by Jane Arbor
"Even so, allowing perhaps for a meal in Hyeres and the ride back, if they had any consideration for you, they're long overdue." He looked thoughtfully at Rose. "I suppose you'd begin to fear the worst if I suggested ringing the Hyeres police and the cottage hospital there?"
"No, I wish you would, please."
But the telephone itself forestalled him. AT its first
ring he plunged again for the receiver and nodded to Rose above it, "Blaise."
Relieved but apprehensive, she listened to the one-sided conversation.
"Yes ... Yes ... " Irritably, "Never mind Get on with it, man ! You are—where? Yes, yes, I know—or near enough. Have you rung a doctor yet ? Then call one to her at once .... Yes, from Hyeres, as that's nearer. And then get back to her ... Yes, I'll bring Rose out as soon as I can get her there ..."
He turned back to meet the anxiety in Rose's eyes. " 'For fun' they took to the mountains for the return journey. He says Sylvie isn't too good at carrier-balancing, and they crashed at a bend. She was thrown clear, but she hit her head as she fell. His machine was unrideable, so they had to walk back to a maas—a mountain homestead—they had passed earlier."
"Walk? But Sylvie can't ! She's not supposed to— How far ?" broke in Rose.
"Four or five kilometres. But they hadn't any choice; passing traffic up there would be negligible after dark. Anyway, Sylvie managed it, though none too well. Blaise says she had 'gone all quiet' by the time they reached the place."
"Quiet?"
"I imagine she was turning drowsy from the blow on her head. But the maas, as was to be expected, had no telephone, so Blaise had to leave her with the people and walk on to the roadside booth from which he rang us "
"And you said you would take me out to where they are?"
"Yes. My car is parked in the Rue Juan. Bring some wraps for Sylvie and a couple of blankets and a pillow, and meet me there in five minutes."
For Rose it was a nightmare drive, made bearable only by the fact that it was Saint-Guy by her side, his hands sure upon the wheel, his knowledge of the tortuous road perfect. Within minutes they had left the lights and clamour of the town behind and were now climbing, now plunging, the woods massively dark ahead, then diminishing by the glare of the headlights to flat, one-dimensional stage scenery trees, then massing again and darkening as the car rushed on.
Sylvie, drowsy after a blow on the head and a too-long walk ! What did that mean ? Rose found she did not want to speculate, nor to discuss it with Saint-Guy. She had felt the quick thrust of anger in him as he had spoken to Blaise on the phone, and she felt too drained by anxiety for Sylvie to be able to defend Blaise at the moment.
As if he sensed her reaction to shock, Saint-Guy left her alone, limiting his conversation to telling her the names of the hamlets they swept through and once or twice, the distance they had still to go.
At last he drew up. "This must be the place, I think." He put a hand under her arm to help her up the crags which served as uneven steps to the stone farmhouse perched on the hillside.
Blaise opened to them. Behind him hovered the woman of the house, chattering in nervous patois. Her husband sat in stolid silence by the chimney-breast and the doctor Blaise had called was straightening from his examination of Sylvie, lying on a horsehair sofa under a brown blanket.
The doctor, repacking his bag at the well-scrubbed Table, answered Saint-Guy's question as Rose ran to Sylvie.
"Yes, there's no reason why she shouldn't be moved and taken home. She is bruised and has that cut which you see I have stitched. More seriously, she has some degree of concussion. But if she has complete bed rest for a few days under the observation of her own doctor, followed by another easy-going week or so, she should be all right after that."
Saint-Guy thanked him, paid his fee and saw him out, before thanking and chatting with the fanner in his own mountain dialect. Meanwhile Sylvie had achieved a wan smile for Rose and an "I'm sorry, Rose dear !" before she was thoroughly and shamefacedly sick, while the farmer's wife clucked sympathy for 'la pauvre petite' and Rose wiped the springing tears from her eyes.
Then they wrapped her in the blankets Rose had brought. Saint-Guy and Blaise carried her down to the car and, for the return journey, Rose pillowed her head in the back seat, while Blaise sat beside his cousin in the front.
Talk between the two men was sporadic and sounded uncordial. Blaise sat hunched and depressed, and though he often turned to see if Sylvie could summon a smile for him, she was sleepily unaware of him. They were not far from Maurinaire when Saint-Guy said over his shoulder to Rose,
"Sleep will be impossible on the square tonight. So I propose to take you both to the Château where there's plenty of room for you and where Doctor Moreau can see Sylvie in the morning. And if you
need any night things for her, Blaise can go down in the car and bring them back."
Rose, who had been dreading a return to the uninhibited noise of the town, thanked him warmly. But in adding that, on the chance of Sylvie having to go to hospital, she had brought toilet things and a nightdress for her, she forgot she had none for herself and, an hour later, had to confess as much to Madame Brissac, the Chateau's elderly housekeeper.
Madame Brissac made as little of it as she had of being called from her bed in the small hours to make up two beds for the girls.
"Tcha ! It will arrange itself," she said briskly. "I happen to have an unused toothbrush, and if you can manage in the emergency with your sister's brush and comb, here in this bureau are nightclothes which I am sure you may borrow without offence."
As she spoke she took from a drawer a pair of black silk pyjamas, embroidered 'F' on the jacket pocket, a matching negligé and black swansdown mules. She explained to Rose,
"These, you understand, belong to Madame Michelet. She calls them her 'weekend spares' and leaves them here in reserve for when she visits us from Grasse in the winter. You and she are much of a size, Mademoiselle Rose, and I think she could not mind your making use of them in the circumstances."
But Rose did mind. She thanked the woman, pretending to accept. But her imagination shrank from the thought both of the intimacy Flore must enjoy at the Chateau and of herself borrowing anything at all from Flore. Instead she went to her bath in her
duster coat and barefoot and, for the first time in her life, went to bed in her slip.
Before she slept—lightly, waking to Sylvie's every movement—she tried to fight the destructive futility of her envy and jealousy of Flore. But it went too deep and was spurred by Flore's inexplicable hostility against herself.
On the edge of sleep Rose thought, In her place I'd pity every other girl in the world. Be gentle with them, make allowances . . for no other reason than that I was sure of Saint-Guy and they weren't.
When Rose returned to the shop the next morning, Madame Saint-Guy insisted on keeping Sylvie for a week under the doctor's care. At the end of it Blaise brought her home and had news which he claimed he could hardly believe.
"Hold your breath—Saint-Guy is giving me a car of my own !"
"A car? Oh, Blaise, how marvellous !" exclaimed Sylvie.
"Isn't it? But of course there are strings attached. That's the way the great Saint-Guy mind works. When he gives—and mon dieu, how he gives wholesale !—it's always on 'conditions,' I've found. As an instance—when he came to my rescue in my English bit of bother, it was understood that I should come back and in future be a good boy about going into cork. And this latest effort on his part was accompanied by a piece of sarcasm to the effect that though Sylvie would probably be wise enough to refuse to go tandem-riding with me in future, in case Rose should be tempted, he was prepared to allow me a car. So I
was to choose any model within reason that I had in mind. Which means, Chérie"—Blaise pinched Sylvie's cheek—"you'll both be riding de luxe in future. That's a promise."
Sylvie laughed, "The way you drive, it could be a threat instead !" and later Rose was to remember how happy and confident she had l
ooked as she said it .
For some days, while Blaise took trial drives in various cars, they saw very little of him. But when he came again he brought for Sylvie a square parcel which, unpacked, revealed itself as a tape-recorder.
"Blaine !" Sylvie's hands hovered over it, then went childishly behind her back. "I couldn't possibly take it—no !"
"Take it ? Of course you can !"
"But they cost the earth !"
He grinned. "Do you know, I've never priced the earth? But Saint-Guy isn't the only one with a piggy-bank, and I got a good scrap rate for the mo-ped. Go on, try it. Have you ever heard yourself on tape?"
"Only once, at a party."
"Then say something now. Talk, and we'll play it back."
The three of them spent an absorbed hour, taking snatches of radio programmes, reading aloud, talking, all three declaring that the others sounded 'to the life,' themselves quite unrecognisable. Blaise said, Fun, isn't it? But the best effect is when people haven't known the mike was 'live.' So one of these days, my children, I'm going to catch you out !"
And that was another happy time Rose was to remember later, when nothing about their threesome relationship was ever to be the same again.
On the Sunday of that week Blaise lunched with them before taking them for their first run in his own new toy—his car. They had had a salad meal and were lingering over their coffee when Sylvie, answering a knock at the street door, brought back Flore Michelet in search of Blaise.
As he stood, Flore's brief cool smile acknowledged Rose as hostess. "Do you mind—? This character is rather elusive these days, though usually, I understand, to be found here with you." She turned to Blaise. "Sorry if I'm interrupting anything. But I want to talk to you," she said.
He sat again, stretched his legs. "Talk away. I'm all ears."
Flore did not take up the laconic invitation. "Privately," she emphasised. "Will you—?"
"No," said Blaise. "Here I am and here I stay until I take the girls out presently. What do you want ?"
But to that Flore's silence was so complete and her glance in the girls' direction so pointed that Rose said quickly, "It's all right, Blaise. We'll wait for you in the car," and went out, followed by Sylvie, neither of them recognising the moment for the fissure between yesterday and tomorrow which it was.
CHAPTER SEVEN
FOR a few days after that they saw nothing of Blaise, and when he came again Rose was out. On that occasion Sylvie worried that he hadn't seemed himself—"sort of odd, and rather offhand with me," she reported—an impression which Rosé pooh-poohed until his next visit to the shop, when it was she who was there alone without Sylvie.
For that time too Blaise was far from his breezy, debonair self. He first asked if Sylvie were about and made no secret of his relief that she wasn't. He was restless, pacing the small area of the shop in a quarterdeck march, chain-smoking and glowering moodily whenever Rose ignored him while she dealt with a customer. Until at last she was moved to teasing protest.
"You know, you're not being exactly one of our brighter advertisements this morning. What's wrong?" she asked him.
As she had expected he might, he snapped, "Wrong? Nothing !" But she persisted, "There is, and you know it. Sylvie does too. She says she wasn't very popular on Thursday, and obviously I'm not today. So come along. Give ! What is it ?"
"I tell you—nothing !" he insisted, then suddenly crumpled. "Oh, there is, of course. You had to know, and so had Sylvie, though how I'm going to—" He broke off. "Rose, have you ever known what it is to-
grow out of a person, in the way one grows out of clothes or daft crazes?"
Rose knew what he meant and said so, her heart sinking. "It's a pretty horrid experience," she said.
"Horrid ? It's abysmal, no less. To be entirely happy with someone one day, and the next—"
"It doesn't happen as suddenly as that !"
"All right. It may not happen suddenly. But it can dawn on you in a flash. Can't it ?" he appealed.
"And about Sylvie—for we're talking about Sylvie, aren't we ?—it flashed on you—when ?"
"Only since Sunday. I came down on Thursday, hoping it wasn't true and that seeing her— But you're right. It must have been happening for a long time, if I had let myself face it. I mean, she is sweet and appealing and as cuddlesome as a kitten. But that said, it's all said. And this flash I had told me it wasn't enough."
Rose declared loyally, "With regard to Sylvie, it's not 'all said.' Among a lot of other things she's brave and a good companion, and you ought to think yourself lucky that she likes you. Has come to like you too much, it seems—"
"I know. That's the devil of it." Wretchedly Blaise ground the heel of his hand between his brows. "At first I asked nothing better than that she should. She's the type that makes a chap come over all protective and chivalrous. But now that the whole thing has gone back on me, I just don't know how to put it to her. Rose, I suppose you couldn't—?"
"I certainly couldn't. If you're convinced of all this, it looks as if you're faced with the alternatives either of staying away until Sylvie realises something
is wrong, or of telling her in so many words that you're not serious. One way is cowardly, the other brutal; kinder in the end, but you can't expect her to appreciate that. Take your choice."
But Blaise took neither course. That morning he drifted away, grumbling that Rose was hard—"about as hard as a diamond," and when they met he said nothing definite to Sylvie. Nor did he noticeably avoid either of them, leaving Sylvie to sense the atmosphere of his changed feelings and Rose to agonise for her.
She wilted visibly before his casual brotherliness which now asked nothing special of her. Now he never took her alone to the shore, and unless Rose went out with them in the new car, they did not go. Until at last, for sheer pity, Rose felt she must do Blaise's ugly task for him, cushioning the truth as well as she could.
Sylvie pleaded piteously, "But why, Rose? Why?"
Rose gestured emptily. "I don't know, darling. I doubt if he could tell you. It's just that men—some men, that is—are like that."
"But not Blaise ! Not Blaise!"
It was a cry which Rose mentally echoed. For with all Blaise's faults, with all his outward caprice, she would have said that where he had set his heart's constancy, there it would stay. For instance, he had never yet shifted from his stand that he would do the work for which he knew he had talent or none at all, and she had thought that his swift, sure attraction to Sylvie had had the same quality of stubborn strength to it.
Sylvie went on, "If I only knew what I had said
or done or been I could bear it better. Shall I face up to him and ask him?"
Rose advised, "It would be more dignified not to. It isn't as if he had committed himself or made you any promises for the future. Or has he?"
"No. How could he, placed as he is for money? It's just that I thought that promises were—sort of—in the air, on both sides." Sylvie paused, biting her lip. "Rose, do you think Flore Michelet could have got at him that Sunday she came here? Perhaps put him off me by telling him something about me ?"
Rose said she was sure not. That day Blaise had been as unco-operative as he usually was with Flore, and what could Flore possibly know to Sylvie's detriment? Rose, however, kept to herself the real reason for her conviction—namely, that unless Flore was more double-faced than seemed credible, it was Rose, not Sylvie, in whom she claimed Blaise was interested, making unlikely an interference on her part between Blaise and Sylvie.
But Sylvie remained unconvinced that it was not some weakness or shortcoming or failure of her own against which Flore had warned Blaise, or he had warned himself before getting further involved with her. Somewhere she was to blame. But where? They were heart-searchings which took her into strange, dark places of doubt. As, for instance, her theory that probably Flore had only been a spokesman for Saint-Guy, who thought her 'not good enough' for even a cousinly connection with his family, so had sen
t Flore to Blaise to say so ... And again, on the night of her accident, when she had 'looked such a mess' and had disgraced herself by being sick in front of him, Blaise
could have seen the red light of invalidism in her then...
In such of her despairs every kindness, every gift, every motive was suspect. And not only Blaise's. Saint-Guy had given him the car as a bribe to wean him away from her ! And Blaise's spontaneous offerings—her birthday perfume, even the tape-recorder —had been just sops to his conscience before he escaped himself ! And in such moods Rose could not argue with her. She could only pity and comfort from such resources as she had.
Sylvie did something final with the perfume and Rose put away the tape-recorder, its last playback unheard. Sylvie declared she never wanted to see the wretched thing again and Blaise was discreet enough not to enquire why they never used it for amusement now.
Outwardly little had changed between the three of them, except that Rose felt herself to be cast as a buffer-state, rather than as gooseberry to the other two. For the enigma was that Blaise still seemed to be on hand as often, his help as willingly proffered, as when Sylvie had been the magnet which had drawn him to their flat and the shop. When he had shirked explanations to Sylvie, Rose had expected he would solve his dilemma by the male stratagem of escape. But he did not. And though she was tempted to suggest that he was not as welcome now as he had been, she refrained for a time, on the slender chance that he didn't know his own mind about Sylvie and that whatever had first pulled him into her orbit might work its magic for him again.
Inevitably Rose puzzled over Flore Michelet's groundless contention that it was she herself, not
Sylvie, who was the attraction for Blaise. Obviously it had never been so; if it were, Blaise had certainly missed his vocation as an actor ! Then why should Flore believe it to the point where she claimed it as a fact not worth the hazard of a bet?