Finally the whole mood changed—her expression changed—one even believed that the tune changed, except that it was by now so familiar. With rapid, light movements, she was reaping her field with a purpose. She was gay, she was smiling; her hands flew faster and faster, so that one laughed aloud with the rapidity and absurdity of it all. It seemed that she would never stop. The tune, the progress across the field, the flashing movement of hand and arm were all one crescendo of speed—until suddenly she fell into someone’s arms, at the other side of the field, and the song was over.
There was a chorus of laughter and again an outburst of clapping. But suddenly Martin’s voice dominated the babel of sound, and what he said was,
“Where’s that photograph? I remember now who it was. I couldn’t be mistaken. The man was your father, wasn’t he? There couldn’t be two people with a talent like that, and no connection between them.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“The photograph! Where is the photograph?”
For a few moments everyone searched for it, with varying degrees of interest and excitement. Then David reached across and picked it up from a side table where Anya had left it earlier in the evening.
“Here it is,” he said, and handed it over to Martin.
It seemed there was a concerned indrawing of breath while Martin stared consideringly at the old, but still unfaded picture. Then he said slowly.
“Yes—of course I remember now. I don’t know why I didn’t recognize him before, except that it isn’t really much like him.”
“But who is he?” demanded Lady Ranmere, with hardly veiled impatience.
“His name was Edcombe—Francis Edcombe.” Martin still spoke slowly, as though recalling carefully something long forgotten. “He was an extraordinary nice and clever chap. He married a Russian girl, I remember, but he was killed in some sort of accident only a few weeks later.”
He paused, but the silence in the room was complete. Only Anya shivered slightly, with nervous excitement, as the identity of her long dead father slowly took shape before her.
“You reminded me of him when I first saw you—” Martin turned towards Anya—“but it wasn’t actually a facial resemblance, and that’s why, after the first, few moments, I dismissed it. I even thought I had imagined it. But something about the photograph struck the same cord again without my quite realizing why. The eyes are the same, I suppose—” He looked from the photograph to the pale, still girl who stood near David. “And then—the way you turn your head, and the rapid change of expression—”
He paused again, as though delving into the recesses of the almost forgotten past and feeling some surprise himself at what he brought up.
“You say you knew him well?” Anya spoke almost in a whisper.
“In a way, yes. That is to say I knew him very well for a short time. We travelled around together tor a few months, ending up in Odessa. That was where he married this Russian girl. Her name was—” he groped in the back of his memory—“Natasha. She was your mother, I suppose?”
Anya nodded wordlessly.
“Extraordinary thing!” Martin looked back at the photograph once more. “I see now—it’s unmistakable. But this makes him look a lot less animated than he usually was. He was a clever chap, in the way you are clever. He used to do sketches and sing at all our parties, and was always a riot. He would have us all laughing or crying, just as he chose. It was when I saw you doing the same thing that I knew.”
“Was he in any way a professional?” Bertram asked, his voice vibrant with controlled excitement.
“Oh, no! He hadn’t any real voice, you know. Just enough to put over what he wanted. But, I remember, he told me once that he came from a theatrical family. Had a much older brother in England who had already made some success.”
“A brother who was successful on the stage?” Bertram’s voice was no longer controlled. “What was his name?”
“Well, really—there you have me!” Martin gave a protesting laugh. “I’ve strained my memory about as far as it will go. I don’t think I—”
“But it’s important!”
“Is it?” Martin frowned consideringly. “It wasn’t unfamiliar to me when he mentioned it, because I’d seen him in something just before I—left England.” He flashed an apologetic smile at his mother in the moment of slight hesitation. “I think—it began with ‘B. Was it Bertram? No, that’s you. Barry? Barney? No, I remember! It was Basil. That’s it! Basil Edcombe. Very good-looking fellow he was, too.”
“He still is,” Bertram replied drily. “And now he is one of our most famous actor-managers. Are you seriously telling us that Anya is his niece?”
“If she is the daughter of Francis—yes.”
“But how absolutely thrilling!” cried Mrs. Preston. “He’s tremendously well known. You must have heard of Sir Basil Edcombe, Martin dear. Even in America,” she added, without malice aforethought.
“There must be some mistake.” That was Celia—pale and considerably dismayed.
“Why?” enquired Bertram rather brutally.
“Because it’s so—so improbable. So melodramatic.” Celia was evidently resistant to any solution of the Anya mystery which might leave the central character in a favourable and acceptable light.
“That’s how life is,” her brother told her, with a glance of shrewd amusement. “You have no idea how improbable and melodramatic your own brother’s life has been at times.”
“That’s different.”
“Oh, no, it isn’t. And, anyway, don’t you think it’s very pleasing to find that Anya has distinguished relations, instead of being an unknown waif?”
“Very pleasing,” Celia said coldly. And then she relapsed into a glum silence.
“So we’ve found an uncle for you at least, Anya,” David smiled and put an arm round her. “How does it feel to be identified?”
“I—don’t know,” she said. And turning her head, she suddenly hid her face against him.
He laughed—but kindly—and ruffled her hair. But Lady Ranmere, unerringly scenting the approach of a too-emotional scene, observed briskly,
“Well, this is all very satisfactory and interesting. Now I suppose the next thing is decide who is to tell Sir Basil about Anya—and how.”
“But I don’t know that I want him told!” Anya looked up quickly again.
“Nonsense, my dear.” Lady Ranmere was quite emphatic about that. “One doesn’t keep these things a secret.”
“Why don’t you want him told, Anya?” David’s tone was more gentle than his aunt’s.
“Because—I told you before—people don’t necessarily want to have unknown relations suddenly wished on to them. It’s embarrassing and—and makes problems.”
“I can’t imagine anyone not welcoming the arrival of his own brother’s child,” exclaimed Mrs. Preston sincerely.
“But then you’ve never been a refugee, Mrs. Preston,” retorted Anya. “You’ve never seen the doors closing and the backs turning. Not necessarily because people are unkind, but because they simply cannot make room for those who’ve been torn from their moorings.”
“But when that person is a relation, child, surely it’s different?” protested the older woman.
“Not always. You think that’s how people are because that is the way you would be.” Suddenly Anya left David’s side and, crossing over to Mrs. Preston, she put her arms round her and kissed her. “I know how you would have behaved to me if I had really been your granddaughter. And I’ll remember you all my life and be grateful for that. But you mustn’t think all people are the same. Or even that they can be the same. This man—this actor—”
“Your uncle,” Bertram reminded her briefly.
“My—uncle—“ She said the word as though it were indescribably curious to speak of someone who belonged to her, even so passingly. “My uncle is a famous man, you tell me. He must be a busy man, with a life of his own and a family of his own—”
“No. His wife died some y
ears ago and he has no children.” Once more it was Bertram who interrupted.
“Then still less is he likely to want to have the responsibility of some unknown girl forced on him.” Anya spoke almost passionately. “I don’t want him to have to take me—to have to bother himself about me—to have to pretend that he is glad to see me, when he probably wishes profoundly that I’d never been born. I won’t have him told!”
She looked round on them all, her eyes bright and a streak of angry color in her cheeks. And so compelling was the urgency of her declaration that, for a moment, they were all silent.
Then David said quietly,
“What do you want us to do, then, Anya? Maintain a sort of conspiracy of silence about this extraordinary discovery? That would be difficult, you know.”
“I don’t care.” She sounded completely obstinate. “I don’t want him told. Not just now, at any rate.”
“Not until you’ve made some sort of success for yourself and can meet him on his own level, I suppose?” David said, with such complete understanding that she was hard put to it not to throw her arms round him this time and kiss him, as she had kissed Mrs. Preston.
“Yes.” She nodded eagerly. “That’s it.”
“And suppose you never make any sort of success at all. What then?” enquired Celia, in a cool tone calculated to deflate anyone’s ego.
“I shall make a success,” Anya retorted coldly, and she drew herself up slightly and spoke with such conviction that, in that moment, no one doubted she was right.
Then Lady Ranmere said, in a not very satisfied tone, “Well—I don’t know. It seems quite extraordinary to make a mystery of all this. But I suppose Anya is entitled to choose her own time for making herself known to her uncle. This certainly has been a day of surprises, Teresa—” she turned to her old friend—“and I think we all feel we want some rest after so much excitement. We won’t keep you up any longer. And I’m very glad, my dear, that you have Martin under you own roof again. However temporarily,” she added, with a slightly disapproving glance at the unperturbed Martin.
Good-nights followed then. All too briefly for Anya’s liking, for, in front of the others, it was impossible to do more than smile at David and hold his hand tightly for a moment. Then the visitors drove away, and the somewhat oddly constituted family party was left.
Almost immediately, Celia—who had been reduced to discontented silence by the events of the evening—said that she was going to bed. And Anya, wishing to leave Mrs. Preston to the private enjoyment of her newly recovered son, would have done the same.
At that point, however, Mrs. Preston got up from her chair and said,
“I am going to bed too. Mary is right. All this excitement is very exhausting, and although one feels happy, I for one am almost dead. But I daresay you want to ask Martin more about your father, darling. You have him to yourself for a while, if you want.”
There was, in her estimation, no greater pleasure she could have offered Anya, and Anya’s grateful good-night kiss acknowledged the fact. Then Mrs. Preston bade her son an affectionate good-night and went away upstairs.
For a while there was silence in the room. The fire, which had been lit because of the coolness of the evening, flickered and stirred in the grate, and the coals fell together, sending up a shower of sparks.
“Well,” said Martin, who was sprawled comfortably in an armchair, smoking, “what do you want to ask me, Anya?”
“I don’t know.” She looked across at him and smiled in the firelight. “I don’t know where to begin. It’s so extraordinary to hear about someone as close as one’s father and yet to have to ask about the smallest detail. In a way, it’s like hearing about a stranger. For most of my life, I thought of someone else as my father—”
“Did you?” Martin shot her a curious glance.
“Yes. My mother married again very soon. A Russian. He was a good father to me all my life, in good times and bad.”
“And most of them were bad times?” suggested Martin.
“We spent years in various camps, as refugees. But that was no fault of his. And, even in the most wretched existence, there are ways of making things better, you know, if people are good and kind and loving.”
“I suppose there are. What happened to your mother in the end, Anya?”
“She died—in a camp in North Germany.”
“Because of the wretched conditions?”
“More or less.”
“It seems impossible! I knew her as a gay, determined, resourceful girl, living a reasonably normal existence as a language teacher. I remember her on her wedding day. She was very pretty. Strictly speaking, prettier than you are.”
“I am sure she was.” Anya smiled. “Tell me some more about her.”
“I didn’t know her very well. I knew your father much better, of course. I liked her, but—you mustn’t mind my saying this, Anya—I strongly suspected that she married my friend as much for the chance or becoming British and escaping, as for anything else.”
“It’s possible. Do you blame her?”
“No. Not as the world has been for many years now. There was a Russian fellow I saw her with once or twice—he didn’t come to the wedding—I always thought she was really fonder of him than of Edcombe. Perhaps that was the man she married afterwards.”
“Perhaps.”
“His name was Ivan. I forget the other name.” He looked across at Anya enquiringly.
“Half the men in Russia are called Ivan,” replied Anya with her secret smile. And her companion did not press the point.
“I wonder why your mother didn’t apply to the relations of her English husband.” Martin frowned consideringly. “It would have been difficult for them to do anything, of course. It always is difficult to do anything for anyone on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. But it would have been worth trying.”
“She married again so soon after the accident,” Anya said. “Perhaps she decided to marry for love, rather than nationality, that time. She had the chance of escaping to Prague with my—my stepfather. I imagine she preferred to do that, rather than make a forlorn attempt to contact unknown English relations, who probably would not have wanted her in any case.”
“I guess that’s it,” Martin agreed. “And so poor old Edcombe would have been as though he had never existed—except for you,” he added musingly.
“Except for me,” Anya repeated slowly. And, for the first time in her life, she had the most extraordinary sensation of belonging to something which had continuity.
Somewhere, back there in the mists of the half-forgotten past, there was a man who was responsible for her existence. And here she sat—safe in the harbour of a conventional, English drawing-room, after indescribable experiences—sole evidence of the fact that he had once lived and loved and walked the earth.
She felt the link, like an almost physical tug at her wrist, and for a moment the firelight blurred before her eyes in a mist of tears.
“He was very young to die, wasn’t he?” she said softly, and there was tenderness in her voice Because he was real to her at last.
“Very,” Martin agreed briefly. “But he lived every minute of his life, I think, while he had it. Perhaps none of us can ask more than that. But—I wish he could have seen you.”
“Seen me?” She repeated the words curiously. “Why?”
“Any man likes to see his daughter,” Martin said with a slight laugh. “And you were so clever and enchanting this evening. He would have been proud of you and happy.”
“W-would he?”
“Why, of course. And I expect he would have asked you what I’m going to ask you now. What do you propose to do with your life, Anya?”
There was a pause. Then she said,
“You ask me what I propose to do. Perhaps that’s the first sign that I am someone in my own right at last. Before, everyone made suggestions of what they should arrange for me. It gives one a strange feeling. You can’t imagine how strange!”
/> “Perhaps I can.” Martin smiled. “Tell me what you plan to do.”
“I want to follow out the scheme of work that Bertram Ranmere has drawn up. I have faith in his judgment and in his powers of development. I am going to try, with everything I have, to be a success in the world of the theatre—in the way he wants and expects. And after that—” she hesitated, became withdrawn suddenly, and said almost formally—“after that—I don’t know yet.”
“Is he in love with you?”
“Bertram?” She was astonished. “Certainly not.”
“All right. He might have been, you know. You’re the kind of girl men do fall in love with. But it’s just as well if he is not. That means there are no strings to the offer he has made to help you?”
“I don’t think there are. No, of course there aren’t. He is just interested in me as a stage artist.”
“Hm.” Martin sounded slightly sceptical, but did not actually query this assertion. “Then it’s the other fellow. David Manworth.”
“In—in what way do you mean that?”
Martin Deane laughed not unkindly.
“I’m old enough to be your father, Anya. I believe I was a few months older than your father, which is a sobering thought. So you mustn’t mind my speaking to you in a slightly paternal way. I’m used to observing people, and I saw perfectly well this evening that you and my rather problematical sister are both in love with the same man. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“It—it could be.”
“Well, it’s never very wise to interfere between women in love, I guess. But—I say this quite objectively, for though blood may be thicker than water, I am not greatly drawn towards my new sister—you would make a better wife for David Manworth than she would.”
“You think that?” Anya clasped her hands together and stared at him. “You really think that?”
Love Is My Reason Page 16