little gilt chain, unlocked it, and looked inside, lifting the little upper tray with its velvet-lined compartments—under this, to Richard’s dismay, he saw a sheet of clean tissue-paper. Damn!—Why hadn’t he had the wits to look under the tray himself? She stared at it for a moment, puzzled; then she turned to him.
‘Now, I think you should tell me what was wrong with the other case,’ she said, slowly. ‘First you shout at me about it, and take it away; and now you buy me a new one. This has never been used at all—and it is not heavy. So was there something dangerous in the other?’
‘Yes, my darling—deadly dangerous. There was a bomb in it—if you had turned the key in the lock we should both have been blown up.’
She stood frowning.
‘This was clever of Luis,’ she said at length. ‘To arrange to kill me, whatever happened to him.’ Suddenly she stamped her foot. ‘Luis and Nell together were too dangerous a combination!’ she exclaimed, with real anger. ‘His cunning, and her folly! Oh, it should not have been allowed.’
‘Well, it’s been stopped now, thanks to you, my dearest,’ he said, putting an arm round her shoulder. ‘Come and sit down; take it easy. Think of the child.’
‘It is of the child that I am thinking!’ she said, and burst into tears, hiding her face against his shoulder. He let her cry quietly for a little while—presently she raised her head and dabbed at her eyes.
‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘This-—this was so near; it has upset me.’ Then she startled him by asking—‘Was the bomb plastic?’
‘Yes, it was. Why?’
‘Major Day was right,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘Right about what?’
‘He was telling me about what El Lobo and the rest had planned, to blow up this other American who comes, and he said “There is almost no defence against plastiqueurs.” There is no defence—none.’ She paused. ‘How did you guess?’ she said quickly.
He told her about the unexpected weight, and the smell. ‘And when you took up the keys to unlock it, I realised suddenly that they would almost certainly operate the detonator. That was why I shouted. Darling, I do apologise for that—but I was so terrified!’ he added, candidly.
She stroked his cheek.
‘You are forgiven! Your shouting saved us, all three!’ She was silent for a moment or two, and then said slowly——
‘You know, Richard, since this has happened, I am really willing to go away. Before, I did not think it necessary, but now, I am almost glad. Here, one could never be—certain.’
‘Quite right, my darling. I’m glad you feel that way about it. The months will soon pass.’
Chapter 17
Some three weeks later Julia Jamieson and Edina Reeder were standing on a damp quay-side in Scotland, watching the red-funnelled steamer ploughing its way towards them across the water. It was one of those rare, fine late-autumn days which are so lovely in the West Highlands when they do come; the soft pale sunshine brought out the lingering purple of the heather on the hills behind the rather ugly little town, and caught the last scraps of gold in the almost leafless birchwoods on their lower slopes; the air was mild and sweet.
‘Well at least it isn’t raining for her,’ Edina said. ‘I do hope she’ll be all right here.’
‘Don’t fuss, Edina—of course she will. I’ve told you she was brought up in the country.’
‘Ah, and so was Madame Bonnecourt—but she hates this climate! I wonder if I’d have time to go and see if she’s got her thick shoes all right?’
‘No, the boat will be in in two minutes. I told Mrs. McKerrow to see to her herself, and they were getting on fine when I left. As for Hetta Atherley, I should think she’d be so glad merely to feel safe that she wouldn’t give a blow for any climate.’
The boat came in, and manoeuvred up against the quay; Julia waved vigorously at a small group standing by the rail—Mrs. Hathaway, tall and erect in a grey Inverness cape, a short fair woman carrying a baby and an even shorter dark one holding a morocco dressing-case; a strikingly pretty girl in a fur coat and wearing a head-scarf stood by them, and presently, catching sight of Julia, waved back.
‘Is that her, in the mink?’ Edina asked, now waving too.
‘Yes.’
‘Well at least she has the wits not to travel in a hat, like most foreigners,’ Mrs. Reeder said hopefully.
The gang-way was let down and the passengers came ashore, while luggage was humped down a second gang-way; after the locals the Madrid party, with Mrs. Hathaway in the lead, stepped ashore.
‘There you are, safe and sound,’ Julia exclaimed, giving Hetta Atherley a warm hug. ‘Lovely to see you. Now this is Mrs. Reeder.’
Edina turned from kissing Mrs. Hathaway to greet her new guest. ‘How do you do? Welcome to Scotland,’ she said.
‘How do you do? It is so kind of you to have us,’ Hetta said, in her pretty plummy English. ‘Oh, Julia, all our luggage has red labels. There is a terrible quantity, I’m afraid.’
‘That’s all right—Bonnecourt has brought the Landrover. Ah, there he is. Bonnecourt, all the bagages of Madame have red labels.’ She turned to greet the nurse and baby. ‘Bonjour, Élise. So this is Richenda—oh, she’s exactly like her Father!’
‘N’est-pas, Madame?’ the Swiss said, beaming. Then Julia addressed Speranza in Spanish, to the latter’s manifest satisfaction—especially when she added that Madame Reeder’s Cook, Olimpia, was a Spaniard too. ‘And Monsieur and Madame Bonnecourt will talk French to you, Élise,’ she went on. ‘We are quite a little U.N.O. here.’
Bonnecourt and a blue-jerseyed porter were rapidly stowing the luggage—pram, carry-cot and all—in the Landrover, and presently the party walked out to the road, where the two cars waited. ‘Now, how shall we go?’ Edina asked.
‘Why don’t you take Hetta and Speranza, and Mrs. Hathaway and Élise can come with me. Mme. Bonnecourt can go in the Landrover,’ Julia said. This lady at that moment came hurrying up, and proudly displayed her feet; she was wearing the souliers forts which she had just acquired at McKerrow’s.
‘Yes, those are much more the style, Madame; now your feet won’t get wet,’ Mrs. Reeder told her. And at last everyone was bestowed in some vehicle, and they drove off.
Julia had her own reasons for suggesting that Mrs. Atherley should drive with her hostess. She had been a little disturbed by her cousin’s unwonted display of what she called ‘fuss’ on the quay, and thought that the sooner she and Hetta had a chance to come to terms, the better; a tête-à-tête drive immediately seemed to her a good idea—once they got back to the house Edina was liable to be engulfed in all manner of domestic and farm affairs.
Her scheme worked better than such plans often do. Almost immediately after leaving the town the
road ran down to a long narrow arm of the sea enclosed by hills—the nearer end was covered with swans, at least two hundred of them, and Hetta exclaimed at the sight.
‘Oh, how beautiful! So many! This is a lake?’
‘No, it’s a sea-loch.’
‘So?—I thought swans lived in fresh water.’
‘Oh, they don’t mind the sea. Anyhow this end of the loch is almost fresh, so many burns run into it.’
‘What are burns?’
‘It’s the Scottish word for small streams.’
‘Oh yes, I see.’ She scanned the hills, down which indeed several burns came tumbling, creamy and foaming from last night’s rain; now she noticed their colour. ‘But how extraordinary—these hills are almost purple,’ she said.
‘Yes, that is the heather. It’s going over now; a month ago it was much brighter.’
‘It is most strange.’ She continued to stare at the mauve-tinged slopes in silence; Edina, amused, realised that her visitor, though too polite to say so, obviously shared the opinion of the young English officer in General Wade’s army, who wrote from Scotland in the eighteenth century that the Scottish hills were ‘most of all disgusting when the heath is in bloom’.
Presently the road left the loch, and climbed gently through pastures and cultivated land, now mostly stubble and plough; Hetta at once asked what the crop had been—wheat?
‘No, it’s too wet for that here; oats is our main crop—and of course roots for the cows.’
‘Oh, do you keep cows? How nice. Many?’
‘About 300.’ She pulled in to the side of the road to let a large tanker pass; the driver waved his hand at her. ‘That’s some of our milk going in to Glasgow,’ Edina said.
‘Milk? In that? But does it not get too much shaken?’
‘No worse than in churns—and of course it’s chilled and pasteurised first.’
‘Pasteurised? You like this? But with pasteurised milk surely one cannot make butter?’ Hetta said earnestly, surprising her hostess.
‘No, but the people in Glasgow don’t want to make butter, only to drink the milk. Of course we don’t pasteurise it for the house, where we do make butter,’ Edina said, smiling a little; she was relieved at the newcomer’s practical interest.
‘Oh, I am glad of this. Of course in Madrid and in Paris we had to use pasteurised milk; but for children especially, I do not think it is so good as natural milk.’
‘How right you are.’
Just then the car topped a rise, and the immense view of the Sound opened in front of them—-endless miles of sunlit water, out of which rose the great shapes, blue and rounded, of mountainous islands; Hetta caught her breath.
‘But this is so beautiful! How fortunate you are to live here!’
‘Wait till it rains,’ Edina laughed; ‘then you won’t see a thing.’
‘But to see this even sometimes is worth many wet days!’
The road ran down almost to sea-level, and then along the coast through fields; Hetta was startled by the intense greenness of the grass, which she obviously preferred to the unnatural colour of the heather. They came to cows; she had never seen Ayrshires before, and commented on their long and pointed horns. ‘But they are chiefly for milk, yes?’ Then a man with a tractor, scattering mangolds across a field, caught her attention—‘Is this sugar-beet that you feed to them?’
‘No, swedes.’
‘But is it not early in the year to begin feeding? There seems to be so much grass still.’
‘Yes, it is, rather; but that lot are pedigree cows, and extra heavy milkers; we are working up their butter-fat record,’ Edina said, increasingly pleased with her paying guest, who did not conform in the least to her preconceived ideas of a foreignborn diplomat’s wife. Of course Hetta wanted to know how butter-fat records were kept, and was told. Then they swung into the drive, where the saw-mill was plainly visible on their right, and audible too—the whine of the circular saw came loudly to their ears.
‘To whom does this belong?’ Hetta enquired.
‘To us.’ At that moment a lorry loaded with sawn timber came up a by-road from the mill, and paused to let the car pass.
‘Where is that going? To Glasgow, like the milk?’
‘No, down the road to Kilmartin; the County Council is putting up a new housing estate, and we are supplying most of the timber.’
‘Does this pay well?’
‘Oh yes, very well; it’s only a few miles away, so the freight costs are negligible. And of course we use a lot on the place too, for gates and fencing-stobs.’
‘Where are your forests?’ Hetta asked, looking about her—near at hand no trees were to be seen but groups of sycamores and limes, with a few exotic conifers.
‘Up the hill behind the house—I’ll show you tomorrow, if you’d care to see the woods.’
‘I should like to very much. What sort of trees? Pinus maritima?’
‘No—here it’s mostly spruce, or larch on the wetter ground. What is Pinus maritima?’
‘In Portugal it is the principal tree. Do you extract the resin?’
‘Goodness no! Do they in Portugal?’
‘Indeed yes—thousands of tons of it.’ They were still happily talking about resin extraction when the car drew up to the front door.
Hetta got out and looked with eager interest at the house where she was to make her home for the moment—with interest, and with a certain dismay. Anything more unlike Gralheira, with its formal baroque elegance, it was impossible to conceive. The architectural style of Glentoran was ‘Scotch baronial’ at its worst: round towers, sham battlements, pepperpot turrets were stuck irrelevantly all about the main structure; the outline of the house seemed to bristle like a giant porcupine. Edina saw her astonished face, and laughed.
‘Isn’t it ghastly?’ she said. ‘And it’s almost as bad inside. Wait till you see the stained glass in the hall!’
‘It is—curious,’ Hetta said. ‘Is it really old, or built to look so?’
‘Oh, sham as can be—19th century. The old castle was down there, where the kitchen-garden is now. But come in—at least it’s warm inside.’
The business of settling in such a large party inevitably took time, but Julia and Edina did not allow Hetta to weary herself with it; they led her into the library, gave her a whisky, and left her there in Mrs. Hathaway’s care while they dealt with the luggage, the allocation of rooms, and the introductions to their own nannies—helped by both the Bonnecourts and by Olimpia, who abandoned her kitchen to come and welcome Speranza, and carry suitcases upstairs. Only when everyone had been installed where they belonged, with their correct possessions, did they allow Mrs. Atherley to go upstairs to her room.
‘Here you are,’ Edina said.
‘Oh, I have this view! How lovely,’ Hetta said, running to the window.
‘Yes. I’m afraid you have to share a bathroom with Élise, but I thought you’d like to be near Richenda.’
‘Oh yes, please. Where are they?’
‘Through here.’ She opened another door and led the way into a bathroom as large as a fair-sized bedroom—which it had in fact been originally; this, beside the usual fittings contained not only a bidet, but a proper sink, two heated towel-rails, and a large old fashioned wooden clothes-horse.
‘Oh, how convenient! Everything can be washed here,’ Hetta exclaimed, delighted.
‘Yes.’ She opened a door on the further side into a bedroom where a log fire burned brightly behind a brass-topped wire fender, flanked by two arm-chairs covered in bright chintz; a vast wardrobe occupied the whole of one side of the room, and there was a proper dressing-table and two or three ancient Victorian chests of drawers, ugly but ample.
‘But this is perfect!—so much space,’ Hetta said.
‘Glad you like it. And here’s the day nursery,’ Edina pursued, opening yet another door. Hetta fairly gaped—again a fire, with more arm-chairs beside it; a large round table in the middle of the room, and several smaller one
s, on one of which stood an electric kettle; there was even a play-pen, and bright cups and saucers occupied a row of shelves on the wall. ‘So Élise can be quite independent if she wants to,’ Mrs. Reeder explained.
Hetta turned and threw her arms round her hostess’s neck.
‘You are too kind! You have thought of everything. It is absolutely perfect,’ she said, and kissed her warmly. ‘But where are they?’
‘Along with the others, I expect,’ Edina said, a little embarrassed by the kiss, but not altogether displeased. They went out into the corridor and followed the sound of voices to the main nursery, where a perfect babel of French, Spanish, and soft Highland English mingled with the shrill voices of the children; Edina, with cheerful firmness, thanked Madame Bonnecourt and Olimpia for their help—they took the hint and departed. Then she introduced her guest—‘Nannie Campbell, this is Mrs. Atherley, Richenda’s Mother; John, Duncan, come and say How do you do to Mrs. Atherley. And this is Nannie Mackenzie, who looks after Julia’s Philipino. How is he today, Nannie Mack? Are the motions a better colour? Oh, good.’
‘What has she done to her face?’ John Reeder asked, staring at the plaster on Hetta’s forehead. He was a sturdy upstanding creature of about five, with his Father’s brown hair and blue eyes.
‘John! Who is “she”? The cat’s Mother?’ Nannie Campbell asked sharply.
‘Sorry, Nannie. But what did the lady do to her face?’
‘Mrs. Atherley hurt herself,’ Edina said. ‘It makes her head ache, so you mustn’t shout when she is there.’
Hetta stood, a little bewildered by the number of strange faces, but also amused and pleased. A stout fresh-faced girl was laying a table at one end of the room; big wholemeal loaves, great round shapes of butter, jugs of milk and platters of oatcakes already stood on it, and she was taking plates and cutlery out of a square opening in the wall—when she had finished she pulled a cord, and shut the doors.
‘That’s the food-lift from the kitchen,’ Mrs. Reeder said, noting Hetta’s glance of enquiry. ‘One couldn’t possibly have everything carried up and down. Now John, you’d better sit up to the table, and you too, Duncan. There’s the other high chair for Richenda, Élise.’