Dorothy Quentin - The Inn by the Lake

by The Inn by the Lake (lit)

  He called himself a dog-in-the-manger because he was not pleased at her success. Then, slowing to take the rutted driveway to the farm, he saw the other doctor waiting for him and forgot Nicki completely.

  The daily riding lessons were fun, Nicki decided. She and Nigel had struck up a friendship that was cheerful without being intimate. He was surprised to find her good company, amusing and undemanding, yet wise in her quaint manner; and Nicki, while she never talked to him as naturally as she had done to Jonathan, was still sorry for him. His mother dominated his life, and the time he spent with Nicole enabled him to escape into comparative freedom.

  "If I ever do get hold of any cash, I shall live in America," he confessed one day. "I'm sick to death of Mother's moaning and the office. Would you like to live there, Nicki?"

  "Is this a proposal?" she smiled. She knew Nigel well enough to tease him now. Lucia would have called him a wet fish to let his mother dominate his life, but Nicole was beginning to understand how it had come about. A boy of twelve could be so easily influenced . . . why, he had been only two years older than Pietro when her grandfather had started talking to him about the money he would inherit one day. . . .

  "No." He grinned at her. "I'm waiting until you grow up, darling, before I propose." He added in a different tone, "I doubt if I shall ever marry. After Aunt Helen's tragedy and the way my parents have conducted their married life, I've lost faith in—permanent contracts."

  She started talking of something else. Marriage described as a permanent contract sounded horrible to her, but she could understand well enough that any ideals Nigel had possessed had been well and truly killed. She was fervently grateful, then, for the happy memories left her by her own parents ... perhaps the best legacy any parents can leave.

  The riding took up an hour or so from each long summer day, and Nicole insisted upon swimming. No one was going to keep her away from the water. Helen objected gently to her going alone to the crowded beaches.

  "It is holiday time, my dear. I'm afraid even Combe Castleton gets crowded with trippers at this time of the year."

  Nicole had laughed. "But I like people, Grand'mère! And I am used to tourists. After all, they kept me for many years."

  She had dropped a brick again. Always when she talked with her grandmother, it was Evelyn they talked about. Helen wanted to hear every anecdote about her daughter that Nicole could rake up from her memory; and the girl so loved her mother that it was easy to remember. But always, always, there were the rocks sticking up perilously from the sea of memory. . . .

  Nicki was beginning to understand her grandmother. From many little bits of information she had made a whole picture of Henry Stannisford, and disliked him more and more. But Helen had had to live him him for nearly half a century. She had had no choice, according to her strict upbringing, but in order to endure her husband's harshness she had had to build a little world of her own, away from realities. Helen was a gentle, tired, sad woman, but in some ways she was younger than Nicole, and in many ways more narrow and conventional. One did not betray one's husband; one did not speak ill of the dead. Though she was Edwardian, Helen was in heart and mind a rigid Victorian; she had kept herself as she had kept Osterley House, a century behind the times.

  She did not encourage Nicole to chatter of the Fionettis, who had befriended Evelyn when her own father would not help her. She did not like to be reminded that her granddaughter had earned her living by painting bad pictures and taking parties of tourists round Lake Lugano.

  "I would like you to take one of the servants with you, Nicole, if you must go to the beach," she said a little distantly.

  Inwardly Nicki groaned, thinking of Coles and Mrs. Moore and the rest of the staff. Parkinson might be the best of a bad bunch, but she could not take Parkinson away from the car in case her grandmother wished to go for one of her rare drives... "Let me take Annie, then," she begged suddenly. "Annie is a dear!"

  Helen frowned again slightly. "Very well. But don't let her become familiar with you, Nicole."

  Annie was young. The only person in the whole of Osterley House who really liked Nicki, who laughed rather shyly at her jokes. Annie was delighted to accompany Miss Nicole on her daily expedition to the beach, whenever it was warm enough; but Annie, born and brought up by the sea, did not swim. She sat sedately in a deck-chair and minded the towels, and looked like an anxious terrier when her young mistress swam too far out. After the swim the two girls sat together for a while in the sunshine, drinking coffee or eating ice-cream from the kiosk, and Nicki would try to draw her out.

  "Have you ever been in love, Annie?"

  "What, me, miss? Oh, no, Miss Nicole. Mum 'ad eleven kids and that don't give us much time for falling in love, like."

  Nicole laughed. She tried to get Annie to talk about her home, and her brothers and sisters, but the girl was too shy. She would only come out of her shell to laugh at one of Nicki's little jokes, or admire her clothes, or the new way she was doing her hair. And when Nicki got into conversation, as she invariably did, with other people on the crowded beach, Annie would suggest respectfully that it was time to go home.

  "Mrs. Moore's that cross if we're late for lunch, miss—" or tea, as the case might be. Inwardly amused and a little exasperated, Nicole knew that even young Annie had been sent as a sort of watchdog to see that she made no undesirable acquaintances. It made her feel more trapped than ever.

  There was a small cliff railway to the town beach. Because it reminded Nicki of the Swiss funiculars, she loved it. But Annie resented the packed, swaying crowd of humanity that used it during the holiday season. And Nicole learned the odd fact that English servants are even more snobbish than their employers. Coles snubbed her by implying that she tired her grandmother unnecessarily, Mrs. Moore snubbed her when she tried to take an interest in the housekeeping, and her one and only visit to the kitchen to see Cook had been a complete failure.

  "There's other prettier beaches along the coast," Annie vouchsafed one day, "where there's not such a mob, Miss Nicole."

  "But I don't mind the crowd," Nicki argued firmly, and it was true. She liked seeing the families sitting on the sand, the children enjoying themselves, the young people sun-bathing on their brief holidays, the swimmers. She did not explain to Annie that she knew about those other, smaller, prettier beaches because Jonathan had told her about them, or that she was still absurdly hoping he would take her to them one day.

  Riding and swimming, while the weather lasted, were fun; but there still seemed to Nicki an endless day to fill in. And at the end of July the weather broke in a thunder-storm and lashing rain. Her grandmother had a slight relapse and had to stay in bed. Nicki had made friends with Dr. Cranford, who made regular weekly visits to the house, but on this visit his face was graver than usual. The heart specialist had left when he spoke to Nicki.

  "There is nothing to worry about immediately," he told the suddenly frightened girl, "but it is essential that your grandmother should have no shocks, no extra strain whatever. I'm afraid a young boy about the house would be very unwise, at the moment—"

  "But Pietro is such a sensible child!" she cried with real dismay. "All the time he would be out of doors, with me!"

  Dr. Cranford glanced out of the study window at the teeming rain. "I'm afraid our weather is not reliable, Miss Berenger—and an active ten-year old can make a lot of havoc in a quiet, elderly household like this. I advise you to postpone his visit."

  Disappointment tore at her heart like a burning pain. In that moment she hated Osterley House fiercely. But it was no use explaining to the doctor that to postpone Pietro's visit would break the child's heart ... he must go back to school in the autumn, and three or four months' delay to a little boy would seem like a lifetime.

  In a sort of frozen sadness she went slowly along to the boudoir. Coles answered her gentle knock on the door and whispered unnecessarily, "Madame is resting, Miss Nicole; it would be best not to disturb her."

  The whole d
ark, looming house seemed like a cage about Nicki, shutting her in, stifling her. She rushed up to her bedroom and threw on a raincoat she had brought from Lugano, a shabby old thing she had never worn before in England. She pulled a hat ferociously over her hair and ran down the stairs and out of the horrible house. She just remembered not to slam the heavy front door behind her, in case it woke Helen. She ran and ran, heedless of the deluge about her, down the drive among the sodden rhododendrons, down the hill past the cathedral close that she loved, without a glance in its direction. Down, on into the town, running as if the devils of Osterley House were at her heels, to Jonathan. He was the only person who could help her now, who could save a boy's heart from breaking; Jonathan had promised Pietro ... today he would have to see her. She would find him somehow, if she had to go to the hospital, if she had to wait until midnight. . . .

  "Please, I must see Jonathan," she told Aunt Bella when she came to the door. It was Bessie's afternoon off, and she had been getting the tea ready.

  "My dear, of course you shall—he's upstairs in his study, the first door on the left"—Bella smiled kindly at the distraught child—"but do take those wet things off first."

  She was talking to space. Nicole had rushed up the stairs, a small, dripping whirlwind. She opened the door without knocking; it was no use knocking when he had the radio on so loudly in there. But it was not a radio, it was a portable record player. Jonathan was stretched in a low chair beside it, smoking his pipe, an odd expression on his face as he listened to the queer, haunting tune. Nicki paused on the threshold, her anxiety forgotten for a moment in her surprise.

  "I must go where the wild goose cries. . . . Wild goose, brother goose, which is best? A wandering foot or a heart at rest ... ?"

  "Jonathan!" She was hardly aware that she cried aloud, until he jumped up and stopped the turntable and smiled at her. He had looked like a man in love, a man dreaming of his love. . . .

  "That's your tune, Nicki . . . you're a little wild goose, you know." He spoke like a man coming out of a dream, accepting her presence there without surprise, until he saw her face properly and her sodden clothes. "Darling! Whatever's the matter—what have they been doing to you?" In two strides he had come to her and folded her close, and she laid her face against him and wept with long, shuddering sobs.

  The only other time Nicki had wept in his presence, in his arms, had been the night of Pietro's operation. Those had been very different tears, tears of relief and joy. The long, shuddering sobs that shook her small body now dismayed Jonathan terribly; he had been buoying himself up recently with the knowledge that the child was obviously adapting herself to life at Osterley House very well. He had told himself that he had been a fool to imagine she would be different from any other girl of her age, suddenly presented with a comfortable life and the prospect of being able to buy almost anything she desired within a few years. He had resolutely turned his back on his memories of Nicki, young and proud, yet so very wise, when she had first confided her family history to him, when she had so practically and yet so idealistically confided her philosophy of life.

  Yet, when he had a little leisure, like this free afternoon, he found himself remembering. And playing that absurd record. It haunted him, anyway; he thought that playing it over and over might exorcise that wretched tune. . . .

  And now Nicki had come to him, very dear and like her old self in the shabby raincoat, with the water dripping off her on to his study carpet. He let her cry out the first storm, holding her firmly in his arms and making the small, inarticulate sounds of comfort that one gives to children in trouble. Then, very gently, he stripped off the soaking raincoat and took the hat from her head. "I'll put the electric fire on, darling, and dry you off—and myself. Look at my shirt!"

  A wan smile rewarded the tiny joke. Hope—ridiculous, impossible hope—was surging in Jonathan's heart. He put her into a low chair in front of the fire, sat on the floor and took her hands between his own, smiling because she had had to use both his handkerchiefs to mop herself up with, and ended by blowing her small nose like a trumpet. His Nicki had always blown her nose in a most unladylike way.

  "Now, little one, let's have it. I thought you were getting on so well at Osterley House—according to Uncle Steve, Helen adores you and only wants to lay the world at your feet, and your cousin Nigel has fallen nicely into line with all her plans—"

  "I hate it there!" Nicki almost shouted contemptuously, "I am so bored I could jump over a cliff! Grand'mère is all right, but she doesn't understand anything; she lives in a world that has been dead for a hundred years."

  Jonathan smiled involuntarily. Nicki always hit the nail on the head so neatly. "Yet she loves you, I think." He reminded her gently, "She likes giving you things."

  Nicole nodded slowly. "Yes. And to please her I have to—to pretend I like being given things. I—Nicole Berenger!"

  He laid his fingers lightly across her lips. "Come off your soap-box, darling. I know—we all know—that you're an independent little hussy. That you're accepting everything to please an old lady who cannot live very long. But you can't tell me that you haven't enjoyed wearing pretty clothes—going to dances with Nigel—and riding. I saw you out riding once, Nicki—and you looked very happy."

  She nodded. "Of course I like my new pretty clothes!" She thought shyly, Because I hoped you would see me looking nice. . . . "But even you don't understand. To please Grand'mère I have to lead such a dull life—you wouldn't believe how dull. I am not even allowed to go swimming alone, I have to take Annie, one of the maids, down to the beach with me every time!"

  Remembering Lugano he could understand her irritation with the perpetual small restrictions of life at Osterley House.

  "But you have sense, Nicki. It will not be for ever. And if it gets too cramped you can leave—"

  "Oh, no. I came because I thought that, too. But Dr. Cranford is always warning me that Grand'mère must not be upset in any way—how can I escape when I know that it would be a bad shock for her?" Nicki spoke with a sad finality that was new to her. "And I do not want to wish her dead, that would be terrible. But yesterday she was not so well, and now they will not have Pietro . . ." The tears welled into her eyes again suddenly, and she brushed them away with the back of her hand impatiently. "Dr. Cranford talked about him this morning as if he was an ordinary, stupid little boy who will make a great upset in the house! Jonathan, I can't bear to stay there if they break Pietro's heart! Every week he has written to me, counting the days—"

  "And you've been counting the days, too, my poor poppet," he answered, smiling, "but that's nothing to worry about, Nicki. We'll have Pietro here. Aunt Bella adores children."

  "Oh—oh, Jonathan, could you?"

  Like a child she looked up at him, trustingly, the fury and the grief suddenly wiped from her tear-stained face. He nodded and spoke cheerfully, though his heart sank a little. If this was all. . . . He was conscious that he had had an ignoble hope that somehow Nigel had antagonised Nicki. But she had not come to him on her own behalf, only on Pietro's. Or chiefly because of Pietro.

  "He will have a much better holiday with Aunt Bella," he added casually, and could not help the thought, And we will see more of you, my darling. . . . "She understands children."

  "I think your Aunt Bella understands everyone," Nicki said shakily, with the laughter coming through her tears like spring sunshine breaking through the clouds. Then her face fell again. "But you have your consulting rooms here, Jonathan—this is a professional house—perhaps Pietro will be a nuisance here, also?"

  Jonathan grinned. "Not a chance—Miss Denbigh would see to that! But I have a better idea—I have a boat, you know."

  "No, you never told me." Her eyes were bright as stars. "Oh, Jonathan! Why have you not let me use your boat all this long time?"

  "Because I keep her down the coast, and I imagined your grandmother would not let you go out alone in a small boat"—and because I had no intention of letting Nigel take you out i
n Bluebird, his honest mind added—"and because it's different from the lake here, Nicki. We have currents and tides and rocks along this coast—can you sail?"

  She nodded vehemently. "Of course I can sail, and I know about navigation. Will you let me take Pietro out in your boat?"

  He smiled. "Yes, on condition you take me as well. I get a little free time, you know—the evenings are light enough now, and the week-ends. But what I wanted to tell you was that I have a cottage in Cobbler's Bay—Aunt Bella was thinking of having a month there, anyway. She could take Bessie; my uncle never wants to leave this house if he can help it—and Pietro can stay with her there."

  "And I can go there every day! Oh, Jonathan, thank you, thank you so much!" She jumped up and held out her hands to pull him up from the floor. "Let us go and ask Aunt Bella now—please—then I won't have to write and put Pietro off ... he has been looking forward to coming here for so long!"

  "I'll be glad to see him again," Jonathan contributed dryly. "I have a professional interest in his cranium!"

  "Dr. Adler has given permission; he is very pleased with him."

  Aunt Bella looked up when they entered the kitchen, laughing, and her eyes were kind.

  "Thank goodness you've come down—I've been tact-fully waiting to make the tea and I'm parched! You made a nice little series of puddles all the way up my stairs, young Nicki. Now come and tell me what it's all about."

  While she brewed the tea and they carried trays up-stairs, they poured out the story of Pietro's possible disappointment.

  "Of course we'll have him, and we'll have him at Vine Cottage," Aunt Bella promised placidly. "It's just the place for a boy who likes messing about in boats." She turned to Nicole. "I never had a son, dear, but I helped to bring up three nephews, so your cousin will be quite safe with me. I know what boys like to eat, too."