Air Ticket

by Susan Barrie

  She looked at him at first in surprise.

  “If Lucien thought I looked thin he’d probably insist on my taking all sorts of things to build me up,” she replied quickly, defending her husband.

  Brian elevated his eyebrows, but he let the matter drop. Then he inquired, “Well, what’s troubling you particularly this afternoon?”

  She told him about Maria. Her face became filled with distress all over again as she got out the few disjointed sentences, and when at last she was silent he put out his hand and put it over her slightly cold one that rested on the table.

  “Well, it won’t cheer you up to go home and brood all by yourself until Lucien finds time to devote to you—” she didn’t notice the slight dryness in his voice as he uttered the words “—so I suggest that you let me take you for a drive,” he said. “If you don’t think Lucien would have any strong objection we could have dinner at a little hotel I know of. After all, he often leaves you alone, doesn’t he?”

  Caro was about to refuse at once, in spite of feeling rather strongly tempted, when she remembered that Lucien had told her he would be dining out again that night. It would be the third time that week—all of them dinners at which, he’d explained, wives were not expected to put in an appearance.

  She thought for a moment, and Brian could feel her weakening.

  “If you’ll let me return home,” she said at last, “and leave a message for Lucien, then I really would like to ... to go for a drive with you.”

  “And you’ll dine with me?”

  “If you’ll promise that I won’t be home too late.”

  “I promise,” he said, and she could tell by the look in his blue eyes that he was grateful to her for her decision.

  Lucien’s car was outside the house when Brian dropped her, but she did not dare go straight to his consulting room and knock on the door to tell him what she proposed to do. So she went to Fraulein Neiger’s office, but Leisel’s desk was unoccupied. She realized that the secretary was probably closeted with her employer, so she picked up a sheet of paper from the desk, wrote a few lines on it, addressed it to Lucien and then propped it up before the secretary’s typewriter.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The little inn where they dined made Caro think of her one weekend with Lucien just after they were married, and his promises that they would return to the mountains and the hotel.

  “You know,”’ Brian said to her when they got to the coffee-and-liqueur stage, “you ought to have thought twice before you rushed into marriage with someone you’d known only a week or so.”

  Caro set down her coffee cup and looked at him with eyes gone strangely quiet and reserved.

  Brian smiled twistedly.

  “If you’d only waited,” he told her, looking at her with very little concealment in his own eyes, “and we’d met when you were still free, I could have made you so much happier than Lucien!” His hands reached across the table and covered hers. “Oh, Caro—” he crushed her hand convulsively “—why didn’t you wait?”

  Caro withdrew her hand urgently.

  “Because I married Lucien,” she said, “and I’m very happy with Lucien.”

  “You’re not,” he told her with absolute conviction. “I know you’re not!”

  “Then that’s probably something to do with me. Lucien’s a very busy man; he hasn’t time to make a wife his first thought. But I married him because I was in love with him, and I still am in love with him,” she insisted with a strangely pale, dedicated look about her face.

  “Then all I can say is, he’s a fool,” Brian said.

  “Oh, no!”

  “You’re deliberately blinding yourself to the obvious fact that you can’t go on in this way for long. Good heavens,” he exclaimed with angry impatience, “doesn’t the man realize that? And do you think other people don’t see it just as plainly as I do—all the multitudes of his friends who’ve been looking on all summer and wondering how soon you’re going to crack under the treatment he metes out to you? A hostess in his house, someone he obviously admires; but just someone in his house—not an adored wife like his first wife, Barbara! He had absolutely no right to marry you if he wasn’t going to give you at least as much as he gave Barbara—”

  “Brian!” she exclaimed, and she looked so white that he was alarmed. “It’s been a lovely evening, but please don’t spoil it by discussing my private affairs.”

  “If you were married to me I’d take you everywhere with me—we’d travel the world and see all sorts of places together! I could promise you one hundred percent happiness! And one of these days when you find you can’t stick Lucien any longer, I’ll be waiting to prove it to you.”

  She gathered together her gloves and handbag with shaking fingers. “I’d like to go now,” she said.

  His eyes pleaded with her.

  “I’m so sorry, my dear, if I’ve said things to upset you,” he told her, as he stood up, “but somehow, after seeing you as you were this afternoon, I knew they had to be said—”

  She knew as he drove her back to Oberlaken that he was restraining himself with difficulty from reopening the subject.

  It was nearly ten o’clock when he said good-night to her outside her house. She waited until his red ear had slid noiselessly away before she put a finger on the electric bell push. Almost before any sound had resulted the door was opened to her. Frau Bauer stood there looking pale and anxious, while behind her Lucien stood near the foot of the curving staircase and watched her enter.

  “Why, Lucien!” Caro exclaimed.

  Lucien asked in an icily cold voice, “Where have you been?”

  “But I left a note,” she replied quickly, her eyes widening. “You know where I’ve been.”

  “On the contrary, no one knows where you’ve been all the evening,” her husband told her. She noticed with a surprise that he was still wearing a business suit and that he had plainly not kept his evening engagement, and this filled her with a sudden vague feeling of uneasiness. “I couldn’t imagine where you had gone, although I’ve telephoned any number of people, and Fraulein hadn’t a clue, either.”

  “But I left a note on her desk.”

  “When?”

  “This afternoon. I think she was with you in your consulting room at the time, and so I propped the note in front of her typewriter where she couldn’t miss it.”

  “Really?” His voice sounded so skeptical that she flinched from it. “Why couldn’t you come and tell me that you were going out for the evening?”

  “Because you made it quite clear to me when we were first married that I must never under any circumstances disturb you in your consulting room.”

  “It’s nonsense to say that you can’t come and see me in my consulting room when it’s important.”

  “I quite agree it’s nonsense. But you made the rule yourself, and naturally I thought you meant it. Also, I don’t like being snubbed, and once was quite enough. I explained in the note I left that Brian had asked me to have dinner with him, and as you were going out to dinner yourself for the third time this week I couldn’t see how you could reasonably object. But you don’t appear to have received the note.”

  “Fraulein Neiger said nothing about it,” he told her quietly. “Are you quite sure you left it where you said you left it.”

  “Sure?” She looked at him in faint surprise. “I came back purposely to do so.”

  “Then something must have happened to it. It must have slipped down behind the typewriter or something. I’ll ask her about it in the morning.” He started to pace up and down. “Caro,” he said, moving near to her, “do you honestly think I would have gone out for the evening not knowing where you were? Do you?”

  She made a barely perceptible movement with her slight shoulders.

  “I don’t know. I can’t think what there was to prevent you.”

  “Can’t you?” She knew now that he was deeply disturbed, and his dark eyes were staring at her in shocked surprise. She stared back
at him. She felt all at once that he and she were poles apart, and that it didn’t greatly matter. What was it Brian had said about everybody watching to see how soon she would crack...? She took a long nervous breath and felt his hands grasp her shoulders. “Caro, what’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing,” she replied, “except that I’m not Barbara—unfortunately for you!” The breath caught in her throat for a moment before she went on, looking at him curiously, “Why did you marry me, Lucien? Apparently all your friends are asking themselves that question, and not one of them can think of a satisfactory answer! They’re all agreed you were so much in love with your first wife that no other woman could stand a chance of winning anything more than a kind of lukewarm affection from you.”

  She freed herself from his hands with a slight twist and stood back. She was very pale. “Lucien, I’d like to go back to England—for a time, at least.”

  He stood looking at her. “I don’t think you quite know what you’re talking about tonight, Caro,” he told her at last. “The fact that I married you has nothing to do with my friends. So why do you allow them to discuss me in your conversations?”

  “I don’t—they find you so absorbing that they have to discuss you! And I’m tired of being compared with someone who meant so much to you that you’ve never got over her, and I wish I'd never met you, and I certainly wish I’d never married you! I don’t want to stay here any longer—I’m tired of being put aside for everything, from a telephone call to the whim of a patient.”

  “I think,” said Lucien quietly, “that you’ll be wise if you go to bed now, and we’ll discuss all this tomorrow.”

  “There’s nothing to discuss!”

  “Oh, yes, I think there is. But you’re terribly tired, and I think you ought to go to bed as soon as possible.”

  She put an unsteady hand up to her brow and pushed the short fringe out of her eyes.

  “I do feel tired,” she admitted, “and I will go to bed—but there’s nothing we’ve got to talk about tomorrow. I just want to go back to London!”

  She slipped from the room before he could say anything further, and for the first time she locked her door against him.

  In the morning she felt like someone who had indulged in hysteria and was calm again, but she was not really sorry for any of the things she had uttered the previous night. They had to be uttered sooner or later, and she no longer had any illusions about her marriage to Lucien. If she wanted to put up with merely playing the part Brian had so aptly described—a hostess in Lucien’s house—then no doubt Lucien would overlook her outburst and they would go on as they had been all summer.

  When she entered the breakfast room he was standing before the window and looking out, and she took her place silently at the table.

  “Caro,” he began, “I’m not going to talk to you now about last night. We’ll wait until I’ve got more time—”

  There was a knock on the door, and he turned impatiently, “Come in,” he said.

  Fraulein Neiger entered. He was about to ask her about the note Caro had so insistently stated she left on Liesel’s desk the afternoon before when he noticed that his secretary’s expression was not quite the calm, untroubled one he was accustomed to seeing at that hour of the morning. When she handed over a written message and he cast his eyes over it he knew at once the explanation for that unusual look.

  “A telegram,” Fraulein Neiger explained.

  Caro watched Lucien as he took in the details of the telegram, and began to wonder why it took him so long to assimilate the message. And then, as he looked up at her at last—at her and not Liesel—her heart began to knock with strange uneasiness.

  “I’m afraid it’s bad news, Caro,” he told her.

  Caro felt the color deserting her face.

  “Not—it’s not ... Beverley?”

  His dark eyes were compassionate as they rested on her small heart-shaped and rather wan face.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. She was involved in a car accident late last night!”

  Caro never afterward knew how she lived through those next few hours. She knew that Liesel’s efficiency displayed itself in obtaining a flight reservation for her to London, and that details of her journey were arranged for her. She knew only that Beverley had been badly injured and that she had to get to her as quickly as possible.

  Lucien had said at once, “I’ll come with you, darling! You won’t have to travel alone.”

  But some part of her brain had come alive at that, and she had told him at once that it was quite unnecessary. She even emphasized the fact that she didn’t want anyone to travel with her, and that she would prefer to be alone.

  “But you look so upset,” he protested, “and I don’t want you to travel alone. Caro, I can easily get someone to take over for me for a few days, and a good many of my appointments can be canceled—Liesel will see to that. And I want to be with you—”

  “But I don’t want you to be with me!” She wasn’t conscious of any deliberate intention or wish to hurt him. But he had shut her out all summer and now she almost felt he was a complete stranger, who still kept his love alive in his heart for his lovely first wife and had nothing real or worth having to offer her. “I really want to go alone,” she insisted.

  He looked at her as if he could not be absolutely certain that she meant what she said.

  “Oh, don’t you understand?” she finally succeeded in convincing him. “Beverley is my daughter—she’s all I’ve really got in the world! I want to go to her, and I want to go to her without anyone else with me! You’re just a stranger!”

  “Very well,” he said, and turned quietly away and she went up to her room, where Frau Bauer was hastily packing her a suitcase.

  On the way to the airport Caro found speech extremely difficult, and Lucien seemed to have retreated into a shell since she had made her wishes clear to him.

  “I think I ought to have insisted on coming with you,” he told her just before they parted, and for once she looked at him and smiled wanly.

  “I’ll be quite all right, Lucien. I’m used to looking after myself.”

  “And if you can you’ll telephone me, won’t you, tonight? And you’ll write to me?”

  “Of course.”

  He put his arms around her and held her for a few moments so closely that she could feel the violent thumping of his heart, and he said shakily before he kissed her, “Auf Wiedersehen, Liebling!”

  And then she was in the air, and the cream car was once more moving sedately away from the airport.

  On arrival in London Caro wasted no time in catching a train for Yorkshire, and once she left the train a hired car conveyed her the rest of the way. She drove straight to the hospital, where she met her son-in-law again for the first time since those bright spring days when he was concluding his honeymoon with Beverley. He looked so haggard that at first she thought the worst had happened, and that she was too late; but David had been up all night, beside himself with anxiety.

  “But tell me quickly—” Caro looked up at him as they met in the entrance to the hospital “—is she...? How is she...? Will she...?”

  “They don’t quite know—yet,” he answered. They were conducted to a small private waiting room, and he dropped his head in his hands as he sat facing her on a chair. “It wasn’t that it was such a very bad collision, but she got the full force of it, and she—we were hoping...”

  “You don’t mean,” Caro almost whispered, as if she couldn’t believe it, “that Beverley is expecting a—baby?”

  David looked up at her with dull eyes.

  “We didn’t tell you about it because we weren’t absolutely certain, but she really was—I mean, she is—” He didn’t seem to know quite what he was saying, and Caro took his hand and held it tightly. “How soon can I see her?” she asked.

  “Oh, I expect they’ll let you see her soon. But she isn’t ... conscious, you know.”

  “No.” Caro swallowed something in her throat.<
br />
  “And I’m afraid you’ve had an absolutely frightful journey,” he said, gazing at her with sudden sympathy. “I rather thought Lucien would come with you.”

  “He wanted to do so, but I—I didn’t want him to,” she surprised him by answering.

  A little later she was allowed to see Beverley, but as David had warned her, her daughter was not conscious. For a moment she wished that she had someone like Lucien beside her. But Lucien was far away, and Beverley did not even know she was there. Caro was almost relieved to feel a light touch on her shoulder and hear the voice of the nurse in charge suggesting gently that as she had only just completed a very long journey it might be wiser for her to rest awhile and come back later on.

  “We don’t anticipate any immediate change,” she said, “and Mr. Rivers might like to drive you home and then return.”

  “But I’d much rather stay here—” Caro was beginning, when David roused himself from his own anxiety to insist sternly that that could not be allowed.

  “I’ll drive you home,” he said, “and you can have at least a few hours’ sleep, and then I’ll come and collect you again in the evening. Do you realize that it will soon be dawn?”

  They had a drive of about twenty minutes, and when the car drew up at last outside the small gray stone house that was Beverley’s own home, Caro realized that she was seeing it for the first time.

  David handed her over to the care of an elderly housekeeper, and within a very short space of time her head was on a lavender-scented pillow and she was drifting into sleep too exhausted for dreams. When she awakened the housekeeper was standing beside the bed with a tray of tea, the room was flooded with sunlight that looked like late-afternoon sunlight, and the little clock on the mantelpiece said five o’clock.