by Jane Arbor
CHAPTER EIGHT
On the morning of the day when Lysbet had arranged to bring Ian over to Falcons in order to meet Jeremy the pony, Caroline rang her up.
“He’s so excited that he has hardly eaten or slept, and ever since that day at the Club he has been astride the armchairs, riding them for all he’s worth,” said Caroline. “I do hope he’ll be good, but when he isn’t he can be such a fiend that I simply don’t know what to advise you to do!”
“I’ll use my instinct,” promised Lysbet laughingly. “I’m glad he is looking forward to coming.”
“He certainly is, but what I really rang you for was to ask you to deliver him back to the surgery instead of taking him home, if you wouldn’t mind? You see, I’ve got to be at the surgery all afternoon, catching up with some work. And Mabel, the woman I share the house with, will be out, so there wouldn’t be anyone at home to receive him. It won’t put you out, will it?”
“No, of course not,” Lysbet assured her. “We shall have an early tea and I’ll return him by about half-past five. Will that do?”
“Thanks awfully!” cooed Caroline more enthusiastically than the occasion warranted, Lysbet thought as she hung up. But Caroline was like that—to gush over trivialities just came naturally to her.
Ian, an independent child, was well able to dress himself, but this morning Caroline could not leave him alone. She kept on making sudden rushes in his direction, armed either with a hair-brush, or a sponge for wiping imaginary smears from his face.
“Now you will be good, won’t you, darling?” she pleaded for the tenth time.
Likewise for the tenth time Ian ignored the appeal and doggedly pursued his own line of thought.
“When I came back, can I bring Jeremy with me?” he demanded.
“Jeremy? Oh, the pony! No, of course not—he belongs to Miss Marlowe.”
The storm clouds began to gather on Ian’s brow. “Jeremy’s got to—” he was beginning when, to Caroline’s relief, Lysbet’s car arrived at the door.
“He has promised to be utterly angelic!” prevaricated Caroline as she bundled her son into the seat beside Lysbet. “You won’t let him be naughty, will you?”
Lysbet let in the clutch and glanced briefly down at the small, rapt face at her side.
“He won’t be,” she promised confidently. Why did Caroline harp so on naughtiness? It was enough to encourage any small boy to overwork himself at being bad.
On the journey out to Falcons she expected Ian’s interest would be taken with the car. But it soon became clear that his thoughts were all with Jeremy. He fired a series of questions at his hostess.
“What time does Jeremy get up?” he demanded.
“Oh, early—very early. Before you do, I dare say.”
“Does he like little boys?”
“I should think so. He hasn’t seen many, but he is very gentle. I expat he’ll like you.”
“Why?” The monosyllable was accompanied by a direct stare which seemed to demand an answer.
“Why? I don’t know, except that he’ll probably know that you’re good and kind and want to be friends. Horses mostly seem to know good people from bad.”
There was a pause while Ian went through a brief period of inward straggle. At last he said disarmingly: “I’m not always good. Mother says I’m not. Will Jeremy know, do you think?”
Lysbet laughed. “I dare say, even if he does he’ll knew that you mean to be good to begin with, and then things happen and you’re naughty almost before you know it. He probably won’t mind too much. Look, this is where I live I’ve got to turn in at this gate, but if you look through the window at your side you may be able to see Jeremy in the paddock.”
As she had expected, the whole of the rest of the morning was given over to the worship of Jeremy...
He had to be brought in from the paddock, to be saddled, to be led out again, to be mounted and finally to be ridden, at first with a good deal of mane-clutching and then with growing confidence.
“I can ride! I can ride! I can ride!” hymned Ian exultingly when at last they went in to luncheon. “Does Jeremy have his dinner now too?”
“No. I expect he’ll have a drink, but he won’t eat until this evening when he has finished his work.”
The small face puckered with anxiety. “Oh! Does he have to work this afternoon? Won’t he be able to carry me any more?”
“That is his work, you goose! But if he had anything to eat now he’d probably be too lazy to do it.”
Ian, seemingly bent on confession, said: “I’m lazy too. Mother says “
“I’m sure she does!” put in Lysbet with conviction. Only one morning with the child had taught her that he responded to reasonable treatment. It was because Caroline expected him to be naughty that he so frequently and obligingly was.
They washed their hands and went in to the dining-room to meet Mrs. Tempest. Eliot Bradd was away.
“This is Ian,” introduced Lysbet.
They solemnly greeted each other and then Ian burst out: “I can ride your pony!”
“Can you?” smiled Mrs. Tempest. “How do you like riding?”
“Very much, thank you,” he said politely. “Except—” he wriggled on the cushion which was helping him to reach the height of the dining table, “my behind feels rather funny!”
Lysbet shouted with laughter and Mrs. Tempest laughed, too, with real enjoyment.
Lysbet glanced at her quickly, only to see the returning shadow which passed across her face.
“She is ill. She is beginning to look it now!” the girl decided. “I must ask Richard to persuade her that she ought to do something about herself.”
They hurried over the meal because Lysbet warned Ian that the short winter afternoon would afford only a few rides more before Jeremy must be fed and watered and bedded down and Ian himself must go home.
He took her hand confidently as they went out to the stables once more and as she looked down into his upturned, not very handsome face, Lysbet felt a sudden urge of affection for the scrap of humanity that he was. One day perhaps there would be an Ian for her ... someone who wouldn’t be called Ian of course, someone who mightn’t even be a little boy at all, but a little girl ... someone who would belong to her and to Richard, someone to whom they had given life ... a new person for the world.
In the surgery Caroline was working at clerical returns and classifications of patients. Richard had insisted that she should catch up with the work since it should all have been finished by the end of the previous month. As she toiled monotonously through the card-index drawers she was thinking that working for Richard hadn’t tamed out to be as much fun as she had expected... He was a good deal more exacting than she had supposed he would be—after all, she was a friend!—and who would have guessed that he would get himself engaged to the Marlowe girl like that? She herself didn’t want anything particular of Richard, but his engagement had effectually put an end to the chance of having fun with him—the chance of the occasional dinner-engagement, for instance. And dancing! Richard danced divinely, as she well knew. It just wasn’t fair for Lysbet Marlowe to have what amounted to a monopoly of him in that direction!
She clashed open a drawer of the card-index cabinet, inserted a card and thumbed impatiently through the pile yet to be dealt with. It was behind the noise of the opening drawer that Richard himself came quietly into the surgery.
He put down his bag and drew off his gloves before he spoke. His face was very grave.
He said: “Why didn’t you tell me, or put down in the diary that there had been an urgent call about Mrs. Harrington?”
Caroline jumped. “Why, Richard! I mean—Doctor Guyse! You startled me—what did you say?”
Richard repeated: “Mrs. Hartington. There was an urgent call for me before I went out this morning. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Caroline stared while her heart took a sudden leap of guilt. “Mrs.—Hartington?” she hesitated. (Damn! This was the unforgivable sin!
How could she deal with it? She must gain time somehow!)
“Come! Don’t take refuge in stupidity. There was a call, wasn’t there?” Richard rapped out.
“Yes. I took it and I promised you would go. I—I didn’t enter it. I meant to tell you before you left. And then I—I forgot every word about it.”
“Until now, I suppose?”
“Yes. Don’t—don’t look at me like that! What has happened? Was it very urgent? Mrs. Hartington is all right, isn’t she?”
“She’s—dead,” said Richard briefly.
“Oh, no!”
Richard did not reply and Caroline did not move, but sat looking at her hands lying limply in her lap. She appeared utterly abject, but her racing thoughts were not so much with the dead patient as with the problematical future of Caroline Ware ... There mightn’t be much ‘fun’ in the job, but at least there was money, and money was something she needed all the while. If Richard were so narrow that he couldn’t forgive her a mere slip of the memory, what could she do?
She shot a sidelong glance towards him. How angry was he? How responsible was she for the woman’s death? That was something which she must find out.
She said slowly: “You mean—she might have lived—if I hadn’t forgotten that they had called?”
Richard Guyse shrugged his shoulders rather hopelessly. “How can anyone say that? I went to the house because it struck me as strange that no one had telephoned before I left. But I went only in the course of my round and—it wasn’t soon enough.”
A ray of hope dawned upon Caroline. “Did you—was she alive then?”
“Yes.”
“Then—it’s all right really, isn’t it? I mean—the fact that you didn’t get the call didn’t make any difference, did it? You went just the same, so—”
He rounded upon her in exasperation. “For pity’s sake, don’t be so bright, Caroline! I suppose you are relieved because there can’t be any public censure of you—or of me? As if that made any difference to the real issue!”
“But you got there—and she still died!” exclaimed Caroline bewilderedly.
“Yes. I got there—and she still died!” mocked Richard out of his bitterness. “It’s all right—you can rest contented that there is no one who can turn upon either of us and say—You had an urgent call which you ignored’! But how much consolation do you suppose that is to me! I could have been with her earlier. And the possibilities—if not the probabilities—of that are enormous. Do you understand what I’m talking about? Or doesn’t moral responsibility mean anything to you?”
Caroline was silent. Her dealings with men were usually based in the simplest procedure. The rules went something like—When they were gay and friendly, you were gay and friendly and responsive too. When they wanted to make love to you, you ‘played up’ just so far as it suited you. When they were too angry to be cajoled you left them alone. But when there was a chance—the merest thread of a chance—that their anger might be melted into pity for you as a woman—well, you played ‘woman’ for all you were worth!
She got up from her chair and crossed the room towards Richard. She did not look up at him until she stood directly before him. Then she raised her eyes, swimming in tears, to his.
“Richard, how can you be so cruel?” she breathed softly. “Of course I understand! It’s only that I’m so—so utterly relieved that there can’t be any question of blame for you, when you did everything that was possible for the patient! You can be as angry as you like with me for forgetting to tell you of the call. But you can’t be angry with me for being glad that you did all that you could! Richard—please!”
Her hands, which had held him at the wrists, slid up toward his shoulders and she kissed him slowly and lingeringly upon the lips.
Involuntarily he put his hands upon her own shoulders in order to hold her back from him. He was completely shocked that she should have sensed his mood so ill that she should think she could appeal to him with that sort of thing!
Unfortunately it was Caroline’s liquid-sounding: “Richard, please!” which Lysbet heard as she arrived at the door of the surgery with Ian. And it was the kiss and Richard’s hands upon Caroline’s shoulders which she saw.
Ian was leading the way but at the door he had stooped to poke a finger round the rim of his shoe. Lysbet, not expecting the movement, almost fell over him but saved herself by leaning forward to catch at the door-handle. It had turned at her touch and though Ian was first into the room she had already seen enough to make her heart sick within her. Even the convulsive movement with which Richard pushed Caroline back she saw as something hastily guilty, rather than the distasteful rejection which it really was.
“Mother! I can ride! I can ride Jeremy! An’—an’ Auntie Lysbet says I can go again!”
“Darling!” Caroline turned about and stooped over her small son, wondering as she did so whether it was possible that Lysbet had seen...
“—An’ the last time round, Auntie Lysbet didn’t hold on to the reins at all! I went an’ went—all by myself. Mother!—you’re not listening!”
Caroline was not indeed listening. Her attention was fully upon the other two as she tried to measure the possibility of Lysbet having seen more than she was meant to see. As she heard the girl greet Richard she sighed with relief. So she hadn’t been in time to see anything after all!
Lysbet had thought swiftly, bewilderedly: “I mustn’t make a scene now—I’ve got to have time to sort it out! If Richard says anything I can’t pretend I didn’t see. But if he doesn’t I shall know that there’s something to conceal. Please, please—” she was almost praying now—“let Richard realize that I saw them. Let him make a joke about it and then I shall know there was nothing in it... Or shall I?”
But Richard only passed a hand over his fair hair and smiled at her a little wearily. “Sweetheart—I didn’t know I was going to see you tonight.”
She moved over to him, her limbs feeling weighted and reluctant. Her answering smile was stiff-lipped as she said:
“This was Ian’s day out. I’ve been acting as his groom since about eleven a.m. And Caroline—” she half-turned her head as if to include the other woman in the conversation, but Caroline was now listening in earnest to Ian’s chatter, “Caroline asked me to bring him back here instead of taking him home.”
“I see. Well, what are you doing now? May I drive you back again?” He glanced at his watch. “I could—there’s just time before surgery.”
“No. No—don’t do that. I—I’ve got the car.” There was almost a hysterical note in Lysbet’s voice but Richard did not notice it. He had no idea that Lysbet could have been a witness of Caroline’s embrace, but his thoughts, usually clear enough, were going round in a circle ... Caroline, the little idiot! That was the second time ... And both occasions, here in the surgery where she should know better. His damned fault of course, for ever having taken her on to do serious work. Hadn’t he known what a scatterbrain she was when Adrian had married her? ... Mrs. Hartington ... how he hated to be the loser in the challenge of power which death offered to every doctor almost every day! ... Lysbet—how sweet and dear she was, everything about her the very opposite of Caroline’s twitter, her insincerity and now her incompetence...
He did not even notice that Lysbet did not kiss him before she excused herself from Caroline’s over-profuse thanks for ‘Ian’s lovely day’ and slipped quietly away.
When she had gone there was silence in the surgery for a minute or two. Then Caroline fetched her coat and shrugged it across her shoulders.
“ ’Fraid I must take Ian home and put him to bed. I may be a bit late for surgery,” she said casually. Then with her hand upon the door-handle she added: “D’you think Lysbet—saw?”
Richard looked at her blankly. “Saw’?” he quoted. “Oh—saw you making an idiot of yourself? No, of course not. But—” he added cruelly and significantly. “I only wish she had. I don’t deny that I should have quite enjoyed telling her the whole sto
ry!”
Caroline’s lip curled. “That would have been—quite caddish,” she said.
Richard’s only answer was to glance again at his watch. “I’ll excuse you from surgery for half an hour,” he said with cold formality. “We will talk about—Mrs. Hartington’s case tomorrow.”
Lysbet took the road out of Fallsbridge, driving with a mechanical efficiency which demanded little conscious direction from her brain. But when she changed gear for the ascent of Enshaw Hill she thought desperately: “I’ll stop when I get over the crest, on the edge of the common. I’ve got to think before I go home!”
She drew the car on to the grass verge and then lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. She looked at them with detachment and made a conscious effort to steady them. She must keep calm and think this out—try to decide what, by this afternoon’s work, had happened between her and Richard. Had anything happened at all?
Yes—jealousy had happened. And distrust had happened. And fear for the future—her future and Richard’s—had happened. But love went on, ceaselessly and pitilessly where before it had been warm and secure and enwrapping. You couldn’t switch off love as you snuffed out a light. If you could, jealousy and distrust would automatically lose any power to hurt.
But she mustn’t dare to judge Richard until she had got things into proportion! There might be a perfectly simple explanation. (Then why did neither he nor Caroline give it? demanded jealousy). It wasn’t so much the kiss which she had seen exchanged, she told herself—it was the significance of it in a possible chain of events of which she knew nothing. For instance, how often had they—no (Oh, no, no! her thoughts baulked. Don’t let’s think of that!)
She took another grip on herself. Richard and Caroline had been friends for a long time, ever since Adrian Ware, Caroline’s husband, had himself been Richard’s friend. And in those days Richard might often have kissed Caroline lightly and in a brotherly fashion perhaps. (Might he? But did that mean that he had the right to kiss her lately, since she had been his employee, since he had been engaged to Lysbet?)