Time of the Temptress

by Violet Winspear

  "Nonsense." Charles Derrington had lit a fat cigar and puffed smoke with that self-confident air of his, as if, Eve thought, Victoria was still on the throne and England was still a mighty empire with nothing to fear from anyone. "With all our faults, Mr. Mitchell, we're a civilised nation of people and could never commit the atrocities on each other that these--er--foreigners are committing."

  "What about Belfast?" Larry had asked, and Eve had seen a very grim look come to his face when he mentioned that strife-torn city.

  "The Irish are hot-headed," her guardian had replied. "Always have been, always will be."

  "I've a bit of Irish in me," Larry had said, and Eve smiled to herself as she recalled the look which her guardian had directed at the tall, dark-haired trainee doctor, whose eyes of light grey were so darkly fringed. Since Charles had given in reluctantly to her insistence that she wouldn't be forced into marriage with James, he seemed to regard every young man who came to Lakeside as her prospective bridegroom. He had very nearly lost her to illness eighteen months ago and since then he had been far less demanding and autocratic. She was all he had, for Charles Derrington had never felt the urge to marry, and they had been closer to each other since those days and nights of restless fever and pain, culminating in a fearsomely poisoned arm which she had very nearly lost.

  She felt Larry moving his thumb against her skin, and very gently but firmly she drew away from him. She liked him and was glad they had met at the St. Saviour's dance, where she worked as a nursing aide, but she [149-150] wasn't in love with him . . . not yet, at least. Somehow Eve felt no inclination to fall in love, she merely wanted to be of use and to enjoy her leisure hours with genial companions.

  A capped and aproned maid wheeled in a trolley, with a silver teapot and bone china tea-service laid out on a lace cloth. Everything in Charles Derrington's house was run in a very gracious and conventional manner; in Eve's eyes the old dear was hopelessly old-fashioned and one of the few people these days who was able to command absolute old-world loyalty from those he employed.

  "That looks lovely, Hilda," she said to the maid. There were thinly sliced cucumber sandwiches, fruit scones and strawberry tarts. "Thank you."

  The maid gave a bob and withdrew, and Larry stood there shaking his head in amazement. "I feel each time I come to Lakeside as if I'm transported back into the Thirties. I believe that's when your guardian decided to stop the clock."

  "It's possible." Eve gave a laugh and gestured to him to take a seat. "And do help yourself to sandwiches."

  Larry sat down in a deep armchair and watched Eve as she poured the tea, adding the cream and sugar they both liked. The sun through the long windows found red lights in her hair, which was a careless cascade on her shoulders, a foxfire contrast to her smooth honey skin. When she handed him his cup he looked into her eyes, a deep topaz, lovely and seemingly untroubled.

  "Are you Irish on your father's side?" she asked, leaning back with her own cup of tea, and feeling very much at ease in his company.

  "No, my mother's." He sipped his tea appreciatively. "She came from County Mayo and still has a brogue, [150-151] and some of their special sort of charm with a dash of the devil mixed in. I suspect I have some of that in me, for I enjoy locking horns with your guardian."

  Eve gave a chuckle. "He's mellowed with age, believe me. There was a time when he might have thrown you out on your ear for daring to oppose his conservative ideas. But I believe he rather likes you, Larry."

  "Do you like me?" Larry's eyes grew beguiling in his lean face. "I've never met a girl like you, Eve. It isn't only that you're lovely, but you have a kind of gallantry about you--you don't have to work at the hospital doing and seeing things that aren't very pleasant, yet you do it cheerfully and even seem to get a kick out of it. I believe there's a core of steel inside that sweet cool body of yours."

  "Just listen to the blarney," she mocked. "I work because it would drive me mad with boredom to sit about the house, arrange the roses and go to card-parties in the afternoons. I need the stimulation of a job, and I once made myself useful at a mission run by nuns."

  "That was out in Africa, wasn't it?" He bit into a sandwich and regarded her slim, charming figure with amazed eyes, as if she seemed too young to have packed into her life that kind of experience, from which she had returned a very sick person, even yet unable to recall all the details of her escape from Tanga.

  "Yes--Africa." Eve frowned and felt again that elusive memory that seemed always to be fretting the edge of her outward content. "I was with the nuns and somehow we got away--someone got us away."

  "It must have been frightening for you--Eve, what made you go out there in the first place, knowing there was trouble brewing?"

  "A man," she laughed. "I didn't want to marry him, so [151-152] I ran away--it's like something out of a true-hearts serial, isn't it?"

  "You mean you were expected to marry him regardless of your feelings--a girl like you?" Larry's eyes held a sudden blaze. "You'd have to love and be loved--madly."

  "Love?" She nibbled a scone. "I think love is a barrel of honey and broken glass."

  "How uncomfortable you make it sound!" Larry gave her a curious look, slightly laced with jealousy. "Are you speaking from experience?"

  Eve stared beyond the windows towards the trees, for at this end of the lounge they looked on to the lake and there the tall green and gold willows were thick . . . almost jungle-thick. "I don't know," she said. "I have some odd mental blanks left from that time I was ill, and then I ask myself if it's possible for love to be forgotten if we've ever experienced it. What do you think?"

  "If love had been painful for you, then you might want to forget it," he replied.

  "Yes," she nodded. "Perhaps the man didn't love me in return, but all the same it's provoking not to remember. Don't we shut from our minds our unbearable sins and our equally unbearable sacrifices?"

  "Sensitive people might." Larry leaned forward and searched her face with his grey eyes, and Eve found herself staring into those eyes and feeling again that odd, elusive flicker of remembrance. "I think you're one of the most sensitive girls I've ever met, and possibly one of the most passionate--curiously enough those two go hand in hand."

  "Passion and sensitivity?" she murmured.

  "The ability to feel a high degree of emotion either [152-153] way," he said. "The trouble is I can't imagine what kind of man could let you go if he knew you cared for him. He'd have to be--ruthless."

  "Ruthless," she echoed, and then she gave a slight, almost cynical smile. "I think love is a small harbour on the borderland of dreamland, and that's all I'm doing, I'm dreaming there was something when there was nothing. Have a strawberry tart. They're homemade and delicious."

  "Thanks," he took one and bit into it. "Are you happy, Eve?"

  She considered his question, slim legs curled beneath her on the couch. "I think I must be, Larry. I have a nice home, a guardian who no longer treats me as if I were an Edwardian box of candy to be handed to the most suitable suitor, and I'm interested in my hospital work. I think I'm reasonably content with my life. What about you, Larry?"

  "I'm doing the work I've always wanted to do, and I've had the good luck to meet you, Eve. You often invite me to Lakeside and I'm wondering if one day you'll come and meet my people? They live in London, near Regent's Gate, and they'd be terribly pleased to meet you. I could drive you up in that little bus of mine, if you'll agree to come."

  Eve considered his invitation and was just slightly worried by it. She didn't want Larry to get serious about her, yet on the other hand it would seem unkind if she refused to meet his family.

  "Do say you'll come," he coaxed. "I have a free afternoon next Sunday and if the weather stays like this it will make a nice run into London, and my little bus isn't too bad. I was lucky to get it--had a rather generous [153-154] birthday cheque all the way from Morocco."

  "Morocco?" Eve looked intrigued. "Have you a relative out there?"

  He
nodded and his eyes filled with an eagerness that was boyish. "It's my mother's cousin. He's been quite a rover in his time, and now he's settled down to produce citrus fruits on this rather tumbledown estate he took over about nine months ago. He seems to be making it work, which doesn't surprise me, for he's that sort of man. Hard in some ways, but you could trust him with your life. I--I can't help admitting I'm fond of him, apart from which he helped with my education--sent money so that my people could let me train to be a doctor. My dad is a train driver, you see. He loves the work, but no one pretends they earn a fortune, so the money always came in handy."

  "I think I like the sound of your family, Larry." Eve had suddenly made up her mind. "I'd love to meet your parents--I've always been fascinated by train drivers."

  He grinned, a long line slashing itself in his left cheek, making her stare at him and think how attractive he was--youthful-looking, of course, but in a few years' time he'd be quite a man.

  "I'll pick you up about noon next Sunday and we'll go to lunch with Ma and Pa, if you'd like that. Roast beef, batter pudding and baked potatoes--you can't do Dad out of his Sunday traditional."

  "Sounds lovely," she said warmly, and leaning forward on impulse she pressed Larry's hand with hers, moving back adroitly when he would have caught her fingers to his lips. Eve shook her head at him. "Friends don't get soppy, and I want us to be friends--for now."

  "Leaving me with a little margin for hope?" he quizzed her.

  [154-155] "You're young, Larry, and the world is full of girls. Some of those nurses at St. Saviour's are very attractive in their uniforms, especially in that blue cape with the little chain across the throat."

  "None of them can touch you," he rejoined, running his eyes over her hair and face. "You have something extra--a little air of mystery, I think."

  Eve laughed and went to the piano, where she sat down and began to play a dated but still tuneful melody of a romantic era lost down the pages of time . . . I'll see you again, whenever spring breaks through again . . . Eve didn't know why it haunted her, but somehow it did. Then with a careless laugh, she broke into a more modern tune and said over her shoulder to Larry:

  "If you're off duty this evening we could go and dance at the Beach Club. At least the band plays civilised, schmaltzy music."

  "I'd like that." He was standing right behind her and she tensed. "Play that other tune again--that more sentimental one. It's a Noël Coward song, isn't it?"

  "Yes, and hopelessly sentimental."

  "Rather lovely, I thought. You often play it, don't you? Is it a favourite of your guardian's?"

  "Good lord, no!" Eve laughed at the mere idea. "Charles is an ardent fan of Leonard Bernstein and he deplores my fondness for the light stuff, as he calls it. Charles likes a full orchestra playing something very deep and complicated--he considers my taste in music, books and drama very flighty considering what he spent on my education. Dear Charles, he really should have had a daughter of his own who might have taken after him, as it is he's landed with me."

  "He's a lucky man," Larry murmured, and though she had warned him not to kiss her, he suddenly leaned [155-156] down and brushed his lips across the top of her head. "I wish I could take you dancing, Eve, but I've got to get back and sign in for some emergency duty, and you know what Saturday night can be like when the football crowds are in town. But it is definite about next Sunday, isn't it? It's a firm promise?"

  She turned round on the piano bench to look at him, seeing a lock of dark hair across his forehead and something in his face that made her study him before she replied, unaware that a little sadness shaded her mouth for a moment.

  "Yes, a firm promise," she said. "Have you got to go now?"

  He glanced at his wristwatch and nodded, twisting his mouth and giving her a wistful look. "You're a temptress, Eve, but duty calls and I've just twenty minutes to make it to the hospital. Noon on Sunday, and it won't come quick enough for me!"

  "Nor me," she smiled, and saw him to the front steps, where his small low-slung car was waiting for him. He swung in behind the wheel and she waved him goodbye, watching until the yellow car swung out of the gates on to the main road. It was quiet after Larry had left and Eve began to stroll in the direction of the garden, where the bright roses were entangled in rays of sunlight, and where the leaves scarcely stirred in the warmth of the afternoon. Suddenly she felt faintly depressed and the scent of the roses seemed to add to her feeling of . . . now what kind of a feeling was it? She paused and put out a hand to touch a rose, which broke and scattered its petals the moment her fingers came in contact with its velvety loveliness.

  She watched the petals drift to the path . . . love might be like that, she thought. One moment a glowing [156-157] thing in the sunshine, and the next a sad little heap of memories.

  Loss . . . yes, that was what she felt. Could it be that saying goodbye to Larry had induced this feeling in her? Was she growing fonder of him than she had realised, or thought wise? He was very genuine, good company and most attractive in a lean dark way, but he was younger than she, not only by a year, but in other ways . . . emotional ways.

  She wandered on towards the lake, cool and shiimmering and faintly dyed with red as the sun began to decline in the sky above the willows. She leaned against a tree and rubbed the forefinger of her left hand against the scar down the side of her thumb.

  She wished it would all come back to her, what had happened to her in Africa, but all she knew from her guardian, and it seemed he had got his information from the flight crew of the plane on which she had travelled home to England, was that a rough-looking soldier had carried her through the gunfire and the burning streets of Tanga and after seeing her safely aboard the aircraft had vanished into the raging noise and confusion of a town under siege. He had safety-pinned a note on Eve's shirt telling the crew her name and where she lived, but beyond this they knew nothing of the man, and Eve often wished she could have found a way to thank him. When she had tried to contact Sister Mercy and the other nuns she had received the shattering reply that they had been killed when a shell had landed on the mission where they had been working in Tanga . . . Eve had wept when she received such sad news about those kind, brave, self-sacrificing women.

  Why, Eve wondered, her gaze on the darkening lake, [157-158] did kindness and goodness have to be so cruelly rewarded? Or was it true that the pure in soul found their haven high up there beyond all the clouds, all the sorrows? She hoped so, and further hoped that somewhere that rough-looking soldier was still alive and hadn't perished in the fighting at Tanga.

  Peace was now restored there under the new President, and Eve hoped it would last and the wild loveliness of Africa could flourish again and the wonderful birds and beasts return to their old haunts, to fish and hunt and stretch tawny in the sun.

  Oh lord, she was getting hopelessly nostalgic and had better return to the house before those silly tears started up again. She had no reason to cry . . . her guardian was good to her, and on Sunday she was driving to London with Larry to meet new people and exchange fresh ideas. Life was good, and she thrust away from her that strange shadow that sometimes seemed to haunt her . . . a memory that wouldn't take shape much as she tried to clothe it, to give it shape and form and words.

  She shrugged and entered the house, to breathe cigar smoke and hear the sound of masculine voices in the study, where the door was partially open. She peered in and there was Charles with a couple of his business friends, and she was about to withdraw when he noticed her.

  "Eve, there you are, child. Been playing tennis, eh? Come along in and meet Stephen Carlisle, who is over here from New York to buy up all the best paintings at Christie's. And you know Tyler, of course."

  "Hullo, Tyler," she smiled at one of her guardian's oldest friends, and held out her hand to the tall American, who had one of those ugly-attractive faces in the [158-159] Abraham Lincoln tradition. As he shook hands with her, his brown eyes ran over her slim, white-clad figure and her hair t
hat had a foxfire gleam under the lights of the study.

  "When I say it's a pleasure to meet you, Miss Derrington, I mean it."

  "Thank you," she said, wriggling her fingers which he held on to. "But I'm the ward of the house, not the daughter, and my surname is Tarrant."

  "I see." He smiled, showing big strong American teeth. "Is that Miss Tarrant?"

  "It is." She cast an appealing glance at Charles. "Do tell your friend that I'd like my hand back so I can go and change for dinner."

  But her guardian chuckled and looked rather pleased with himself as he drew on his cigar. Ah, thought Eve, so the American was wealthy and Charles was match-making again. Well, that wouldn't do, for Eve had already decided that if she was going to let love into her life, then she couldn't do better than let her friendship with Larry Mitchell grow into something warmer and closer. There was something about Larry . . . the more she saw of him the more he appealed to her. She wished of course that he was older, but they had plenty of time to develop their relationship, and with him she'd be a companion rather than a possession.

  Stephen Carlisle looked the type who would regard a woman as he regarded the paintings he bought, something to be owned and admired, but whose opinions would be disregarded. Eve made a determined effort and pulled free of his handclasp. She saw his thick eyebrows pull together and she knew she was right about him . . . he was the arrogant, rather humourless type [159-160] who thought his money made him irresistible.

  "I must excuse myself right after dinner," she told Charles. "I have a date at the Beach Club."

  "Surely you can break it?" he said, giving her a slight frown. "If it's with young Larry Mitchell, then he'll forgive you."

  "You underestimate Larry," she replied, uncaring that she had told a white lie in order to escape the further attentions of Stephen Carlisle; she'd drive to the club, for there was always someone there whom she knew and could dance with. "Larry is very strong-willed Charles. He's taking me to meet his parents on Sunday."