Love Is My Reason

by Mary Burchell

  She was to go with David, to his own country, his own home. (To her Lady Ranmere was merely incidental, which would rather have surprised that lady.) No fear, no hardship, no insecurity would have mattered if David were to be there. That she was to have him and security seemed almost more than her heart could bear.

  But she had to hide her joy somehow; to appear no more than quietly and deeply grateful for the kindness of the offer. Only to herself could she say, “It was David’s idea! I know it was his idea, although Lady Ranmere explained it and put it forward as her own suggestion. He wanted me in his own home. Oh, please, God, let that be the truth! I’ve had so little in my life. I’m not complaining, but I haven’t had very much, have I? Please let me have David near me. I don’t mind being cold or hungry or homeless. Only let me have David.”

  But aloud she said, almost formally, though sweetly, “I do thank you both with all my heart. I will try to do everything you want and not to be a nuisance.”

  “You’re a good child,” said Lady Ranmere, which was quite a handsome accolade from her.

  But it was David who gently ruffled her bright hair and said,

  “You couldn’t be a nuisance. You don’t know how to. Well, I’m glad that’s settled.”

  It was not so easy when it came to explaining to Mrs. Preston, however. After a restless and wakeful night, she had come to the firm determination to claim the girl she was certain was her grandchild. She was appalled when opposition came from Anya herself, of all people.

  “But, darling, I want you to come to me,” she cried, when it was explained that Lady Ranmere had offered Anya a home for the time being. “Why should you go to someone else? You belong to me.”

  “Dear Mrs. Preston, it is not so simple as that.” Anya smiled pleadingly at her. “You are kind enough to say I belong to you. But I don’t know. We don’t any of us know.”

  “I know!” insisted Teresa Preston obstinately. “Mary—” she turned indignantly to Lady Ranmere, who was standing by—“I don’t think this was kindly done of you. You had no right to interfere between me and Martin’s child.”

  “My dear Teresa, I tried to do what was best for you both, in very difficult circumstances,” Lady Ranmere replied, unmoved. “Anya is behaving very well in not exploiting the situation. But it would be kinder to her if you let her have some breathing space while enquiries are being made.”

  “But enquiries have been made. They were made years ago,” retorted Mrs. Preston impatiently. “What more do you suppose could be done?”

  ‘They can be made from another angle now,” Lady Ranmere pointed out. “When you tried to trace him before, you assumed he was in Bulgaria. Whatever Anya’s photograph does not prove, at least it proves that Martin was in Russia.”

  “Oh, Mary, you know it’s a forlorn hope—trying to get information out of any of the countries beyond the Iron Curtain,” cried Mrs. Preston. “Suppose we still discover nothing—which is what is almost certain to happen—what then?”

  “Then, my dear, you will have to make a considered decision—in conjunction with Celia, for it is her home too—as to what you want to do.”

  “I know what I want to do now.” Mrs. Preston spoke with the slight sulkiness of an obstinate child. “And as for Celia—” She stopped, for even such emotion as she had experienced in the last twenty-four hours could not break the affectionate submission of a lifetime.

  “Celia’s problem too may well be settled, if you are prepared to wait a few months,” Lady Ranmere pointed out thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose either of us would be surprised if Celia were to become engaged in the near future, do you?”

  “Well, no. I suppose you are right.” Relief and pleasure flooded into Mrs. Preston’s face at this reflection. While to Anya it seemed that hope and joy drained away from her heart.

  It was not really for her to say anything at this point, and yet she had to say it—in a tone that she strove to make no more than casually interested.

  “Is Celia more or less engaged to someone, then?” she asked, not looking at Lady Ranmere who, she knew, would consider the question a little inquisitive and out-of-place.

  But Teresa Preston—happy now in the thought that everything might work out well, after all—hardly cared who shared her confident expectations.

  “Oh, yes, darling. And that’s another reason why I am so glad to have found you. You’ll be there to keep me company, when Celia marries David and goes away.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Anya stood by the ship’s rail, watching the cliffs of Dover grow every moment more distinct as the light mist lifted from the water. It was as though a gauze curtain rolled up on the next scene in her life, she thought, half frightened, half excited by the prospect.

  Then David, who had been walking the deck of the cross-Channel steamer, came to a stop beside her and said, “The first glimpse of your future home, Anya. How do you like it?”

  She turned her head to smile up at him, and the wind blew a strand of her bright hair across her cheek.

  “It doesn’t seem quite real,” she said. “But then—nor do lots of other things. Sometimes I think I shall wake up in the room in the barracks and find I have dreamed it all.”

  “Nonsense!” He rejected the idea almost violently. “You’re never going back there. You below to us now.” She would have liked him to have said “to me”. But that was a very secret thought which she must keep to herself.

  “We were lucky to get everything fixed up so quickly,” he went on after a moment. “I hardly expected the Consul to be so co-operative, or that it would be comparatively easy to get you a visitor’s visa and take you with us right away.”

  “I still don’t understand it.” She smiled again and shook her head. “To cross a frontier was for us a sort of dream. Something one waited for and hoped for but never quite believed in. Something which came near perhaps but always retreated again, without explanation or reason or hope. For us—”

  “Don’t say ‘us’, Anya! You aren’t a displaced person any longer,” he insisted with almost boyish eagerness. “It’s all going to be different now.”

  “Oh, David—” She touched his arm lightly, almost caressingly.

  “Why do you say, ‘Oh, David’ in that tone?” he wanted to know. “As though I don’t understand anything?”

  “I didn’t mean that you don’t understand anything!” She was rather shocked. “Only that there is such a big gulf between your world and mine.”

  “We’re in the same world now,” he pointed out.

  “Only you belong and I am a visitor,” she reminded him.

  “I’ve just told you that you too belong now,” he retorted with a laugh, and he ruffled her hair with an indulgent hand.

  Then the others came up and intimate moment was over.

  “Well, darling—” That was Mrs. Preston who, in spite of Lady Ranmere’s common sense arrangements and Celia’s definite hostility, always made a point of addressing Anya exactly as though she were her dear, accepted granddaughter. “How does it feel to be nearly home?”

  “Wonderful,” Anya said, smiling at the older woman. And, for the hundredth time, she tried to find some way between the affectionate intimacy which Mrs. Preston craved and the tactful reserve which Lady Ranmere thought proper. If she succeeded to anyone’s satisfaction, it was certainly not to Celia’s. She gave Anya that cool glance of dislike which was so often in her eyes when she looked at the girl her mother so fondly tried to claim as hers.

  “How happy she would be to see me thrust out of their lives again,” thought Anya, with a sigh. And she was glad that Bertram chose that moment to take her lightly by the arm and say she must come and see the arrangements for the arrival and berthing of the ship.

  Oddly enough, Bertram was the one with whom she felt most completely at ease. David caused her exquisite agitation because she loved him and must hide the fact. With his aunt she was never happily at ease because she knew instinctively that Lady Ranmere, while bein
g kind and just to a degree, wished heartily that she had never come into their lives. Mrs. Preston was a loving but ever problematical influence, and Celia quite simply detested her.

  With Bertram it was different. He liked her, in a careless, uninhibited way, and it was, she thought, a matter of complete indifference to him whether she were indeed Mrs. Preston’s granddaughter or a stranger.

  As they sauntered along the deck now, his air towards her was much the same as it would have been to Celia or his mother. But as soon as they were out of earshot of the others, he gave her that puckish grin of his and said, “I thought you might like to be saved the necessity of displaying further enthusiasm over a situation which must at best be agitating and at worst depressing.”

  “I am not depressed.” Anya looked rather shocked. “I am very grateful for all—”

  “I’m sure you are, dear child,” he interrupted. “But gratitude, though a very proper sentiment, is not one which raises the spirits.”

  She laughed at that. And though she did not offer to comment on his view of gratitude, she thought, not for the first time, that he was cruelly penetrating.

  “I’m glad you’re going to live with my masterful Mama for a time, you know,” he went on. “You interest me, Anya. Professionally, I mean. I’m going to try you out in something one of these days.”

  “Try me out in something?” She looked surprised and a trifle alarmed.

  “Don’t worry. It won’t be yet. But I shall make it my business to see something of you, even though I don’t actually live at home.”

  “Where do you live?” she asked with interest.

  “I have a flat of my own in town. So has David,” he added.

  “Has he?” She tried not to sound as though that interested her much more. “I wonder—” She stopped, not quite knowing how to put her query in sufficiently casual terms.

  “You wondered exactly what the set-up was?” he suggested obligingly. “Well, both of us regard my mother’s house as home. She has a rather nice place, you’ll find, in Buckinghamshire, which is a short way outside London. David and I quite often run down there for the weekend.”

  “But you mean—David does not actually live there?”

  “Not during the week. Nor do I. Though I do realize that isn’t quite so interesting,” he added teasingly.

  She felt herself coloring and hastened to change the subject slightly.

  “And what about Mrs. Preston and Celia?” she enquired. “Where do they live?”

  “About half a mile away from my mother’s place. Only a few minutes by car. You’ll see a lot of them. Whether you want to or not,” he added rather cryptically. And Anya found that she could not make herself ask what he meant by that.

  There was silence for a few moments while they both affected to be interested in the activity on the lower deck. Then at last Bertram said,

  “We had better get back to the others now. We’ll be landing any minute.”

  The bustling scene as they disembarked half fascinated and half scared Anya, but nothing could eradicate her whole-hearted fear and distrust of the immigration officials. Rooted deep within her was the certainty that officials were capricious, all-powerful beings who, with a wave of the hand or a stroke of the pen, could alter the course of one’s life.

  She trembled violently when she had to approach the man who was examining her papers, and when he asked her some routine questions, a sort or paralysis of terror descended upon her.

  “I—don’t know,” she stammered. “I think—”

  And then suddenly David was beside her. And—with an understanding which seemed to her little less than sublime—he put a careless, comforting arm round her and spoke to the official on her behalf. She hardly heard his words. Only the calm, authoritative sound or his voice, which seemed to stand like a wall between her and despair.

  She did not look up. She did not follow the progress of’ the brief conversation. She only knew from the slight pressure of his arm that it was all right and she could move on now. And presently they were with the others again and Celia was saying in a tone of slightly distasteful surprise,

  “What is the matter with Anya? Why is she crying?”

  Only then did Anya know there were tears on her cheeks, and that she had torn a hole in one of the pretty lace handkerchiefs which Mrs. Preston had given her.

  “She was frightened,” David said briefly.

  “Of what?” enquired Mrs. Ranmere.

  “Of something we wouldn’t understand,” her nephew replied drily. “But it’s all right. It’s over now. Isn’t it?” And suddenly he bent his head and kissed the side of Anya’s cheek.

  “Yes,” she whispered, and with difficulty resisted a wild desire to cling to him and kiss him over and over again.

  No one commented further, though Anya could not imagine that the kiss was approved by either Lady Ranmere or Celia. But she did not care. A sort of defiant, rapturous satisfaction wrapped her round. He had kissed her, and all the way up to London in the train it seemed to her that she could feel the light touch of his lips on her cheek.

  After Bertram’s talk of town flats and country houses, she greatly feared that David might leave the party when they reached London. But her anxiety was unfounded. From one great railway station, as it seemed to her, they all drove through splendid and crowded streets to another station and embarked on a second railway journey.

  “Are you very tired, darling?” It won’t be long now,” Mrs. Preston assured her kindly. “You will soon be home. I wish you were really coming home to me. But at least you will be very near and we can see each other often.”

  Anya smiled and managed to murmur something graceful, though the knowledge that Celia glanced at her without favor made it rather difficult.

  It was almost dark when they arrived at their final destination—a pretty little countrified station, where their party was received with respectful friendliness by the station staff of one.

  Cars were waiting and here at last the party divided. After very affectionate good-byes from Mrs. Preston and coolly graceful ones on Celia’s part, the Prestons and a great deal of luggage were stowed away in one car. A uniformed chauffeur held open the doors of the other waiting car, and Lady Ranmere shepherded Anya towards it.

  “All right, Chivers. I’ll drive,” Bertram said to the chauffeur, who yielded his seat rather reluctantly, Anya thought, and throughout the short drive continued to look straight ahead, with a severe air which said plainly that he washed his hands of all responsibility for either the car or its occupants.

  “You won’t be able to see much of the outside of the house tonight,” David told Anya, as they turned into a short, gravelled drive with large trees on either side. “But it’s beautifully situated really and I think you’re going to like it.”

  “I know I shall love it,” she replied eagerly. Which was indeed the case. For a shed would have been almost beautiful in her eyes so long as David visited it often.

  An elderly, uniformed maid admitted them, and showed every sign of austere pleasure on greeting Lady Ranmere. “Well, Dixon, it’s nice to be home,” Lady Ranmere said. “Is everything all right?”

  “Oh, yes, my lady.” Dixon’s tone implied that nothing would presume to go wrong so long as she was in charge.

  “This is Miss Beranova, who has come back with us from Germany to pay us a visit,” Lady Ranmere went on making Anya’s advent among them sound irreproachably normal and undramatic. “I hope you got my letter, and that you have the green room ready for her.”

  “Yes, my lady,” said Dixon again. “Good evening, madam.” Her greeting to Anya was an admirable mixture of respect for any guest of Lady Ranmere’s and pity for anyone who possessed such an outlandish name.

  They went up the beautiful wide staircase then, and Anya was introduced to her room—a charming place with green and white chintz curtains and bedspread and a moss-green carpet which seemed to her the height of enchanting luxury.

  “W
hat a pretty room,” she said shyly to Lady Ranmere, who had accompanied her there.

  “I’m glad you like it, my dear. I hope you will be happy here.” Lady Ranmere spoke with the impersonal kindliness which she always displayed to Anya. “Come downstairs when you have unpacked and we will have some supper. I think we must all be ready for it.”

  Then she went away with Dixon, leaving Anya to the elegant green solitude of the room which was now—incredibly—called hers.

  Unpacking was still a simple matter for Anya, though not so pitifully so as when she had first come from the barracks.

  She opened the neat new suitcases which had been bought for her in Munich, and carefully lifted out the one or two simple but pleasing dresses which Lady Ranmere and Mrs. Preston had provided between them.

  It took her some time to discover that her wardrobe had sliding doors. But once she had mastered the simple mechanism of them, she found them indescribably attractive, and, with a good deal of artless pleasure, she hung her dresses on the hangers which she found inside the wardrobe.

  Then she put away her new nylon underclothes in the chest of drawers, reserving one special drawer for the silk stole which David had given her.

  After that she looked round and wondered if it would be all right for her to put her few personal belongings about the room. Finally she put the photograph of her mother and the man she had known as her father on the dressing-table, where they looked distressing alien and out of place. But she felt there would be some disloyalty in not letting them share her new and luxurious surroundings, so she left them there.

  Her little ornaments and personal articles which had travelled with her from one deary camp room to another looked pathetically shabby and unsuitable for any place in the room. So she slowly put them back in her case, and, as she did so, she came across the photograph of the two young men, which had precipitated all the strange events of the last week or so.

  She held it in her hands for several minutes, staring at it as though she would wrest its secret from it by sheer force of will.