by Sara Seale
“Such as?”
“You know very well. A point of view that seems to have escaped you is the girl’s position if you make her your heiress. Do you want her to be married for her expectations?”
“Well, it would be better than not being married at all,” his aunt replied with her usual frankness, and his eyebrows rose.
“You don’t seem to have a very flattering opinion of your protégée’s powers of attraction,” he observed mildly, and she began wildly retrieving her slipping shawls, catching her rings and her charms in the wool, in a sudden fever of exasperation.
“Of course I have!” she protested. “A dear child, a kind child—so like poor Pierrot—but plain, perhaps, do you think?”
“No.”
“No? You do surprise me, dear boy. When one thinks of Roma ...”
“That’s your trouble, isn’t it, my dear?” he said gently. “You still hanker after Roma, and Charity is just the stand-in.”
“No, no, they are quite different,” Astrea cried. “Roma disappointed me bitterly and I no longer want her back. This dear child fills all the corners of my heart.”
“So did the others,” he reminded her with sudden dryness. “They were all figure heads for Roma, whether you realized it or not, but this dear child, as you call her now, could be hurt when you tire of her.”
His aunt got up and began to prowl about the room as she always did in moments of agitation, and the multitudes of little charms jangled merrily as she gesticulated.
“I don’t know what’s got into you, Marc,” she exclaimed. “First you say the girl is out for what she can get and I’m a gullible old fool, and next you are only concerned with her feelings, and not at all with mine. Why should I tire of her? Is she not associated with Ganymede, the Cup-bearer, and am I not planning a future for the child—the future that should have been Roma’s?”
He uttered a short, sharp sigh of defeat. As a witness, he thought wryly, his aunt might well baffle the most astute cross-examiner; her logic was negligible and her statements quite unpredictable.
“Have it your own way, my dear,” he said with a tired smile. “You usually do, if it comes to that.”
The thaw started in the night, and all Sunday the miracle of whiteness lost its beauty, leaving behind slush and mud and battered fences.
All the morning Charity had battled with Astrea’s hairdye. It had been a formidable experience, for Astrea, never patient with other people’s ineptness, had directed proceedings with alarming thoroughness and frequent abuse. Charity sat down to luncheon with heavily stained fingers, and Marc, glancing at her worried face, said, with a brief smile:
“Is this your first experience of Astrea’s tantrums? You’ll have to get used to it, you know, if you want to stay.”
“It was all rather unnerving,” she admitted, looking ruefully at her stained hands. “I was terrified her hair would go green, or something. Dyes can go wrong, can’t they?”
“I imagine so. Why on earth didn’t you wear rubber gloves? That stuff will take days to come off.” He spoke a little sharply, and she hastily hid her hands under the table, remembering how fastidious he always seemed about his own person. .
“No one suggested it,” she answered nervously, “Minnie was annoyed, I think, at your aunt insisting I did the job, and just stood there glumly and wouldn’t help.”
“Poor Charity! Playing spiritual daughter to a temperamental prime donna isn’t all beer and skittles, is it?” he observed, and she thought the old mockery was back in his voice and the glances he occasionally gave her not too kindly. Did he, like Minnie, resent his aunt’s attachment for her, she wondered wistfully, but when, later, they sat by the fire in the music-room listening to the steady drip of the thaw and the dull thuds of lumps of snow falling off the roof, he asked her suddenly if she would like him to read to her.
She acquiesced with gratitude for the return of a side of his personality which she was beginning to like, and curled pleasurably up on the rug to listen. He read her poems from A Shropshire Lad, which her father had loved, and the poem he had quoted from in the snow, yesterday. He read well, without the affectations of many readers of verse, and she thought he must often read aloud to himself for the sheer delight of speaking the lines.
“Yes, I do,” he admitted with a smile when she asked him. “Poetry, I think, needs not be spoken aloud for full appreciation.”
“That’s what my father used to say. What secret, solitary sort of things you do!”
His eyebrows rose. “Such as?”
“Well, this, and climbing mountains—scrambling, didn’t you call it? What else?”
“Sometimes I go abroad and wander round the art galleries, sometimes I explore forgotten corners of the British Isles and just mooch.”
“Always alone?”
“Yes.”
She sighed.
“Loneliness can be a little sad, can’t it?” she said.
“I haven’t found it so,” he replied.
“But your kind of loneliness is self-imposed,” she said shrewdly. “It can be different when it’s thrust upon you.”
He looked at her with gentleness.
“And have you found that, Charity?” he asked, watching her pale, unawakened face in the firelight.
“In a way, I suppose. I don’t make friends easily, you see,” she answered simply. “The girls I met at work only wanted to talk about clothes and boys. They all had boys, of course.”
“And was there no boy for you?”
“Oh, no, they found me dull. I expect I was. I don’t dance very well and don’t care much for most of their interests. After my father’s company they seemed very callow to me.”
“Very likely, considering your father was a mature man,” he retorted a little dryly. “You will probably always appeal more to an older man.”
“Will I?” She sounded doubtful, as if the thought that she could appeal to any man was new to her.
“Don’t you ever think about getting married, having a home of your own?” he asked curiously, and she shook her head.
“Not really—only as an imaginary picture of security,” she said.
“Are you happy here? Does my aunt represent your notion of security?”
She considered this for some minutes, and he had noticed before how she seldom gave a hasty answer to a serious question.
“Yes,” she said then. “Because she has an abundance to give and receive—not material things, I don’t mean, and these fancies about adoption and legacies. You knew they were fancies, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but I wondered if you did,” he answered a shade austerely. “Astrea will hurt you, Charity.”
“Hurt me? Oh, no! She’s old and lonely and forgotten, and grateful for someone who really cares that she once was famous. Her tantrums, as you called them, won’t hurt me, for I think she is fond of me, and I—well, I’m truly fond of her.”
“I see,’ he said and, for a moment, felt angry with Astrea, whose affections were notoriously fickle. He had not, himself, contributed anything but harshness to this strange girl’s conception of security, but at least he had not offered illusions which could be shattered by a passing whim.
He leaned forward into the circle of firelight and took her chin between finger and thumb, turning her face up to his.
“Be wary, my dear,” he said. “Adoption might, I think, be difficult at this stage, but Astrea may well alter her will. If she does, you must remember that it can, as easily, be altered again. Don’t build on shifting sand.”
She did not understand him. He was, she supposed, trying to warn her, but he no longer seemed to be questioning her own motives.
“I wouldn’t want the money, anyway,” she said, trying to reassure him, “but the thought has a kind of comfort—that a stranger should love you enough to want to adopt you and leave you their money, I mean.”
He leaned back in his chair a shade impatiently, and opened the book of verse on his knee.
“You’ll have to dree your own weird, as they say in Scotland, Charity Child,” he said with rough tolerance. “You are, I’m beginning to suspect, marked out for disappointment, disillusionment, and, probably, grief. You had no business to get yourself born into this day and age.”
He began to read aloud again, and she sat watching the firelight play across his dark face; and knew a curious impulse to be friends with him, to be admitted to the closed circle of his solitariness and find her niche there. He was, she thought with surprise, a highly sensitive person under that professional mask he wore so well.
The house seemed empty after he had gone, and Charity, used all her life to a man’s company, found she missed him. It was pleasant to look forward to the Easter Vacation when spring would surely have come to Cleat, and they would walk on the downs among the lambs and watch the miracle of tender shoots pushing up through the soil. Even by the end of the week the last traces of winter had gone. March had slipped into April with the gentleness of the proverb and the young grass was green with the promise of spring.
When Marc came at the weekend, he brought a present for Charity. It was only a cheap anthology of verse he had picked up at a second-hand bookstall in an idle moment, but for Charity, perhaps because it was so unexpected to receive a gift from him, it had an odd significance.
“For heaven’s sake!” he exclaimed, momentarily irritated by her extravagant thanks. “Don’t carry on as if I’ve spent a fortune on you—the thing isn’t even new!”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said shyly, then stood there, dumb and ill at ease, conscious that she had been over-effusive.
Astrea’s old eyes lit up with a naughty light when she was shown Marc’s present, but almost at once she handed the book back with a snort of disgust.
“Second-hand!” she exclaimed. “But Marc always did like pottering about these musty old shops.”
“My father used to say you sometimes picked up a treasure that way. Nearly all our books were secondhand. We couldn’t afford new ones,” Charity said.
“Well, Marc can,” his aunt retorted. “I shall speak to him. This is not the way to start his courting.”
“Courting?’ For a moment Charity stared at her, open-mouthed, then she burst out laughing. “Astrea! What wild notion have you got up your sleeve now?”
“Just a little scheme I had, dear child. You like Marc, don’t you?”
“I don’t know him very well.”
“That shall be remedied when he comes for his vacation. Marc ought to settle down. I’ve been saying so for years.”
“Please—” began Charity with an alarming vision of how awkward such ludicrous manoeuvres could become, but Astrea waved her protestations aside.
“You know nothing of life,” she proclaimed sweepingly. “Doubtless you are too ignorant and unsophisticated for someone like my nephew, but if I make you my heiress, things will be altogether different, won’t they?”
“Not in the least—it wouldn’t alter me,” replied Charity rather shortly, remembering Roma, and Astrea swooped on her with one of those sudden enveloping embraces that put an end to all argument.
“Ah, my little Ganymede, nothing could alter you!” she cried. “You are my spiritual daughter—better, perhaps, to remain that way. Marc, too, should stay detached—celibate, would you say?”
“I really don’t know,’ Charity replied a little breathlessly. It was profitless to try to follow Astrea’s contradictory fancies, she decided ruefully, and at least Marc should understand his aunt by now, but the weekend was hardly restful.
Friday evening was spent in an orgy of record-playing. Astrea always insisted that the gramophone should be turned up full blast for opera, and the robust voices of the singers screaming above the Wagnerian brass echoed round the room until Charity’s ears sang. Marc lay back in his chair, enduring with admirable detachment; it must, she thought, be torture for the uninitiated to be deafened by such a cacophony of sound. His eyes were closed and he only opened them to suggest that Charity should play them something soothing on the piano.
“Philistine!” said Astrea scornfully. “Such magnificent passion! Such great voices! Though I always say the soprano sings flat in that superb passage at the end. Now when I was at my height“
“But you never aspired to Wagner, did you, Astrea?” her nephew reminded her unkindly. It was an admission which she never cared to make, for were not those in the top flight more famous for their exacting roles in German Grand Opera?
“Wagner is ruination to a more delicate voice, as you should know,” she snapped. “Give him Clair de lune, Charity, hackneyed, sweet soothing syrup.”
Charity went to the piano and the soft, plaintive music of Debussy’s charming piece filled the room with a nostalgic quiet, and at the close, Astrea’s mood had changed again.
“Charming ... charming...” she sighed. “Moonlight ... Pierrot ... they both become the child, do they not, Marc?”
He made no reply, but only smiled a little enigmatically, and soon afterwards went to bed.
In the morning Astrea broke her rule of breakfasting in her room and dragged her nephew off to drive her round the countryside looking for a Home Craft colony newly settled in the district. They returned very late for lunch, cluttered with lengths of tweeds, shapeless jumpers and pottery of hideous design. Everything had to be displayed while Minnie grumbled in the background and declared the lunch to be ruined, and was not at all pacified by the gift of a jumper and a particularly ugly flower-vase.
“What on earth can you want with all this rubbish?” Marc asked impatiently. He had driven miles out of his way, following his aunt’s vague, directions, and had spent a wretched morning listening to Astrea trying to impress a dreary collection of amateur craftsmen who had clearly never heard of her.
“Well, one had to buy something, hadn’t one?” she answered, and he grinned. Astrea had been very rude in her efforts to persuade the colony what an honor she was conferring upon them. Her purchases were, presumably, in the nature of a peace offering.
“After luncheon,” she announced ominously, “we will all weed the garden. I cannot think what Noakes does with his time—weeds are sprouting everywhere. You and Charity—”
“No, my dear aunt, Charity and I are going for a quiet walk on the downs,” Marc interrupted firmly. “I need a little quiet and meditation before offering myself for the noisy pleasures of the music-room.”
“Perhaps the child will not want to walk,” said Astrea petulantly.
“The child will,” Marc replied, and did not seem to think it necessary to consult Charity.
“Wouldn’t you like to get away on your own?” Charity asked him as they began to climb the chalk track which led to Cleat Beacon.
“Not particularly,” he said, but they walked in silence for the most part, and Charity wondered if, amongst the trials of the morning, he had been subjected to his aunt’s views on his future.
They walked along the ridge of the Beacon, and Charity remembered that other occasion when he had castigated her so cruelly and ruined a perfect day. “Was this the spot?” he asked her suddenly.
She looked enquiringly, but was silent, still not sure of his mood.
“Where I bit you so badly. Isn’t that what you were thinking of?” he said.
“You were unkind and very rude,” she told him, lifting her face to the wind as he remembered her doing before. “You called me a gold-digger and a clever little nobody with an eye to the main chance. You warned me that you would have no hesitation in getting me out of Cleat if I—if I didn’t behave myself.”
“I’m glad to learn you have such a retentive memory,” he observed mildly. “Perhaps I can match it. You told me you disliked me intensely and that I must have had a very unfortunate experience of life.”
“We would seem to be quits, then,” she said demurely, and he put a hand for an instant on her shoulder.
“All the same, I should like to apologize,” he said unexpect
edly. “I must have hurt you. I didn’t, you see, understand much about you, then.”
“You sound as if it had worried you.”
“It has a bit. Your composure used to nettle me in those early days, I’ll admit, but I hadn’t realized how vulnerable you are.”
“Vulnerable?”
“I think so. You must remind me of that first occasion if I bite you again—and I probably will.”
“Because I’m ignorant and—and unsophisticated?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“Something your aunt said.”
The ready frown drew his dark eyebrows together.
“You don’t take all my aunt’s nonsense seriously, I hope,’ he said with a hint of displeasure, and she felt embarrassed, guessing that Astrea had, indeed, been meddling once again, and he was warning her.
“Of course not,” she said hurriedly, side-stepping into the tufty grass, deliberately widening the space between them. “You don’t have to—have to fear complications from me, Marc.”
He closed the gap with one stride, and she was again conscious of his shoulder touching hers, and the queer intimacy of their solitude on that lonely strip of down-land.
“Don’t I?” he said softly. “But perhaps it won’t be you who causes the complications. I think you are a new experience for me, Charity Child.”