Hunter's Green

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  I let her go and moved about collecting the things I’d need for a bath—my “sponge bag,” now that I was back in England. Then I went down the hall to where steaming hot water roared from huge faucets into such a tub as one never saw in America. I poured in pink bath salts from an apothecary jar on a table, and got into the tub for a wonderful soaking. Athmore water might not be this hot again until evening, so I had to take advantage of it now.

  The room filled with steam and the mirrors misted over with sweetly scented fog It wasn’t exactly bracing, but I luxuriated, trying to put off the moment when I must go downstairs and face all the insoluble problems that awaited me. A mind fresh awake in the morning will seldom let one be, however. Strangely enough, considering all the other difficulties which awaited me, it was the recurring thought of Old Daniel that nagged at my mind. There was some meaning hidden in my chance meeting with him, and I must find it. The accidental snapshot I had caught of him might well have some bearing on the puzzle.

  I got dripping from the tub to wrap myself in a bath towel as big and thick as a rug, and thoroughly warmed from a hot-water-pipe rack. Then I snatched up my robe and scooted back to my room.

  There I spread out the snapshots on my bed for a more careful look, studying them while I toweled myself dry. Only the last few I’d taken were important—the shots of the chapel ruin—and only one of these had a particular significance for me. I picked it up and studied it more closely than I had before.

  The figure of Old Daniel was blurred, indistinct, lost in shadow. He stood beside a bush near a high portion of crumbling wall. I could just make out his dark jacket and the peaked cap pulled low over his face. He must have stood there watching while I took my pictures, not approaching me at once.

  I put the packet of prints and film away in my suitcase, holding out only the one I’d caught of Old Daniel. Whether it would have any significance in explaining the accident, I did not know, but I slipped it into my handbag and left it in a bureau drawer. I would mention the picture to Maggie or Justin later on.

  In twenty minutes I was dressed and I hurried downstairs for breakfast. I needed to ask no one the customs of the house. There would be chafing dishes to keep the food hot on the dining-room sideboard, ready for irregular breakfasters. There would be cold toast waiting in open racks, because no one in England seemed to mind cold toast, and there would be wonderful marmalade, hot water for tea, hot milk, and abominable coffee. I was home again at Athmore.

  Nowadays the large dining room was used only for dinner parties, and the small Wedgwood room for family meals. It was a room I had always liked, and I stood in the doorway for a moment while nostalgia swept through me. All heavy, gloomy colors had been banished here. In the morning light it was a cheerful blue-and-white room with blue Wedgwood insets around the white marble fireplace, blue walls that were less intense than the walls of my present room upstairs, and a white Wedgwood frieze where walls met ceiling. The table not nearly so large as that in the adjoining gold dining room, was Hepplewhite, as were the blue-upholstered chairs set invitingly around it. In the beginning of our marriage Justin and I often breakfasted together in this room—and sometimes we’d held hands under the table.

  There was no one here now. I went to the sideboard to help myself, and Morton looked in, faintly superior as I remembered him, to see if there was anything I needed. Morton belonged to the vanishing school of butlers who stayed with one family forever and partook of their fortunes, good and bad, presenting a dignified and correct demeanor, behind which his own opinions and notions carried on a vigorously secret life which the gentry pretended did not exist. Justin had told me once that a good butler, a good waiter, should be gracefully invisible—but I always forgot this and wondered about Morton as a person. His opinion of me was undoubtedly low, but I greeted him warmly, ignoring his lack of welcome.

  Of kippers and grilled kidneys I would have none, but I managed scrambled eggs, toast and marmalade. And when I had finished I went outdoors.

  At least I knew how to dress for spring at Athmore and I had put on a gray woolen skirt and yellow pullover sweater, a fresh yellow band to hold back my hair, and low-heeled walking shoes. The morning was brightly cool, but the air still bore a taint of wet ashes as I walked down the slope toward the workshop and garage area.

  The screen of beeches on the embankment shielded me from view, and I took care to stay behind the trees. One of the yard men was working with Justin, carrying out charred wet wreckage and dumping it on one side of the driveway. An upper corner of the building that had once stabled Maggie’s beloved horses was smoke-blackened, and repairs would be necessary—but the rest of the stable workshop appeared unharmed.

  Next to it was the big garage which Justin had built a few years before I had come here. Horse-poor they might be at Athmore, but cars, as Maggie said, were a necessity in the country. I recognized the black Morris Oxford that was Maggie’s. I had sometimes driven that very car in the old days, since Justin’s car was always busy taking him to and from London. The other two cars I did not recognize. The newer English model—a blue car—was probably Justin’s everyday car, since his taste did not run to the spectacular. The red Mercedes-Benz was undoubtedly Marc’s, since he usually managed to get what he wanted, in spite of always being short of cash. There was no car to account for Nigel’s transportation, and I supposed he must use Maggie’s when he needed one. Once more I wondered about his being here, and about his engagement to Maggie Graham. Did he still have connections in the Bahamas, and would she go there if she married him? Somehow I could not imagine Maggie living away from Athmore but I did not want to recall the thought Dacia had dropped into my mind last night—the suspicion that Maggie would marry Nigel only to save Athmore and her precious Marc. I would hate to believe that, but I knew very well how far Maggie would go for Marc’s sake. She had proved that to me long ago.

  Next to the big garage with its open doors was a small, neat, new building I had not noticed until now. It, too, looked to be a garage. Its doors were closed, but through a front window I could glimpse a long gray car. This, I supposed, must be Justin’s new, experimental car. Fortunately, the fire had not touched it.

  A sound from the direction of Athmore’s front gates reached me and I stepped close to a tree trunk, reluctant to reveal myself. The car that came toward the garage was a cream-white Jaguar, and I knew at once who it belonged to. Alicia Daven had always driven a white car and she was at the wheel now. I leaned closer to my shielding tree trunk. There was no way to return to the house without being seen, and I wanted to avoid her.

  The Jaguar drew up on the concrete apron before the garages, where I could look down on it from my embankment. Alicia seemed as golden and beautiful as I remembered. Her masses of fair hair were drawn into a French twist at the back of her head, as she wore it much of the time. It became her in its elegant simplicity, as everything she wore became her, from the white cashmere of her sweater to the heather tones of her tapered trousers. She was Justin’s age, but she looked younger, with her fair English skin and delicate features. I remembered her heavy-lidded eyes and that perfect, straight nose, with the nostrils that could lift with the unconscious disdain of the aristocrat. All at once I was nineteen again and wildly jealous, hating the woman who meant to have my man. That he had been hers first was an indigestible fact which I had never been able to swallow.

  Perhaps she felt my gaze upon her, for her deeply blue eyes turned my way and she saw me there, peering out from behind my tree trunk. Saw and recognized me, and said nothing at all, though she did not look away. The next move was left to me, and there was no easy choice. I could not go on cowering like a child behind a tree. Nor could I turn and run toward the house as I might have liked. That would be retreat, and I would not give in to the impulse. What about that sturdy resolve of mine to meet poise with poise? I must go down there and speak to her, whether I wanted to or not.

  She held to her silence as I descended the embankment toward he
r, watching me with that air of confidence which was hers by birth. The calm of a born assurance had never been mine, and as I neared her I became less and less confident of my ability to deal with her on any level. This was regression and I hated it. Yet I could not stem the slipping away of my self-possession.

  “Hello, Eve,” she said, and smiled at me in her remotely kind, rather pitying way.

  I knew very well how treacherous any seeming kindness from Alicia was likely to be, yet her manner disabled me. Open warfare I could meet. But her manner of being a bit sorry for me sent my blood pressure soaring in the old, hateful way. I could not even return her greeting casually. I simply stood beside the white Jaguar and stared at her with the baleful air of the child I had once been.

  “Maggie tells me you’ve been doing very well in New York,” she went on lightly, ignoring my lack of response. “Your work there sounds fascinating.”

  There was nothing sensible I could find to say. I would not be a hypocrite and simper about my job at the travel agency.

  She knew very well that I was furious, and she knew why. At least she now chose to put aside her pretense at conversation and took a direct thrust at me. “You shouldn’t have come here, Eve. You’ve only made it hard for yourself and more difficult for Justin. He hates to hurt anyone.”

  Even her choice of the word “anyone” was a cut. “Justin can take care of himself,” I told her, and knew I sounded sharp and angry.

  By contrast her tone grew more velvety. “Not altogether,” she said, her implication, plain. She meant that she would take care of Justin far better than I ever had.

  “You aren’t married to him yet!” I cried, and heard the outraged Victorian ring of my own words. What should have sounded triumphant bore a petulant sound. This was what she had done to me in the past, and she was succeeding again. I knew it and knew the fault was mine for responding as she wished—yet I could not help myself.

  “You’ve always insisted on injuring yourself,” she said, speaking an irrefutable truth with all the honeyed gentleness she could put into her voice.

  The honey—absent till now—warned me. I stepped back from floundering in utter quagmire and smiled at her stiffly. It was a smile that promised her battle, and she knew it very well. But her tone had put me on guard, and I looked around to see Justin coming toward us from his workshop. How much he had heard I couldn’t tell. There was thunder in the look he gave me, though it was to Alicia he addressed himself.

  “Hello, darling,” he said and came to the side of her car. She raised her face sweetly and he kissed her with an elaborate tenderness. At least I took some satisfaction in knowing that his kiss, at this particular moment, was more a slap for me than a kiss for her, and I hoped she sensed that too.

  She slipped gracefully from under the steering wheel and slid along the seat. “Do drive, will you, Justin darling? I’m feeling lazy this morning.”

  “I like you that way,” he said and set the car into motion, turned it around on the apron a bit too sharply for as good a driver as he, and went off toward the front gate.

  I looked after them, shaken by wild, futile anger. Now he would go with Alicia and she would offer him this new, deceptive serenity with which she could surround herself. Like Maggie, I was unconvinced that it was the true serenity that comes from being at peace with oneself, but it must serve well enough to give Justin the surcease he needed from the strains of his own troubled spirit. When had I ever done anything but trouble him more? Yet I could not be another Alicia—and I did not want to be!

  At least I was trying to be honest about myself, trying to face up to all that was wrong. I doubted that Alicia had ever bothered to do that herself, or ever regarded herself as less than perfect.

  As the car disappeared, something dug into my ribs so sharply that I jumped. Dacia Keane had come quietly to stand beside me. The sharp instrument that had stabbed me was her small, pointed elbow.

  “That puts your nose out of joint, doesn’t it?” she said, nodding in the direction of the departing white car.

  I turned my back on the car resolutely and gave Dacia my startled attention. This morning she was dressed like a boy, yet she looked not at all boyish Her orange coat hung open, and beneath it she wore a shirt of Italian blue, unbuttoned at her skinny little throat. Boys’ shorts of the same color stayed up mysteriously, though belted low on her narrow hips, and below them long blue tights covered surprisingly well-shaped legs. On her feet were square-heeled, silver-buckled black shoes. She had slicked her wispy yellow hair down with water, and her face was devoid of make-up except for the meticulously careful job she had done on those enormous eyes with false lashes and pencil, even at this hour in the morning. More than anything else, however, it was her mouth that kept her from looking boyish. Her uncolored lips were full and slightly pouting in repose, though she could flash a dazzling smile when she chose. Young as she was, this was the mouth of a temptress.

  “Do you still think you can get him back?” she asked, moving her elbow as though to prod me again.

  I stepped out of range. “Aren’t you ever afraid of dangerous ground? Doesn’t your mother ever spank you?”

  She grinned at me impudently. “Not so you’d notice it. Do you know about my mum? They always print it about her when they write me up. That she was a char, I mean. She scrubbed out offices after Pa ran off—and before too, since he liked the inside of pubs better than the inside of any place where he ever worked.”

  She waited for some exclamation on my part, cocking her brassy young head at me.

  “Are you bragging?” I asked.

  Velvet brown eyes stared at me for a long while before she wrinkled her nose, deciding.

  “I suppose I am bragging. Why shouldn’t I? There was a time in England when a charwoman’s daughter couldn’t amount to nothing. ‘Anything,’ that is. You notice, I’m trying hard to speak in a proper way. Marc made me go to a teacher to learn how to speak, he did. Anyway, now that everything’s swinging in London, it’s all the more special if you’re a char’s daughter. Sort of anti-Establishment, if you know what I mean. People get proud of themselves for taking you up and being so terribly democratic. But you don’t feel that way, I can tell. I suppose it’s because you’re American. You’re used to all those self-made men—and women. It’s not so new for you as it is for us.”

  Once more she slipped her hand companionably through the crook of my arm and drew me toward the garage.

  “I thought you slept late,” I said. “Nellie told me you were up at night and in bed late in the morning.”

  Dacia shrugged orange shoulders. “Maybe I’m getting caught up. Besides, with you here there’s more happening. More people having a fit. So I came down to be in on it. Breakfast I don’t care for much, so I’ve skipped it. Come take a ride with me in Marc’s car, will you? He’s taught me to drive, and I like to practice.”

  Marc was as reckless a driver as I’d ever seen. He loved cars passionately, loved to drive, as Justin, strangely, did not—and he drove as though the world had to give way and nothing could ever harm him.

  “Ooh! I don’t drive like he does!” Dacia cried. “I want to live awhile, I do. Come along, Evie. We’ll do the parklands course, and I’ll show you a place I like. I’ll even tell you how to get your Justin back, if you really want him.”

  “Thanks,” I said dryly.

  She never minded a snub. “It might be good for Marc if you did get Justin back, at that. I don’t know if it makes much difference to me. Marc and I understand each other pretty well, though whether I’ll marry him or not is to be seen. We fight a lot, you know. Though he doesn’t try to make me over—except the way I talk—and I don’t try that with him either. But just the same I scare him sometimes—like last night at the fire. Is that what went wrong with you and Justin? Did you try to make each other over?”

  I laughed at her endless chatter. What “making over” there was had been on Justin’s side. Not that he had tried very hard. He told me
once that he wouldn’t play Pygmalion—or Henry Higgins. He simply took it for granted that I would stop being the fairly independent American girl he had married, and turn myself into a suitable English wife. I’d tried to do that, but it hadn’t worked.

  Dacia got into the bright red Mercedes and backed it out of the garage, while the yard man who had been helping Justin watched her doubtfully. I joined her in the black leather seat and she turned onto a road that led past the garages. As we set off she explained the new testing course to me. To some extent it followed the line of earlier carriage drives through Athmore’s parklands, and was shaped in the form of a closed “m.” The ovals on either side were of uneven size, and the roads followed the outline of the “m” with a connecting bar making the middle stroke of the letter. The right-hand enclosure was the largest, harboring Athmore itself at its front, but leaving the ruins of Athmore Hall outside the righthand loop of the course.

  As I expected, Dacia drove too fast. The red car went roaring down the connecting bar and took the well-banked curve to the right with a speed that made the tires squeal. Dacia flashed me a look of delight and did not lessen her pressure on the accelerator. She drove like Marc, though with less control.

  Woods and a pond swept by us in a flash, and all we had was speed and the wind whistling past our ears in the open car. I could feel my hair whip back from my head as we went, and put my hands up to the band that held it. She did not slow until we turned down the outer rim of the righthand course. Then she flung me a look of triumph.

  “Wasn’t that wonderful! Only danger is real! Only danger makes me come to life.”

  “Danger could also be the death of you at this rate,” I said. “You’re not a good enough driver for such speed.”