“Just a minute, Angus,” said Rowan, suddenly remembering something. “I must speak to Miss Mackintosh. I won’t be long.”
He frowned a little, but nodded, and Rowan flitted across the floor in her ballet flats to where Miss Mackintosh, the instructor, stood beside the piano on its platform, discussing the evening’s programme with her pianist.
“Yes, Miss Lenox?” she said, smiling. Rowan was a favourite of hers. “What is it?”
Rowan explained about Mrs. Ferrier’s entertainment, and Miss Mackintosh listened with careful attention.
“Of course,” she said finally. “We’ll pick out a team for your friend. You and Mr. Todd will be one couple, naturally—”
Rowan, quite forgetting that she had not had a chance to sound Angus, said yes, and with the instructor’s promise of choosing a team and some suitable dances, and practising them, she went off to join her set.
She had an opportunity, just before the class began, of saying to Angus that a friend of her mother’s had asked her to produce some dancers for a show she was organizing.
“A charity affair?” asked Angus, without enthusiasm.
“Not exactly. It’s for old people living in a Home.”
“Oh, Lord! They won’t know dancing from performing elephants. It’s a waste of time and trouble doing it for people like that.”
“Not if it gives them pleasure,” said Rowan. “But you don’t need to do it if you’d rather not.”
There was no time for him to say any more then, and he found himself not wanting to argue with Rowan this evening. She seemed rather subdued and out of spirits, not like herself. He made a sudden resolution, tremendous to him, that he would be gentle and do as she asked—only for this evening, of course! He was not going to give up any independence of thought or action even for Rowan; but just this once he would acquiesce.
Being Angus, however, he could not make this concession gracefully, and for the remainder of the class was so gloomy and grumpy that Rowan wished heartily that she had not said he might walk home with her.
“It will act as a counter-irritant, I daresay,” she told herself as she changed her shoes. “Squabbling with Angus demands the whole of one’s attention!”
As they went out into the crisp exhilarating night air, Angus took her dancing shoes from her without a word, and rammed them into the pocket of his shabby waterproof. He remembered these little courtesies so seldom that Rowan was touched, and when he drew her hand through his arm yielded without protest.
In front of them the street ran downhill in a sweeping curve between the tall cliffs of houses. The overhead lights, strung up among the tramway wires, were like gold beads on a black thread. Far ahead, the few points of light from windows in the Castle shone as if in mid-air.
Forgetting the Tinkers for the moment, Rowan said softly:
“How lovely Edinburgh is! There’s no town in the world like Edinburgh!”
“Horrible slums, and vile suburbs,” replied Angus at once.
“Yes, I know all that. But in spite of the slums and the mess they have made of the High Street, and the nasty rash of little bungalows all round,” said Rowan defiantly, “you can’t really spoil Edinburgh.”
“The only reason I can stand the place at all,” said Angus, in a strange stifled voice, “is because you’re here.”
“Oh, Angus!” Rowan felt touched again, but uneasy. “I may not always be here, you know—”
He seized the hand that lay in the crook of his arm and swung her round to face him, heedless of passers-by. “You—you’re not going away?”
“Not that I know of,” said Rowan, trying to speak lightly. “But I don’t think my job is going to last much longer, and I might not get another in Edinburgh.”
“I knew there was something wrong with you to-night,” he said, still standing looking at her. “You are worried about your job, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am,” said Rowan.
“They aren’t going to sack you, are they?”
“Oh, no.” Rowan could not help smiling at this. “But I know they can’t afford to pay me. In fact—” she broke off.
Angus could be uncomfortably quick in guessing what was left unsaid. Now he said sharply: “You mean they don’t pay you regularly? Well, then, you’d better leave at once. It’s no good staying in a job like that.”
“But I’m fond of them. I couldn’t just leave them,” Rowan began. She was going to say that she couldn’t bear to desert Orlando, but she was afraid Angus would never understand her feeling for the little boy. “I’m fond of them,” she finished lamely.
“Oh, of course, if you’re going to be sentimental about your employers—” said Angus, and seemed to lose interest.
“What about this dancing you’re arranging for the Lost Pussies’ Shelter, or whatever it is?” he asked, as they walked on.
Rowan told him about it, adding that she thought Mrs. Ferrier would probably ask him to her house one evening. “I hope you’ll come,” she said. “Hazel and Holly and I will be there.”
“All right. You let me know the day,” Angus answered quite mildly, and without any of his usual sneers at her “snob friends”. He seemed to have forgotten his quarrel by letter, too. Rowan had no intention of reminding him about it. To be amiable was as near to an apology as one could ever hope he would reach. She wished he had been a little kinder over the question of the Tinkers and her job, but perhaps he was right and taking the sensible view, and she was, as he said, sentimental about them.
“Then I’ll be sentimental about them, or at least, about Orlando,” she thought, suddenly rebellious.
Her colour rose, her eyes began to sparkle. The crusading spirit was burning in her. She would do something, when the time was ripe. Aloud, she said: “Tell me about your harvesting in Aberdeenshire, Angus. What was it like?”
So Angus told her about it all the rest of the way home, and walked away feeling less out of tune with life than usual.
Rowan went to bed with a little nagging thought for company. Perhaps she had not done Angus any good by allowing him to complain so much about his hard lot, perhaps she ought to have taken a different line altogether, and told him he was lucky to have been adopted, even by the Todds, and not left in his orphanage.
She had been sorry for him. She was still sorry for him, but he was very selfish and his own troubles had not made him any more understanding of other people’s. And yet, he could be so attractive when he liked, and she remembered how he had carried her shoes for her this evening.
Then she remembered something else.
“Oh, dear! The silly creature has gone off with them in his pocket! How like him!”
CHAPTER 18
“Yes, I’ll go with you. Why not?” said Hazel, when Rowan gave her Mrs. Ferrier’s message asking her to come with her sisters and bring some songs.
“Oh—thought perhaps you might have something else on, that’s all.”
Rowan mumbled in confusion.
Hazel smiled. She never had anything else “on” nowadays, and was growing accustomed to it. Life was a succession of dull grey days with nothing to lighten them, but what of it? Thousands of people must live like that, so why not Hazel Lenox?
“You will be wearing your new greeny-browny dress, Hazel, won’t you?” Holly asked anxiously.
“I’m going to wear my black georgette, as it happens,” said Hazel.
Holly wailed. “Oh, no! Don’t wear that, it doesn’t suit you a bit, and besides, it’s so old! Do wear your new dress, Hazel.”
The new dress was a brown taffeta shot with green, and it made Hazel’s eyes green too, and showed up the lights in her soft brown hair. She knew it suited her; she had bought it to wear when Adam asked her out, and it had never been needed.
“Very well. Anything for peace,” said Hazel, and Holly beamed.
“You’ll be glad you listened to me,” she remarked smugly. Rowan, who heard all this, turned away to hide her amusement, and met Hazel’s e
yes in the mirror.
It was too much. They both gave way to laughter, and Holly, flouncing from the room with the dignified but obscure remark that it was a funny thing a person couldn’t tell another person what dress she should wear without people behaving like laughing hyenas, only made them worse.
“Poor old Holly! It’s a shush-shame!” Hazel said, hiccuping with mirth and wiping her eyes. “But I cuck-couldn’t help it!”
“Holly is funny,” Rowan agreed. “All the same, she is right about that dress, Hazel, and black doesn’t suit you.”
“All right, all right. Don’t you start,” Hazel implored her. “Or I won’t come at all.”
Holly had better cause than she knew to plume herself on persuading Hazel to wear the new dress. First impressions, rightly or wrongly, mean a good deal, and Mrs. Ferrier might have seen Hazel looking like a stick of blanched celery, the effect of wearing black, instead of a dryad in bronze-green.
“What an enchanting creature!” she thought, feeling more annoyed than ever with Adam for saying that he would not be at home that evening.
Charles had been quite ready to stay in and listen to music. He was making himself agreeable to Lavinia Browning, the violinist, at this moment, and from the way that rather prickly, difficult woman was smiling at him, appeared to be a success.
A personable young man was a great help on these occasions, and Mrs. Ferrier was grateful to Charles. But two personable young men would have been even better. Two pretty girls in party frocks were another asset, and Holly, though she could not yet be described as pretty, was a handsome stalwart young thing with a capacity for hero-worship, and John Marshall, the baritone, would like her.
Altogether, apart from Adam’s defection, Mrs. Ferrier was pleased with her party, in spite of the preponderance of women.
This reminded her of something, and she turned to Rowan.
“I thought your dancing man was coming, my dear?” she said.
“Yes, he is, Mrs. Ferrier, but I’m afraid he is going to be late. Angus is rather vague. I hope he doesn’t get cold feet at the last minute.”
“Is he likely to?” asked Mrs. Ferrier, with interest.
“It’s very difficult to tell with Angus,” said Rowan doubtfully. But at that moment Mrs. Ferrier’s daily woman, who was obliging for the evening in a highly unsuitable light blue dress and a small frilled apron, opened the door and ushered in a kilted figure.
“Here he is,” exclaimed Rowan, much relieved, and introduced Angus to his hostess.
Mrs. Ferrier welcomed him so warmly that Charles, approaching, grinned sardonically and said to himself, “I knew she wouldn’t be able to stand the fellow, poor brute.”
He didn’t mind much if Angus saw through this—it was more than unlikely that he would—but he would be sorry if Rowan noticed and was distressed. It was really very wicked of Aunt Maud, and he meant to tell her so when he got her to himself. In the meantime, as she was leading Angus away to introduce him to Ellen Fairweather, the plump good-natured little soprano, and as he himself considered that he had done his duty by Mrs. Browning, who was pretty heavy going, Charles said to Rowan:
“They’ll be starting soon, and we aren’t performers, so let me find you a good seat where you can listen comfortably.”
Rowan liked Charles. Though she had only met him once before, she felt as if she knew him quite well. He was the kind of person who was dependable without being dull. But she hesitated, glancing towards Angus, for whom she felt responsible.
“Oh, he’ll be all right. Aunt Maud doesn’t neglect her guests,” said Charles, easily.
To demur would be foolish, and she did not want to behave as though Angus were incapable of looking after himself, so Rowan smiled at Charles and took the chair he had kept for her.
It was in a little alcove with a rounded top, at the corner of the wall next to the window, and farthest from the door. From it the whole room could be seen, with the black boudoir grand along the wall opposite. An old-fashioned sofa, very long and with a high back, fenced it in.
Charles pulled a second chair forward and sat down beside her.
“What a good place you’ve chosen,” said Rowan, approvingly. “I like this.”
“Before the house was made into flats this was the main bedroom, with a dressing-room off it, reached by a door in this very alcove,” Charles explained. “My aunt had the door walled up. When there isn’t a party she has a little table in here with flowers on it. I’ve always liked this corner. You can see and hear better than anywhere else in the room, and no one can come shoving in beside you.”
“It would be difficult, certainly,” said Rowan.
“Very. That’s why I chose it,” said Charles tranquilly. And as she looked at him, a little taken aback, he added: “I hate to be disturbed when I’m listening to music. Don’t you?”
“Oh! Oh, yes, I do,” replied Rowan, annoyed with herself for turning pink, and sure that she could read amusement in his cool grey eyes.
“I wonder if you’d come and have lunch with me one day soon?” he asked next.
“Well, I’m at my job, you know. I have lunch there every day except Saturday and Sunday,” said Rowan, regretfully. “I’m sorry.”
“We could make it a Saturday,” he suggested. “Tell me about your job.”
Rowan, beginning with the bare statement that she taught three small children, found to her own surprise that she was telling him all about the Tinkers, and especially about Orlando, her certainty that the family was going to crash, her fears for Orlando’s future.
“What a rotten show,” he said, when she ended. “He sounds a nice little chap, too. I don’t wonder you’re worried.”
“Oh!” Rowan’s face, vivid with pleasure, was turned to him again. “Oh, you do understand!”
Before he could answer, Mrs. Ferrier, who had seated herself at the piano, began to play, and silence fell over the big softly-lighted room.
Charles was not sure whether he was sorry or relieved. Sorry, because his sympathy had lighted that blaze in her eyes, but relieved as well, for honesty would have forced him to tell her that her shiftless employers would have to be left to fend for themselves, and she could not make herself responsible for the small boy with the absurd name, no matter how fond she was of him. On the whole, relief predominated. Cool and level-headed though he was, Charles did not want to see the light in Rowan’s brilliant eyes quenched, nor to know that she had withdrawn her sudden step towards him.
Glancing round the room, he became aware of a hostile gaze fixed on him and their corner. It was the gloomy Angus, who had seated himself alone on a straight-backed chair alongside the door, as if to ensure his escape, and was glaring at them morosely.
Angus was as gloomy as he looked. He felt defrauded, brought here to the house of people he did not know and did not want to know. Rowan might at least have sat beside him instead of being penned in the far corner of the room, cut off from everyone and especially cut off from him, with that supercilious fair-haired brute of a lawyer close by her. If he had had the courage, he would have gone. Nobody would have missed him, of that he was bitterly certain.
Rowan wouldn’t. She didn’t care a straw for him, though she was the only person he looked for or thought of. Nothing seemed to touch her except things like the plight of that crazy artist’s family where she worked. She could get into a grand stew over them. “Fond of them,” she said, but somehow Angus had been sure she was going to mention one by name. Could it have been the painter himself? Had she fallen in love with Tinker? Angus had let this thought creep into his head, and like all disagreeable thoughts it lay, apparently forgotten, in some recess of his mind, ready to appear again when its moment came . . .
All this time the music had been going on, piano alone, then violin and piano. Angus was not paying any attention to it, but the waves of sound, flowing out into the still room, had their effect on him.
Now John Marshall was going to sing. He had a fine voice, bea
utifully trained, flexible and sympathetic.
“‘My faithful fond one’,” he sang, the notes ringing out with exquisite tenderness:
‘My faithful fair, wilt not come to me?
On bed of pain here, who remain here,
With weary longing for a sight of thee!
My fair and rare one. My faithful fair’ . . .
Angus, hearing the words, thought of Rowan. Fair and rare, yes, she was; and she would come flying if summoned to his bed of pain . . . but she would come for anyone who asked her, not only for him. He sighed impatiently, and did not notice that people turned their heads reprovingly at the slight sound.
Now the singer was asking if anyone had a favourite in the old book. He would be delighted to sing it for them.
Charles Ferrier said clearly: “Could we have ‘Bonnie Strathyre’?”
John Marshall looked over at him and nodded, smiling, and Charles sat back to listen to the song that always brought to him the memory of warm summer afternoons in Perthshire, honey-smelling heather and heather-tasting honey, white-stemmed birches and running water, blue hills and a blue sky. Now it made him think of Rowan too. He would like to wander with Rowan through one of those golden days, through all the golden days.
The music took its toll of each of them in one way or another.
The crystal-clear soprano of Ellen Fairweather was soaring effortlessly as the lark’s she sang about. It was a song that Mrs. Browning liked, though for her part she was never so deeply stirred by singing as by an orchestra or her own instrument.
Angus was not paying much attention consciously to the pure sparkling voice, or the air, though it was to haunt him later. The words were what struck him. Something about the lark finding repose in the full waving corn, and the bee on the rose though surrounded with thorn. Lovers were just like the silly larks, going over and over again to the place where they lost their happiness or their nestlings. The bee must go where honey was, thorns or no. . . . He was a muddled thinker, too intent on seeing everything from the angle of its effect on him, for clarity; but he realized suddenly that it was stupid and unjust to blame either the waving corn or the thorn-set rose, and therefore he could not blame Rowan for being Rowan. If she hurt him, she did not mean to. She had given him her friendship, frank and generous, and he was lucky to have it. Of course, he loved her. How could he help it? Could any man with blood in his veins know Rowan and not love her?
Near Neighbours Page 18