by Sara Seale
He frowned.
“Don’t you like Mary?” he asked a shade irritably.
“Yes, of course. I don’t know her very well, and anyway—” She began to laugh, at Bart for his lack of perception, at herself for a romantic dream which faded without a struggle in the cold light of logic.
He stood watching her with the frown still between his eyes.
“I’m inclined to take your temperature, just to make sure,” he remarked. “You’ve been acting very oddly ever since I came home.”
“Perhaps we all have,” she said, remembering the bewildering events of the day. “I’m quite well, Bart. I—I’m just not used to so many quick changes.”
“Quick changes?”
“In people, I mean. You, Paul, Pierre—even Smithers—have all done or said odd things today. It isn’t surprising, perhaps, that I should have caught the habit, too.”
He considered her gravely for a moment, as if searching for a clue to the quality in her that eluded him, then he shrugged, dismissing the day’s unusual disturbances from his mind.
“Well, aren’t you going to put it on?” he asked, impatient with her cool reception of his gift. It was a fine pearl and had cost a good deal of money. “It should fit. The jeweller remembered the size of your wedding ring.” She slipped the ring on to her finger above the thin, plain platinum band. It felt cold to her skin and she stood there a little awkwardly, not knowing how to express her thanks in the face of his unsentimental bestowal of his gift.
“May I kiss you, please?” she asked at last with childlike directness,
“If you like,” he replied, and his indifference was discouraging, but as her lips brushed his with shy hesitancy, he drew her suddenly close, holding her mouth under his with an urgency which took them both unawares, and felt the little shiver that ran through her.
“You’d better go to bed now,” he said, releasing her. Tm still not quite satisfied about that temperature.”
“Very well,” she replied, obediently, and her eyes were dark and held a sudden brilliance. “Will you—will you be coming in to me?”
He stood there, regarding her a little strangely, the lines of his dark face taut and stretched.
“No not tonight, I’ve got work to do,” he said jerkily, sounding suddenly harsh.
She could not quite hide the disappointment in her eyes, or the bewilderment, and he turned abruptly to his desk and began pulling out drawers.
“Goodnight,” he said, without looking up.
“Goodnight,” she echoed, and went softly from the room.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I
MAY changed into June, and with the dying of that month, the bad weather returned. It was, Lucy was to discover, to be one of the wettest summers for years, with the bracken growing high with tropical swiftness and a perpetual mist driving in from the sea to shut Polvane away in ghostly isolation. But before the halcyon days of May had gone, Lucy had come to terms with that wild, bleak coastline, even finding solace in the solitude which had once dismayed her. She would paddle in the rock pools which lay warm and sheltered in the little coves at the foot of the cliffs, and sometimes Paul would be with her, teasing and attentive, and sometimes Bart.
It was he who took her to Gannet Cove and showed her the spot where long ago he had rescued her from drowning, and she remembered the scene as if it had been yesterday; the golden sand and calm, deceptive blue of the water, the children’s voices jeering: “Ba-ba ... silly sheep...” and her own frightened plunge into the sea. She remembered, too, exactly how the man who was now her husband had looked when he flung her on the sand, with his dripping clothes, and the wet black hair falling over his dark, angry face.
She shivered.
“I don’t like this place,” she said. “It hasn’t finished with me.”
Propped against a rock, he regarded her with the fond amusement he reserved for his son.
“Are you feeling psychic?” he asked lazily. “Gannet Cove is quite harmless if you remember about the currents and the tides, but I shouldn’t try swimming here if you’re no more expert than you were at fourteen. The tide comes in very quickly and there mightn’t be a rescuer at hand this time.”
“I shan’t come here alone,” she said, and he raised his eyebrows.
“Well, Paul’s an excellent swimmer,” he observed, and she glanced up quickly at the slight change in his voice.
Of late, she thought, he seemed deliberately to throw them together, perhaps proving to himself or to her that his anger on the occasion he had given her the ring was unjustified, but it made her uneasy, and she did not care for the young man’s ready assumption that he should take his cousin’s place.
He stood now at the top of the cliffs, waving and shouting to them, and immediately started to race down the rough path to’ the beach, sure of his welcome.
“For someone with a dicky heart he seems pretty unconcerned,” Lucy remarked with unusual tartness, and Bart looked surprised.
“There’s nothing wrong with his heart, as far as I know,” he said. “Who’s been telling you tales?”
“He told me himself,” she said, watching the young man leap from rock to rock, his blue linen slacks and yellow hair making bright splashes of colour against the granite. “He said he had rheumatic fever badly as a child and it left him with a bad heart.”
“A slight murmur, possibly, but nothing to worry about.”
“Not enough to be a handicap when it came to a job of work?”
“Dear me, no! I think Master Paul has been stringing you along, Lucy Baa-lamb. The fact is my young cousin just doesn’t like work,” he said, but he did not sound concerned. He had, she knew, a good-natured fondness for his cousin and was, probably, a little sorry for him.
Lucy sighed, hurt by the easy pleasure with which he turned to greet the tutor; it was so seldom she had a chance of getting her husband to herself.
“Hullo!” Paul shouted. “Wasn’t this the place where you once rescued Lucy from a watery grave? She built quite a romance on that little episode, you know.”
“Really?” said Bart, and his eyes rested thoughtfully on Lucy for a moment.
“Pity it had to be you and not someone like me.”
“Why?”
“Oh, well—” Paul’s laugh had a note of affectionate apology—“you’re not the romantic kind, are you? And you’re almost another generation, and wedded to your profession and all that.”
“You talk a good deal of nonsense,” Bart retorted a little shortly.
“Yes, don’t I?” Paul grinned and, seizing Lucy suddenly by the hand, raced her unwillingly across the sand.
Bart stood and watched them, his eyes narrowed against the sun. Lucy ran with grace, her hair flying, her long, bare legs flashing in the light like that other girl whom she so much resembled, who had come with the mummers that May morning when she was a child, and danced on the lawn. Paul had reminded him that his own youth was going and the hearing had come as a shock. He had scarcely regarded himself as belonging to another generation.
Out of hearing, Lucy was crying breathlessly.
“Stop it! I don’t want to run!” and trying to pull her hand from his, but he only gripped it more firmly.
“Yes, you do. No use making sheep’s eyes at an unresponsive husband. You and I make a much better pair.”
“You’re impossible! Let me go back to him.”
“When we’ve touched that rock shaped like a stork on the other side for luck. It’s the Corn Rock, a charm for fertility. You ought to be thinking about that, oughtn’t you, my sweet—a little playmate for Pierre?” But when they had touched the odd-shaped rock and turned to run back, Bart had gone. Lucy saw him reaching the top of the cliff path, and shouted, and he turned to wave, but did not stop.
It happened so often now. Paul’s interruptions were natural enough, she supposed, but she wondered, sometimes, if he took a kind of warped pleasure in denying his cousin chances of becoming better acquainted wi
th his wife.
“Oh!” she said with the sharp disappointment of a child. “And I so seldom can get him alone.”
Paul flung himself down on the sand and pulled her after him.
“That’s an odd complaint for a bride to make,” he said slyly. “What happens in the evenings—or in the nights, if it comes to that?”
He was often bold in his observations now. In admitting so much that day on the terrace, she had in some curious, fashion, given him the right to probe into her affairs.
She made a small movement of distaste.
“You know very well how things are between us, Paul,” she said. “But your knowledge came by accident—you might respect it.”
His laughter had a derisive sound.
“I was never a respecter of other people’s secrets, my sweet,” he retorted. “Knowledge arriving by accident, as you so primly put it, is one of my few amusements.”
“You are really rather a nasty young man,” she said, discovering that under all the boyish charm he took pleasure in malice because, for him, the good things of life were beyond his grasp.
“Yes, aren’t I?” he replied with that engaging impudence which she had once found amusing, then his mood suddenly changed.
“Don’t turn against me, Lucy Locket,” he pleaded, his eyes apologizing to her. “I have to tease you, or I should make love to you.”
“What nonsense!” she exclaimed sharply.
“Not nonsense, my sweet, unfortunately for me. Do you think it doesn’t make me grind my teeth when I see my pompous cousin handed something on a plate that he hardly knows exists?”
“He’s not pompous—you are, quite often!” said Lucy taking refuge in childish retaliation.
“Self-sufficient, then, which is much the same thing. One wonders how he managed to satisfy the beautiful Marcelle. Perhaps it was just as well she died, or there might have been a scandal, and that wouldn’t have suited Cousin Bartlemy.”
Lucy was idly picking up handfuls of sand and letting it run through her fingers.
“I find your resentment of Bart very hard to understand,” she said, striving to be reasonable. “He’s very generous to you and quite unaware of your dislike. It doesn’t help endear you to me, you know.”
He looked at her quickly under his lashes, aware that he was in danger of over-playing his hand. He had no desire to alienate her sympathy at this moment.
“I’m sorry, Lucy,” he said, looking downcast. “I must sound beastly ungrateful to you, but I thought you would understand. You, too, have been kicked from pillar to post by people who didn’t want you. Were you never resentful of the good fortunes of others?”
“I don’t think so, but I never, like you, had a good Samaritan to ease the way for me,” she said gently, trying to understand a point of view so different from her own.
“But can’t you see—one doesn’t want charity?” he persisted. “All right for a woman, perhaps—you, for example—at least you live in comfort—but a man likes to stand on his own feet.”
“Well, what’s to stop you?” she retorted, stung by his assumption that she was content to live on his cousin’s bounty.
“You know very well—my wretched health.”
“There’s nothing wrong with your health, or your heart, either. Bart told me so. I think you’re just a sponger, Paul.”
He got to his feet, brushing the sand from his linen slacks. His eyes looked suddenly very blue and burning in a face that had lost colour.
“I’ll remember that remark,” he said quietly, and began to walk away along the sands without her.
She got home some time later to find the house deserted. Paul’s little sports car still stood in the drive, so he was presumably somewhere about, but Bart must have extended his solitary walk, for the library was empty.
“I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.
With vassals and serfs at my side,”
Smithers was singing from his pantry where he was polishing the silver, and Lucy smiled and ran upstairs.
He got to his feet, brushing the sand from his linen slacks. His eyes looked suddenly very blue and burning in a face that had lost colour.
The schoolroom door was open and she heard Paul saying:
“No, Pierre, he doesn’t want to see you this evening, so make haste and get undressed before I go.”
“But Papa said when he and Baba came back—” Pierre’s high treble protested.
“He’s changed his mind. He told me so himself. He can’t always be bothered with little boys, you know, so hurry up, now.”
Pierre began to cry, partly with temper, and Lucy hurried into the room.
“When did Bart tell you he didn’t want to see Pierre bathed?” she demanded. “It was a promise.”
He did not look a whit disconcerted.
“Oh, sometime down on the shore,” he answered carelessly.
“I was there all the time—there wasn’t a word mentioned,” she said, and he shrugged.
“Have it your own way, but don’t blame me if your lord and master is annoyed at being forced into the role of conventional parent. The part scarcely becomes him, does it? Be quiet, Pierre, don’t behave like a baby or Papa may smack you instead of kissing you goodnight.”
He spoke with light inconsequence, but Lucy remembered the day when the boy had sobbed out his disquieting little tale of woe.
“It’s all right poppet, Paul made a mistake. Your father hasn’t come in yet, but I’ll come up in a little while and undress you and we’ll be ready for him. Paul I should like to speak to you, please,” Lucy said, and walked out of the room, her slender back very straight.
He followed her down to the library and helped himself to Bart’s sherry.
“All right, I made a mistake—so what?” he said, and sounded aggrieved.
She looked at him curiously, wondering why she had ever felt sorry for him. He was, she thought, a mass of egotistical contradictions, with an overwhelming sense of self-pity, but she could not have believed that he was just as malicious in his intentions.
“Paul, I meant to ask you about this at the time, but other things put it out of my head,” she said. “A week or so ago Pierre implied that you had been using his father as a threat.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“I don’t quite know, because I don’t think Pierre himself was very clear, but I gathered that you never actually punished him yourself for naughtiness, but held over his head the things Bart would do to him if he found out. That would account very greatly for the boy’s fear of his father.”
“You certainly have it in for me today, haven’t you, Lucy?” he said with a grin. “First I sponge on your husband, and then I try to suborn your stepson. Any other complaints?”
“Paul, I’m not trying to pick a quarrel,” she replied patiently, “I only want to find out the truth.”
“The truth! Don’t you know that all kids are natural liars? They twist and exaggerate the truth, as you call it, because for them there is little difference between fantasy and reality.”
“I know that—all the same, a child would hardly invent anything quite so—so adult as this.”
“Don’t you believe it! Pierre had a natural fear of his father—are you suggesting I encouraged it?”
“Yes,” she said simply.
He drained his glass and filled it again, angrily, spilling the wine on the polished table and leaving it there to stain the wood.
“Really, Lucy! For someone who, like myself, is little better than a servant in this house, you take a lot upon yourself,” he said. “Are you, by any chance, hoping to win Bart’s rather chilly attentions by getting me out?”
Lucy mopped up the spilt sherry with her handkerchief and kept her back turned to him. Her hands were beginning to shake.
“I think we’ll leave my position here out of this for the moment,” she said quietly. “At least you can’t deny you used to take Pierre into his mother’s old room and show him her clothes.
Smithers saw you.”
“And what’s wrong in that? A harmless little amusement for wet days with old Smithy acting the goat with his dramas and recitations.”
“Except that Bart thought that all her things had been cleared out long ago and certainly wouldn’t have approved of his son being encouraged to pry when his back was turned.”
“Perhaps you’re right” said Paul indifferently. “Personally, I always thought, he kept the place as a sort of shrine. How was I to know?”
He sounded, now, merely cross and sulky, as if he were a small boy accused, unjustly, of peeping through keyholes, and Lucy exclaimed, with the exasperation she might have felt for a child’s wanton stubbornness:
“But you must have known! Everything that could remind him of her has been got rid of—photographs, personal possessions—even her portrait—and the drawing-room is locked up and never used. He couldn’t bear to be reminded of her.”
His eyes travelled over her slowly and a little smile came into them.
“Yes, my dear Lucy, that’s what you have to fight against, isn’t it?” he said softly. “A beautiful ghost whose place you can never take, however much you try. Your battle is lost before it’s begun, my sweet, and you know it.”
The tears sprang to her eyes, but before she could reply, Bart’s voice spoke from the doorway.
“A little early for drinking, isn’t it, Paul? It’s barely five o’clock,” he said.
Lucy did not know how long he had been standing there, or how much he had heard, and his face told her nothing. Paul flushed and looked a little disconcerted, but replied jauntily enough:
“It is a bit early, I suppose, but I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“I still prefer to act as host in my own house,” Bart retorted coolly, and replaced the stopper in the decanter with deliberation.
This time Paul went scarlet.
“I’d always thought I could treat your home as mine, Bart,” he said in a deeply wounded voice.
“Did you? Well, I think there are lines to be drawn. Neither my possessions nor my wife’s good nature are completely at your disposal.” Bart spoke with the sudden frigid politeness which had become so familiar to Lucy, and Paul banged his empty glass on to the silver tray so that it smashed in several pieces.