Near Neighbours

by Molly Clavering

  “But, of course, it’s only his dancing,” she thought. “Poor young man!” And she sighed for Angus Todd’s sake.

  “Tired, Dorothea?” asked Monty, hopefully, hearing the sigh. This time she answered him, agreed that it was time they left, and after thanking the Lenox girls and Murray, they went quietly home to bed.

  CHAPTER 11

  The two cousins, Adam and Charles Ferrier, walked home in companionable silence to the top flat in one of the windy crescents north of the Haymarket Station where they lived with Adam’s mother.

  Not even to each other had they ever given, as their real reason for staying on in Lyon Place, their fear that Mrs. Ferrier might die of a broken heart if left by herself. They were mistaken in this, human hearts being a great deal tougher than is generally supposed, but the motive was a good one, and Mrs. Ferrier, who had guessed it almost before they did, smiled and sighed, and said, “Bless them, the silly dears!”

  She always thought of them together: the boys, or the dears, she made no difference between her son and her husband’s nephew. Charles had been no more than a baby when his parents were killed in a car accident; she had come to consider him as a son, and he and Adam had been brought up together. Besides, it had been Charles’ father, Will Ferrier, whom she had loved. Only after he came back from winter sports in Austria engaged to an English girl whom he had met there did she take any notice of Will’s brother David. She had married David a few months after Will’s own marriage, and the two boys had been born within six weeks of one another. . . . She had been very happy with David, happier, probably, than she would have been as Will’s wife. It had been a quiet increasing happiness which did not die when David died, though it had been towards the end of the War, with both the boys away in the Army, and she had been alone.

  Somehow David seemed to be not very far from her, just waiting for her to catch up with him, not wanting her to be miserable. So she continued to serve on the various committees to which she belonged, and she went on playing bridge.

  And the boys had come back and settled down to work, Adam at medicine and then surgery, which had been his ambition since childhood, Charles to take his S.S.C. and W.S. exams, and into the family firm of Watson and Ferrier, where he was now a partner.

  The boys were dears, Mrs. Ferrier told herself, and if they seemed a little too serious and well-behaved, so that at times they were almost dull, the world they had grown up in and the War they had helped to fight were the causes.

  Adam and Charles had no idea that there was anything lacking in the lighter side of their lives, and Mrs. Ferrier’s delight on hearing that they were going out to a party made them laugh.

  “A pity that Aunt Maud couldn’t have gone with us this evening,” Charles said. “She’d have loved it.”

  Adam was not so sure. “Don’t you think she might have found it a bit—well—childish?”

  “Perhaps. But she likes gaiety and there was plenty of that. I like your Lenoxes, Adam.”

  “Oh, they’re not mine!” Adam began in a hurry. “This evening’s the first time I’ve been to the house—”

  “Don’t be so infernally literal,” Charles begged him. “You know quite well what I mean. What’s the name of your one? Hazel? It suits her. She’s a real nut-brown maid.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t go on talking about ‘my’ one like that,” growled Adam. “I just happen to know her because she’s on the staff in Orthopaedic Out-Patients. She’s a sensible sort of girl.”

  “I doubt if she’d thank you for describing her like that.”

  “Well, she is sensible. You can take her out without giving her the idea that you’re crazy about her,” said Adam. “Not like the Rennie. She thinks that a visit to the pictures is bound to end in bed.”

  “It might—with her, though sometimes with those red-heads their hair is the most passionate thing about them.”

  “What do you know about red-heads?” demanded Adam, suspiciously.

  “Not a great deal. My knowledge is largely theoretical,” Charles said with regret. “Never mind about them. What I want to know,” said Charles, “is—why don’t you get cracking and do something about this girl, Hazel? However sensible you think her, she may have hankerings after romance, and some other fellow will come along ready to provide it—and you’ll find you’ve lost her.”

  Adam said nothing, and Charles was beginning to curse himself for having said too much, when Adam burst out:

  “Damn it! I’ve always meant to steer clear of marriage. It would play hell with my work—”

  “Wedded to your scalpel? Well, then, that’s all right. You don’t need to bother,” said Charles. “As long as the girl understands. But it’s up to you to see that she does.”

  “Oh, I know you think I’m a cold-blooded fish!” said Adam, stung by his cousin’s carefully expressionless tone. “But since I’ve got to know Hazel I don’t know what to do, and that’s the truth. I suppose I’m in love with her—and it’s playing hell with my work. You need to be single-minded and single-hearted to be a surgeon, Charles. Or so I believe. And I don’t seem to see my way out of this at all.”

  Genuine perplexity and distress sounded in his voice, and Charles did not know what to say. How could one give sensible advice to Adam?

  Between these two was a deep-rooted undemonstrative affection of which they never thought consciously, and which they would have been horribly ashamed to show. Charles could not understand Adam’s feelings about marriage and his job, because he could not share them, but he could understand that the problem was a real one to Adam.

  Feeling extremely inadequate to the occasion, Charles said:

  “If you feel like that, there’s nothing for it but to carry on and see how things work out. Only I think you ought to tell Hazel.”

  “It sounds so—so bloody condescending!” muttered Adam. “As if I knew she was fond of me and wanted to warn her off!”

  “Well, that’s more or less the case, isn’t it? But you can put it on general lines and leave the personal element out,” said Charles. “And now, here we are, so you’d better be ready to tell Aunt Maud about the party. I can’t say you look much like a returned reveller.”

  “I don’t feel like one,” Adam retorted crossly, as they went up the long stairs to their flat.

  But he pulled himself together sufficiently to reply to his mother’s opening question, “Was it a good party, dears?” so calmly and cheerfully that Mrs. Ferrier knew at once that there was something the matter.

  “I think I’ll go to bed,” Adam said, and having kissed his mother and nodded to Charles, went off.

  “Did you enjoy it, Charles?” asked Mrs. Ferrier, hopefully.

  “Very much indeed, Aunt Maud,” Charles said. He went and stood with one arm on the mantelpiece, and looked down at the great sheaf of green leaves with which Mrs. Ferrier filled the sitting-room grate in summer. “It was great fun. I liked the young Lenoxes. The son has just done his National Service and is working for his C.A., and there are three extremely attractive girls. There are four girls all told, but the youngest is away with her mother just now.”

  “Mrs. Lenox wasn’t there?”

  “No, but the eldest daughter is married. Willow. She was doing chaperon—if one is needed nowadays. In any case, Miss Balfour—you know who I mean—lives next door, and was there too. It was all perfectly correct.”

  “I’m sure it was,” said Mrs. Ferrier, stifling a sigh. It sounded just as dull as everything that young people did in these times, dull and decorous!

  Presently, Mrs. Ferrier remarked that Willow was a most unusual name, whereupon Charles told her that the others were called Hazel and Rowan. Willow, he said, was the prettiest, but rather empty-headed. The other two were not like that. And he added, casually:

  “Hazel is on the staff at the Empress. She was the one who asked Adam to go this evening, and to bring me.”

  “Oh, is she? Did she? And you liked her, Charles?” murmured Mrs. Ferrier. �
�Well, I am glad you had such a nice evening, darling.”

  “And you can’t help thinking it sounds terribly dreary and like a Sunday School treat,” Charles said teasingly.

  “You are far too clever for me, dear Charles,” said his aunt, serenely.

  “Not I. You can run rings round me, and you know it,” he said.

  And before she could think of a retort, he had kissed her affectionately, told her not to sit up too late, and gone to bed.

  A tune was running through his head as he undressed, and at last he found himself whistling it.

  When he recognized it he frowned, remembering. It was the old air called “Whistle o’er the lave o’t”, to which Angus Todd, the dark, sullen youngster had danced Shean Trews. Charles recalled Willow’s saying that Rowan always managed to pick the odd ones. At least, he thought, jumping into bed, Angus Todd was not a bounder like Willow’s own boy-friend Grant. He couldn’t see Rowan so much as looking at a fellow like that. But of the two, there was no doubt that Grant was the better value at a party.

  Charles fell asleep with the words of another old Scots song soothing him like a lullaby.

  “Her lips are like rowans in bright simmer seen,

  And mild as the starlight the glint o’ her een,

  Far sweeter her breath than the scent o’ the briar,

  And her voice is sweet music in bonnie Strathyre.”

  * * *

  “I was a fool to go. A damned fool,” Angus said to himself, trudging back alone. “I might have known I’d be out of it. All these others, they speak a different language, they didn’t want me. They’ve all been to the same school, or the same kind of school, and I’m just an outsider. It was all right when I was dancing, even if I had to do it in my stocking feet because I’d no shoes with me. Yes, I could show them something there.”

  But even their praise, though freely and generously given, was not the sort of praise they would have handed to one of themselves. . . . If he could be a professional Highland dancer! He was good enough, his teachers had all wanted him to take it up seriously, but his parents—or rather the Todds, who had adopted him—were horrified at the suggestion, and so he had to grind away at the University, doing agriculture. Then there would be his National Service to do after he had got his degree, if he got it. The prospect was distinctly gloomy.

  This long summer vacation was all very well for those who could enjoy it. He had looked forward to it himself, picturing the pleasure of not having to get up early and rush to classes, of spending days with Rowan, evenings dancing as her partner. It hadn’t worked out like that. Things hardly ever did work out the way you wanted them. Lying in bed was not encouraged by Mr. and Mrs. Todd, even if one had nothing to get up for that mattered, and he saw very little of Rowan except at the dancing practices. Perhaps it was just as well that he was going North to work at the harvest whenever the dancing exhibitions were over. Rowan might miss him once he had gone.

  But would she? Would she hell, he thought, and laughed sardonically, so that an old lady who was passing him drew aside in alarm and wondered whether she ought to report his peculiar behaviour to the next policeman she met.

  Angus never saw her at all. He was already yards away from her in body and miles in mind, brooding still over the certainty that Rowan would not miss him, brooding over his unknown heredity and his undistinguished schooling, brooding over what he would feel when he had to think of Rowan marrying someone not himself. He could not bear to think of her as married. Of course, he didn’t want her to be an old maid, but since even in his rosiest dreams he could not see her marrying him, there seemed no other future open to her. Unless she died young, in which case he would go mad and probably kill himself over her tomb. The unwelcome thought that this idea had been used before crossed his mind, but on the whole he felt happier as he stalked along the quiet streets. Reaching the Todds’ house just before midnight, he crept up to his room, where he fell asleep comforting himself by remembering that in about nineteen hours he would be seeing Rowan again at dancing.

  * * *

  His insatiable longing to be in the limelight would have been appeased if he had been able to hear the quarrel which developed at Number Six Kirkaldy Crescent during the final tidying-up after the party.

  Willow began it. A little above herself because of Micky’s devoted attention and Christine’s consequent jealousy, she said with a light laugh that really Rowan might ask someone slightly less boorish to their next party.

  Until that moment Rowan’s own feelings had been fairly equally divided between irritation at Angus’s inability to mix with other people and pride in his beautiful dancing, but on this attack she took fire at once.

  “Angus can’t help being shy!” she said hotly.

  “Shy?” Willow said with a provoking lift of her eyebrows. “I don’t see how you can call him shy, my dear. After all, he was only too willing to show off with his solo dancing!”

  “He wasn’t showing off. Dancing is just the thing he does well,” cried Rowan. “Like Murray’s tennis, or John Drummond and his piano playing, or Micky Grant’s flirting with every female he sees who isn’t an absolute gargoyle!”

  It was Willow’s turn to fly into a rage, and she did it dramatically as always, stamping her foot and shrieking.

  “How dare you be so beastly about Micky? I believe you’re jealous because he doesn’t pay any attention to you!”

  “As it happens,” retorted Rowan, her eyes sparkling. “He has tried his well-known charm on me more than once, but I’ve succeeded in making him understand that as far as I’m concerned there’s nothing doing.”

  “I don’t believe it!” cried Willow.

  Rowan said nothing. She had far more self-control than Willow, and was already sorry she had lost her temper. But Angus, poor Angus, was not fair game, she had to defend him.

  “For Heaven’s sake, Willow, stop making that ghastly din!” said Murray, coming into the drawing-room, where this scene was taking place.

  Hazel, rushing up from below, went straight to her elder sister and shook her.

  “Stop it at once!” she said sharply. “Or I’ll pour a jug of water over you.”

  “I must say,” remarked Murray, lighting a cigarette, “I’ve never met anyone so completely uninhibited as our Willow. Did you ever hear anybody but a small child make such a row? It was like pigs being killed.”

  “You’re all beasts to me!” Willow wailed, but on a lower note, for Hazel had looked meaningly at the largest bowl of flowers. “Why don’t you go for Rowan? Why do you always pick on me?”

  “Well, for one thing, Rowan seems perfectly quiet and sane,” answered Murray. “But if she’s been tormenting you, poor persecuted creature, we’ll deal with her. Come on, Red Rowan. What have you been at?”

  “I lost my temper,” Rowan confessed at once. “But she was horrid about Angus.”

  “I’m sure he isn’t the kind of person Mummy would like you to know, or to ask to the house,” said Willow priggishly.

  Rowan’s mouth opened, but before she could make an angry reply, Murray said:

  “What rot! There’s nothing the matter with him that I could see, except that he is a bit Byronic, you know, Rowan. Hardly the life and soul of the party.”

  When Murray looked at her like that, with a twinkle, and spoke so reasonably, Rowan never failed to respond.

  “I know,” she said, nodding. “He is a gloomy creature. But he’s unhappy by circumstances as well as nature. You see, he’s an adopted child, and the Todds told him he was when he was quite little, so he’s never felt the same as other people with proper parents.”

  “Oh, poor fellow!” Hazel said softly.

  But Willow cried: “There! Isn’t it just as I said? We don’t know who he is or where he comes from—”

  “I don’t suppose he escaped from Borstal to come here this evening,” Murray said, drily. “Pipe down, Willow. Rowan can ask her friends to the house without all this from you.”

&nb
sp; “I’m the eldest. I’m married,” began Willow.

  “Then you’d better start behaving like the eldest,” said Murray, losing patience. “And if you want to have the say in who’s to come to the house, you’d better set up house for yourself. I don’t know why you and Archie haven’t done it long ago.”

  Willow burst into tears in earnest, and sobbed that they all hated her and wanted to get rid of her.

  Hazel and Rowan exchanged glances of dismay. Murray had allowed his sharp tongue to run away with him for once, and Murray, though he was not going to acknowledge it, was a little sorry he had spoken. But he only said disgustedly: “If this is the way a party ends, for God’s sake don’t let’s have another. Good night, girls, I’m going to bed.”

  “We’re tired and cross. It’s time we were all in bed,” said Hazel. “Come along, Willow, dear, and do stop crying.”

  Characteristically, Willow wrenched herself from Hazel’s arm and turned to Rowan, with whom she had been quarrelling violently.

  “Rowan! I’m so miserable!” she sobbed.

  Rowan nodded to Hazel. “You go on,” she said. “We’ll be up in a few minutes.”

  What means Rowan used to calm Willow the others never knew, but she had always been able to do it from the days when she had been in the nursery and Willow a temperamental schoolgirl.

  At breakfast the next day Willow appeared composed and cheerful, but treating Murray with a dignified reserve which made him want to laugh.

  He said so to Hazel as they walked up the Crescent to their bus stop.

  “The truth is that Willow thrives on scenes,” Hazel answered. “Rowan’s the one who looks a rag this morning. All the same, Murray, my pet, I wish you hadn’t said that to Willow about finding a house of her own.”