by Q. Patrick
Nestling on it in the green, weathered cedars, Kay could see the white peaked roof of the playhouse Ivor had built there as an extra-private retreat. The sight of it and the quivering memories it evoked somehow snapped the lotus charm. Almost before she realized it, she said: “Maud, I’ve got to talk to you about Elaine. Are you really happy about the wedding?” Maud, who was occupied with a piece of embroidery, glanced up, her gray eyes watching Kay intently. “You mean because Ivor’s been married before, because he’s so much older?”
“That. And—and he hasn’t a particularly wholesome reputation.”
Maud selected a strand of shell-pink wool and threaded it through the needle eye. “I don’t think you’d blame him for anything he’s done, dear, if you knew him.”
“Apparently you don’t blame him. In fact, you must approve of him intensely to park the entire family on his charity!”
She hated herself for saying that the instant the words were out of her mouth.
A faint flush had come into Maud’s cheeks. “It’s unkind and not true to call it charity. For many years Gilbert has been handling the Drake estate, first for Ivor’s father and now for Ivor. It’s a big job and gradually he gave up all his other work for it. He’s done a great deal for Ivor and this is Ivor’s way of repaying.” The needle drew the thread surely through the canvas. “After Gilbert’s paralysis, with doctors’ bills and everything, we had very little left and yet the doctors said Gilbert had to have plenty of sunshine and fresh air.” Maud looked up, her gray eyes suddenly challenging. “If Ivor hadn’t sent us here, Gilbert might not be alive now. That means more to me than any gossip about what Ivor may or may not have done. It also means more than any stupid pride about accepting favors.”
How could Kay argue against that patient gratitude? How could she make Maud see that Ivor’s favors were never favors; that he thrived on playing lord and master to people who couldn’t exist without him?
“But it’s—it’s so bad for Terry, Maud. You’re getting him used to the luxurious way of living. Don’t you see how hard it’s going to be when he has to start looking for a job at twenty dollars a week?”
“Terry won’t have to look for a job yet, Kay. After the wedding, Ivor has promised Gilbert a little income for the two of us; and it’ll see Terry through his last year at college.”
“Maud!” Kay stared incredulously. “You can’t—you can’t have accepted all that! It can’t be you. It’s Gilbert. It’s just the sort of thing he’d do. You say he gave up all his other legal work for Ivor. What you really mean is that he didn’t have any other clients. He’s always been shiftless. Now he’s selling your daughter for his own security!”
“You mustn’t say that.” Her sister’s eyes were very bright now. “You never approved of Gilbert. But he loves Elaine as deeply as she’s always loved him. He’d rather die than let her marry any man if he wasn’t sure he’d make her a good husband.”
“And you think Ivor would make a good husband?”
“He has been very kind to us. Oh, I know he may drink a little too much …”
“Drink! If it was only drink! Do you think he made Rosemary Powell a good husband?”
“Rosemary?” Maud’s voice was very soft. “Ivor’s told me all about Rosemary. Poor, neurotic girl! Just because she was mentally unstable even when he married her, you can’t blame Ivor for what happened.”
“Ivor told you Rosemary was mentally unstable? He dared to say that? Rosemary was as sane and young and lovely as Elaine when she married him. It was he who turned her into that broken, neurotic creature who threw herself out of a window rather than go on. He did that to her, and he did it deliberately because it’s in his blood to destroy. He’d have done it to me too if I hadn’t escaped in time.”
“To you? Kay, what on earth do you mean?”
“I’m talking about Ivor and me. I met him here three years ago. I thought he was the most glamorous man in the world. He made wild love to me. I even promised to be his wife, and he gave me that emerald he gave Elaine. Oh, I was crazy, blind. And I almost realized it at the time, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even admit that he was bolstering himself up with drink, morning, noon, and night, that he was getting me to drink too. I didn’t even think what he meant when he hinted that there were more exciting things than drink. I—I was so blind I didn’t even sense danger that day when I stumbled and fell on the rocks and—and I saw his eyes, staring bright like a snake’s, as the blood trickled down my bare arm. …”
She tossed back her hair. “It was only through Rosemary that I saw the truth. Rosemary had been there all the time. I just thought she was a little Bermudian girl who dropped in because she lived close by. Then one day she came to me, accused me of stealing Ivor, told me she was engaged to him. And all that time. Ivor had been making love to me in front of her, deliberately, because he enjoyed seeing her go through hell! I tried to tell Rosemary, tried to warn her what he was really like, but she was young and madly infatuated and—and she didn’t find out until it was too late.”
“Kay, that’s a lie. A wicked, shameful lie. I …”
“It’s a lie, is it? Then perhaps you’d like to hear the truth from Rosemary herself. Upstairs I have her diary. She sent it to me just before she killed herself. I’ll get it for you.”
Suddenly Maud leaned forward, putting a hand on her arm. From the end of the terrace had come a slow, trundling sound. “Gilbert!” she whispered fiercely. “You mustn’t say any more now.”
Gilbert Chiltern was pushing himself toward them in a wheel chair. At his side moved a tall, gaunt woman in a nurse’s uniform.
Maud’s voice came jerkily. “Kay, I want you to meet Alice Lumsden, Ivor’s cousin. Alice, this is my sister.”
The nurse’s deep, suspicious eyes stared at Kay. She gave a little nod and then turned to Maud.
“At the hospital they said Mr. Chiltern’s range of motion had not increased. But they think he’ll soon be able to get a little exercise swimming.”
Mechanically patting at the cushion behind Gilbert’s back, she rustled starchily away.
Gilbert Chiltern was smiling at Kay with the faintly sarcastic courtliness with which he always treated her. She was amazed at the absence of change in him. Always meticulous about his dress, he was wearing a dark-green silk bathrobe over light-green pajamas. The cushion of the wheel chair, peeping out, was light and dark green too. In spite of the paralyzed legs, which were pathetically thin and wasted, the gay color scheme gave him a jaunty air. With his prematurely snow-white hair, his dark, amused eyes, and his athlete’s shoulders, he looked as handsome and aristocratic as ever.
“Welcome to our Eden, Kay. The only thing I hold against Ivor is the face of his poor relation. He might have picked me a more toothsome playmate.”
Kay tried to answer frivolously, but soon the social effort was too much for her. Murmuring something about having to unpack and dress for dinner, she hurried away from the terrace and up to her room.
With fingers that trembled, she tugged open a suitcase and, fumbling through clothes, pulled out the little green leather diary.
She turned to the title page:
ROSEMARY DRAKE
HER DIARY
Underneath was a note scribbled in a sprawling, shaky hand:
Kay, dear, read this. 1 want you to. Read it and see how right you were. Never show it to anyone, never unless there’s another—Rosemary Drake.
Shakily Kay leafed through the pages, pausing at random.
… Ivor knows I’ll always love him, that my love for him’s like a poison in my blood. He knows I won’t ever get away. That’s what gives him his power. When he brought her here, he knew I was in the flower room, knew I wouldn’t have the courage to come out, that I’d have to stay there and listen …
As she read through the poignant self-revelation for the hundredth time, Kay’s anger blazed again.
… I think he knows I’m planning to kill myself. Sometimes I can see by his eyes.
Oh, 1 know him so well now! He knows and he’ll never lift a finger to stop me. Maybe that’s what he was always waiting for …
Suddenly Kay snapped the diary shut and spun round, clutching it in her hand. A voice had sounded from the door, a low, brittle voice saying: “Here comes the bride!”
For a moment she thought Elaine must be some vision conjured up by her own mind. It was too cruel, too glibly ironical.
Her niece was standing in the doorway in an exquisite wedding dress of paperweight taffeta, with feathery puffed sleeves, a fitted bodice, and a full, flaring skirt which reached to the floor. A small cap adorned her dark hair and yards of white gossamer tulle floated down from it in a train.
“The dress has come. How do you like it?” Elaine’s lovely face had been bright and smiling. Gradually, as she looked at Kay, her expression changed. “Why are you staring at me like that?”
“Why, Elaine …” Kay faltered.
“You don’t have to tell me.” The girl’s dark eyes suddenly blazed. “You heard what Don said about Ivor paying for this dress—for all the trousseau.”
“My dear, I …”
“You’re just like the rest of them. You think I’m marrying him for his money.” There was a swift, almost hysterical defiance in the girl’s voice. “Terry thinks that. Terry used—used to love me, but he hates me now. He despises me because he thinks I’m marrying Ivor to be rich. But I don’t care what any of you think. Why should I?
“Ivor is rich. He is older than I. He has been married before. But why shouldn’t I love him? I’m glad he’s rich and can afford all those wonderful things for Daddy. It isn’t a sin to marry a rich man, is it?”
She stopped dead, swinging blindly away as the door opened again and Simon Morley strolled into the room. The girl wore a leaf-green bathrobe over her swimming suit and her amazing chestnut hair was damp and pushed carelessly back from her forehead.
“Just back from aquaplaning with Terry.” She ran a finger around the silver slave bracelet on her wrist. “I heard there was a dress rehearsal, so I came to peek.”
Behind their long lashes her chameleon blue eyes moved over Elaine with the faintest trace of mockery. “Darling, you look too picturesque for words.” Her smile, parting red, exotic lips, seemed to include Kay in its obscure irony. “This trip to the altar Ivor’s certainly ringing the gong, isn’t he?”
The room was caught up in a thick, hostile silence. Vaguely Kay was conscious of voices and a commotion downstairs in the hall and then of footsteps ascending the stairs. The other girls seemed to be listening too. Both of them turned as the footsteps drew nearer and nearer.
Then, at the very pitch of that queerly built-up climax, a tall, lithe man in an immaculate white suit stepped into the room.
Kay felt sudden dizziness. Elaine took a short step forward.
“Ivor!”
“Yes, darling. Ivor, by the grace of Pan-American Airways and a hired boat from Hamilton.”
“But—but I thought you were coming tomorrow.”
“So did I until I got onto the plane.”
Very slowly Ivor Drake’s eyes, dark and slightly tilted at the corners, moved from Elaine to Simon Morley. Finally they rested on Kay. They showed not the slightest vestige of surprise or embarrassment.
“This,” he said, “is a stupendous welcome. Kay Winyard, Simon Morley, and Elaine Chiltern, all in a girlish group to greet me. The Three Graces—or would it be The Three Fates?”
He paused.
“The past, the present, and the future.”
CHAPTER 3
Unexpectedly in those first grueling seconds Kay’s entire attention was fixed on Simon Morley. The girl was staring at Ivor, her face lit up with sudden incandescent fury.
“You’ll have to get along with only two fates for a while,” she said. “I’m going home.”
Ivor’s slight shrug dismissed her. With that slow, extraordinarily supple grace of his, he moved to Elaine and put his hands on her arms.
“Darling, you’re lovelier than my memory of you.” He kissed her gently on the lips, his fingers moving across the soft taffeta of the wedding gown. “Beautiful and laudably impatient to be a bride.”
Elaine still seemed in a daze. “I was just trying on the dress for Kay. You—you seem to know each other.”
“Yes. We met once—years ago.”
Only then did Ivor Drake turn squarely to Kay. It was amazing how he had not changed a particle in three years. He must be almost forty now. Yet he could have passed for twenty-eight with his slim figure and the tanned, unlined face which showed maturity only in the sophistication of the mouth and in those dangerous mahogany eyes that never missed the tiniest movement in a room or the faintest change of mood.
Thoughts were tumbling in Kay’s mind. Had he come back a day earlier because he’d heard she would be there? Had he guessed why she had come?
His gaze had shifted to the little green leather book in her hand. Did he know what it was? With the slightest trace of derision in his voice, he said: “I’m delighted at the prospect of having you for an aunt, Miss Winyard.”
“And I’m delighted to be here for the wedding.” Kay felt no awkwardness now, only her own antagonism and more subtly the antagonism emanating from him. “I never forgave myself for only just missing your last one.”
Elaine’s eyes in her pale set face were bright and puzzled. “Kay’s going to be maid of honor, Ivor.”
“So you told me.” For an instant his eyes flickered. “Kay Winyard—maid of honor! What could be more apt?” He slid his arm around Elaine’s waist. “Come, darling, your honorable aunt will be wanting to dress for dinner. We must leave her in peace.”
At the door he paused, glancing at Kay over his shoulder. “That’s quite a sound principle for prospective aunts and nephews, don’t you think—leaving each other in peace?”
That was a definite challenge and Kay accepted it. Although her plans were still vague, she felt oddly sure of herself now. Slipping the little green diary into a drawer of her dressing table, she chose a white evening gown with jade-green sandals. She had picked a spray of feathery blue plumbago from a vase at the bedside and was just arranging it, Bermuda style, in her hair, when the gong boomed for dinner.
After cocktails, most of which were consumed by Ivor, dinner was served, as lunch had been, in the white-walled patio at the back of the house, with candles already lit in high hurricane glasses.
The moment Kay sat down at the table, she sensed the extraordinary change which had come over the family with Ivor’s arrival. There was nothing tangible. In fact, the Chilterns, all of them, had assumed a sort of overexcited politeness to welcome the unexpected host. And yet beneath the smooth veneer, like the pulsing of a heartbeat, she could feel an undercurrent of tension.
It was in Ivor too—in the very excess of charm in this man who never overexerted himself without a purpose. As the beautifully prepared meal progressed, Kay was almost sure that he was conducting this charm ensemble for her benefit, just to show her how completely he had her family eating out of his hand.
And then gradually she began to realize that something was going wrong. Acutely conscious of Ivor and his every shift of mood, she detected the change first in him, in a certain insolent tilt to his smile, a caressing softness in his voice which spelled danger. And slowly she realized the cause, realized that for some unfathomable reason the Chilterns were no longer responding the way he wanted them to. Elaine, lovely and flowerlike in a white satin dress similar to Kay’s, had slipped into apathetic silence. Terry too seemed remote, awkwardly out of the group. Even Maud, in spite of Ivor’s attempts to attract her interest, was withdrawn in some reverie of her own.
Kay felt increasingly keyed up. She knew Ivor so well, knew that lack of adulation, particularly from dependents, was poison to him and that, subjected to it, the paper-thin layer of charm could be ripped like a circus hoop. She watched the danger signals of his mounting exasperation, waited for the flare of
almost feminine spite which was bound to come.
And it came with a suddenness that startled even her.
Staring down the table at Maud, Ivor said casually: “Do you know if the bed’s made up in the playhouse?”
“Terry’s been sleeping over there. But I can easily get Don to take clean sheets over after dinner if you want to be on the island.”
“It’s bad luck for the bridegroom to sleep under the same roof with the bride. I’d be more conventional in the playhouse.” Ivor’s gaze, dark and sardonic, shifted around the table to Terry. “That is, unless Terry doesn’t want to move out.”
Terry looked up. “Why should I care?”
“Well, it’s charmingly private on the island.” Ivor shrugged. “And it only takes six minutes to row over there from the Morley house.”
Terry’s eyes went steel hard.
“Just what are you implying?”
Kay saw the quick parting of Ivor’s lips. “Come, Terry, you’re a grown man now. Or aren’t you? Bermuda’s the place for romance. Simon’s a very attractive girl and I—er—understand she’ll go quite a long way for a slave bracelet.”
Slowly Terry rose, his long body looming over the table. In a low dry voice, he said: “You swine! You damn, lying swine!”
It was amazing that the polite veneer could be cracked so suddenly and so completely. It was amazing too—the white, impassioned fury that was in Terry.
Ivor was watching him, his eyes lit up with a queer brightness, his fingers tightening around his highball glass. “It’s not exactly polite to call me a damn, lying swine in my own house, is it?” His nostrils were quivering faintly. “I may have been able to make things comfortable for your father and mother. I may be willing to finance the completion of your liberal education. But I’m still hoping to be able to marry Elaine without having to deed you my house too.”
As he delivered that final, crude taunt, his eyes slid for one instant to Kay and with sudden clairvoyance she saw the motive behind this wanton attack. Ivor had failed in trying to show her how he could charm the Chilterns; now he was letting her see just how successful he could be in humiliating them.