"Mm, to a certain extent." Fern sipped her tea, and now the gaiety induced by the carnival had left her. She didn't want to discuss her marriage, but if she changed the subject Ken would guess she wasn't happy; that something was wrong.
Then he seemed to sense her mood, or was reluctant himself to linger on the subject. "Are Aster and Bryony keeping well?" He spoke with an abrupt heartiness that made a diner at an adjacent table glance frowningly at them.
"Yes, they're both keeping well." Fern clutched eagerly at this new topic of conversation. "Bryony's had young Frankie in bed with a couple of chest colds just lately, so she and Rick are thinking of moving out of town into the country. Rick's work is movable, as he's an
interior decorator, and Bryony was always a bit chesty herself as a child."
"Frankie's a grand little chap----" Then Ken broke
off, almost painfully, as though a wave of cold regret broke over him.
The lounge suddenly seemed more shady, and Fern, glancing out of a nearby window, saw a bank of stormy clouds congesting the sky above the ocean. "I think it's going to rain before long," she remarked.
"Then let's go down on the beach and catch the last of the sunshine?" Ken suggested.
"My bus leaves soon—"
"Look, I'll drive you home if you like. Those glass-roofed touring buses get horribly stuffy after they've been standing in a parking-lot for several hours."
The bus was an air-conditioned one, but somehow she couldn't hurt him by refusing his offer, and after they left the Talbot they crossed over to the beach. Their feet sank into the pale dry sand as they sought out a spot that was comparatively peaceful. They sat down and Ken held open his cigarette-case. Fern accepted a cigarette, and there floated into her mind remembrance of her honeymoon flight to New York. How kind Ross had been to her that day. He had almost seemed to mean his sweet attentions . .. and that kiss on the tarmac.... Oh, God, the tight holding of his arms... the caress of his mouth.
She bent her head to Ken's lighter, and she must have grown pale, for he was staring at her. Her sudden paleness threw into relief her softly rouged, sweet-shy mouth, and it was her mouth which held his glance. Once his to touch with eager lips, now only Ross Kingdom had the right to hold her, to press his cheek to her soft one and tell her how lovely she was.
"Do you like working in Gap Flamingo?" Fern asked him. His skin had so darkened in the Californian sun that he had an almost foreign look, and his steel-blue eyes showed vividly against his dark skin. Fern noticed the admiring glances thrown at him by several girls playing beach ball nearby.
He talked about his job for several minutes. He had been offered a permanent post at one of the Golden Orange factories, but the challenge of building up Bramley's Maidenhead branch into something really big had made him turn down the offer. He would be going home in a fortnight's time, he added.
Home!
Fern stifled a sigh and flicked ash from her cigarette, then she broke into a slight smile as a plump little girl in baggy bathing drawers wandered up to them. She smiled most flirtatiously at Ken. "I'm lost," she told him, with a blink of long seductive lashes.
"You're a fibber," he grinned. "Your mummy and daddy are sitting just over there. I saw your daddy making you some sand pies a while ago."
"Did you?" She sidled closer to Ken, evidently as fascinated by him as those older girls with their beach ball. "Were you watching me?"
Fern sat smiling at the interchange. Ken, she recalled, had always got on well with Aster's little girls.
"D'you like ice-cream?" Ken enquired of the minute seductress.
"Peanut clusters are best," she replied, and from the sticky condition of her chin and hands it was obvious she had already enjoyed one. Ken, with the usual male indulgence for anything feminine and flirty, handed over the money for another peanut cluster and she went prancing off in the direction of a white-coated vendor, one hand holding on to her slipping beachwear.
"All girls should stay that age," Ken laughingly declared.
"So should boys," Fern agreed.
"Looking angelic in baggy, sea-wet drawers."
"Demanding only peanut clusters from life."
They laughed together, then Ken said : "Do you miss your nursing, Fern? You were always a pretty keen member of the profession, weren't you?"
"Oh, Ross didn't want a working wife, and I quite enjoy looking after him and the bungalow. I've discovered that I'm quite domesticated, though I'm still in-
clined to burn the potatoes now and again and to hard-boil Ross's eggs."
Ken gazed towards the ocean where swimmers were being chased to the beach by big, hungry-looking rollers. Something muttered, then growled in the sky towards the west where the sun hung like a sulphur-coloured globe. A rising wind belled the front of Ken's shirt, lifted grains of pale sand and sent a discarded ice-cream carton rolling along.
"Then you're happy with Kingdom?" Ken said quietly.
"Yes."
She was worrying the charms on her wrist, the tiny pagoda, the frog, and the heart which Ken had given her long ago. Quite suddenly one of the bracelet links broke apart, and Fern's exclamation of dismay brought Ken's glance round to her. He saw at once what she had done. He stubbed out his cigarette and took the bracelet from her fingers. "Here, let me see if I can fix it."
The pretty trinket was still warm from her wrist as Ken tinkered with it. She had often worn it in the old days, he recalled, and he wondered bleakly how he could have hurt Fern the way he had. Of all the people he knew, she, with her generous, compassionate disposition, was least deserving of pain and humiliation. Yet he had caused her both. Now there was no going back, no rectifying his mistake. She was married, to a man who looked as though he could be highly possessive of so beautiful a wife.. ..
There Ken's reflections broke off. With an alarming suddenness lightning flared white over the ocean, thunder crashed through the sky and in a matter of seconds a sheet of torrential rain covered everyone on beach, boulevard and hotel veranda.
Ken and Fern leapt to their feet. He thrust the charm bracelet into a pocket of his blazer and they joined the general stampede for cover. The storm had hit the town with such a swift intensity that people were running left and right like so many startled hares. Husbands yelled at wives to get a move on; mothers screamed at their
children to hurry, so frightening them that childish trebles and sobs were breaking out everywhere.
"Fern, give me your hand!" Ken cried above the tumult of pelting rain, crashing waves and half hysterical people. She obeyed, her fingers almost crushed in his steely ones as he raced her pell-mell across the road, making for the entrance awning of the Talbot Hotel.
There beneath the awning they stood gasping for breath, their soaked clothing plastered to their bodies, Fern's hair streaming down her back like a wet silver pennant. Ken hustled her into the lobby of the hotel. Other people were tumbling in behind them and quite soon the place was a hive of damp, noisy humanity clustering at front windows to gape at the deluge and lining the cocktail-bar to order warming drinks of bourbon or brandy.
Flimsy frocks and sunsuits had soaked up the rain rather quicker than hardier male clothing and the sympathetic manager of the Talbot put several unoccupied rooms at the disposal of females in distress. In groups they towelled their dripping hair, chattered worriedly about the increasing ferocity of the storm, and awaited the return of their frocks from the hotel laundry-room where they were being dried out.
"This cockeyed storm has just about finished my permanent," a woman laughed at Fern through the folds of a towel.
"I've never known a storm start so quickly." Fern's silver hair crackled as she briskly combed it.
"My husband reckons if the rain keeps on at this pace without a let-up, the roads out of Marina will be flooded. I can remember it happening once before, and was that a douser! Bridges down. Washouts. Automobiles wrecked. ..."
Fern worried her bottom lip with her teeth at this piece of inf
ormation, while over in a corner of the room someone had a transistor radio going and an announcer was reading out a far from reassuring weather report. High winds were on the increase and the storm was hitting other coastal towns at an alarming rate. Canyon
roads at various points were already becoming waterlogged and lightning had struck a local telephone cable, which meant that various lines would be out of action for some time.
Also, from a nearby window, Fern could see the palm-lined boulevard turning to a river in front of her eyes. Rainwater gushed and foamed about the thick girths of the palm trees, their green fronded branches snapped sharply in the increasing wind, while ocean and sky roared together, creating a clamour that shook even this sturdy hotel.
"I—I was hoping to get home tonight," Fern told her companion.
"But you're here with your husband, aren't you, honey? Surely I saw you downstairs with him—tall, nice-looking?"
A pink flush stole into Fern's cheeks. "He's just a friend—"
"Oh?" The woman's glance rested for a second on Fern's wedding ring.
That made Fern feel worse and her flush deepened. "W-we came separately to watch the carnival and bumped into one another in the crowd."
"Well, why not phone home if you can?" There was a slightly knowing glint in the eyes resting upon Fern. Not long married, the woman summed up, and obviously a bit scared of her husband. More so now she found herself likely to be held up overnight in Marina owing to this storm ... in the company of that attractive blue-eyed guy down in the lounge.
"As a matter of fact my husband's gone to 'Frisco for a day or so," Fern admitted. "It isn't that he'll be at home to worry about me, it's just—well, I'd sooner get home if I possibly can."
"This storm might let up, but quite frankly I doubt it. Just listen to that rain!"
Fern listened, a slender, apprehensive figure in her butter-yellow slip, her white shoulders caped in her unrestrained hair. It looked very much as though she and Ken would be compelled to spend the coming night here
at Marina, and already she was visualizing her husband's sceptical, perhaps angry reaction to the news. He might think her chance meeting in Marina with Ken a little too coincidental. He knew how she had once felt about Ken; then added to that, she and Ross had parted on the coolest of terms that morning. She had accepted the careless brush of his lips like an automaton, her own face schooled into a polite mask. "I hope you'll find the Professor a lot better," was all she had said.
That was all, when she had really been longing to cry out: "Take me with you. Let me share everything,
the good and the bad; the sweet and the sad____"
But she couldn't plead for a closer place in his life; she shrank from the thought of embarrassing him with her love. Even of evoking a mere physical surrender that would cause an aftermath of regret in him. He could walk away from a flirtation in the Gap Flamingo woods that made him tender with nostalgia, but if he became her lover he might consider himself trapped; irreparably committed to their marriage. Fern did not want Ross on those terms.
At that moment a maid came into the hotel room with an armful of dried frocks. Fern slipped into hers, then she pinned her hair into a French knot, applied a little face-powder and lipstick and went downstairs to the lounge. Ken stood among a group of people in front of a television set, listening to a newscast.
Unless people were absolutely obliged to use their cars, the advice was DON'T. Washouts and sections of fallen cliff-side were now blocking many roads; detours were being arranged wherever possible, but the situation was becoming increasingly grim for motorists. The rapid, excited voice of the newscaster advised people to keep to the shelter of their homes as much as possible, there was as yet no let-up in the deluge and it looked like lasting well into the morning. A blare of music followed this announcement, the face of the newscaster faded and on came a cereal commercial.
Ken met Fern's eyes. "I've ordered dinner here," he said. "We—can't leave yet."
"I know." Her eyes were big with apprehension, then he saw the thumb and forefinger of her right hand worrying the gold band on her left hand, and the real source of her apprehension was revealed to him.
Residents of Marina Beach, along with the many sightseers enticed there by the carnival, would long remember the terrifying storm that followed it.
By nine-thirty the rain was still bucketing down, then suddenly there was a power failure. The Talbot Hotel bloomed with candle flames and there was in the air, emanating from the eyes and voices of people, a feverish kind of jauntiness. The storm menaced them; like a dangerous animal it prowled round and round their shuttered citadel, banging at windows, shaking doors, throwing itself at walls. Danger spiced the blood and quickened the awareness of what it meant to be alive. That may have been why female faces took on a sort of mystery by candlelight and why husbands drew their wives closer to their sides.
By ten o'clock, with no let-up in the strength of the deluge, Fern agreed with Ken that it would be suicidal to attempt the drive back to Cap Flamingo. They would have to stay overnight here in Marina.
The manager of the Talbot announced in the lounge that he could provide scrap accommodation for at least half his sudden influx of guests. He suggested that mothers with children and the older folk be allowed first choice of this accommodation. The remaining younger people would be bound to find rooms at either the Topmast Motel or the Halfway Inn, both set further back from the sea-front and likely to have escaped the earlier invasion of rain-soaked people off the beach and the promenade. The hotel station-wagons were at the disposal of all those willing to brave the drive to the motel or the inn.
"I'm willing," Fern assured Ken. He managed to borrow a trench-coat for her from one of the hotel staff, and along with a group of other young people they raced from beneath the Talbot's en-
trance awning and scrambled into one of the waiting station-wagons. Their rather rakish-looking driver turned to grin at them. "Say, I hope you're all good swimmers," he drawled.
"Tony here belongs to the Bottom Scratchers," one of the girls assured him gaily. "If he can catch abalone, he can catch me."
They all laughed, then the station-wagon sloshed, slid and bucked its way through a black, wild night. Rain drove relentlessly against the front windows and the wipers fought gallantly to keep it in check.
"What hotel you making for, Bud?" one of the men asked the driver.
"The Halfway Inn. And it looks as though we're gonna have to make a detour." A couple of ghostly figures in streaming oilskins waved them to a halt with lanterns. There was bad flooding up ahead, they were informed. They'd best turn off here at Grandison Avenue and get on to higher ground pretty snappy. "And keep an eye out for the mud," one of the oil-skinned figures advised. "It's slicker than a greased eel up-aways."
Once more they were on their way, and Fern, shivering with nerves and very damp about the feet, sat gratefully within the circle of Ken's warm arm. She vaguely wondered what this unexpected adventure would have led to had she not been married... had she never met Ross. Would she and Ken have got back on to their old romantic footing? She was half inclined to think so, for like this, so calm and kindly, he was the man she had always thought him.
Their companions in the station-wagon took them for husband and wife. Fern waited for him to deny this, then when he didn't, she told herself it didn't really matter. An explanation, the usual "Oh, we're just good friends," would only produce smiles like the one that woman back at the Talbot had smiled to herself.
"Feeling a little warmer?" Ken murmured.
"Mm!" She smiled up at him and was glad there was no more hostility between them, that these hours together had killed it.
Then sudden lights speared the darkness ahead of the station-wagon and their rakish-faced driver swore with gusty relief. Not only had the electricity power been reestablished, but they had arrived at the Halfway Inn. Half a minute later, laughing and noisy with relief, the occupants of the station-wagon scrambled out into
the swirling water covering the driveway. There were feminine squeals at its cold touch and the young men took eager advantage of the situation to scoop curvy bundles up into their arms and carry them into the inn like so much pirate loot.
Overnight accommodation was available, thank heaven. Hot showers as well now the electricity was in working order again.
After a shower and a brisk rub down, Fern tumbled into bed, where she sat enjoying the delicious Gaelic coffee which a waiter brought to her room at Ken's order. Afterwards she forgot the storm and fell fast asleep.
She awoke to a strange silence and broad daylight. It had at last stopped raining, but the extensive grounds of the inn were a sorry, draggled sight. Pockets of water filled the dips and dells where holidaymakers liked to take their picnic baskets. Men in wading boots were clearing muddy litter and broken branches off the garden paths, while entire families of flowers had been lifted clear out of their beds to lie pathetically dead in the many puddles.
The storm had ravaged and receded, but there was a paleness about the faces of the people taking breakfast on the glass-roofed terrace of the inn, an earthy, damp smell in the air.
Fern sat with Ken at a corner table. They tucked in busily to eggs and bacon while Ken explained that he had phoned for a cab to pick them up in roughly half an hour's time. His car was parked in a lot near the Marina sea-front, and the roads permitting, he should have Fern home in Gap Flamingo around noon.
So absorbed in this conversation were they that the stare of a woman sitting at a table further along the
terrace went completely unnoticed by them. Her inquisitive, bird-like eyes dwelt first on the lean, dark male face, then on the beautiful face of his silver-haired companion, who was hanging on to his every word. Those eyes expressed amazement, shock, then cynicism. That girl Fern had such an angelic face, Gladys Hammond thought. Why, one would think just from looking at her that she was clean as tumbling snowflakes.
Gladys Hammond and her husband were staying at the inn for a short holiday. At the moment Walt Hammond, along with several of his golfing cronies, was out inspecting the condition of the inn's famous greens after the deluge. Walt's concern for the greens had already tried his wife's temper, while the fact that she was on a slimming diet and breakfasting very frugally didn't help to make her feel exactly sweet this morning. She glared at a rye biscuit, then told herself that if Fern Kingdom was playing around with her ex-boy friend and Ross found out, then she'd be for it. He had Edwina's temper and a bit more tagged on when he was put out. Gladys lifted the biscuit, took a bite. Funny girl, Fern. . crazy, in fact. Ross was the exciting brand of guy most girls didn't stand a chance in a million of leading to the altar.
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