The Youngest Bridesmaid

by Sara Seale

  “Glamour ... story-book stuff ...” he answered carelessly. “Besides, we bullied you into it, Blanche and I.”

  “Yes, it was story-book stuff. It still is in a sort of way—the island, the unnatural weather, Tibby, like the Bad Fairy laying curses instead of gifts, and you—”

  “And I, I suppose, am the Demon King, or is it the Demon Lover? What a child you are!”

  “You are not a lover at all, and I am no child,” she said, and he leaned forward again and pulled her roughly against his knee.

  “You’re a child to me in comparison to such ladies who have seen fit to be kind to me,” he said, but the raillery had gone from his voice now and she reached up a hand to touch his face.

  “You must try to forget my lack of experience,” she said gently. “I so often don’t know how to take you.”

  “Poor Cinderella ... I haven’t really been fair, have I?”

  “Even Cinderella stepped out of the cinders and, as far as we’re told, lived happily ever after with her prince.”

  “And this prince is hardly doing his stuff, you’re thinking?”

  She rubbed her cheek against his knee, wishing he would not talk to her as if she were a child, though perhaps that was his only defence against an embarrassing situation. He felt the little quiver of protest that ran through her body, and turned her face up to his.

  “Forgive me if I seem to talk down to you,” he said with that odd flash of perception that so often took her by surprise. “And try to remember that I’m adjusting the balance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I put the cart before the horse by my fine gesture, didn’t I? I married you without any courtship, which I believe is important to a girl, so we must start again. Do you understand, now?”

  Her face became suddenly so radiant that he wondered for a brief moment whether his policy of forbearance had been mistaken.

  “In my own way—in my own time, we’ll come to that happy ending,” he said, and gently kissed her.

  III

  For Lou it was both a promise and an explanation. She thought of those carefree days in the open, remembering with impatience at her own stupidity, the half-tender approaches, the gentle teasing which she had dismissed so lightly because she had thought he was merely being kind. He had, after all, been trying to pave the way to a deeper relationship and, whatever his regrets for his hasty action, he was prepared to stand by it with unlooked-for consideration. In my own way ... in my own time ... he had said, and the evenings were no longer an awkward hiatus between the day and the morrow, and even Tibby’s barbs could be smiled at and forgotten.

  “You’m proper pleased with yourself, all of a sudden, bain’t you?” the old woman said, after one of her more acid remarks had met with no reaction, and Lou knew from the fact that Tibby had unconsciously slipped into the Cornish idiom that she was more than ordinarily disturbed.

  “Why should you mind if I’m pleased with myself, Tibby?” Lou asked, trying for the first time to win the antagonistic old woman over to toleration if not to liking. “Honeymoons are times for self-congratulations, wouldn’t you say?” She spoke deliberately, proffering a challenge because, in her new-found felicity, she was no longer afraid of Tibby.

  The woman observed her narrowly, recognizing a change which she could not account for but knowing at the same time that she could, if she chose, soon prick this little bubble of complacency.

  “Honeymoons is for lovers,” she stated repressively. “The way you were wed, missis, hardly calls for joy bells.”

  “You are rather impertinent,” Lou said quietly, stung at last to an assertion of authority, and was surprised to find the method worked. Tibby’s thin lips compressed and her eyes narrowed, but when she next spoke it was with the artificial voice of a well-trained servant.

  “I beg your pardon, madam,” she said. “Will you be wanting anything special for dinner?”

  It was so out of character that Lou laughed and knew at once that she had immediately lost ground if, indeed, any had been gained. Tibby raised her sparse, almost non-existent eyebrows in contemptuous reproof and observed, still in that correct, but somehow insolent voice:

  “I’m only waiting for orders.”

  “You know very well that my wishes are of no account. Running the house and ordering the meals are your province. It wouldn’t please you now if I were to ask for something for dinner that you hadn’t already prepared, now would it?” Lou said, but she sighed as the woman left the room with a smirk of satisfaction. It was no good calling Tibby’s bluff, for she would always have the last word. It was no good either, striving to ingratiate herself by offers of help in the kitchen, or pleas for instruction in housekeeping, for this she had already tried with no success.

  “Why the hell do you bother?” Piers had said impatiently when she confessed to failure. “Tibby resents interference, and I should have thought you would have been glad to be relieved of household chores.”

  “Most women like to feel they have a say in the matter of running their homes,” she had replied without thinking and, although he said nothing, his raised eyebrows and the small twisted smile had told her plainly enough that, although he had married her, she was still a guest in his house.

  But those were now the minor pin-pricks. She learnt to swallow Tibby’s rudeness without giving ground, ignore the long evenings when Piers seemed to forget her and shut himself away with papers and legal documents, often coming to bed long after she had gone upstairs. She looked forward to the small comforts, the times he would share their early morning tea, sitting on the bed and making very personal remarks in order to make her blush, the occasions he would come in unexpectedly to say goodnight and tuck her up with a careless kiss and the assurance that he was next door should she want anything in the night.

  He went occasionally to the mainland on unspecified business, but he did not take her with him. She knew vaguely that he owned property there as he did in many parts of the country, but he never discussed his business affairs with her and it was a long time before she knew of the many charitable boards on which he sat.

  “Piers Merrick is a strange mixture,” someone told her much later. “He doesn’t mind his name being bandied about as a rich playboy or an idle young rake with a long and probably erroneous list of short-lived affairs, but let the press get hold of something worth while he does with his money and he’s hopping mad.”

  But even early on Lou became aware of this contradiction in him. He would talk at length and amusingly about the lavish expenditure of his bachelor days, but when she discovered by chance the benefits reaped by charities and indigent friends, he shut up like a clam.

  “Why do you like to be thought just rich and raffish and God’s gift to the gossip columns?” she asked him once, and his eyebrows went up at such unaccustomed plain speaking from her.

  “One gets labelled,” he replied with lazy evasiveness. “And one should never disappoint one’s public.”

  “Stuff and nonsense!” she exclaimed, sounding, he thought with amusement, oddly like Lewis Carroll’s immortal Alice. “That’s all right-for film stars and publicity hunters, but not for a man.”

  “You really are like Alice at times. I’d never realized,” he said with interest, and was delighted when she innocently enquired if Alice was one of his ex-girl-friends. But for all her hints, he still seemed reluctant to take her with him to the mainland, neither would he agree to a second visit to the Druid’s Cave.

  “Why not?” she asked. “I want to explore it properly.”

  “You didn’t like the cave. You said it was evil.”

  “Yes, well ... I was scared that time. I wouldn’t mind with you. Besides, Tibby says—”

  “Tibby talks a great deal of nonsense, if you’re silly enough to listen,” he said a little roughly.

  “But there is a legend, isn’t there?”

  “Very likely. Cornwall is full of legends and superstitions. Leave the cave alone, Lou.”


  She submitted without argument, but her curiosity was aroused. One day, she thought, she would visit the cave again. In the meantime, her immediate needs were more pressing. Melissa’s expensive trousseau was fast becoming ruined, and when Piers demanded somewhat impatiently to know why she did not wear more sensible clothes for messing about among rocks and pools, she replied, with some indignation:

  “Because there’s nothing else. You said you would buy me slacks and jerseys, but you’ll never take me to the mainland. Do you think I enjoy wearing Melissa’s expensive things?”

  “Melissa?”

  “You must know that everything I have here was meant for her, and wasn’t planned for this sort of life, anyway. There was no time to fit me out, besides—”

  Besides, she had been going to say, you were paying for it all, but she broke off, watching the irritable frown which drove two deep furrows between his eyes, and knew that he had probably never given a thought to her wardrobe except to deplore her taste.

  “Besides, it’s time I bought you a wedding ring of your own, you were going to say, weren’t you?” he said with a change of manner. “You’re quite right, of course. Tomorrow we’ll go to Truro and remedy my neglect. I’ve been selfish wanting to keep you unspoilt on the island.”

  “Have you, Piers?” she asked with surprise, and he grinned with a trace of sheepishness.

  “Part of your fairy tale’s rubbed off on me, perhaps. I’d a notion to keep you just for myself.”

  “That,” she retorted with faint severity, “is rather absurd. “You can hardly think of yourself as the jealous lover.”

  “Can’t I? Well, perhaps not. Still, it’s as well to lie fallow till all the excitement and gossip is forgotten, wouldn’t you say?”

  “That makes more sense. Will there have been much gossip?”

  “What do you think? People have short memories, however. By the time I’m ready, curiosity will be dead. In the meantime I at least owe you a respectable wedding ring and a few essentials to personal comfort. Tomorrow we’ll go on a shopping spree.”

  She had thought when the morrow came he would most likely have changed his mind, but he seemed in a festive mood, and if, at times, Lou felt rather like a schoolgirl being treated to an unexpected outing by an indulgent uncle, the day was a success. Shops were painstakingly explored for garments more suited to life on the island, a wedding ring bought, and some charming trinkets to go with it, and he observed with a slightly sardonic eye her simple pleasure in these trifles.

  “I must take you back to London sooner or later,” he said. “You’ll need some decent jewellery, clothes of your own choosing. When we’ve done with Rune you’ll be ready for more sophisticated pleasures. It will be rather fun to spoil you.”

  “How do you mean—done with Rune?”

  “When it’s served its purpose for our better acquaintance. You haven’t forgotten what I told you, have you?”

  She had not, but she thought he might have. The Piers Merrick of popular conception was given to careless assurances, she knew.

  “In your own way ... in your own time, you said,” she replied a little shyly.

  “Yes, Lou, just that. Bear with me for a while longer, will you?”

  She smiled at him but made no answer. If he was renewing a promise or merely apologising for a lack of ardour, she did not wish to know then. The day had been so delightful and his consideration so gentle that she was content to fall in with whatever he might have in mind for them both, and by the time they started back in the launch for the island she knew his mood had changed again. Before leaving the town he had, on a sudden impulse, filled the car with flowers and fruit and extravagant baskets of hothouse blooms that would scarcely last a day divorced from their careful packing.

  Lou gazed, wide-eyed, at the great colorful heap he had flung so carelessly into the boat, and then stole a look at his dark, impatient face as he took the helm. He glanced down at her at the same moment and his smile was tender and a little amused.

  “Were you thinking this display had rather a bridal air?” he asked, but her reply was lost on the wind.

  “And why not?” he said enigmatically. “Perhaps we have waited too long?”

  When they reached harbor he lifted her on to the jetty, holding her for a moment against him before setting her down. Young Sam Smale, idling at the water’s edge with a couple of the older men, began gathering up the flowers and fruit, posing, Lou saw with amusement, in innocent awareness of the picturesque effect he created, glancing at her under his lashes to see if she noticed. She had never much cared for Sam, who, basking in Tibby’s favor, would shirk whatever chores he had no taste for, but today she knew an assurance which could match his own, and smiled upon him obligingly. So perfect was this delicate promise of fulfilment that even when one of the fishermen remarked that the weather was on the change, she refused to believe that anything could spoil the halcyon day.

  “Oh, surely not!” she exclaimed, her eyes on the calm sea and cloudless sky, but Piers, pausing to sniff the wind, said the man was a good weather prophet and was probably right.

  “Break by morning,” the fisherman affirmed, and went off to see to his nets.

  They walked up to the house, followed by Sam, making Lou thought, a strange, colorful little procession, flowers strewing in their wake because there were too many to manage in one armful. She wanted to stop and pick them up, unwilling to leave them there to die, but Piers seemed impatient to get to the house.

  “You won’t miss them. What are a few flowers, anyway?” he said with the careless indifference of a man who could afford to buy up an entire florist’s shop and replace them if necessary on the morrow.

  “Shall you mind if the storms come?” he asked, sounding gay and a little provocative. “We might find ourselves cut off, you know.”

  He did not speak very seriously, but his eyes were suddenly a little anxious, and her heart lifted. To be cut off from the mainland with a husband at last embracing the mood of a lover could only be a blessing and a delight.

  “No, Piers, I shan’t mind at all,” she replied with polite restraint, but her voice was as gay as his and she could laugh with real amusement at Tibby coming to meet them with a nursery air of outrage at the evidence of such wanton extravagance.

  “What game are you playing now, Piers, I should like to know?” she demanded. “ ‘Tis carrying make-believe too far to go squandering good money on lovers’ nonsense. Rune’s no place for fancy frills.”

  “The money happens to be mine, and the make-believe is possibly yours, and my wife’s entitled to as many fancy frills as she may desire,” Piers retorted, and the old woman’s suspicious glance went swiftly from him to Lou, quick to register the subtle change in both of them. Her spleen for once turned on Sam, carrying the flowers into the hall, and turning with smiling expectation to catch an admiring glance from her.

  “Don’t come cluttering up my clean kitchen with that trash, Sam Smale,” she snapped. “And if you fancy yourself standing there like a cissy, I for one can think of better ways for a man to look.”

  Sam lost his air of childish vanity and merely appeared sheepish, and Piers said with unusual forbearance:

  “Now, Tibby, don’t be so churlish, you old faggot! Flowers don’t grow much on Rune, as you should know. Mrs. Merrick will enjoy arranging them. Put them down here, Sam.”

  “If you’re laying in for a siege, it would have been better to have bought supplies. Weather’s on the change, they say,” Tibby sniffed, but Lou noticed that for all her scorn, the woman’s bleak eyes softened in spite of herself as they rested on the glowing pile of color heaped on the stone flags.

  “I’ll arrange a special bowl of the best ones for your kitchen,” Lou said, and saw, for the first time, an unwilling flash of pleasure in the woman’s face before, with another sniff, she retired to the kitchen quarters from where smells of baking bread and toasting scones had wafted invitingly before the dividing door was closed.
It was the hour for tea and relaxation before the evening began, and, despite the familiar antagonism which Tibby, and even the bare, monastic house exuded, Lou felt she had come home.

  She ran upstairs to change her dress, aware that the day held a new significance, that she must meet her husband more than halfway, and, holding fast to this strange new thread which had been woven between them, match his demands with hers. After tea she would arrange her flowers, decking all the rooms with color and gaiety, piling the fruit in glowing pyramids, abandoning herself to the hitherto unknown luxury of such abundance and the promise it surely contained.

  Piers sat watching her at this occupation when, the tea things cleared away, she darted in and out of the rooms with bowls and vases and every receptacle she could lay hands on. He thought how charming she looked with her soft hair flying and her skirts twirling as she sped with such earnest concentration from one flower arrangement to another. It was, he reflected with unfamiliar humility, a little chastening to discover how much delight could be given by so careless an impulse. The costly presents he had bought in the past, with no more thought than this, had received less appreciation, and he realized with faint surprise how much he must have missed of the pleasures of a life which had been too easy and too superficial to admit the simple things. Only Rune with its bare essentials and its privacy had satisfied that unrecognized void in him, and now this child whom he had married so wantonly, so casually, was beginning to lay the same spell on him, had, indeed, already moved him to honesty when he had told her that very first day that she could be something that he needed.

  “Lou—come here,” he said aloud, and at the odd urgency in his voice she dropped the flowers she held in her hands and ran across the room to him.

  “What is it?” she asked, and was aware when he did not immediately reply that the wind was rising. It was rather pleasant, she thought inconsequentially, to become acquainted again with the proper seasons of the year, after the freakish calm of those days and nights on the island.

  “What do you really think of me?” he asked unexpectedly, pulling her down to perch on the arm of his chair, and she stiffened uneasily, conscious that the wrong answer could wreck that new-found felicity between them.