‘And so what is Helmut doing now, for female companionship? He doesn’t strike me as the kind of man to settle for long periods of celibacy.’
‘I don’t think he is, and I don’t think he has. Though he hasn’t said so to anyone, I rather think he’s found himself a girlfriend in Heraklion. He drives there alone one or two evenings a week, but I doubt if he’s alone once he gets there.’
‘And Lewis Sinclair?’ Until now it had been a subject that had only been skirted around, and Daphne was determined to skirt around it no longer. ‘What’s the state of play there?’
Kate took a drink of her wine and then said, with studied carelessness, ‘The state of play is that he did once have a shattering effect on my peace of mind, but that he does so no longer.’
‘And so you’re now on the same kind of friendly terms with him that you’re on with Helmut?’
‘No. But then Lewis is the dig’s director and, coupled with that, he doesn’t have the kind of personality that encourages easy friendliness.’
Out of the corner of her eye Daphne saw Ella roll her eyes. Ella, she knew, had a very easy relationship with Lewis.
‘And Nikoleta? Are she and Lewis really a hot number?’
‘Nikoleta and Lewis’s relationship is a complete mystery. And if they are hot lovers, they win top marks for discretion.’
Ella put her wine glass down and shifted position so that she was lying on her tummy, with her weight resting on her arms. ‘I share a room with Nikoleta, and I know no more than Kate. What I do know, though, is that Christos is beginning to doubt there will ever be wedding bells.’
‘And I think Kit,’ Kate said, ‘is hoping there won’t be.’
‘Heavens!’ Daphne’s violet eyes widened. ‘Is Kit besotted with Nikoleta as well?’
‘He’s begun paying her a lot of attention, and Nikoleta doesn’t seem to object to it.’
‘Goodness! What a hotbed of action the Villa Ariadne is! What about the Squire? Is his love life equally interesting?’
‘The Squire,’ Kate said in amusement, ‘is as unworldly as he looks and lives a life of perfect probity.’
‘I rather thought so, which leaves only Ella’s love life to be discussed. Now that you are engaged, Ella, and there is a wedding in the offing – at which I assume Kate and I will be bridesmaids – have you finally joined the ranks of the deflowered?’
Scarlet banners flew in Ella’s cheeks. ‘Absolutely not! Sam and I don’t lead the racy lifestyle you and Sholto lead, staying in grand country houses for long weekends, where bedrooms are conveniently next door to each other and everybody, married as well as single, bed-hops. I expect that in London, Sholto has a very smart flat . . .’
‘He most certainly does. It’s a mansion flat in Knightsbridge.’
‘Well, Sam doesn’t have a mansion flat – in Knightsbridge, or anywhere else. He lives in digs in Scooby, North Yorkshire, and when I’m in Yorkshire I live at home with Mum, Dad and Granddad. Neither place is a likely setting for a seduction; and before you rhapsodize about hay lofts and river banks, forget it. Sam is a Yorkshireman and a Methodist. He takes it for granted that when he marries, his bride will be a virgin. And I’m happy with that. I don’t want to shame my family by being pregnant when I walk down the aisle of Wilsden’s Methodist church.’
‘You’ve no need to. No one has, if they live within travelling distance of a Marie Stopes Mothers’ Clinic.’
Kate put her wine glass down. ‘That’s not true, Daphne.’ There was affectionate exasperation in her voice. ‘The clinics are for married women, hence their name. They aren’t for single women. They aren’t even for single, about-to-be-married women.’
‘And so you put a wedding ring from Woolworths on your finger, register as “Mrs” – and Bob’s your uncle. You come away with a Dutch cap in a tin box, and no fears of becoming pregnant.’
She swung her legs from the bed. ‘Of course using it can be a pesky nuisance, and when you are invited to as many country-house weekends as I am – and as Sholto is – it’s hard to remember, when you leave, that it’s still in its tin box in a bedside drawer. I’m forever forgetting about it and leaving mine behind.’
‘And what happens then?’ Ella was riveted, despite her determination not to be.
Daphne shrugged. ‘I trot along to the Stopes clinic in Camden, admit to being unforgivably careless and come away with a replacement.’
Looking across at Ella, she said, stark truth in her voice, ‘I don’t know how you do the remaining-a-virgin thing, Ella. I’m so totally, utterly, completely in love with Sholto, I just can’t keep my hands off him – and I don’t want him to keep his hands off me. It’s as if all other men are a dull grey, and Sholto is in glorious, stupendous, sensational Technicolor. Every time I see him, my heart leaps and I want him so much I can hardly breathe.’
Later, as Kate drove Ella back to Knossos in the Sally, she said, ‘Is the way Daphne feels about Sholto the way you feel about Sam?’
For a long moment Ella didn’t answer, and then she said, ‘No. Not quite. We’ve known each other for such a long time, and that long friendship is what lies at the heart of our relationship. I know it sounds dull, compared with how Daphne describes her relationship with Sholto, but perhaps their relationship won’t last, whereas I know my relationship with Sam will, because, quite simply, it’s impossible for me to imagine him ever letting me down. He would cut his throat first.’
It was so unexpectedly dramatic, coming from Ella, that Kate sucked in her breath.
‘And for that reason,’ Ella added fiercely, looking out of the Sally’s window so that there was no opportunity for their eyes to meet, ‘I’m determined not to let him down. Not ever.’ And in her lap her hands were clasped so tightly together that her knuckles were bloodless.
Their plans for the next morning were to visit the necropolis site in Fortetsa, but even before Kate was dressed, a fellow guest at the hostel knocked on her door to tell her there was a phone call for her.
The communal telephone was in the hall and, tying the belt of her dressing gown around her, Kate hurried down to the ground floor.
‘It’s me,’ Daphne said unnecessarily when Kate picked up the receiver. ‘I’m sick again, so don’t hurry over. Give me an hour.’
Kate made a suitably sympathetic noise and said, ‘You were perfectly okay last night. Did you eat anything after we left?’
‘No, but I had something called “green pie” for breakfast. The waiter in the hotel’s dining room told me it was a traditional Cretan breakfast dish. God only knows what was in it.’
‘In spring and summer it would be any green vegetable or salad leaf. Now, in November, your guess is as good as mine. Would you rather we called Fortetsa off?’
‘No. The way I feel at the moment, there could be no better place for me than a necropolis. I might just ask to be left there.’
Beneath the black scarf covering her head and shoulders, Eleni’s sun-wrinkled face was concerned when, forty minutes later, Kate told her that Daphne had been sick after eating green pie for breakfast. Clicking her teeth together, she said, ‘Green pie, cheese pie, whatever kind of pie, it would make no difference. What she needs to drink – what all women in her condition need to drink – is plenty of Mountain Tea.’
Realizing the assumption Eleni had come to, Kate said, amused, ‘Daphne isn’t having a baby, Eleni. She’s simply eaten something that has disagreed with her.’
‘And when she felt sick the day she arrived?’
‘She was travel-sick. Lots of people get travel-sick.’
‘And lots of women are sick when they first fall. Nikoleta’s cousin in Canea was sick every day for a week. For a week she was sick, even before she missed her time. And the Lady Daphne has the look.’
‘The look?’ Ella asked, stuffing the things she needed for the day into a haversack.
With a gnarled hand, Eleni gestured expressively. ‘When a woman is making a child there is always a look. A
nd Lady Daphne has the look. Let me parcel some Mountain Tea for you to take to her.’
As Eleni set about spooning dried Sideritis leaves from a large jar into a paper cone, Kate and Ella stared at each other, transfixed.
‘It’s possible,’ Ella said at last. ‘Especially if she was as careless with her little tin box as she said she was.’
‘But surely she’d know if she’d missed a period?’
‘Maybe she hasn’t. Maybe, like Nikoleta’s cousin, she’s simply begun being sick from day one.’
Ella drew in a deep, steadying breath. ‘Do we tell her? Do we tell her Eleni thinks she could be suffering from morning sickness?’
‘It can’t do any harm, can it? Even if she began being sick almost from day one, this is the second week she’s felt regularly queasy. She must already have missed a period, or be on the point of missing one. If she hasn’t, or isn’t, it doesn’t matter, does it? And if she is . . . well, the sooner she’s aware of it, the better.’
They barely spoke to each other on the short journey into Heraklion. As they entered the town’s narrow, busy streets, Ella finally voiced what they were both thinking. ‘If she is pregnant, what on earth will she do?’
‘God knows.’ Kate slewed the Sally around the lion fountain in Platía Venizélou. ‘But whatever it is, it’s bound to be a nightmare.’
‘I’m over it,’ Daphne said as she opened her room door to them. ‘Why anyone would serve a pie filled with unnameable greenery for breakfast is beyond me. I should have had more sense than to have eaten it. Why are you both looking at me like that?’
‘Because you’re being sick so often.’ Kate sat down on the edge of the still-unmade bed, adding bluntly, ‘Eleni thinks it might be morning sickness.’
‘And she’s sent you some Mountain Tea,’ Ella added, handing it over.
Daphne took it from her. ‘That’s very kind of Eleni, but please tell her I am most definitely not suffering from morning sickness.’
‘Great.’ Ella’s relief was instant.
Kate, not so easily reassured, said, ‘When was your last period, Daph?’
‘God, I don’t know, Kate. I never pay them a thought, but to humour you . . .’ Daphne lifted her clutch bag from the dressing table and, taking a slim pocket-diary from it, sat down on the room’s only chair. ‘I know I had the curse when I was at Cliveden, the weekend before my reunion with Sholto, and I was at Cliveden . . .’ she flicked carelessly through the diary’s pages, ‘I was at Cliveden the weekend of the sixteenth of October.’
There was silence.
At last Kate said unsteadily, ‘And it’s now the end of November, Daphne.’
‘Yes.’ Daphne’s voice was odd, as if she still hadn’t grasped what the dates meant.
Ella, terrified of Daphne’s reaction when she did grasp their meaning, said, ‘Don’t panic, Daphne. If you panic, you won’t be able to think clearly and . . .’
‘I’m not panicking.’
Letting her breath out slowly, Kate said, ‘Good. The question now is: what are you going to do about it?’
‘Do about it?’ Dazedly Daphne looked across at her and then, instead of breaking down in hysterics, a slow, joyful smile spread across her face. ‘I’m going to leave for England now, immediately, so that I can be there to greet Sholto when he returns from Geneva. And then – together – we’re going to plan a perfect, splendid, beautiful Christmas wedding!’
Chapter Sixteen
Daphne’s confidence concerning how Sholto would greet the news was absolute. In the weeks since their reconciliation, he had left her in no doubt as to how passionately he felt about her and how bitterly he regretted what he now declared to be his insane refusal to end his affair with Francine.
‘I don’t take kindly to being given ultimatums,’ he’d said wryly, his arms around Daphne when, aboard their cruise ship and in bed, she had thought she deserved an explanation. ‘I don’t have any other explanation for you, darling. Just damnable Hertford pride. It’s been our downfall ever since 1689, when Tobias Hertford left it a little too late in bowing the knee to William of Orange. If he’d been quicker off the mark, my father could well have inherited an earldom, like yours, and not a mere marquessate.’
His hand had caressed one of her small, high breasts, his thumb tantalizingly brushing and circling her nipple and, with familiar delicious sensations spiralling through her body, Daphne had no longer cared about the Hertford pride; all that had mattered was that Francine was ancient history and that Sholto was, for the second time in an hour, about to make blissful, rapturous love to her.
Now, once again, she crossed by seaplane from Heraklion to Athens, but as there were no seats available on the next day’s Imperial Airways service from Cape Town to London via Athens, she was reduced to crossing to the foot of Italy by ferry and then travelling the rest of the way by train. All through the long, tedious journey her initial certainty concerning Sholto’s reaction to her news never wavered. She simply didn’t allow it to.
From the moment she had laid eyes on Sholto at Miranda’s party, she had known that she wanted him, and that she would always want him. Even when she had issued her ultimatum about Francine and he had refused to accede to it, it had made no difference to the fundamental way she felt about him. Her own pride had ensured she’d been hesitant when, in the travel agency, Sholto had suggested that she join him on the cruise he was about to take; but even when she had been hesitating, she had known it was a hesitation that wouldn’t survive his touch – and it most certainly hadn’t survived his kiss.
Although their reconciliation was still only weeks old, Daphne didn’t have a shadow of doubt that she was destined to spend the rest of her life with him. All her many previous love affairs were as if they had never been; her only love, now and forever, was Sholto.
As the train halted at the Swiss/German border for passports to be checked, she reflected on how instant her reaction had been, to the realization that she had definitely missed her period. The joy that had sung through her veins at the certainty that she was carrying Sholto’s child had been primeval in its intensity.
Her passport was returned to her and, as she put it back in her clutch bag, it occurred to her that as men were physically and emotionally wired differently from women, Sholto’s reaction would not be primeval in the same way hers had been. He knew she used a Dutch cap, so he would be disbelieving when she first told him he was going to be a father; but hard on the heels of his disbelief would come the realization that, as their engagement would have been announced sometime over the next few months – for how could it not be, when they were so crazily in love with each other and there could be no family objections? – all it meant was that things would now be speeded up.
In leaving Crete immediately, as she had done, she would be home in time to meet him when his plane from Geneva touched down at Croydon in two days’ time.
As the train ate up the miles across Germany she pondered whether Croydon Airport was the best possible place to tell him that she was having a baby and decided, fifty miles short of the border with Belgium, that it wasn’t.
Where then was?
The most likely thing Sholto would have in mind, when she telephoned him to let him know she had come back from Crete several days early, was to ask her where she would like to dine that evening. Her usual answer was Quaglino’s and, after they had dined and caught up on each other’s news, he would expect it to be post-haste either to her flat, if Sandy was absent from it, or his mansion flat in Knightsbridge. And then it would be bed, glorious bed.
She thought about bed, glorious bed for a long time and, as they neared the Belgian border, began pondering as to whether Quaglino’s was any more suitable for her purpose than Croydon Airport. It was a wonderfully intimate and atmospheric restaurant, but it was also a public place and, though it may have been a suitable place for her to break the news of her pregnancy if they’d been married, it wasn’t the most suitable venue when Sholto’s initial
reaction was going to be one of incredulity, bordering on disbelief. That being the case, Quaglino’s was out.
Bed, though, was still very much in, and the most perfect place possible for her to break her momentous news. The snag of the arrangement was the time that would be spent over the dinner preceding it, when she would be longing to share her news and yet having to keep it to herself.
It wasn’t until the train approached the Belgian border and she again took her passport out of her clutch bag that the solution stared her in the face. Dinner would simply have to be skipped. She would still have to allow Sholto to book their regular table at Quaglino’s, for if she didn’t, it would arouse more questions than she could answer. She would then, after her telephone call to him – and a good hour or so before their arranged meeting time, when he would be getting showered and changed, in readiness for the evening ahead – arrive on his doorstep unannounced.
His flat, wonderfully private and full of memories of the many times they had made love in it, was the perfect place for what was surely going to be a moment they would remember lifelong.
Sholto’s briefcase was bulging as he stepped into the Foreign Office’s chauffered car waiting for him at Croydon Airport. Top of the list of his many files was one labelled ‘ITALY’. Mussolini, long in cahoots with Hitler, had, in a rabble-rousing speech, threatened to withdraw from the League of Nations. No one in Geneva had been overly surprised at his threat, but it was yet another ominous indication of the way the world was moving inexorably, step by step, towards war.
The car sped out of the airport and on to the main road leading into central London and he shaded his eyes with his hand, appalled at the blindness of his country’s pacifists. Only in the Foreign Office were the true dangers of the international situation recognized; and the Prime Minister, at loggerheads with his Foreign Secretary and bent on a policy of appeasement with Hitler, had not called a Foreign Affairs Committee meeting since early summer.
Beneath the Cypress Tree Page 17