Child Friday

by Sara Seale

  “Neither,” she retorted, buttoning up his shirt for him. “And don’t forget you’re my husband.”

  His hands were suddenly round her wrists, holding them against his breast.

  “No, I don’t forget that,” he said in an altered voice.

  She looked up at him, and in the clear morning light the lines in his face, the streaks of grey in his dark hair and the blank expressionless stare of his scarred eyes were cruelly emphasized, bringing a lump to her throat It was a strange, intimate moment, and Emily thought he was going to add something more to that last observation, but he released her hands and turned away abruptly as though he was suddenly aware of what his face might reveal.

  “Thanks,” he said laconically. “I can manage now.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  EMILY had an unexpected and rather curious letter from Miss Pink, congratulating her on her marriage.

  I hope my hunch has come off (she wrote surprisingly). You had little to recommend you for the position for which I usually cater, but for this one you may be the answer. Dane and I are old friends. I should like to come and visit you sometime, if I may.

  Emily passed the message on to Dane and was surprised that he seemed agreeable to the suggestion that someone should come to stay at Pennyleat.

  “But you don’t like strangers,” she said. “I mean you don’t like seeing people.”

  “Yes, locals who come out of curiosity or other reasons, but Louisa isn’t a stranger,” he said. “I have her to thank for you, so it would be churlish to deny her the satisfaction of seeing how her experiment has worked, wouldn’t it?”

  “And is it working?” she could not resist asking.

  “You should know better than I,” he retorted. “After all, it’s you who have to put up with the vagaries of a blind husband. Would you say it was working?”

  She thought of her inadequacy in the matter of driving the car, the slowness with which she looked up a reference, and her inability to deal with Mrs. Pride, and even Shorty, as an efficient housewife.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You probably would have done much better with one of Miss Pink’s more experienced girls.”

  “I tried them,” he said. “Perhaps experience in the way you mean was not what I wanted. Ask the old girl down. She works damned hard at that agency of hers. She could probably do with a break.”

  So Emily wrote to Miss Pink, wondering what it would be like to entertain someone to whom she had always been accustomed to apply for a job.

  The rest of January was cold and wet. Emily went out in the car with Shorty on the few fine days and became an adequate, though unadventurous driver.

  “You’d never set the Thames afire, but you’re safe, I’ll give you that,” Shorty told her finally.

  “Well, it’s something to be safe, isn’t it?” said Emily, and thought of her own gratitude for security.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” he answered, rubbing his flat nose doubtfully, and added with apparent inconsequence: “That old geyser is back.”

  “What old geyser?”

  “Mrs. Mortimer of Torcroft. Saw ’er in the village yesterday.”

  “Oh!” said Emily tentatively. “Is she likely to come here, Shorty? Mr. Merritt doesn’t seem to care for her very much.”

  “Naow! She won’t bother us—not unless—” Shorty broke off and Emily asked, because the allusions to Mrs. Mortimer had begun to worry her:

  “Is there a mystery about Torcroft, Shorty?”

  “Not that I know of,” he replied. “ ’Istory repeats itself again, they say, don’t they?”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s necessarily true,” she said, puzzled by his manner.

  “We’ll ’ope not,” he replied piously. “Once in a lifetime’s enough, ain’t it?”

  “It might be,” said Emily patiently, “if I knew what you were talking about.”

  “Let’s ’ope you never will,” Shorty answered, sniffing. “We ’ave enough complications as it is.”

  Emily was puzzled and asked Mrs. Meeker what she knew about old Mrs. Mortimer of Torcroft.

  “Oh, her!” the woman .replied, eyeing Emily with inquisitive bright eyes. “Her’s back to Pennycross at last. Thought her’d die in them foreign parts, but Devon folk conies home in the end. That niece of hers led her a tidy dance, I’d say.”

  “Niece?” Emily wrinkled her forehead. She seemed to remember that Alice had spoken of a niece.

  “ ’Twas, Miss Vanessa dragged the old lady to all they heathen countries, I’m thinking. Never could stop in one place at a time, the pair of ’em. She’m married by now, I should say. Pretty as a picture she was and all the men mazed for her.”

  “Used she to stay at Torcroft in Mr. Carey’s time?” Emily asked, pieces like a jigsaw puzzle beginning to take shape in the back of her mind.

  “Oh, yes. Made her home with old Mrs. Mortimer most times,” replied Mrs. Meeker, dusting diligently. “Never had a penny of her own and hoped to marry money, I always understood. Oh, well! I don’t doubt she found some wealthy Count or such-like in they foreign parts they went to.”

  The days went on and the moor would change overnight from a clear vista of rolling country to a weeping shroud of mist. Often the mist would surround the house, blotting out the high wall and the lawns and the yew walk, seeping in at the windows and mingling with the smoke of the wood fires. At those times their isolation was complete. They might have been marooned on an island for all the contact they received from the outside world.

  “Does it never worry you?” Emily asked Dane when, for the fourth day on end, it was impossible to venture out of doors.

  He gave a strange smile.

  “Why should it?” he said. “I live in perpetual darkness. A moor fog makes no difference.”

  “No, I suppose not,” said Emily, who had forgotten.

  “But you,” he said, catching the despondency in her voice. “Is the isolation getting you down? Do you want to get away for a bit?”

  “Where should I go?” she answered gently. “No, Dane. I don’t mind it. If you had, like me, to live with uncertainty from day to day, you would understand that isolation, when it’s coupled with security, can have a very soothing touch.”

  “So I’ve found," he replied with faint irony. “But you’re too young to be satisfied with such things for ever.”

  “I’m content,” she said, and was surprised when he countered harshly:

  “But for how long? How long can I expect someone to put up with life with me as it is?”

  “I married you,” she said. “I knew what it would be.”

  “Did you? Weren’t you snatching at a way out for yourself—or, perhaps you were even a little sorry for me?”

  “You didn’t ask me for my reasons at the time. You were content that the arrangement suited us mutually.”

  “Quite right, I was,” he said, his lips twisted in a wry little smile. “Forgive me, Emily, I’m becoming too sensitive to your moods. I thought you were regretting things.”

  “No,” she said softly, locking her hands round her knees because she, had an impulse to reassure him by touching him. “No—I regret nothing.”

  She was, as the days went on, increasingly aware of a hunger in Dane which had not been apparent when she had first come to Pennyleat. Frustration there had always been, but it seemed to her now that whatever he had been driven to deny himself on account of his blindness was slowly forcing itself to the surface and taking toll of him. But she was powerless to help him. She had no experience of a man’s needs other than those that were made plain; she had little experience of men at all, and Tim had shown her how misplaced offers of affection might be received. Had Dane not said he wanted nothing of her? Was she not, perhaps, imagining a need that did not exist, because she herself had been lonely all her life?

  She spent much time in the drawing-room now because the piano was company and the airs she remembered had a nostalgia that evoked her happy moments.

&nb
sp; This one her mother had sung to charm afresh her husband and child, this had been taught her by the little old German piano tuner who had been a fine musician in his day, and this she had heard at a London conceit when she had first fallen in love with Tim. But Black is the Color, that Appalachian folk-song with the plaintive air which had risen, unbidden, to her mind on New Year’s Eve, had no memories beyond the present.

  She was singing it again one late afternoon to amuse herself before tea. The failing daylight mingled with the glow from the fire, giving the room an illusion of faded elegance. She did not hear Dane come in. Only when he knocked against one of the occasional tables, being unfamiliar with the room, was she aware of his presence and stopped singing.

  “Was black the color of your true love’s hair?” he asked with gentle mockery. “The young man you ran after?”

  “No,” she said. “His hair was red and it’s not tactful to remind me that I ran after him.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have told me,” he retorted. “Go on singing.”

  She hesitated, then continued to sing in her light voice:

  "The winter's passed and the leaves are green,

  The time is passed that we have seen,

  But still I hope the time will come

  When you and I shall be as one...”

  “ “The time is passed that we have seen’,” he repeated slowly as she stopped singing again, and she wondered if he was remembering the girl he had once been in love with before his blindness had made her courage fail. “Any more?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes.

  I love my love and well he knows

  I love the ground whereon he goes ...

  “What happened to me was very much what happened to you, I think. Perhaps one remembers the hurt more than the person.”

  “Yes I think one does,” he said. “Emily, I shouldn’t have married you.”

  She looked up again, startled. “Why, do I compare so badly?’ she asked, trying to make light of it.

  “You don’t compare at all.”

  “But you’ve never seen me.”

  “Oh, yes, I see you often, peeping through snowy branches with frost in your hair.”

  “Oh, Alice’s picture of me.”

  “When one’s blind one has to make pictures,” he said, and she stretched up a hand to him.

  “Dane,” she began, “I don’t know how to say this to you, but—but because you can no longer see needn’t mean—it shouldn’t make any difference if you wanted—you see, I don’t really know what you want.”

  “Do you know what you want?” he asked, and his voice sounded strangely moved.

  “Yes, I think so. To make you happy if I can—whatever you might ask.”

  “Child Friday,” he murmured softly. “I don’t think I’ve deserved you, Emily. One day—”

  “Yes—one day?” she prompted eagerly, but his ears, quicker than hers, had caught the sound of a step in the hall. The drawing-room door was ajar and someone suddenly switched on all the lights.

  Emily sat blinking at the girl who stood there just inside the room. In the white brilliance of electricity her vivid beauty was dazzling. She shook back a mane of red-gold hair and observed Dane with the cool deliberation she might have afforded to an inanimate statue.

  Emily half rose from the piano stool and Dane lifted his head and said sharply: “Who is it, please?”

  The girl moved towards him with extraordinary grace, her hands outstretched, her lovely, painted mouth parted in a smile.

  “Dane darling!” she cried. “How good to see you—and looking so well!”

  Emily saw his whole body stiffen and just for a moment a curious expression crossed his face; a flash of naked desire followed involuntarily by one of profound distaste.

  “Vanessa?” he said quietly.

  II

  To Emily, forgotten on the piano stool, came a moment of painful clarity. There was an unconscious intimacy in their motionless figures, a familiarity, each with the other, that cried aloud for recognition. This was the girl who had hurt him so grievously long ago, the girl whose courage had failed when he most needed her. For an instant they remained there, Vanessa searching his face for the scars she had dreaded to find, Dane looking down at her as if, perhaps, he was re-creating for himself the vivid beauty he could no longer see, then he gently disengaged his hands and thrust them in his pockets.

  “I had heard your aunt was back at Torcroft,” he said. “Are you staying with her?”

  “I arrived late last night,” she replied. “We didn’t know until we came back from abroad that you had inherited Pennyleat. Aunt Gertrude moved so suddenly from place to place that letters never caught up with us, but now she’s gambled away the little money she had and has come home to vegetate.”

  “And have you married, Vanessa?” He asked the question calmly, as if it had little importance, but Emily saw the sudden strain in his face and the hint of impatience in Vanessa’s.

  “No,” she answered. “But rumor has it in the village that you have. Is it true?”

  “Three weeks ago.”

  “So little as that? If I’d known ... if I’ come down sooner...”

  They had so plainly forgotten Emily’s presence that she struck a soft chord on the piano to remind them, and Dane turned instantly and held out a hand to her.

  “This is my wife, Emily,” he said. “Vanessa Larne is an old friend. Her aunt is Mrs. Mortimer who has lately come back to Torcroft.”

  Emily rose from the piano stool, conscious that Vanessa Larne was at last giving her full attention. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and vividly blue and they took Emily in from head to toe with embarrassing deliberation. Emily at once became conscious of being badly dressed and untidy, the insignificant little typist or governess for whom Vanessa had probably taken her.

  “Really?” she said with a slight drawl. “A little young for you, surely, Dane.”

  To Emily it was a polite way of saying dowdy, negative, and utterly unsuitable, and she flushed.

  “How do you do, Miss Larne?” she said colorlessly. “I’ll go and see about tea. Will you come to the library when you’re ready, Dane?”

  She went out of the room leaving the door open behind her, and heard Vanessa say:

  “Where did you pick her up, darling? Hardly your cup of tea, I should have thought. Your tastes must have undergone a change in the last five years.”

  Emily did not catch Dane’s reply but her cheeks were hot as she went to warn Mrs. Pride there would be a guest for tea. A line of the old song she had been singing for Dane returned to mock her. The time is passed that we have seen ... Had he been thinking of Vanessa when he had repeated it after her, and had the following lines held a different significance for him than they had for her? But still I hope the time will come when you and I shall be as one...

  “Don’t be a fool, Emily Moon,” she admonished herself aloud. “You know exactly why he married you in the first place. You did it with your eyes open.”

  But as she waited in the library for Vanessa and Dane to join her, she remembered how he had wanted to hurry the marriage on when he heard of Mrs. Mortimer’s return and knew that the marriage had been one, not only of expediency, but a guard against a weakness which he, perhaps, still suspected in himself.

  Mrs. Pride brought the tea in herself, a service she seldom performed, and her manner held an unusual warmth as she greeted Vanessa.

  “Still as pretty as you ever were, if I may say so,” she said. “My, but you and Mr. Merritt had some rare old times when old Mr. Carey was alive! I’d thought to see you married by now, Miss Vanessa, I will say.”

  “I hope you’re not suggesting I’ve been left on the shelf, Pridey,” laughed Vanessa. “I’m glad you’ve stayed on with Mr. Merritt. Who would have thought he would have been the next master here?”

  “Who indeed?” said Mrs. Pride meaningly. “You shouldn’t have gone traipsing in those foreign parts for so long.”

  “No
, perhaps I shouldn’t,” said Vanessa idly, and nodded a smiling dismissal.

  Emily poured out tea for them, feeling caught up in a past in which she had no share. Vanessa did not actually ignore her but her talk was full of reminiscences. Every so often she would throw out a word of explanation but her eyes frequently rested on Emily with an amusement that was half pitying. Dane responded less freely. The skin seemed to have tautened over his cheek-bones and he sat well back in the shadows so that the light should not shine on his eyes.

  “They did a wonderful job on you, Dane,” Vanessa said, after a long, deliberate scrutiny of his face. “Have you never thought of experimenting? There’s a wonderful new eye operation, I believe, that’s often successful.”

  “The corneal graft?” he said, and added a little grimly: “It’s a matter of waiting for a dead man’s eyes.”

  “How grisly!” she said with a shudder.

  “The finer arts of surgery are inclined to be grisly,” he retorted dryly. “The human body reduced to terms of spare parts is not edifying.”

  “Do you mean to stay in Pennycross long, Miss Larne?” asked Emily conversationally, and Vanessa made a small grimace.

  “Was I being tactless?” she said indulgently. “Yes, I shall be staying on and off indefinitely. My aunt’s house is the only home I have. I shall amuse myself by coming over and bullying Dane out of his retirement. It’s nonsense to shut himself away in the middle of Dartmoor, don’t you agree?”

  Emily did not know the right reply to this and glanced a little helplessly in Dane’s direction, but he answered for her.

  “You won’t find life at Pennyleat any more entertaining now than in the old days, Vanessa,” he said. “Emily and I have work to do, and in the holidays there is Alice.”

  “Alice? Oh, the little girl. I’d forgotten she went with the house. You’ve become quite a family man, Dane. And did Ben Carey leave you a lot of money?”

  Emily considered Vanessa’s question in doubtful taste but Dane only smiled, as if he recognized and forgave an impertinence which was familiar to him.