The Glass Castle

by Violet Winspear

  ‘Yes,’ he said casually. ‘Will you sit here on the sofa while I take the chair? And what will you both have to drink?’

  ‘A Dubonnet,’ Heron said, and was glad to sit down and relieve her legs of their feeling of weakness. ‘Please, Edwin.’

  She felt him look closely at her, as if he caught the tremulous note in her voice, and as he raised his arm to signal the waiter, Sybil continued to look at him as if she couldn’t believe her eyes.

  ‘Have I come as such a shock?’ he asked, leaning back in his chair and crossing his legs with an ease of manner which Heron envied. Casual as his kiss had been it had shaken her, for her deepest instincts told her that Edwin did nothing that was truly casual. He meant the things he said to people, and his actions, like his words, all had a purpose behind them.

  ‘Heron led me on to believe that she was engaged to some rich old man,’ said Sybil, shooting a reproving look at her cousin. ‘She never gave me a clue that it was you, Mr. Trequair. Um, I think I’ll have a vodka and orange to help me get over the shock.’

  ‘Not too much of one that you’ll withhold your consent to the nuptials, eh?’ Edwin looked quizzical, sharing his glance between the cousins as if assessing the physical differences between them. His gaze narrowed until the pupils seemed to be flickering like fool’s fire seen across distant moorland, where sky and earth blended blue and dense.

  ‘I think it’s the most exciting thing to happen for a long time,’ enthused Sybil. ‘I told Heron at my party that you were my idea of a fascinating man. Heron has always been a bit of a dark horse and simply gets a kick out of keeping things to herself. She didn’t let on for a fraction of a second that she was wearing your ring, and led me to believe that she was marrying someone just for his money.’

  ‘And now you know differently,’ said Edwin dryly.

  ‘Yes, indeed. Heron wouldn’t marry just to be rich. She’d have to be heels over ears in love. Did you fall for each other at my party? Did it happen like a bolt out of the blue?’

  Sybil was full of an ingenuous eagerness, her fair hair swinging from cheek to cheek as she glanced first at Heron and then at Edwin. ‘It must have been like that, for you haven’t known each other very long. Will you be having a gorgeous white wedding? Oh, I do hope so! With Heron’s hair and eyes she should look stunning.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ He said it so casually, yet Heron felt the flick of his eyes as he turned to pay the waiter for their drinks. No ... no, she wanted to cry out. Not in white! Not at all! Not you and I, Edwin, when you know it isn’t a case of love with us!

  ‘Here’s good luck to both of you,’ smiled Sybil, lifting her glass. ‘It’s a wonderful surprise and I’m all for having you in the family, Mr. Trequair.’

  ‘Thank you, Sybil.’ He smiled at her, without the ironic twist to his dark left eyebrow. ‘And please call me Edwin, or I shall begin to feel like that elderly gentleman about whom you were teased. I hope I don’t strike you as being too advanced in age for the possession of a young bride?’

  ‘No—’ Sybil studied him with her blue eyes which had never held much shyness. ‘I think you’re one of those men who’s always at the right age, if you know what I mean. When Daddy told me you’d bought Aunt Ruth’s portrait I was rather puzzled, but now I know why you wanted it.’ Sybil glanced in happy innocence at Heron. ‘It will be thrilling for you to live at the Glass Castle, Heron. Oh, I do think you’re a lucky girl!’

  ‘Do you?’ Heron took a sip at her drink, and felt as if her every nerve were coiled and waiting to spring her to her feet, in flight from this maddening situation. She swallowed almost all her drink, craving the courage to say it was all a mistake and she had no intention of ever living at Edwin’s house ... as Edwin’s wife.

  She looked at him and her grey eyes were filled with a wild look of appeal. He met her eyes and she knew that he saw her mounting desperation ... he leaned forward and his hard, lean fingers closed around her left hand. ‘Heron has not yet accustomed herself to the idea of being my wife and is still wondering if I shall be good to her. My dear, do you really see a whip in my hand?’

  She shook her head ... instead she saw a tiger in his eyes and she knew that his temper would be deadly if he were frustrated in his plan to marry her. He didn’t love her ... he had said nothing about loving her, but he had made up his mind to have her, and again there swept over her that curious feeling of being powerless against his claim on her. It all seemed mixed up with her mother, and the lake, and the house above Jocelyn’s Beach which he had bought, he said, just for her.

  ‘Heron holds on to her feelings,’ Sybil laughed. ‘I believe she’s rather afraid of being hurt.’

  ‘Some people are,’ drawled Edwin. ‘They build a shell around them, which has to be cracked by someone brave enough to do it. Heron, now we’re together with the girl who will be your chief bridesmaid, how about naming the day? Would you like a June wedding?’

  No wedding ... no marriage, she wanted to cry out, but his fingers closed with sudden steel-like intensity about hers, and deep in his eyes flared the tiger-flame, and she knew there was no escape from him. No escape from what now seemed inevitable ... that she become the bride of Trequair and live with him in his Glass Castle.

  She felt him crushing her hand as he waited for her to answer him. She was quite convinced that he could, and would, break every bone in her fingers if she did not give into him. Yet it wasn’t fear alone that made her submit ... it was the strange feeling she had of having arrived at a destination from which there was no turning back. All she could do was to drift with the tide that was carrying her so inevitably to Jocelyn’s Beach.

  ‘June sounds perfect,’ Sybil didn’t seem to notice that she was displaying more enthusiasm than the prospective bride, ‘and if the weather is fine and settled, you could hold the reception in the garden of Memory. The roses will be in bloom and all that mass of honeysuckle, and it will be a super setting for a wedding.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Heron, in a strange voice, ‘the garden of Memory sounds just right for our wedding.’

  The lean fingers gripped, then slackened and were gone. The waiter handed menus and enthused about various fancy dishes, but Heron for one was not feeling particularly hungry and she said she would have melon then filet mignon with pommes frites. Sybil said she was starving and requested a prawn cocktail, followed by slices of beef with browned potatoes, sprouts and gravy. Edwin enquired if they had trout and was told at once that it was fresh up from Devon that morning. ‘Then make mine the trout,’ he said. ‘And I’ll start off with pate.’

  The waiter collected the menus, bowed and was gone, to be replaced by the wine waiter. It was all ritual, thought Heron. It was all as pagan as her marriage-to-be. There would even be a bride-price, and that would be the sacrifice of her pride and her person ... her heart alone would belong to her, for Edwin had not asked for that.

  The wine was selected and a few minutes later they made their way into the dining-room which was still as graceful and charming as in the days when Oscar Wilde used to dine at his own special table with Lord Alfred Douglas, the incredibly handsome son of the Marquess of Queensberry. As Heron glanced about her, she had the feeling that those gay ghosts of yesteryear had left their images in the gilded mirrors, and their unrepentant laughter in the mocking eyes of the cupids holding the carved ribbons of the Louis panels.

  ‘I always feel so worldly when I’m invited to lunch at the Ritz,’ said Sybil, as they took their seats at a table by one of the long windows. ‘There’s something in the atmosphere, a sort of superiority, as if here came all the celebrities.’

  ‘And all the pagans,’ murmured Heron, and her eyes flicked Edwin’s throat as she spoke, dark brown against the white of his shirt, and she remembered the things he had told her about himself ... things unknown to the waiters who showed him such deference ... things that would have shocked those diners at nearby tables, who were taking note of the autocratic way he held his head, and t
he way he wore his Savile Row suit. Heron supposed that his faithful Chandra had arrived earlier by train, bringing a change of clothes for the tuan, for last night Edwin had been clad in evening wear when he had driven her back to London.

  ‘I do admire Heron’s ring,’ Sybil said to him, her small white teeth crunching a breadstick as they waited for their first course to arrive at the table. ‘It’s so unusual, so sort of symbolic, and such a romantic change from the solitaire diamond or the chunky emerald.’

  ‘I suppose an emerald might have been thought fitting for a girl with rose-gold hair,’ he said. ‘But rubies have great beauty, and they are said to protect their owner from death by drowning.’

  ‘Years ago,’ Sybil gasped, ‘Heron fell into the lake at Memory. Did you know—did she tell you? A boy who worked there saved her life.’

  ‘It’s ancient history,’ Heron broke in. ‘I see our waiter approaching, so you’re about to be saved from your ravenous hunger.’

  ‘Doesn’t everything look good!’ Sybil attacked her prawn cocktail with avidity, and urged Heron to do the same with her melon, the small sweet variety from Israel resting on a bed of ice. ‘Darling, will you be married at St. Mark’s? I do think it’s such a lovely old church.’

  ‘I’ve decided on the church,’ Edwin said, unexpectedly. ‘The ceremony will take place at the Cloister of Ste. Marie at Geesewell. The Abbey is equally attractive and a bride arriving there doesn’t have to walk among gravestones to the church door. Well, Heron? You approve?’

  Heron gave him the strangest look ... in the grounds of St. Mark’s her parents lay at rest, and he knew, this man who had known no parents, how sad it would make her feel to be so close to them on that day and yet unable to reach out for the reassuring clasp of their hands.

  ‘I do like Geesewell and the Abbey,’ she said. Her fork plunged into her melon, her heart hammered. ‘But, Edwin, wouldn’t a register office do for us? We aren’t romantic people—’

  ‘Heron, don’t be such a spoilsport!’ Sybil almost choked on her last succulent prawn. ‘There are too many quickie weddings these days, with no dressing-up, no glamour, no sound of bells and silver horseshoes. It’s all so utility that it might as well be wartime. Darling, you aren’t one of those dreary people—you’re inwardly one of the most romantic girls I’ve ever known!’

  ‘Don’t worry, Sybil,’ Edwin savoured his wine. ‘Your cousin’s wedding will not be a utility one. Like most romantic people Heron is a little shy—’

  ‘Please don’t keep insisting, you two, that I’m a silly romantic,’ Heron broke in, and she was so tense, so filled with inward trembling that she didn’t dare to touch her wine glass in case she upset it and the ruby-coloured wine spilled across the table. ‘I’m the very opposite to that! I’m not carried away by heady ideas of love and bliss, and the three of us know that I’m marrying Edwin for his money! We know all right, so why wrap it up in yards of white brocade and virtuous lace?’

  ‘Drink your wine,’ said Edwin, and his face looked as impassive as that of an Eastern god carved out of teak. ‘The start of an engagement is always an uncertain time ... for some girls it’s almost like crossing a minefield, and even before she has taken a dozen steps she feels she ought to retreat, dodge back to safety before she steps on dynamite and all the security is blown from under her feet. My dear girl, I assure you, you wouldn’t be feeling like that if you were marrying me just for my money.’

  ‘What else am I doing?’ she asked. ‘If I loved you I wouldn’t feel as if I were walking on dynamite. Surely the path to love is strewn with rose petals!’

  ‘My dear, to arrive at the roses one must dare the thorns.’ He quirked a smile at Sybil. ‘Don’t let us worry you,’ he said. ‘Heron and I know each other very well—we are matador and bull—lioness and tamer—duellists who fence without the safety button on the point of our foils. It isn’t the most cosy form of courtship, but in many ways it is the most exciting.’

  ‘It sounds positively explosive,’ said Sybil. ‘I can see that you two aren’t going to be a cooing and billing couple. But then Heron was never a dove-like person, all soft feathers, agreeable and vain. And you, Mr. Trequair—Edwin—you are somehow hawkish. A bit like a pirate, I think, who has never suffered fools gladly.’

  ‘I could certainly never suffer a foolish wife gladly,’ he agreed.

  At that point in the conversation their main courses came to the table, and Heron found that her filet mignon was delectably tender and her appetite sharper than she had supposed. Somehow Edwin’s description of their courtship had pleased her, for in his own sardonic manner he revealed how he stood with her—en garde and therefore more prepared for cuts than kisses.

  She scooped more spinach on to her plate and glanced across at him. He met her glance and held it, and in that moment, there in the well-worn luxury of the Ritz dining-room, they seemed to be mutually aware of understanding each other. He winked imperceptibly, and even as a smile darted across Heron’s lips, there darted through her the conviction that she was never going to get to the complex heart of Edwin. The real man was always going to be a mystery to her, and that the only transparent thing about him would be the Glass Castle.

  Edwin spent the rest of the day with Heron and her cousin. After lunch he drove them to the flat so Sybil could dispose of her packages, and then they went to Rubin’s the jewellers, where he insisted on buying Sybil a lipstick case of fluted gold, tipped at one end by a topaz and at the other end by a sapphire blue as her eyes. The case contained a pair of lipsticks, one for day wear and the other for evening glamour. Sybil was highly delighted and informed him that if Heron should change her mind about marrying him, then she would just ‘love’ to take Heron’s place.

  ‘You’re delightfully pretty,’ he told her, with his own slightly wicked smile, ‘but you’re far too young for a man like me.’

  ‘I’m only a few months younger than Heron.’ Sybil pouted her lips and compact in hand she began to apply the soft pink of her daytime lipstick. ‘You don’t seem to regard her as being too young for you.’

  ‘Heron isn’t,’ he drawled, swinging the car around Piccadilly Circus into the stream of traffic heading for Shaftesbury Avenue. ‘She is a thousand years your senior, my child, and therefore almost my age.’

  Sybil blinked her lashes at the autocratic jut of his nose above the flare of his nostril and the deep groove of his scar. ‘What is the man talking about?’ she demanded of Heron.

  Heron reclined lazily in her corner of the burgundy-coloured back seat, having permitted Sybil to share the front of the car with Edwin. He had quirked an eyebrow but had not protested. Sybil flung round to look at her cousin, whose hair flamed softly against the upholstery and whose eyes were shielded by her lashes so she had a deceptively slumbrous look.

  ‘Reincarnation,’ said Heron. ‘Aeons of years ago he was Grand Vizier of Babylon and I was brought captive there by his corsairs. I wasn’t too happy about this and I led him a dance until he had me locked in his tower—which was made of solid glass.’

  ‘Oh, it’s a game!’ Sybil was always ready for such, being one of those delightful, inconsequential, smiled-upon people to whom life was kind more often than it was cruel. ‘Was there a dashing prince around to throw you a rope ladder so you could escape?’

  ‘No such luck. I had long hair reaching almost to the ground and I was climbing down my long plaits when the Grand Vizier came from his counting house, where he hoarded his gold and his rubies, and he swung his scimitar and cut off all my hair. I fell at his feet and thought he would chop of my head, but instead,’ Heron paused, and though her lips smiled her eyes were pensive behind her lashes, ‘he married me.’

  ‘Were you happy ever afterwards?’ Sybil’s smile was ingenuous.

  ‘I—I don’t know the end of the story. Ask Edwin.’ ‘Babylon became dust,’ he said. ‘It blew across the centuries and we met again. I don’t believe a story ever really ends, for the scribe can always go on writing of
love and hate, of peace and war, of grief and joy. These scattered atoms of deep emotion come together again in human beings ... a memory of time lost and time regained. And here we are and I’m going to pick up our tickets for tonight. I’ve booked seats for the play—the one we missed, Heron.’ They had arrived at the Classic Theatre.

  ‘So you could have got them,’ she accused.

  ‘Yes.’ He swung round to look at her as the car braked into the kerb. ‘But I had other plans. As they say in the East, when a man goes after tigers he cannot afford to take chances. I shan’t be more than a few minutes.’

  He let himself out of the car and went into the theatre. Sybil gazed at the marquee. ‘The Constant Nymph,’ she said. ‘Sounds old-fashioned.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll love it.’ A slight note of cynicism came into Heron’s voice. ‘It’s all about a girl who kills herself for love.’

  ‘A weepie!’ Sybil looked thrilled. ‘Isn’t your Edwin clever! He knows exactly how to please a girl.’

  ‘He’s had a thousand years in which to learn,’ Heron said dryly.

  ‘Do you really believe in all that reincarnation stuff?’

  ‘I don’t think I’d quite discount it.’ Heron stared at the Gothic ring on her hand. ‘Edwin always gives me the feeling that he knows more about me than I know about myself. It’s uncanny—odd—mixed up with Memory, and yet unremembered. I—I can’t seem to get away from him.’

  ‘Do you really want to?’ Sybil leaned an elbow on the back of her seat and studied Heron with the candid eyes of a girl who rarely looked back, or beyond tomorrow. ‘I think he’s awfully generous—I’m sure he loves you.’