“Are you going to be ashamed of me at table?”
“Indeed I hope not. You have natural good manners and should succeed admirably.”
“That is what I think,” said Gamaliel, smiling broadly.
With the inclusion of Ruby’s Barnaby Orme-Head, the seating arrangements had suffered some changes and Fiona and Maria had decided to dispense with the seat opposite Romula’s at the lower end of the table.
“It’s going to look so odd otherwise, madre,” explained Fiona. “We’ve given Maria the seat on your right, next to her we’ve put Mr. Orme-Head, then Diana, then Gamaliel, next to him Ruby (who is nearest his age) and then Parsifal.”
“On the other side of the table,” said Maria, “next to you we’ve put Garnet, then Fiona and next to her are the two children. The boy Quentin will be opposite his mother so that she can keep an eye on him, and Rupert is to be next to the little girl to fulfil the same purpose. The children go to a very good boarding-school, so they should not be too uncouth. Bluebell is to neighbour Rupert and that concludes the seating arrangements.”
“Oh, well, I suppose it will have to do,” said Romula. “You seem to have given thought to the matter.” She looked older than her seventy-five years, a cossetted, selfish woman dependent upon others just as much as they were dependent upon her. “I would have preferred to have Fiona next to me rather than Garnet.”
“It would make the party less symmetrical, madre, that’s all, but just as you wish,” said Fiona. “I have no desire to sit between Garnet and a fidgety little boy, I assure you.”
“Oh no, let be, let be. Who is this Gamaliel? Is he Jewish? Will the food suit him? I believe they have fads.”
“Oh, no, he is not Jewish, madre,” said Fiona, when she had exchanged glances with Maria. “He is an orphan whom Parsifal and Blue adopted some years ago.”
The introduction of Gamaliel when he arrived provided something of a sensation.
“But he’s black!” Romula exclaimed, leaning heavily upon her silver-topped ebony stick and gazing astoundedly upon the comely youth.
“Black is beautiful,” said Gamaliel. “Do you not think so, dear old Mrs. Leyden? I like old ladies. They also are beautiful.”
“You are a very astonishing young man,” said Romula. “I will have you next to me at table.”
The rearranged seating at table proved not unsatisfactory so far as most of those present were concerned. Fiona and Maria saw no reason for giving the music teacher a place next to Romula, so Maria remained on her right with Barnaby next and Diana on the other side of him.
Fiona was opposite him and next to her sat Garnet, so that she was between him and Gamaliel who, although mindful of the table manners which Bluebell had been at pains to teach him, still managed to entertain his hostess in his own way.
“Have you ever been mugged, dear old lady?” he enquired. “After dinner I will show you what to do if it ever happens to you. Also I have a manual on karate. I will lend it to you and then you will be safe under any circumstances. I will teach you the killer chop. You may not use it in competitions, of course, but it can be a very good thing to know.”
“Does your pupil make the progress you would wish, Mr. Orme-Head?” asked Diana in the voice she kept for what might be termed state occasions.
“Oh, yes, indeed,” the shock-headed young man replied. “She works hard, practises assiduously and is unusually gifted.”
“How nice,” said Diana, dismissing him in her mind (despite his handsome appearance) as a stuffed shirt and abandoning her intention of flirting with him. This had been intended to stimulate Garnet, who appeared to be having an absorbing conversation with Fiona, punctuated, to Diana’s envious fury, by laughter.
Meanwhile, Gamaliel was consolidating his position with the giver of the feast.
“Do you believe that women are superior to men?” he asked Romula.
“No. I think the sexes complement one another.”
“Women are superior. They give birth.”
“Well they most certainly could not do that without the help of men in the first place.”
“The Virgin Mary did, if you believe the story. Suppose I had not been born? What a tragedy! Do you think white is superior to black?”
“Mrs. Leyden will be in trouble if she says so,” said Maria with heavy humour. “You might invoke the Race Relations Board, Gamaliel, and they are a sensitive body.”
“Ham, Shem and Japheth were brothers. Black, yellow and white, but Ham seems to come first and he was black,” said Gamaliel. “Three kings came from the east, too, black, yellow, white. They brought gold, frankincense and myrrh. Gold comes first. Gold is black. Black is beautiful.”
“Get on with your dinner, or you will be less than equal with the rest of us; you will be all behind,” said Maria.
“So you believe all men are equal,” said Gamaliel, obediently shovelling food into his mouth. “Does God believe that?”
“Of course He does,” said Maria stiffly.
“Then God must be cross-eyed. All men are not equal. I am not equal. I am a prince. Mrs. Leyden is not equal. She is very rich. Muhammad Ali is not equal. He is the best boxer in the world. Who wants to be equal? Only those who cannot be superior.”
“Then I think I must be one of those,” said Maria.
“Your black boy is only keeping madame amused, I hope. She is not likely to take him up to any serious extent, is she?” said Ruby to Parsifal. “She likes playthings, and that is what he is.”
Parsifal, always diffident and unsure of himself, wondered whether to ask the obvious question and then discovered that there was no need.
“I began by being one of her playthings myself,” Ruby went on, “but I don’t mind that, so long as I get what I want in the end.”
“And what is that?”
“A first class musical education and then, when I am ready, a proper launching. She has the money and I have the talent. People think I suck up to her for what I hope she’ll leave me when she dies, but it isn’t that. I only need her backing. The money will go to her family, as it should.”
“Do you really think along those lines?”
“Fiona thinks she stands a chance,” Ruby went on, her pert little face settling to a hard stare as she caught Rupert’s sardonic eye across the table and realised that he had heard every word of the conversation, “but I could tell her something different. Do you want to hear it too?” she said to Rupert.
“Eat up your chicken, Millament,” said Rupert, transferring his attention to his daughter. “You’re messing about with it.”
“I like chicken alive, not dead,” said Millament. “Can’t I have some more of those little sausages?”
“They’re made from dead pigs,” said Quentin. “Dead pigs with maggots in them.”
“Be quiet, Quentin! Don’t be disgusting,” said his mother from further down the table.
“Oh, Lord!” said Ruby. “Bloody kids!”
“Black is beautiful,” said Gamaliel. “Maggots are not.”
“Has anyone noticed that we are thirteen at table?” asked Parsifal, desperately changing the subject. Everybody except Maria and Fiona, both of whom already knew the score, took a hasty glance around.
“Dear me!” said Romula. “These superstitions! Only the weak-minded would pay any heed to them. Well, they can clear now and the men can have their port while we repair to the withdrawing-room.” She made as though to rise.
Gamaliel seized her arm. “Not you!” he said. “Let somebody else be first!”
Ruby skipped along to Barnaby. “You don’t want any nasty old port. Let’s go out and look at the sea, maestro,” she said.
“Not just now, Ruby,” said Romula. “Mr. Orme-Head has to get home.”
“Oh, yes, rather!” agreed Barnaby, who had done full justice to the dinner and the wine. “I had better be moving.”
“Well, you have your port,” said Romula kindly, “and then pop in for some coffee if you would li
ke it. You have a long journey and will be doing some of it after dark as it is. I am never very happy about motor cycles at the best of times and after dark they are extremely dangerous. You have to get to the outskirts of London, I believe.”
“Well, not exactly, no. I’m staying with a friend in Exeter.”
“Well, have your glass of port and then we will say goodbye to you for the present. The withdrawing-room, Ruby.”
Ruby pouted, but followed the other women out of the dining-room.
“Really, mother!” said Maria, when they were seated and the maid had served coffee. “That was rather cool of you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was worse than cool; it was very uncivil of me,” Romula agreed, “but if I had not made myself plain he would have stayed on. There is family business to attend to when the men join us. You, Diana, had better run your children home. It must be past their bedtime. Rupert can tell you what is said.”
“Rupert needs the car as much as I and the children do. At what time shall I return and pick him up?”
“Oh, whenever you like, of course.”
“Better still, if madre doesn’t mind, and to save you the extra journey, we can put him up here for tonight and Lunn can run him home in the morning,” said Fiona. “Is that all right, madre?”
The children were not anxious to leave, as it was clear that Gamaliel was to stay for coffee, but Diana, accepting dismissal, ushered them out. Gamaliel, who had opened the door for her, returned to the room and seated himself on the floor at Romula’s feet. As though she were unaware of what she was doing, she grasped a handful of his springy hair and rubbed it gently through her fingers. Gamaliel leaned back so that he was resting half against her chair and half against her knee. Fiona said: “You’re rather a big boy to be sitting on the floor.”
“St. Paul sat at the feet of Gamaliel,” said the black youth. “Now Gamaliel sits at the feet of his great grandmother.”
“I hope she feels complimented,” said Fiona, laughing. Romula gave Gamaliel’s thick hair an affectionate little tug before she took her hand away.
“It may surprise you to know that I do feel complimented,” she said.
“I am very pleased to hear it, grandmamma,” said Bluebell. “Well, it is getting late.”
“Oh, Lunn will drive you home,” said Maria, as the men came in. “Mother said she had family business to discuss, so you must stay a little longer.”
“I thought I had,” said Romula, taking up another handful of Gamaliel’s hair, “but I believe I am too tired and, in any case, it is more than time this young man was in bed. He may be of heroic stature, but he is still at the stage of growth. Goodnight, Gamaliel. Goodnight to the rest of you.”
Gamaliel rose to his feet in a fluid, effortless movement and stood to face her. “Goodnight, dear old lady,” he said. He made the appropriate gestures as he concluded. “My hand, my head, and my heart at your feet.”
“Well!” said Maria that night at bedtime to Fiona, pausing with her fingers on the handle of her bedroom door. “This is a nice state of affairs, I must say! Not a word of her intentions and that black boy literally the nigger in the woodpile! Besides, what on earth induced you to call her bluff about putting Rupert up for the night? She had to agree, but she won’t forgive you for that. No wonder she changed her mind about making any disclosures!”
“If he had not been asked to stay the night, Diana would have had to come back for him. I had no ulterior motive in getting him to stay,” protested Fiona.
Maria made no comment on this obvious lie.
“Mother is still downstairs,” she said. “Perhaps she wants to speak to me alone. I think I will go and find out.”
CHAPTER 3
Headlands
Because neither of them was related by ties of blood to Romula and because both of them were her dependents, Fiona and Ruby maintained an uneasy truce and were even, in some respects, in one another’s confidence.
On the morning after the dinner party both rose early and walked over to the stables where, without previous arrangement, they met.
Ruby arrived first. She greeted the groom: “Morning, Mattie. How’s tricks?”
“You’d better take Brutus this morning. He can do with a gallop. Great doings up at the house, I hear. Seem Redruth was ferrying folks there and yon all day.”
“Yes, we had a family get-together.”
Owing to their having shared a common background in that both had attended the same State school, although Ruby from an orphanage and Mattie by bus from her village home, there was a free-and-easiness still between the two young women, for Ruby was afraid of Mattie and dared not put on airs and graces in her presence.
“What’s new, then?” Mattie enquired, as she led Brutus out.
“What’s new,” said Ruby, “is that, unless we all take care, that black boy the other lot adopted is going to scoop the pool.”
“Oh, yes? How come, then?”
“Mrs. Leyden has taken a fancy to him.”
“She took a fancy to me once. Wanted me to go in for show jumping or eventing or something of that. ‘My neck’s my own,’ ” I said. “ ‘I’ll break it my way, not yours.’ ”
“This wretched boy is playing up to her.”
“Not to worry. She’ll see through him in time if that’s what he’s up to.”
“She hasn’t seen through me yet.”
“That’s different. She’s got ambitions for you and I reckon they’re the same as you got for yourself.”
At this point Fiona turned up at the stables. Mattie, who was facing that way, had seen her leave the house. But for her breeches and boots, Fiona would have walked well, but in her riding clothes she needed to be in the saddle before she became graceful once more, thought Mattie.
“Hullo,” Fiona said, coming up to the other two. “Oh, I see Ruby is taking Brutus. What do I get, Mattie?”
“Emperor. You’re longer in the leg than Ruby.”
“I’d rather have Clytie.”
“I had her out yesterday. Emperor needs a run. You’ll find him frisky. Don’t let him gallop you over the edge of the cliff.”
“That’ll be the day.” Fiona mounted and soon put the good-looking horse to a canter over the downland turf. The June morning was fresh and cool at that early hour, but there was a mist over the sea which gave promise of heat to come.
There was half a mile of level ground before the cliff-top dipped between the two headlands. The canter changed to a gallop, but as they approached the downward slope Fiona pulled up. The horse tossed his head and snorted, but otherwise stood steadily enough while his rider looked southward at the sea.
Far beyond her, the headland called Scar Point, craggy, dark, and forbidding, stretched out its long neck towards a single rocky island. Around this the sea creamed and snarled. When, letting the reins fall slack, Fiona turned sideways in the saddle to look back, the great bulk of St. Oleg’s Head stood guard over one of the many tiny coves by which the surf-thundering waters encroached, as far as the rock-coast would allow them, upon the turf-clothed land.
On the cliff-top clumps of gorse hid rabbit burrows. Rabbit droppings and those of the downland sheep were everywhere. A solitary Scots pine, either an invader or the last sentinel left behind by an army of trees long gone, was growing almost on the edge of the cliff. The wide, unbroken sky was too nebulous and pale to be called blue and, so early in the morning, there was no distinction to be drawn between it and the misty sea, for the vague horizon could not be defined. A herring gull swooped, dipped, and glided, and then took powerful wing towards the tiny harbour where the fishing boats came in.
There was the regular rhythmic drumming from the hoofs of a cantering horse and then Ruby reined in beside Fiona and said: “I want to talk to you.”
“This is neither the time nor the place. I’m out for a ride, not an argument.”
“You know how difficult it is to hold private conversations up at the house. Madame cal
ls it ‘whispering in corners.’ I suppose being so rich makes her suspicious when two of her hangers-on start getting together and going into a huddle.”
“You may be a hanger-on; in fact I think you are one. I happen to work for what I get.”
Ruby was not prepared to take umbrage. “Look, I know you don’t like me very much,” she said.
“Sometimes, and this is one of them, I don’t like you at all. I suppose you want to talk about last night,” said Fiona, regretfully resigned to abandoning her contemplation of cliffs, island, sea, and sky.
“Well, you and I are in the same boat, you know,” said Ruby placatingly.
“I am rather particular about my shipmates.”
“Until the boat begins to founder. People are glad enough of them then, if only as companions in distress, which I reckon we are.”
“I don’t envisage any distress.”
“Then there’s something wrong with your eyesight. Madame talked nothing but family last night and has obviously taken a fancy to that black boy, into the bargain.”
“Well, he is family, I suppose. It’s a legal adoption and he counts as Bluebell’s son.”
“The little beast was sucking up to Madame the whole evening.”
“No, I don’t believe it was that. I think they simply got on well together. I was watching them.”
“You know how easily she’s flattered.”
“I have no doubt you do.”
“You won’t gain anything by quarrelling with me. We’ve got to get together and protect our interests.”
“Look, Ruby, I am not quarrelling, neither am I a gold-digger. This question of gain is as unimportant to me as it seems to be obsessive with you.”
“You’ll find it important enough when Headlands is sold up and whichever one of them has been left the property slings us out on our ear. Wake up! We’ve got to do something about it,” said Ruby.
Mingled With Venom (Mrs. Bradley) Page 3