by Sara Seale
CHAPTER THREE
Sarah kept up her disappearing trick for three days. She would vanish immediately after breakfast and return last thing at night. Rather to her disappointment, James made no enquiry as to where she had been, and on the third day she appeared just as Pepper announced dinner, still clad in her dungarees, now somewhat in need of cleaning, her hair wild and her hands unwashed.
“Hurry up,” James said. “We’ll get dinner put back and give you a quarter of an hour to change.”
She stared at him.
“But I never change when I’m as late as this,” she protested.
“When Sophie and I are alone we don’t bother at all. We have things on trays wherever we are.”
“I see,” said James pleasantly. “Well, as you see, Sophie has changed tonight, so run along.”
“I’m not going to change. I’m going out again directly afterwards,” she said.
“Well, dear, just go and wash your hands and we’ll excuse you tonight,” said Sophie, who was thinking of the fish getting cold.
“I think, if you don’t mind, we’ll wait while Sarah changes,” said James quietly. “That thing she’s got on is filthy.”
Sarah looked at him in amazement. He really meant it!
“If I’m too dirty for you, J.B.,” she said loftily, “I’ll have my dinner in the kitchen.”
“A very good idea,” agreed James blandly, “if the kitchen doesn’t mind dirt. Come along, Sophie, things will be getting cold.”
“Well!” said Sarah, watching their retreating backs, then she stamped off to Pepper’s pantry.
The next evening she was home by half-past six. Tonight she’d show him. She’d take an hour getting ready. Half a bottle of essence in the bath, clouds of powder, ten minutes with the hairbrush. He thought her a scruffy little schoolgirl to be ordered out of the room, did he? She’d show him.
Sitting in front of her dressing-table tugging at the tangles in her thick red hair, she scowled at her reflection in the glass. It was difficult to be dignified with red hair. All her life she had resented that red hair. It made people suspicious right from the start. She would try another line. She would be meek.
She shook her head and the bright hair fell softly curling on to her bare shoulders. She spent quite ten minutes deciding what she would wear, and the room was soon littered with frocks inspected and discarded. Peronel had always said: “Dress to your hair.” White? But the new white was too grand for an evening at home and the old white was soiled. She would wear the green chiffon. She snatched it from its hanger and slipped it over her head, clasping a gold chain belt round her narrow waist, then she surveyed herself in the long mirror with satisfaction and smiled.
“That’ll knock him,” she said, and ran out of the room, leaving it in a state of chaos behind her.
She found James alone in the library, drinking sherry.
“Hullo!” he said when he saw her.
She waited a little defiantly for any comment. If he made one crack she would never forgive him. But he only asked her if she would like a glass of sherry, poured it out, gave her a cigarette, and talked pleasantly about the alterations he thought of making to the house.
Sophie wandered vaguely into the room looking more absent-minded than usual, but her eyes lost their vacant look as she saw Sarah, and glancing meaningly at James, she gushed:
“Doesn’t the child look nice? A great improvement on our little stable boy of last night, isn’t she, James?”
“Sherry, Sophie?” asked James. Sophie would! “I was just telling Sarah that I’m planning to turn the barn into a sort of playroom—ping-pong and that sort of thing. Don’t you think it would be a good idea?”
Sophie looked a little bewildered, then she smiled delightedly. James was going to ignore the whole thing. How sensible!
Dinner was a pleasant meal despite Sophie’s tendency to hit on dangerous subjects. Even to Sarah it seemed fitting to see James at the head of John Silver’s table with herself and Sophie on either side. The evening light streamed in at the long windows gleaming on old silver and the delicate Venetian glass which formed part of a fine collection. There was a faint indefinable formality that had been missing for a long time, and Sarah found she liked it. No, she decided, catching Pepper’s approving eye as he handed her a dish, one couldn’t have sat down to dinner with James in dirty overalls reeking of stables.
It was James who steered the conversation into harmless channels, averting the disaster which Sophie seemed to be wantonly courting. Sophie was in one of her most tiresome moods. It soon became clear that in the course of the week-end she and James had done some serious talking and that she felt the need for justifying her own lack of vigilance over Sarah in the past.
“Where have you been these last three days?” she asked Sarah once, and the unusual query was in itself enough to make the girl look at her in surprise. Sophie had long since given up enquiring what Sarah did with her spare time.
“Oh, I’ve been about,” she said, and made a small affectionate grimace across the table.
“With those common Baker boys, I suppose. You know, Sarah, I think it’s time you gave up playing with schoolboys. And they have a bad name in the village.” Sophie glanced sideways at James and began to eat with concentration.
Sarah looked at her suspiciously.
“This is very unlike you, Sophie,” she said warily. “I thought you liked Jake and Tigger.”
“I’ve nothing against them as boys, but the whole family are a little—well, dear, James understands.”
“Oh, I see,” said Sarah, giving James a hostile look. “Well, I wasn’t with the Bakers.”
‘Then,” said Sophie, before James could speak, “you were with that Pinto person, which is worse.”
“And he, also,” said Sarah with dangerous calm, “has a very bad name in the village. Yes, I was with Pinto. He’s doing another portrait of me, and we had picnics in the studio and had very good fun. Does J.B. understand that?”
James turned to Sarah.
“I want to meet these people,” he said. “Jake and Tigger sound fun.”
Sarah looked at him. His face, like his voice held merely kindly interest, and she smiled.
“I don’t know if you’ll approve of all my friends,” she said frankly. “But you shall meet them.”
Sophie, watching her vivid little face turned expectantly towards her guardian, sighed. It. was nice, she thought, to be young and fresh and at the beginning of life, with a man as attractive as James to counsel guidance. He might have been very different. Sophie was sentimental. In Sarah’s softened mood-she could believe in any outcome to the situation. James was twenty years older, it was true, but the child was attractive and he had plainly been taken with her that first evening. Now that, thought Sophie, watching them, would solve everyone’s problems in the simplest possible way. How pretty the child looked in that green frock with the candlelight falling on her bright hair. James had thought she was top thin and needed more rest. Well, they never rested, these young people, as she had told him, and Sarah was probably still growing.
They drank their coffee on the terrace, watching the shadows grow long on the smooth turf. Sarah seemed dreamy and abstracted, and didn’t notice Sophie’s meaningful look as she rose to her feet and said:
“Well, now I think I’ll leave you. You’ll want to have a little talk and get to know each other.”
“What did she say?” asked Sarah as Sophie went into the house.
“She wants to finish a book and thinks it’s damp out here,” James said tactfully, if untruthfully.
She shook her hair back from her face.
“Go on with what you were telling me at dinner,” she said, “You make it all sound such fun.”
“It was fun,” he said, smiling at her. “One day we’ll travel together—you and Sophie and I. You’d enjoy it.”
“Will we? Will we really, J.B.?” she asked, and he noted with amusement that for the time at l
east she had forgotten to ask again how long he was staying.
“Of course. Travelling should be part of everyone’s education. It was to have been part of mine only I had to cut it short and earn my living. That’s why I’m afraid I took so long over it when I did go.”
“Were you really poor?” she asked with interest.
“I was really poor,” he assured her a little wryly. “And it wasn’t easy because I hadn’t been brought up that way.”
“Why didn’t Long John help?” she asked. “It seems funny he didn’t when he left everything to you.”
“Perhaps that’s why. He believed in people—young men at any rate—finding their own feet. He was right, I think.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Sarah, screwing up her eyes thoughtfully, “have set that booby trap if I’d known you were poor.”
He laughed.
“What an odd thing to think of! But nice of you, Sarah, all the same. Let’s take a walk round before it gets too chilly.”
They strolled across the lawn together, and James slipped a hand through her arm and gave it a squeeze.
“You’re too thin, my dear,” he said. “I suspect too many late nights and not enough rest. We’ll have to do something about that.”
“I’m as strong as a horse,” protested Sarah. “And no one wants to be fat these days.”
“You’ll never be able to wear frocks like the black horror until you acquire a ‘figger,’ ” he teased.
“Was it a horror?” she asked, quite without rancour.
“I like this one better,” was all he said.
They came to the pool and stood watching the little waterfall tumbling over the rocks and ferns in a frothy boil.
“The Bakers and I bathe here,” Sarah said. “It’s lovely to stand underneath the waterfall and let it come down over you.”
“Yes, I’ve done it many times as a boy.”
“Have you? And did you stub your toe on that sharp rock just underneath?”
“I did indeed. And there’s a deep hole over on the other bank you can slip into if you’re not careful.”
“I know. How funny, J.B. I suppose you discovered all the things I did. Did you use to climb the oak with the rotten bough at the bottom of the wood?”
“And the tall fir that barked your shins coming down?”
“And did you play Infidels and Christians in the old pig pound?”
“No, I think it was Indians and Settlers.”
She laughed and pulled him down on to the swing seat.
“It’s awfully queer,” she said, “almost as if we’d known each other as children.”
“We’ll do a tour of the place tomorrow and find out how many old friends we have in common,” said James. “You know, Sarah, I’ve seen nothing of you at all since I came home.”
She felt a little guilty. She had kept out of his way deliberately and had meant to be rude, but it seemed a little churlish now. He was going out of his way to be nice to her.
“I’m sorry about last night,” she said. “Pepper lectured me in the pantry.”
His eyes twinkled.
“You were behaving rather like the girl in the book, weren’t you? The girl whose line you said was all wrong.”
“Yes, I was,” she admitted, “but you threw my original line out of gear the night you arrived.”
He laughed.
“The sweet womanly pose? Yes, I’m rather sorry. I would like to have seen how that one worked. What else have you got in store for me?”
Her green eyes slanted.
“I can be a devil,” she said with satisfaction. “A devil no one could put up with.”
“Yes, I gathered that in the village,” he remarked dryly. “Oh, I know the whole idea is to drive me away as soon as possible, but you won’t, you know, Sarah. I think I’m quite capable of coping with devils.”
This sounded suspiciously like a challenge, and some of her first resentment returned, and she had to voice it.
“I know you’d been scavenging,” she said. “Whatever they told you, it’s all true, so now you know.”
“I hope it isn’t all true,” he replied lightly. “I don’t for a moment suppose it is, so do your worst, Sarah, I’m equal to it.”
“That is a challenge,” she said uneasily. “All right, J.B., you asked for it.”
He regarded her thoughtfully for a moment or so without speaking, then he said:
“I’d rather like to get to the bottom of this attitude. Can you give me any real reason why you’re so anxious to get rid of me?”
Sarah couldn’t. When she came to think of a reply she could find no logical reason why she should resent James’s homecoming so much.
“I don’t know,” she said with surprise. “You were a stranger, and I don’t think any of us really quite believed in you. Sophie and I get on awfully well and—and—”
“What you really mean is you can twist Sophie round your little finger, and you weren’t sure about a third person.”
“We didn’t want a third person butting in. Neither would you if you’d always been independent.”
“But why should we interfere with each other?”
“You couldn’t help interfering with me,” Sarah said. “Peronel said you would have tiresome ideas about budding womanhood.”
“Did she indeed?” James was undecided whether to laugh or be annoyed. “I wasn’t aware that I had any particularly fixed ideas on the subject, but I suppose there must be a few obvious rules for everyone.”
“It isn’t a man’s job to look after a girl,” she said stubbornly, and this time he did laugh.
“I’m not so sure,” he retorted. “It depends on the girl. You don’t pay much attention to women, do you, Sarah?”
She thought of Sophie, the staff of the schools in which she had refused to stay. It was true. Long John had always been her authority and after him Pinto, and even old Pepper.
“Long John always said that was a biological law,” she remarked slowly. “Women would take things from men but not from other women. And that’s why women in authority over women were hardly ever a success. It was one of his pet theories.”
“Yes, I know. He’s argued that way with me. I think there’s something in it, you know,” James said. “That’s why, presumably, when I inherited Fallow I inherited you as well. He might just as easily have given Sophie full guardianship.”
“I suppose he might,” admitted Sarah, then added quickly: “The why didn’t you start three years ago?”
“Yes,” said James a little wryly, “there you have my Achilles heel. I’m afraid I was shirking my responsibility, though I didn’t realise it at the time. I thought, as all the technical details were under control I wasn’t needed in person. There was Sophie, there were schools—or so I thought. I should have come to see for myself. I’ve no doubt now, that’s what my uncle really intended. But it’s never too late, so now perhaps you’ll understand why I mean to stay.”
“But why—why now?”
“Because,” said James simply, “I think you need looking after, my dear Sarah.”
“Oh,” said Sarah rather blankly. It looked as though it wasn’t much use trying to get rid of the G.I.
He shot an amused glance at her disconcerted face.
“It will be much simpler for us both if you make up your mind to it,” he said humorously. “It’s so wearying to live in a perpetual state of feud.” He saw the sudden glint in her eyes and added quickly: “No, you won’t get rid of me that way. I daresay you’d get a tremendous amount of fun out of trying to wear me down, but it wouldn’t work. I can be stubborn top. Listen, Sarah. That first evening when you didn’t realise who I was—you quite liked me—be honest now, didn’t you?” She said nothing but dug an uneasy toe into the turf and set the seat swinging. “You know you did. After all, you did bring me out here to this very seat for the purpose of—”
The seat rocked wildly.
“You’ll never let me live that down, will yo
u?” she cried, her cheeks hot. “I think it’s unfair.”
“Far be it from me” said James mildly, “to throw a lady’s kindness in her face. I was only trying to point out that you couldn’t have found me totally obnoxious—at least I imagine not.”
“Well, anyway, you kissed me back,” she said childishly.
“Naturally.” He smiled. “I’m no laggard, and I thought you were very charming.”
“Pinto says no woman amounts to anything till she has thrown away her inhibitions,” she said irrelevantly.
“Does he really?” said James. “He doesn’t seem to be a person of very original ideas.”
From the expression on Sarah’s face this appeared to be a shock. She had evidently thought him to be both original and revolutionary.
“Sarah dear,” he said with gentle humour, “don’t you know that every Chelseaite talks like that? It’s just a line. Nothing new.”
“Not with Pinto,” she said uneasily. “Pinto’s a real artist, and very sincere.”
“How did you meet him?”
“Sophie thought I might study art to give me something to do, so I used to go to Pinto’s studio twice a week.” She giggled. “That was a year ago. He said I hadn’t the smallest idea how to begin to paint, but he liked painting me, so I stayed, and then the lessons stopped, and now I just go down there whenever I like. You see we became friends.”
“I see,” said James. “We must have him up here some time.”
“Pinto wouldn’t come here!” exclaimed Sarah scornfully. “He despises people with money. He says money chokes ambition and deadens perception.”
“I wonder if he’s ever really been poor,” said James mildly. The Pinto affair, what he had heard of it, slightly worried him. He knew that he would have to put a stop to the friendship, but he was not prepared to be drawn into heated argument with Sarah at the moment Yesterday, he had listened for nearly an hour to Lady Bollard’s views on the subject. Her clichés were almost as well-worn as Pinto’s. “A scandal to the village ... always drunk ... women ... in all probability painting Sarah in the nude ... taking her to public-houses ... making an exhibition of herself ...”