by Sara Seale
For a moment his expression softened, and Charity saw how he must once have looked at her, with understanding and a half-rueful tenderness.
“I wouldn’t kick anyone who was down,” he told her gently. “But you won’t stay down, Roma. You still have most of the weapons in your locker, even if you didn’t fool your astute American husband. Well, what are you going to do for cash?”
“She will stay here, of course,” boomed Astrea, who had been left long enough out of the conversation. “Cleat was home to Roma once, and can be again You shall even have your old allowance back, dear child—that marriage settlement must be invested—Marc shall see to it for you.”
“I’m not a broker, Astrea,” he said mildly, then turned back to Roma. “So there is something?”
“Nothing that brings in much more than a pittance,” Roma replied negligently. “It’s already invested in American stock. I suppose I can get it transferred over here?”
“That will have to be gone into. Well, are you proposing to make Cleat your home again?”
“What else can I do?”
“You could work,” he said unexpectedly, and her beautifully pencilled eyebrows rose in delicate twin arches.
“Doing what? Would you suggest I took a post of companion, like Charity, here?”
“Charity, and girls like her, at least keep their self-respect,” he retorted with sudden hardness, and a little muscle jerked under one of Roma’s eyes.
“You haven’t forgotten — or forgiven, have you?” she said with gentle regret.
“Your type of woman sometimes makes it difficult to do that,” he replied quietly. “I’m not reproaching you, my dear. I only wondered whether, after all this time, life had taught you anything.”
“Oh, yes,” she said with a hardness that matched his. “Life has taught me a great deal; one great truth being that unless you go after what you want yourself, no one else will root for you.”
“And do you know yet what you want?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said again with a little smile. “I haven’t changed.”
Charity got up, trying to find an excuse to leave them. It was perpetually disturbing, she thought angrily, this habit they all had of ignoring her presence when they wanted to discuss their affairs. At least Marc might have the common decency to wait until she was out of the room.
“Sit down, child, and don’t fidget,” commanded Astrea, who had no intention of allowing the discussion to be diverted again, but Charity refused to remain an unwilling listener any longer.
“Minnie will need help with the beds as the daily women don’t come on Sundays,” she said firmly, adding, as she reached the door: “In any case, I should have thought you would have preferred to—to discuss Mrs. Nixon’s affairs alone.”
She saw Marc looking at her with the old mockery. He was, already, quite a different person from the man who had quoted Housman under the cherry tree.
“Haven’t you learnt that the perfect companion has no ears?” he asked with teasing kindness.
“Like a well-trained servant,” Roma added with an exaggerated drawl, and as the door closed behind Charity, Marc said sharply:
“That was unforgivable!”
They were, Charity thought during the following week, an ill-assorted household. Marc and Roma were polite enough on the surface, but in Roma’s case, at least, there seemed to be an undercurrent of resentment which might at any moment lead to an explosion, and Astrea, delighting in a situation which relieved her own boredom, cast hopeful red herrings across the conversation. Charity, trying hard to efface her own personality in the character of paid companion, found, however that she was drawn, despite herself, into the family arguments. Astrea’s fulsome insistence on the girl’s place in her affection was difficult to meet with equanimity under the quizzical regard of the other two, for each in their own way, Charity thought, viewed her with suspicion, and Roma at any rate looked complacent when Astrea, as sometimes happened, had a revulsion of feeling, and reminded her new spiritual daughter that she was there on sufferance.
Marc found her, after one of these rebuffs, sitting on the steps of the ornate porch, gazing out to the line of the downs, and looking much as she had when he had first seen her on the station platform, in a graceful curve of melancholy, her long legs twisted under her.
“Not so easy, is it, Pierrot?” he said.
“Pierrot?” She raised her face and looked at him with those dark grey eyes clouded now with uncertainty.
“You take to yourself the traditional attitude when you are troubled,” he said. “Do my aunt’s vagaries worry you?”
“It’s sometimes difficult to know where one stands,” she admitted. “I think, perhaps, your aunt likes to use me as a whip for Roma.”
His eyebrows lifted.
“Do you, now? That’s very perspicacious of you. And do you mind being used as a whip?”
She flushed, hearing the mockery in his voice.
“I’d thought she was fond of me,” she said, and he gave a small exclamation of impatience.
“Oh, my dear child,” he said, “be your age! You did very well as a substitute, but you can hardly expect to compete with Spiritual Daughter Number One!”
“No,” she said, and he experienced that old desire to shake her.
“Is it still material benefits, or have you a misguided affection for my aunt?” he asked, and saw her blink.
“You won’t give me the benefit of the doubt, even now, will you?” she said.
His face, in the April sunshine, took on a brittle hardness as if it masked a softer, more tender impulse.
“What I think about you scarcely matters any more, my dear,” he answered. “I would sooner you didn’t get hurt, that’s all.”
“And you?” she said, responding at once to that suggestion of consideration. “Will you get hurt — again?” But she did not know him well enough to trespass, she realized immediately. His concern for her had been kindly impersonal, while hers for him had been born of closer ties.
“My private life is scarcely any business of yours,” he answered coldly. “Concern yourself with the job for which you are paid and you’ll come to no harm.”
He could, she thought unhappily, put her in her place more firmly than ever his aunt might do. She did not need to be reminded of her position in the household; she merely found it difficult, at times, to know what it was.
“Do you think you’re a match for Roma when it comes to a pretty case of gold-digging?” he asked suddenly, and the color crept under her pale skin, but before she could reply he had walked away, and she gazed after him, the old dislike back in her eyes. His words could have been another warning or merely a derisive reminder that he had not, in spite of a closer unity, revised his first opinion of her.
He was right of course; she was no match for Roma, whatever the odds. She could only accept the older girl’s pleasantries as she did the veiled snubs with the knowledge that she and not Roma was the interloper, that however much Astrea used her as a goad, Roma Nixon was secure in the old allegiance, secure even in the knowledge of her one-time power over Marc, to hurt him again if it suited her, or to take, this time, that which she had once wantonly thrown away.
“You mustn’t take Astrea too seriously,” she told Charity indulgently. “She’s given to fancies, you know.”
“So everyone tells me.”
“If by everyone, you mean Marc, he’s only trying to warn you. Astrea’s turned your head, a little, perhaps, with all this talk of money and adoption. You may even have thought she had Marc up her sleeve for you as well.”
“That’s absurd!”
“Is it? All the same, honey, you could hardly be blamed for cashing in while the going’s good.”
Charity looked at Roma, wanting to answer back, to protest, even to hurl insults, but there was, she saw, no malice, then, in the older girl. Her attitude was one of wry amusement, she would, her manner proclaimed, do exactly the same herself, in Chari
ty’s place.
“Look,” Charity said, trying to be reasonable. “I wish you would understand that I’m not in competition with you—over anyone or anything. It’s all a little ridiculous, don’t you think?”
“So long as you understand that, honey,” said Roma, with her warm, indolent smile. “I said you and I would get along, didn’t I?”
“It was, Charity discovered, only too easy to get along with Roma providing you gave in to her. Charity did not mind being made use of, but she found herself at the girl’s beck and call far more than her employer’s.
“Really!” Astrea exclaimed petulantly. “Dear Charity isn’t employed as your lady’s maid. You should look after your own clothes, Roma, or employ a girl to do it for you.”
“I couldn’t afford it, Astrea darling,” retorted Roma serenely. “Besides, Charity doesn’t mind, do you, honey?”
If Charity did mind, she wasn’t going to admit it in front of Marc, who listened to such exchanges with an inquisitive humor and made no comment, but she wished Roma did not consider it necessary to repay her small services with gifts of unwanted clothing; they made her feel beholden in quite the wrong way and she never wore them. They lay in one of the drawers in her room, neatly folded, scarves, jumpers, even discarded lingerie, the faint perfume that clung to them an ever-present reminder of the donor.
“Why do you do it?” Marc enquired on one occasion. Roma never made any secret of her own generosity in such matters.
She shrugged and gave him a lazy look, quite aware that for some reason or other he did not approve.
“Well, I can hardly offer her money, can I?” she replied carelessly. “After all, she’s a cut above the usual little girl one finds in this kind of situation.”
“One mightn’t always think so, judging by your manner,” he replied mildly, and she gave him a swift, calculating glance.
“Do I detect a rebuke, darling? She’s hardly your cup of tea, I should have thought,” she said.
“No? But then my tastes may have changed during the last seven years.”
“Very possibly, but you don’t convince me that the fastidious Marc Gentle can’t do better than his aunt’s paid companion.”
“How you do harp on that aspect,” he said with faint distaste, and quite suddenly the temper he remembered of old flared up.
“You’re like Astrea!” she exclaimed. “You both enjoy rubbing in the virtues of that whey-faced little waif as a reminder of my own shortcomings.”
He regarded her with interest and a certain admiration. Roma had always looked magnificent when driven to anger, and he smiled as he remembered how his own coolness had always provoked a further outburst from her.
“Why do you smile?” she demanded then. “Do you enjoy getting your own back after ‘all this time?
“Not at all,” he replied equably. “If I smiled, it was possibly at the rather absurd notion that you could be jealous of someone you describe as a whey-faced, little waif.”
“Jealous—of that poor little drip!”
“Your aspersions grow in picturesqueness, if not in accuracy, my dear.”
“I’m not casting aspersions!” she said scornfully. “The poor girl can’t help being plain, I suppose.” He merely raised his eyebrows, and for a moment her anger was submerged in genuine curiosity. “Don’t you think she’s plain?”
“No.”
Her eyes widened in disbelief.
“You’re not going to treat me to that sad pierrot nonsense of Astrea’s, are you?”
“I wasn’t, no—though there is a slight suggestion at times; a certain plaintiveness, the traditional black and white melancholy, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’ve never paid enough attention to the girl to notice,” she snapped, and saw, too late, that he had simply been angling for a rise
“Oh, Marc, you always enjoyed making me lose my temper,” she said, reaching up her hands to his shoulders. “I think, perhaps, you still have a small weakness for me.”
He looked down at the lovely face raised to his, and saw the first tiny lines of hardness and disillusionment around her mouth and eyes, and those infinitesimal flaws moved him more than her beauty.
“A weakness for you was once my undoing,” he told her gravely, and her fingers tightened on his shoulders.
“Is it too late?” she asked softly, and when he did not reply, reached up to kiss him.
It was, perhaps, inevitable that Charity should interrupt them at that moment. The small study which had been made over to Roma as a sitting-room was virtually a passageway between two larger rooms and one or other of the household must frequently pass through it. She stood awkwardly in the doorway, uncertain whether to proceed on her way or go back and shut the door, and Roma snapped, without drawing away from Marc: “Can’t you knock if you want to come through here?”
“I—I’m sorry,” Charity stammered. “I didn’t know—I didn’t think—”
“You didn’t think Marc and I might like privacy upon occasion? Well, now you do know.”
Charity’s eyes went to Marc, and the coolness of his regard stung her to indignation and a curious, unaccustomed feeling of pain. He stood there quite unembarrassed, and his faint smile was a little mocking.
“You should,” she told him, without pausing to choose her words, “hang a Do Not Disturb notice on the door for these occasions. I apologize for intruding.”
She crossed the room with her nose in the air and went out by the other door, and Roma gave a soft little laugh.
“Well, I believe she has the beginning of a crush on you, darling—poor little scrap!” she said before the door was properly closed, and only then did Marc disengage himself.
“You enjoyed that, didn’t you?” he said.
“Embarrassing the child? I didn’t notice that you were in much of a hurry to spring guiltily apart!”
“Perhaps,” he answered mildly, “I hadn’t a great feeling of guilt.”
“Why should you? If I know Astrea she will have acquainted her second spiritual daughter with our past history, long ago.”
“Oh, undoubtedly—but these things can be misconstrued.”
“Well, does it matter?”
“Not at all—” he replied with cool indifference, “—no, probably not at all.”
But it mattered a great deal to Charity. She had heard Roma’s remark as she left the room and she felt suddenly raw and nakedly exposed. They would have laughed together after she had gone, and Marc, who had been so unperturbed, might have felt a little flattered. They would treat her, in future, with kindly tolerance, he because his male ego would be soothed by her presumed change of heart, Roma because in the knowledge of her beauty and the power she bad once held over him, she could afford to be magnanimous. And was it true, thought Charity, fighting an emotion that had never come her way before, was it true that this sense of awakening was no more than the crushes the girls in the shop had experienced for film stars and television personalities? Was there no more than that to the shy sense of familiarity she had felt with him when they had stood under the cherry tree on Easter morning and he had quoted Housman? Sentimental rubbish, she told herself angrily. Had he not said, himself, that he tried his quotations out on her because all poetry lovers liked an admiring audience? It was unfair to remember that she had worn a white dress that same evening because it was Easter and the spring of the year, and he had looked at her with tenderness and said softly:
“ ‘Wearing white for Eastertide ...’ ”
She suddenly disliked him again very much, so that it was not difficult, when next they met, to be stiff and offhand with him, to show him, she hoped, that, although he might laugh behind her back, it could make little difference to her.
The days slipped by quickly enough, and soon it would be time for Marc to return to London. He and Roma motored frequently into Brighton, where, it was to be supposed, she found an outlet for her boredom. They would return in the evenings, sometimes very late, to be avidly quizz
ed by Astrea who alternately made arch innuendoes or declared herself to be neglected. Roma, after these occasions, seemed relaxed and very sure of herself; it was impossible to tell from Marc’s manner how the day had affected him.
Astrea discussed them both endlessly, and Charity listened in duty bound to many disclosures that were not, she felt, intended for her ears. It seemed as if her life, like Astrea’s, must henceforth be centred in these two, and it became exhausting to catch the prevailing mood, for one moment Astrea would declare her dearest wish of seven years ago was about to come true, and the next would condemn Roma as a heartless mercenary who, even now, would trifle with her nephew’s affections, hoping that the past might be forgotten.
“But she will not get my money!” she would exclaim. “If she wants Marc, she must take him on his own terms, as she would not years ago. You shall be my heir, dear, dear Ganymede, my little cup-bearer. I have made that very plain.”
How plain she had made this nebulous statement Charity was still unsure; indeed she had become heartily tired of the subject. She had no wish to figure in Astrea’s will, and it was not pleasant, she found, to be used as a threat to someone else. Roma had made her own interests fairly clear, Charity thought, and that was her business; if she wanted Marc as well then that was her business, too, but on this last reflection Charity wavered. Did he deserve nothing better than to rate as a meal ticket for someone he had once loved, and still did, for all she knew? It did not occur to her that Roma’s affections might be seriously engaged, for had she not thrown him over, when it suited for a rich man old enough to be her grandfather? Oh, well, thought Charity crossly, serve him right, either way! He was disagreeable and superior, and, most likely, cold as stone. She was unprepared, consequently, when on the last day of his visit he proposed that they should walk again to Cleat Beacon.
“It’s raining,” she said rather blankly.
“Good spring rain,” he replied imperturbably. “Are you afraid of a mild soaking?”
“Of course not, only—”