by Pamela Kent
Helen directed a look of the purest dislike at him., and started to walk briskly up the shelving beach. Just before she reached the steps hewn out of the jagged cliff that led up to the gardens of Trelawnce Manor she glanced back over her shoulder and saw him still standing where she had left him and looking after her, and he sketched her an ironic farewell salute.
When she looked back a couple of minutes later the beach was empty, and he had gone. There was no boat putting out to sea, and he had not followed her up the steps. It would have been easy to see if he had walked away along the beach, and he had not done that.
So which direction had swallowed him up? In which direction had he disappeared?
She could only think of the mouth of the cave, and she wished she had the courage to go back and find out whether her suspicion was correct.
But she simply had not the courage ... and again, she could not have told anyone quite why. Perry Trelawnce was Roger Trelawnce’s cousin, in addition to which Roger employed him, so even if he disliked him personally he must have confidence in his abilities. She was quite sure he would not allow him at the manor if he disapproved of him entirely.
But she knew that, under no circumstances, would she trust Perry Trelawnce, and, finding herself alone with him on the beach that morning had actually filled her with acute uneasiness at one stage. And now he had vanished ... she felt reasonably certain he had vanished into the cave.
For what purpose she did not try to think.
She lunched alone, because Roger Trelawnce had gone into Truro on some sort of business and was not expected back until evening. She felt oddly cut off and isolated in the big, sombre dining-room, and every time she looked at the empty chair at the head of the table she had to give herself a mental shake, because nowadays her thoughts attached themselves so easily to the figure that so frequently sat in that chair that they were becoming a kind of embarrassment to herself.
She had no right to think about Roger Trelawnce, no right at all! And yet not merely did she think about him, she dreamed about him. He haunted her sleeping moments, just as he haunted her waking moments, and if she allowed herself to dwell upon him, to the exclusion of every other subject that she might dwell upon, and should certainly cultivate as a kind of central pivot for her straying thoughts and her vain wishful thinking, then she was lost, and her future would be an unhappy thing indeed, with neither peace nor contentment nor even a clear conscience.
For Roger Trelawnce was a married man. He might look at her with eyes that told her he wished he was not, but that did not alter the fact that his commitments were inescapable, since his wife was not only his wife but she was an invalid. Not physically ill, but mentally strangely at sea ... an utterly unusual, unbalanced young woman to whom something had happened that should not have happened, but which had changed the whole course of her life. It was fairly obvious she was not in love with her husband, although she might once have been. It was just as plain that Roger was not in love with her ... but surely he must have been once?
They were tied together by bonds that, in the peculiar circumstances, they could not break, and yet each was only partly aware of the other—completely and casually indifferent. For a reason Helen knew nothing about.
She supposed she could find out a good deal by judiciously pumping Mrs. Pearce. The housekeeper was loyal to her employer, but Helen had a strong suspicion she was not so loyal to her employer’s wife. There were moments, when she emerged from the wing that was Valerie’s prison-house—albeit a lavishly equipped one—when her eyes looked dangerously bright, as if with repressed indignation, and her lips tightly set. More than once Helen had run into her when she looked like that, and when she had almost appeared to be muttering protestingly to herself; and she was fairly certain that if she had asked one or two blunt questions on those occasions, instead of discreetly looking the other way, and proceeding in the opposite direction, she could have learned all that she secretly so ardently desired to know.
Now that she had been at Trelawnce for more than a month she was aware that the housekeeper looked upon her a little differently from when she first arrived. Then, although perfectly friendly, the Cornishwoman had treated her as if she was a bird of passage, someone who would remain with them temporarily, and then go her way again. But nowadays she consulted her about things, about menus and household arrangements, even staff depletions. When a new girl came for an interview she asked Helen what she thought of her, and she asked her what she thought about the patterns that had been sent down for new drawing-room curtains. She was perfectly content that she should wish to do the flowers, and she asked her to use her influence with the head gardener in order to get more blooms sent in.
And occasionally, nowadays, she looked at Helen a trifle oddly ... almost speculatively. When she carried the coffee tray to the drawing-room after dinner in the evenings, and set it down in front of Helen, she wore a slightly smug expression, as if everything was exactly as she would have it, and her glance went from one to the other of them—her employer and the girl he had made his ward—with a benign look of indulgence while she waited to hear whether they had any instructions for her to carry out.
She closed the door upon them, and the softly lit drawing-room, quietly and discreetly, as if she knew her place and was prepared to evaporate into thin air if they desired it. She was not curious, she was not critical, she was far from being displeased ... And she was in the house if they wanted her.
She was their housekeeper.
Such an attitude on the part of Mrs. Pearce sometimes made Helen feel guilty and uneasy. Particularly when she thought of Valerie, alone in that silent wing...
The housekeeper came bustling in now, while Helen was still toying with her sweet and gazing out through the open window at the sunlit terrace, and she smiled and asked her what she was going to do that afternoon.
“Do you think I ought to go upstairs and see Mrs. Trelawnce?” she asked, feeling conscience-stricken because she hadn’t seen her, for three days.
Mrs. Pearce shook her head while she collected various items and placed them on her tray.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” she said. “She’s resting at the moment, and I don’t think it’s wise to disturb her too much.”
“But wouldn’t she like to sit in the garden? We could have tea under that big cedar-tree on the lawn. It must be so hot upstairs...”
A firmer shake of the head answered her.
“She has air-conditioning, and her windows are wide open. She was never a one for a great deal of exercise, in any case. A bit of a sybarite, as they say.”
“Didn’t she bathe, and do things like that?”
“She did at one time, but she had a bad attack of cramp once, and that put her off.”
“I see.”
Mrs. Pearce wielded the brush-and-crumb tray fiercely. “Would you like tea on the lawn yourself, miss? Annie can bring it out to you.”
“Thanks,” Helen answered. “I think I would. But I’m going down to the creek first. I’m going to do some painting.”
“Oh, that will be nice,” the housekeeper returned complacently, and Helen sat thoughtfully at the table for a full ten minutes after she had left the room.
When she finally left the house with her easel it was not to make for the creek. She crossed the garden and the park and made for the cliff top, and the steps leading down to the beach.
She was feeling puzzled. She could have sworn that someone had left the house ahead of her, and that it was not one of the maids. She distinctly saw a figure in summer cotton, that seemed to have a fair head attached to it, flitting amongst the trees. And there was no doubt at all that it was Nimo following along in its wake.
But when she cleared the trees, and reached the open green-clad cliff-top, there was no one at all in sight. She had the entire sunlit world to herself.
She descended the roughly hewn steps to the beach, and it was the same beach from which she had bathed that morning. She set up
her easel within a few yards of the rock behind which she had dressed and undressed, and deliberately forced herself to ignore that jagged entrance to a twilit world behind her, although she knew that it would not be long—her growing curiosity would not permit it to be long—before she explored that opening.
It was a strange thing, as she realised, that she didn’t do so this afternoon, with no one about. And if she were an ordinary holidaymaker she would almost certainly have explored that cave long before this.
Then why hadn’t she already done so? Because there was something about that cave entrance that repelled her as well as excited her curiosity? Because she had the strong feeling her guardian did not wish her to explore it, t or because she associated it with Perry Trelawnce? ... whom she would dislike very much to meet anywhere near it!
She started on a small oil that was intended to embrace the whole wide sweep of the bay, but nothing very much else. There was no life or movement on the shimmering surface of the water, apart from the endless swooping movement of gulls, the occasional shriek of which shattered the silence around her. The yacht that had been anchored off the mouth of the creek that morning had gone, and she wondered whether it was very far away by now, or whether it had dropped its anchor in another of the coves along the shore.
She thought of Perry’s contemptuous reference to shipowners and multi-millionaires, and supposed they were the only kind of people who could afford to run a full-sized yacht these days. Even Roger contented himself with a small cabin cruiser that he had wanted to name. after herself.
He had wanted to call it Helen...
She painted away furiously in order that she should not once more commit the dangerous mistake of allowing her thoughts to dwell upon Roger, especially when there was nothing very much to distract them.
Above the clear crying of the gulls, the gentle wash of the incoming tide, she heard something suddenly that caused her to sit with one of her brushes in mid-air. Voices ... a woman’s voice, and a man’s. They were being wafted to her from the cliff top; or so she thought at first, until she realised that it was a conversation that was actually taking place on the beach, within a few yards of where she sat, in front of the entrance to the cave.
Her heart fluttered uneasily, as if she had been running, and on top of that had been badly startled. Unless she actually peered round the rock she could not see who it was who was talking—and she derived a certain amount of comfort from the thought that the talkers, unless they were already aware of her presence on the beach, could have no knowledge that she was so close to them—but the voices were unmistakable, particularly the somewhat husky, feminine voice that could belong to no one but Valerie Trelawnce.
She was saying, accusingly:
“You were not here when I came to look for you the other day. You’re never here when I come to look for you!”
Perry answered awkwardly:
“How can I possibly be here waiting for you all the time? You know how dangerous it is ... and with that prying female around how am I to know when the coast is clear?”
“She doesn’t mean to pry,” Valerie defended Helen— and the latter was reasonably certain she was the ‘prying female’. “In fact, she means well, I’m sure, and she’s kind ... Mrs. Pearce brings me messages from her. She would like to come and visit me often. I don’t think we’ve got much in common, but I don’t dislike her.”
“I wouldn’t trust her too far, anyway,” Perry warned her. “For one thing she’s got looks ... and Roger has taken to them, I can tell that.”
“Roger never notices whether a woman is pretty or not.”
“Rubbish! He didn’t lose his manhood with his arm ... and he used to have a reputation for squiring dames. You can take it from me he was never a misogynist ... quite the reverse, in fact! And now the old Adam is lifting up its head!”
“I don’t believe it,” Valerie told him sulkily. “Otherwise why have I had so little success with him?”
“Because you’re not his type, darling. You’re not at all his type! He likes good little girls who are precisely what they seem on the surface.”
“You just said that Helen is not what she seems on the surface!”
“I said she’s dangerous ... by which I meant she has a lot of curiosity. She was damned curious about that yacht this morning. I’ve got a feeling she suspects something...”
“Does it matter?” she asked, with the vagueness that typified her. “Very soon now we’ll be away from here ... you and I! And then it will be wonderful, won’t it?”
“Yes, yes,” he answered, with a hint of impatience. “Of course it will be wonderful, but you’ve got to be patient, my sweet. We can’t rush things.”
“But you said it wouldn’t be much longer now. You said—”
“Never mind what I said,” he responded curtly. There was a brief period of silence, and then Helen, venturing to peep round the rock, saw the two figures melt into one another and become one for a short and rather ugly period of time. There was so much violence in the way the man’s arms closed round the graceful, feminine shape, wearing the same summer cotton that had disappeared earlier amongst the trees—and crushed her up against him, and such obvious desperation in the fastening of Valerie’s arms about his neck, that Helen wasn’t only shocked, she was actually revolted.
He kissed her ardently, but in a way she would have disliked very much to be kissed herself, and then let her go.
“What about tomorrow night—?” Valerie began breathlessly.
But he placed a hand swiftly over her mouth, and ordered her to be more careful. He glanced round him, as if suspecting the apparent emptiness of the cove.
“You mustn’t talk about things that don’t really concern you, sweet. Now get back to the house. Which way will you go?”
“I think I’ll go back the same way that I came.”
“Good. That’s probably the safer way—”
“When will I see you again?”
“I’ll let you have a signal. Be careful not to run into the Pearce woman on your way back ... I neither like nor trust her. She’s another potential enemy.”
“Oh, Pearcy’s all right.”
They kissed again, swiftly—although she would have prolonged it—and then he stood back and watched as she climbed the stairway to the cliff-top. Silhouetted against the blue of the sky, her flaxen fair hair blown about by the breeze, her slimness the weakest link in her armour, for it was the slimness of one who was dependent on others for care and protection, Valerie waved a hand, and he waved back. Then, after hesitating for a moment longer, she vanished.
Helen felt as if tension was tightening her throat, and pressed close to the rock for concealment she wondered what would happen to her if Trelawnce so much as suspected her presence. The whole brief episode had left her shaken and enlightened, but she was also afraid. Instinctively, right from the first, she had disliked and mistrusted the hard-faced Perry ... but now she knew he was not merely planning to take Roger’s wife away from him, he was involved in something else that was far more likely to involve him in trouble if it was found out.
The impression she had been left with, having witnessed the lovers’ meeting, and heard their interchanges, was not so much that they were mutually violently attracted to one another, but that Perry had other fish to fry that were far, far more important. He might be planning—one day—to possess himself of Valerie; but for the moment his thoughts were distracted by other concerns, and if it was love he felt for her it was considerably watered down at the moment by those concerns.
Of the two, it was Valerie who was entirely single-minded and prepared to offer wholesale devotion. She probably didn’t care about anything else, the success of his plans, the reward of waiting, the necessity for being patient. He must have some strong hold over her that he could induce her to be so patient ... and to put up a pretence for the benefit of her husband and Mrs. Pearce.
Although perhaps it was not altogether pretence. She was not
entirely as other women, and that could be one reason why her lover enjoined her to be patient. Revolted by him as she was, Helen would have believed him capable of anything, even failing a young woman like Valerie, who so pathetically and so plainly had placed all her confidence in him.
And, strangely enough, Helen felt no criticism of Valerie as she pressed herself against the rock. She only, felt intensely sorry for her ... an aching kind of pity.
Even the gulls seemed to cease making their weird crying noises as she stood there pressed against the rock, and the cove was as still and silent as an empty vessel as the vital seconds ticked past. If Perry suspected her presence he would let her know ... soon. If he had no idea of her presence he would go away.
Her heart beat suffocatingly, and thundered in her ears. Instead of silence the whole world vibrated, or so it seemed to her, to her heartbeats.
And then, once more, she ventured to peep round the rock.
Perry was climbing the jagged steps to the cliff-top. Once at the head of them he paused and lighted a cigarette, inhaled a few quick puffs, and then ground it out almost absentmindedly beneath his heel. He went on his way without a backward look.
Helen waited for fully another quarter of an hour, and then she, too, climbed the cliff.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ROGER returned from Truro in a frame of mind that indicated he had had a reasonably successful day, although in no sense of the word was he elevated by what had taken place that day. On the contrary, there was a certain air of resignation about him when they went in to dinner.
Helen was wearing a dress that she had not yet worn at Trelawnce, a simple patterned silk that seemed somehow to lend her an air of reserve. There was nothing noteworthy about it, nothing ostentatious. But it fitted in with the quiet drawing-room when they went in for coffee, and underlined her own quietness and thoughtfulness.