But She hadn’t seen the phoebe bird; she had seen the toad.
Had Ben seen it too … and deliberately ran the mower over it? Why should I think something like that, she asked herself, but remembered the hard, pitiless face, the low forehead, a modern version of a Cro-Magnon man. He’s cruel, I know he’s cruel, she thought, and then heard Norma’s voice.
“It’s me again. You don’t mind, I hope?”
“Mind! Norma, hello, are you worn out, did you work hard today?”
“I work hard every day, that’s what days are for, aren’t they? To work hard? What did you do today, my pet?”
“I went to the Fair.”
“How was it?”
“Lots of fun.”
“Did you win anything, like one of those awful dolls?”
“No, a paperweight. And Douglas was there, bidding on livestock.”
“As was only to be expected.”
“He bought a bouncing bull.”
“With wicked, red eyes?”
“Oh, such a baleful expression.”
“I knew you went to the Fair, Pompey told me when I came over on my lunch hour. You could comment on my handiwork.”
“Norma, the flowers look beautiful. All the women admired them.”
“What women?”
“We had a kaffee klatsch. Ladies Aid, from the Church.”
“No wonder you look so pale and wan.”
“It was rather out of my sphere. However. Make yourself at home. I want to quickly bathe and change.”
“Want your back scrubbed?”
“No, but you can start the drink pitcher.”
“Righto. Go on up now, come down all beautiful and glowing. You do look rather white. Why?”
“It was the toad.”
“The what?”
“Nothing, I’ve already forgotten it.”
But she hadn’t. That arm raised, the stone smashing the wounded creature to a pulp. Well, what else was there to do? Pompey: “Had to put it out of its misery.”
She went up the stairs and opened the door to her room. Closed it and then smelled the fragrance. On top of the lowboy an exquisite arrangement of cornflowers, marguerites and asparagus fern. When she bent to it, sniffing, there was a scrawled note.
These are for you from me … Norma.
It was an antidote to ugliness and small, lonely suffering. I won’t think of the toad, she told herself, and touched the flowers with a grateful hand. What a lovely thing to find … Undressing, she looked at it once again and then got into the tub, half dreaming. The smell of searing meat drifted up from below; her mouth watered. I should marry Pompey, she decided. He’s the best cook in the country. Climbing out of the tub she wrapped herself in a huge Turkish towel and heard the words of the marriage ceremony. “Pompey, will you take this woman in sickness and in health, for better or worse, until death do you part?”
“I do,” Pompey said, and she threw the towel across the rack, bathed her warm, flushed face, and got dressed. In better spirits, she joined the others in the living room.
“Get busy on this,” Norma said, handing her a drink.
“Yum,” Margo said, sipping. “I’ve just had a proposal of marriage from Pompey; it was in a kind of bathtub dream.”
“Congrats, may I be a bridesmaid?”
“Yes, you’re to wear a long yellow dress with daisies in your hair.”
“I’ll start looking for one tomorrow.”
They laughed companionably. “I have my odd and sundry fantasies too,” Norma confided. “Once I dreamed I was walking naked through Britton Woods with the Minister. He chucked me under the chin and started becoming very familiar. I slapped his face. ‘How dare you?’ I said, and then woke up. I saw him on the street next day, and almost whopped him one. Poor thing, he looked so astonished at my mean expression. Of all people, the Reverend, poor old soul.”
“If you had the temerity to walk naked through Britton Woods,” Margo said severely. “It served you right when he got fresh.”
“I agree. Oh, I agree.”
“Listen, thanks for the flowers, Norma. I can’t tell you how lovely it was to find them there, and your dear note.”
“Just one of my small pleasures,” Norma said. “Well, here’s our friend. Hello, John, drinks are ready, help yourself. Margo went to the Fair today.”
“That’s nice.”
“It was like being a kid again.”
“She won a paperweight.”
“Well well.”
“And after that she entertained the Ladies Aid at tea.”
“Really?” He looked over at Margo, made a wry face. “So they’re starting to drop in.”
“Apparently.”
He pushed his dark hair back. “If nothing else does, that will drive you away.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that bad,” she started to say, and then caught her breath. What he had said … what he had said …
If nothing else does, that will drive you away …
“I suppose they brought little treats,” he went on. “They really are the salt of the earth, but just the same preserve me from them.” He raised an arm and again dashed back his hair. “That’s the trouble with this house. You can’t pretend you’re not at home. There’s always someone home. Pompey, or Ben in the garden, or Clara, cleaning. How did you manage?”
She could speak again now, though her lips were dry. “Quite well,” she said. “It wasn’t a long visit. They got up, by some apparently prearranged signal, all at once, and went chugging away in their cars. And they did bring treats, nice ones, thoughtful ones. Things they made themselves.”
The lock of hair fell over his forehead again. He was sitting with one leg thrown over the arm of a Hepplewhite chair, a long, lean leg, and his skin was lightly tanned, not bronzed from the outdoors like Doug’s, but summer-darkened. She thought suddenly, He’s handsomer than Doug and he knows it and no, they don’t really look alike. It’s the personality behind the face that gives it individuality, even though nature made them from the same genes.
He couldn’t have meant anything by that sentence, she told herself. It had been just a random thing to say. And a day or two ago it wouldn’t have registered.
A day or two ago …
Before the telephone calls …
Yet the very first evening she had been here he had said something else, something she hadn’t forgotten. “Just like old times …” She couldn’t picture Douglas saying such an insensitive thing. What makes him tick? she wondered, watching him. What makes John tick?
“Dinner’s ready,” Pompey said, clapping his hands in the doorway. “Come in, you all. Before it cools. I worked my butt off. Bring your drinks in with you.”
• • •
Later, in bed, Margo thought about it again. What John had said. The words, in fact, rang in her mind: Drive you away … drive you away … drive you away …
“Tomorrow being tour day,” he had announced at dinner, “I’ll be home at two in the afternoon. Just close the door to your room, Margo. It won’t be shown, so don’t worry about straightening it up.”
She turned, trying to sleep. Tomorrow was a tour day, and in spite of what John had said, she would leave her room in apple-pie order, so he could show it if he cared to.
So better get some sleep.
She was overtired, though, it had been a long day. The Fair, the fresh air and activity, the slight strain of entertaining the Ladies Aid women (too much a reminder of her aunt), the vivid recollection of Ben Blough raising his arm and then lowering it …
“That did it …”
And the telephone outside.
At any minute it might shrill out, and she would jerk in the bed, stiffen.
The hell with all that, she decided, and got up to take a sleeping capsule. She went out to the balcony, smoked the whole of a cigarette, ground it out in one of the iron urns, and went back to bed.
It won’t work, she told herself, this time it won’t work. But even
as she was thus informing herself, it worked. The moonlight bathed her still body, one arm thrown over the edge of the bed, and the rustling in the trees fell on deaf ears.
CHAPTER NINE
The bus arrived at a quarter after two. “You want to put in a word or two?” John asked Margo, but she quickly declined. “You know the tour, you can’t have forgotten it,” he said, but she told him she would only be self conscious and spoil the whole thing.
“Well, then, some other tour day,” he said, and they went outside to welcome the waiting guests, about thirty of them. It gives one pause, she thought, and there was a quiet pride in her, that the history of this house was part of her own. John, in navy suit with cornflower-blue shirt and gold cufflinks, was very much the grand seigneur, and looking very handsome. The younger girls in the group exchanged glances which could only mean, Isn’t he groovy?
His voice, dark and deep and well-modulated, carried well, so that even those in the back were able to hear, and Margo was reminded of such day tours in foreign cities. “Everyone can hear, I hope? This is the Piazza Navona, one of the most beautiful squares in R-r-r-ome …”
“And now you see, ladies and gentlemens, zee Tour Eiffel, erected for zee Paris Exposition of 1889, voila …”
She stifled a smile and followed. John said, “In this room is the tester bed where John Quincy Adams slept. Note the Deerfield blinds at the windows. In 1794 the chimneys were rebuilt, the new roof raised on the house in 1799.”
He pointed out highboys — ”from the Phillips house in Boston” — the vertical sheathing and fine paneling in the lower hall, the lustre ware and Lowestoft in the dining room.
“These pewter plates on the mantel,” he said, “have long histories. The one on the right was brought to Salem, Massachusetts, from England, with the advance guard of the Phillips family in 1630. The other two were imported by Nathaniel Brand about 1750.”
He led them out to the back veranda. “This was called the stoop. Just where Nathaniel Brand got the idea for this typical southern adjunct to a plantation house is a conundrum, for it is known that he never spent any time south of the Mason-Dixon line.”
“He must have known Southern people,” a tourist suggested.
“He must and did,” John said, smiling. “It’s, of course, the only explanation.”
The tour took an hour and a half. When they had all gone off in the chartered bus, John asked Margo if he had performed creditably. She said yes, more than that, and congratulated him. “After all, I’ve heard it just about forever,” he reminded her, and went back to his office. She stayed there, remembering what she had just heard and whom she had first heard it from, her Aunt Victoria. Sighing, she lit a cigarette on the back veranda and looked out over the green meadow past the gardens and dreamed.
Pompey came out and asked her what she wanted to drink. Iced coffee, Gatorade, maybe something stronger?
“Nothing now,” she said, thanking him, and alone again, looked across the meadow and the gardens and the tall trees, to the spire of the little church in Plunkett, a hand-span away at the other side of Justice Creek. It was very peaceful and very quiet, and after a while she fell asleep.
• • •
She must have slept the afternoon away, because when she woke the sun was lower in the sky and, although the day was still brilliant, there was a faint violet tint to it, and she looked at her watch.
It was just after five.
Then she heard the voices.
Very low, indistinct, and to her right, in the gardens. A man’s voice and a woman’s voice. Oh, it’s late, she thought. They’re already home, and I must bathe and change. She got up, a little stiff, stuck her packet of cigarettes into a pocket, and walked across the stoop to the steps. Someone said, “Now, listen, you just take it easy. You don’t want to — ”
There was a low rumble in answer … John’s voice? And then the woman again, Norma, of course. “I said, stop that, don’t you realize that — ”
For some reason, Margo was wary. She went down the steps that led to the garden path and peered ahead, past the house. There was a quick glimpse of a flowered dress, long and floating dark hair … Norma. And then someone else … someone who stood tall and strong and powerful against the evening sky, his bronzed torso gleaming in the heat of the slanting sun, strong arms reaching out …
That’s not John, Margo thought. That’s Ben.
It was Ben, all right, and his arms, the biceps rippling with power, easy power, pulled Norma against him, forcing her head upwards, a hand thrusting through her hair.
“You’re hurting me,” Norma protested, in a stifled voice.
And Margo stood stock still, clenching her hands. I knew it, she thought. I knew it …
His enormous hands, holding up the wriggling toad, blood trickling down his wrists …
The sounds of the struggle were muted, but horrifying. Norma freed a hand and raked it down Ben’s face. “Let me go,” she hissed. “Let me go, you animal …”
Margo ran down the steps. Over Norma’s head her eyes and Ben’s met. Hers were blazing, his blinking with surprise. He released the other girl, who staggered slightly, grabbed at his arm for support. Then she turned. Her face was flaming red, her eyes filmed. For a moment there was absolute silence.
Then Norma’s hand raised and landed on Ben’s face with a stinging slap. “There,” she said, spitting the words. “There! That’s for being a stupid ape. That’s for — ”
The man stood there, looking at Margo, rubbed his cheek, and then drew himself up. He stood outlined against the cobalt sky, his dark head striking … and menacing.
Then he laughed, his eyes insolent. “What’s the harm in a little kiss?” he demanded. “You’re not nuns, are you?”
“Don’t say another word if you know what’s good for you,” Margo cried. “Norma, come into the house.”
She held out a hand and the girl took it. “Did he hurt you?”
“No. Let it go.”
“If he did, he’ll pay dear.”
“But he didn’t. Please. Just forget it.”
They went into the house. “I’ll have him thrown off the place,” Margo said between her teeth.
“No, don’t, don’t. It was my fault. I was teasing him, the way he used to tease us. I should have known better. He has a trigger temper. He took the only revenge he knew. So … please, let it go. Just let it go. What am I, a sugar-plum fairy? I’m a grown woman, and I’m not afraid of Ben. Or anyone.”
“I won’t have him here any more.”
“Then who’ll do the gardening? You won’t find anyone. Some kid, after school. They don’t care. I said it was my fault. I did provoke him, I admitted that. I should have known better. Oh, don’t spoil the whole evening, Margo. Come, let’s water the plants upstairs. I haven’t had time to do it for the last few days. They must be dying of thirst. Help me. That’s the good girl.”
They went up the stairs. “I knew he bothered you,” Margo said stubbornly. “The first day I saw you talking to him. You looked disturbed. I won’t have that.”
At the top of the stairs Norma turned to her. There was a hardness in her face. “Listen to me, now,” she said. “You just listen, Margo. I have to live in this town with him. He’s a bit of a problem. But there are other problems, and I have to live with them too. There’s no escape, the way there is in a large city. Here, you coexist. Ben lives here and so do I. So don’t antagonize him. He won’t forget it. You have to control someone like Ben, the way you have to control a computer. It’s my business, not yours. Don’t tell me how to run my life, Margo, I’ve managed so far without any help. I’m sorry you … I’m sorry you saw his pass. But it rolls off me, doesn’t touch me. I have bigger problems than that.”
She put a hand on Margo’s elbow. “I mean it,” she said. “Don’t interfere.”
“Wouldn’t you do the same for me?”
“Not if I knew the circumstances.”
“You mean to say, if
someone attacked me the way he — ”
“Don’t try to play God,” Norma said, with steel in her voice, and then, smiling her charming smile, put a hand through Margo’s arm. “We are not going to talk about it any more,” she said. “Now let’s give the plants some water. We’ll take turns.”
On the balcony was a huge watering can which, when filled, bowed one down with the weight of it. There were four urns in all, gigantic iron pots filled with flowers of the season, at the moment marigolds and pansies and morning glories. Norma watered the first two and Margo the next, her arms aching with the effort. “That will do it for now,” Norma said. “It’s work, isn’t it?”
“My God, yes.”
“Ready for a stiff drink?”
“I want to wash a bit first.”
“Then see you in short order,” Norma said, putting the watering can back in its niche. “You must tell me about the tour. John said you seemed pleased with his performance.”
“I was.”
For dinner, spareribs and sauerkraut, and the candles flickering, and the breeze whispering through opened windows. Wine, in tall tumblers, and Pompey saying, “Seconds, for whoever wants them, otherwise we’ll have leftovers tomorrow.”
She was in her room at just before ten, and the telephone rang. She went to it warily, but it was only Douglas.
“I’d like your company tomorrow,” he said.
“That sounds nice.”
“Get here at around eleven and we’ll find a nice place. I’m not sure but I think I know where.”
“Yes, all right, fine, Doug.”
“Don’t oversleep.”
“I’ll have Pompey wake me.”
“That’s my girl.”
When she was ready for bed she considered. Should she take the phone off the hook?
Better do, she decided, and removed it.
Then, half an hour later, went out again and put the receiver back on the hook. Let’s just see, she thought.
But it didn’t ring.
At first she was tense, waiting. Then dropped off, woke again, listening. And then slept once more.
Nothing woke her. In the morning she thought about it. Last night it hadn’t rung. Why did it ring some nights and other nights didn’t?
Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances Page 90