by Anne Weale
Leaving the driver to bring his bags, Cal strode up the path, saw her standing at the window, and raised a hand in casual greeting.
Her heart pounding but her face calm, she went into the hall to meet him.
‘Hello, sweet. How are you?’
For the benefit of Marcos and Rocío who were coming out of the kitchen to welcome him, Cal put his arm round her waist and kissed her near but not quite on the mouth.
In the manner of their race, the cook and her husband were voluble in their relief and pleasure at his homecoming. But presently Marcos nudged Rocío and they withdrew, obviously thinking their employer must be eager to embrace his wife at greater length.
But after they had retreated to the kitchen, Cal did not accompany her to the drawing-room, but said, ‘I’m running a bit behind schedule, so I’d better bath straight away. We can talk en route to the reception. Ask Rocío to make Harrison a pot of tea, will you?’—this being a reference to the driver who had brought up Cal’s two cases and was waiting inside the front door.
Antonia watched her husband go upstairs, his long legs taking them two at a time as easily as she took one. Then pinning a smile on her face, she turned to the driver and said, ‘Come through to the kitchen, will you?’
Had she and Cal been a normal couple, she could have followed him upstairs and sat on the edge of the bath and talked to him while he lay relaxing in the hot water. As it was, she did not see him again until he came downstairs, looking refreshed and spruce in the pale grey suit and blue shirt which, on her instructions, Marcos had put out for him.
‘There’s just time for a drink before we go. What will you have?’ he asked her.
‘Sherry, please.’ As he went to the drinks cupboard, she added, ‘I—I was terribly anxious about you, Cal.’
‘Yes, waiting for news plays more hell with the nerves than actually being involved in an unpleasant situation. I hope everyone won’t want to question me about it at this thing we’re going to tonight—I’ve talked about it quite enough already. You weren’t plagued by any of the media people, I hope?’
She shook her head. ‘There’s a list, by the telephone of all the people who rang up to ask how you were.’
‘I’ll look at it some other time. Tonight I should prefer to forget the whole thing. Hello, what’s this?’—noticing the piece of canvas work which she had left on the arm of the chair by the window.
‘Fanny showed me how to do it. It helped to pass the time while we were waiting.’
He said, ‘That reminds me’—for an instant she thought he was going to say it was two months since their wedding—‘I’ll quickly ring up Fanny to thank her for looking after you.’
She watched him dial the Rankins’ number. He had an exceptionally good memory for telephone numbers, American zip codes and similar things. Indeed his memory was so retentive that she felt sure he did know it was the date of their wedding but, this time, had chosen to ignore it.
He had a short but affectionate conversation with Fanny, drinking his gin and tonic while listening to her side of it.
‘Time to be on our way,’ he said, as he replaced the receiver.
Harrison had already returned to the car and was reading. He saw them come out of the house and had the rear door open by the time Cal opened the gate for Antonia.
‘There were details of a couple of rather promising-looking, properties waiting for me at the office. Tomorrow we’ll go and look them over,’ he remarked, on the way to the reception.
Otherwise they had little conversation and sat apart from each other like people whose marriage was on the rocks rather than newlyweds, one of whom had just come through a time of great danger, she thought dully. Antonia longed to move close beside him, and to snuggle her cheek against his shoulder, but Cal was staring ahead, preoccupied by thoughts in which, all too clearly, she had no place.
When they arrived at the reception, none of the faces of the people already there was familiar to her until, on the other side of the room and deep in conversation, she caught a glimpse of Diana Webster. Had Cal known she was going to be present? Was that why he had come, although he had more than once said that a form of entertaining he abominated was the drinks party at which squashy morsels of food had to be eaten standing up?
If Diana’s presence had been the lure which had overcome his dislike of this type of function, he was too discreet to make a beeline for her. Not that there would have been much point in his doing so. As he had feared, within moments of their arrival he was surrounded by people who wanted to hear his account of the hijacking.
Instead it was Diana who sought out Antonia. Among so many people it would have been possible for them to pretend not to notice each other. Antonia would have done this, feeling that the sight of Cal’s wife and his former girl-friend hobnobbing could only cause malicious amusement to those in the know. But Diana had no such compunction, and not only did she single Antonia out of the group with whom she was conversing, but suggested they should sit together on a nearby sofa. Short of being openly unfriendly, it was impossible to avoid this unwelcome tête-à-tête. Antonia wondered what Cal—now somewhere at the other end of the crowded room—would think if he saw them together.
‘I can see you share my love of clothes,’ was Diana’s first remark, as they sat down.
She was wearing a pale blue dress which Antonia, having by now accustomed her eye to the hallmarks of the leading English designers, judged to be by Bill Gibb.
She herself was wearing her first English-made clothes, a co-ordinated blouse, skirt and jacket by Jaeger. But her shoes and her bag were Spanish, as she found English shoes expensive and most styles too broad for her feet.
She said, ‘Yes, particularly Jaeger, as you see, and I’ve found a lovely boutique for evening clothes in Beauchamp Place. It’s called Regamus. Do you know it?’
‘Yes, but it’s rather expensive—not that that would worry you, of course.’
No more so than Bill Gibb’s shop, thought Antonia. But it was likely that anyone with Diana’s views on the equality of the sexes would have little time for a non-working wife with a lavish dress allowance. In fact the Jaeger co-ordinates had been a present from her uncle during his visit to London, and although several times she had browsed through the rails of romantic dresses in Regamus, she had never yet bought anything there, having no need of new dresses until her trousseau was exhausted.
Aloud, she said, ‘Yours sounds a most interesting job. How did you get into television?’
‘Oh, quite by accident. I read English at Oxford and meant to become an academic. But like a lot of clever girls I was rather witless about men, and I got myself pregnant. It seemed a disaster at the time, especially as I had to spend the last two months in bed. Fortunately my son’s father could afford to support me, but I loathed being dependent on him, and a friend suggested television script-reading as a means of earning some money and an antidote to boredom. Later I became a researcher-cum-reporter, and then a director, and finally what I am now, a producer. So what seemed a catastrophe has turned out extremely well. I have a career which suits me much better than being a don would have done, and a very nice son who, fortunately, takes after me.’
‘How old is your son?’ asked Antonia, rather taken aback by the candour of these revelations.
‘Fourteen. To save you working it out, I’m thirty-five,’ said Diana, with a gleam of amusement in her light grey eyes.
Older than Cal, thought Antonia, with surprise. She had judged the other woman to be in her late twenties, for her face was completely unlined and there was no tell-tale slackness where the lobe of her ear joined her cheek.
‘A career in television is like a career in newspapers,’ Diana went on. ‘It’s more fun to be in front of the cameras, but the power lies behind them, just as being a reporter is more fun than being a sub-editor, but it’s the subs who rise to become the editors and administrators.’ She sipped her drink. ‘And you, Mrs. Barnard, did you give up a career to
many’ Cal?’
Antonia shook her head. ‘No, I should have liked to have gone on to university, but my family were very much opposed to it.’
‘And you allowed them to dissuade you? You must have a much more malleable temperament than I have.’
Again, although the remark was made pleasantly enough, Antonia felt there was a touch of scorn in it, and was prompted to answer, ‘It was a great disappointment to me at the time, but as you were saying, sometimes a bad thing turns out to have been a good thing. If I had gone to university, I shouldn’t be here, married to Cal.’
‘And obviously wildly in love with him, which must suit his temperament to a T.’
‘I should think it suits everyone to be loved.’
‘Within reason, yes,’ said Diana. ‘Too possessive a love can be stifling. But Cal, although possessive himself, would never allow any woman to interfere with his independence. I know him very well.’ There was a slight pause before she added, ‘Because of my friendship with Laura.’
‘Yes, he told me that you and she were strong believers in Women’s Lib.’
‘And warned you against such dangerous doctrines?’
‘He expressed his own views. He didn’t tell me what I should think.’
‘And what do you think?’ enquired Diana.
‘As the most repressive influence in my life was feminine rather than masculine, I’m not inclined to blame men for all my difficulties.’
‘Your mother?’
‘No, my mother is a sweet person, but I have a rather tyrannical aunt who took over the household after my grandmother died.’
‘A frustrated careerist, no doubt. You should sympathise with her. Probably, had she been allowed to go out in the world and do something more inspiring than housekeeping, she wouldn’t have become tyrannical. I know I should have gone berserk had I been born fifty years earlier, and had to kowtow to Papa until someone offered to marry me, or remain a downtrodden spinster if nobody did.’
‘Yes, I agree with that, but not with your view that keeping house is necessarily uninspiring,’ Antonia said mildly. ‘Do you know Cal’s friends the Rankins?’
‘No.’
‘Fanny Rankin has seven children and a large house to run, and she’s one of the most well-read and interesting women I’ve met since I came to England. She makes being a wife into an art, and by the time they’re all grown up she’ll have sent seven very civilised young people into the world. If that’s not an achievement, I don’t know what is.’
Before Diana could comment, a man’s voice said, ‘I gather you’ve been beating your favourite drum, Diana, but you won’t make a convert of Antonia. She’s been too effectively brainwashed by the other school of thought.’
They found Cal standing beside them.
‘I shouldn’t dream of trying to convert your wife, Cal, and you’re out of date as far as my personal views are concerned. I know I used to be anti-marriage, but now I think I was wrong.’ With a graceful movement Diana rose and stood facing him, a tall woman whose high heels made her almost as tall as he was. ‘If I had my time over again, I wouldn’t be nearly so adamant that marriage wasn’t for me. In fact, if the right man asked me, I might even say to hell with my career. But perhaps it’s too late for that now.’ She glanced down at Antonia. ‘Goodbye, Mrs. Barnard.’ Then she made her way among the knots of chattering people and was soon out of sight.
Cal’s eyebrows were drawn together and his tone was curt as he said, ‘Shall we get to hell out of this scrimmage?’
‘Yes, if you like.’
He was taciturn on the way home. Antonia wondered if he was regretting that he hadn’t persisted in trying to make Diana marry him. But perhaps it had taken the shock of his marriage to make Diana realise her career was not all-important, in the same way that the shock of the hijack had made Antonia recognise her own change of heart.
After a while, she said. ‘Have you met Diana Webster’s son, Cal?’
He gave her a frowning sideways glance. ‘Good lord, did she tell you her life history? Yes, I’ve met the boy. Not a bad lad, considering his father would seem a pretty poor specimen of humanity.’
‘Why d’you say that? Because he didn’t marry her?’
‘He would have done so, I believe, but she wouldn’t have him. No, for letting Diana deny him access to the boy. I’m damned if a son of mine would grow up without knowing me except by report.’
‘You would think he would want to know his father. It must be very unpleasant having parents who are on bad terms. However, I must admit that in spite of having no father he hasn’t lacked masculine influences. Diana has always had someone in tow.’
Including you, she thought, with a pang.
That night, in bed, she pondered Diana’s remark—And obviously wildly in love with him, which must suit his temperament to a T.
What made it obvious to her? And if obvious to her, why was it not obvious to Cal? Have I fallen in love with a man who thinks only of practical matters and who has no romance in him? she wondered. Then she remembered one of the books in his bedroom. No man was entirely prosaic whose reading included some poetry. But perhaps those depths of his nature would never be known to her. It might even be that, having revealed them to Diana and failed to evoke the total response he had wanted, he would never again put himself in the power of a woman.
I love him—but I don’t understand him, Antonia thought, with a sigh.
From the moment she saw Mulberry Lodge, Antonia knew that—if she could make Cal love her—she could be intensely happy there. It was a small Queen Anne house of weathered apricot brick which reminded her of the cliffs of the mountain behind the Finca de la Felicidad. It was empty, having been until recently the home of an eighty-four-year-old maiden lady whose age and reduced circumstances had prevented her from keeping the place in repair. But dilapidated as it was, it had an elegance of proportion and a charm of atmosphere which made Antonia long to restore it to its full beauty. The grounds were a wilderness of long grass, nettles and brambles, but there were many fine trees beside the two great mulberries from which the house took its name, and it was not difficult to visualise how lovely the garden could be with the lawns and shrubberies put in order.
The kitchen and the several dank sculleries made Cal grimace, but it seemed to Antonia that they were unimportant compared with the pine-panelled drawing-room with two tall windows at either end and a large hearth in the centre of the long wall. Instantly, she saw the windows framed by floor-length curtains with comfortable feather-cushioned sofas facing each other on either side of an Oriental hearthrug, and the spaces in the panelling hung with landscapes or seascapes.
What Cal thought she could not tell, and hesitated to ask in case he did not share her enthusiasm. His comments about the house they had seen before lunch had been non-committal, but it had been closer to London and in much better order than this one.
‘Could we look round the inside again?’ she asked, when they had explored as much of the garden as was accessible. There was a small walled kitchen garden, and an orchard with a couple of empty beehives falling to pieces under the unpruned apple trees.
‘Why not? We’re in no hurry,’ he said, in a tone which made her feel that he had made up his mind already, but had no objection to pottering if it amused her.
In one of the sunny rooms upstairs, she said suddenly, ‘What a pleasant nursery’ this would make!’
Cal met her eyes with his own slightly narrowed and enigmatic. ‘Is that a theoretical observation, or a practical one?’
She turned to look out of the window. ‘I thought your wish to have children was one of the reasons why you married me?’
‘One of them.’
Antonia wondered what was in his mind. Could it be that, knowing now that Diana had changed her views, he was no longer impatient to exercise his marital rights, but instead was pondering the possibility of an annulment? If that were so, why bring her to look at houses? Maybe he was the kind of man
who, having married, would stay married; not for religious reasons but because having set his seal on a contract he would never break it.
If his character is strong enough to cut Diana out of his life, I should be strong enough, loving him, to give him everything I can and ask nothing for myself, she thought. But how can I be sure that he does mean to cut her out? And I’m damned if I’m going to share him with her—that would be asking too much.
‘You like this place, it would seem?’ he said.
‘Yes, I do—very much. But perhaps it isn’t what you had in mind?’
‘In general a house means more to a woman than it does to a man. As I told you once, with reference to food, I’m open-minded about the style of cuisine provided it’s first class of its kind. In the same way, if a house is comfortably furnished and warm in winter and cool in summer, I don’t mind if it’s an old house or a new one. I leave that to you. Old houses are often less convenient to run, and need a great deal more maintenance, but usually they have the advantage of better situations and full-grown trees. If you like this house, and the survey is favourable, we’ll have it.’
It was only a few days later when he told her the surveyor’s report had shown a good many faults but none of them serious enough to deter him from buying Mulberry Lodge.
‘But I think we must allow at least six months for the place to be properly wired and plumbed, and central heating installed, not to mention the redecorations. By the time it’s habitable, it may not be too long afterwards before the nursery is occupied.’ He paused. ‘Are you beginning to view our second honeymoon with rather more equanimity than you did our first?’
His reference to the nursery had deepened the colour in her cheeks. ‘We—we certainly know each other better than we did when we were married,’ she said, in a low tone.
‘Do we? Sometimes I wonder. Those beautiful limpid dark eyes don’t reflect much that goes on behind them. You’re a reticent creature, Antonia.’