Family Gathering Page 14

  Helen could only stare at him, speechless with scorn and contempt, and Jeremy looked at her reflectively. Wonderful looker, he mused. That colour and those eyes and that delectable figure—all wasted on a silly little clothes-horse.

  “You—you—” Helen tried to go on, and choked.

  “Naughty temper,” reproved Jeremy. He saw her fist clench and one of her hands stray towards the more brittle pieces on the stall. He waited with detached interest—it would be interesting to have a china- smashing display just as Lord Batch was preparing to make the first purchase.

  Sales went well. Old Mrs. Codrington, pouncing with delight upon a hair tidy, said that she had not seen one like it since she had given one to Lady Rome many, many Christmases ago. Her daughter looked earnestly at two velvet apples stuffed with pins, and Helen waited fearfully.

  “Such pretty ones—I used to make them,” said the prospective buyer. “I always used to embroider my initials on the bottom—it seemed to me such a pretty idea.” She sighed. “I think—I think I ought to buy them,” she said, “to remind me of the ones I used to make.”

  There was a dreadful little pause. Helen found herself unable to move, but Jeremy, leaning across, picked up an apple and held it out. Both stall holders saw the initials neatly worked upon the bottom. Helen put out a hand and snatched the exhibit hastily.

  “I’m—I’m so sorry,” she said. “That’s sold—both of them. I oughtn’t to have left them out.” She put them underneath the stall and looked at the two ladies. “These ash trays,” she said, “are very nice…”

  The money came in steadily. Mrs. Elgin-Smythe looked closely at a handkerchief box and gave a cry of joy. It was in every way, she said, like the one she had given Lucille on her eighteenth birthday. She would buy it and take it across to Lucille now—then there would be a pair.

  Helen took the money, put the box firmly beneath the stall and promised to make a special presentation when Lucille was less busy.

  Old Mr. Ledgard, head of the Orphanage’s Board of Governors, gave a little more trouble. He liked the Burmese lacquer box—he’d brought several home with him twenty years ago from Burma, and given them all away. Useful things—more than one tray inside. Sometimes they had a name on them—his had been U Ba Pe. If he could have a look underneath this one, he could see—

  “Too bad,” said Jeremy, giving a swift look at the box. “It isn’t a U what’s it one—this is a Maung Ba type—and it’s sold. How long were you in the East?” he inquired without pause. “Long, sir?”

  While Mr. Ledgard was telling him, Helen dealt with Mrs. Cram, who had seen the Toby jug before somewhere, and Miss Webb, who remembered working Lady Rome’s initials into a tea cosy of exactly that pattern, many years ago. She was so busy that Lord Batch came upon her unawares, and she and Jeremy lunged together for the scent spray. There was a sharp crack as their heads met. The incident did nothing to improve Helen’s temper. She sold Lord Batch a large black vase and was handing the money to Jeremy when she looked round and gave a cry of dismay.

  “What’s up?” asked Jeremy.

  Helen pointed speechlessly. On a small stool behind the stall, Alexander was seated, and on his knee, face downwards, lay a limp Edward the Bear. The bear’s back seam had been neatly ripped open and his stuffing lay in a heap at Alexander’s feet.

  Jeremy examined the damage calmly.

  “Total loss,” he announced, adding in admiring tones: “Very thorough bit of work for a little chap that size. Wonder how he got the stitching undone?”

  “What does that matter?” demanded Helen. “The thing’s a wreck and now you’ll have to give everybody their half-crowns back again.”

  “Back again?” echoed Jeremy. “This is a charity— we’re collecting half-crowns, not giving them away.”

  “But they paid for a raffle,” said Helen, “and there’s nothing to raffle.”

  “The trouble with you,” said Jeremy, “is that you fuss too much. You ought to relax, or you’ll be old before your time.” He gave a short whistle and beckoned to Duncan. Duncan came across obediently and Jeremy addressed him in a low voice. “You’ve got the raffle numbers?”

  Duncan nodded.

  “What number did old Batch choose?” asked Jeremy. “Can you remember?”

  “Yes, I can,” said Duncan. “His mother’s age—seventy-four, but I can check it—I’ve got the counterfoils.”

  “Well, check it,” ordered Jeremy, “and then do me a favour, will you?—chuck all the numbers out of the hat and write a collection of seventy-fours. Got that?”

  Duncan pondered for a few moments.

  “Sharp practice,” he decided after a time.

  “That’s it,” agreed Jeremy. “Now you look sharp, too—go on.”

  The drawing of the raffle was a pretty affair and brought tears to the eyes of the more sentimental among the watchers. Old Mrs. Batch, led to the spot by Lady Rome, dipped into the deep vase—held by Jeremy—in which the numbers had been placed.

  A dip into the vase, a piece of paper, and the winning number was read out. Number seventy-four—Lord Batch.

  There was laughter and applause, together with good-natured shouts to the effect that mother and son were in league. Lord Batch, amid more laughter, received from Lady Rome’s hands the large box in which lay Edward the Bear, face upwards and looking remarkably stout. The winner regarded his prize with a whimsical expression and a great show of embarrassment and at the same time Jeremy moved Alexander forward imperceptibly. Alexander, looking up at his property, held out arms to claim it. In a moment Lord Batch had stooped, amid great applause, and placed the box in the little boy’s arms.

  “Pretty, don’t you think?” said Jeremy.

  “It was dishonest and low-down,” said Helen, “but I don’t suppose that would worry you.”

  The drive home was pleasant. The fields and hedges looked fresh and green after the gloom of the dark and ill-ventilated hall. The evening was still and peaceful and the sun’s rays shone on the house as they drew up before it. Jeremy switched off the engine and looked for a few moments at the beautiful old building spread before them. Helen glanced at his face and waited for him to speak.

  “You don’t like it, do you?” he said after a while.

  “Romescourt?” said Helen. “I—”

  “You think we ought to get out and offer it to—well, how about Distressed Gentlefolk? That would almost give us a number one priority on the waiting list.”

  “I don’t know anything,” said Helen, “about—”

  “Queen Elizabeth really did sleep here,” said Jeremy. “Remind me to show you the room. I can’t show you the bed, unfortunately, because Her Majesty liked it so much that she agreed to do a swop—she took the bed and gave the then owner one of the royal barges in exchange. He went up to London and had a few goes on it, but he didn’t take to the seafaring life and so he said the swop was off. But the Queen called him a varlet and kept the bed, and so Rome came home—he was very much incensed and it was he, I’m sorry to say, who spread all those stories about the Queen having slept all over the place. He left the barge in London and they always use it for the Merrie England productions and for river pageants.”

  “Will you,” asked Helen, “I mean later on—will you live here?”

  “Where else?” asked Jeremy. He got out and opened the door for her and led her round the house. “Let’s go in this way—it’s quicker. Pity you’ve got to go off so soon—you haven’t really done the rounds. Not even the cinema—didn’t Granny tell you about the Hunnytor cinema?” He ushered her into the little sitting-room.

  “She told me,” said Helen, “that it had been enlarged and could now hold nearly a hundred people.”

  “A hundred and four,” said Jeremy. “We’re progressive in these parts. Sit down—you must be tired,” he added in concern, “after standing all the afternoon in those shoes—they don’t look very comfortable.”

  “All my shoes,” said Helen, “are extr
emely comfortable.”

  “Well, they don’t look it,” said Jeremy. “I used to wonder how those girls used to hop on and off buses when I was in London.”

  “Where did you live, exactly?” asked Helen.

  “I don’t know—it all looked alike to me,” said Jeremy. “Streets and shops and shops and streets. I used to have landmarks—fire stations, petrol pumps and so on. Great help. But the whole place was pretty awful, I thought. And full of stinkers—bring a single one of ’em down here and the traffic would stop, they look so peculiar—but you pass one peculiarity after another up there and nobody so much as glances at ’em. It’s a funny thing,” he went on thoughtfully. “Looking at you, I’d have said you were an open-air type. You don’t give the impression of living in streets and shops. My own impression is that you got on well in London—in your job, I mean—and got too absorbed to see how cramped you really were. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were bottling up a lot without knowing it. Denying yourself your longing for country living and stifling your natural instinct for wide spaces and—”

  “I don’t live instinctively,” said Helen. “I plan.”

  “Ah,” said Jeremy. “You plan.”

  “I do,” said Helen. “I liked certain things that led me to London—and then I stayed there.”

  “What sort of certain things?” inquired Jeremy.

  “Beautiful clothes,” said Helen. “Not tweeds just flung on. And sheer stockings and good theatres and expensive restaurants and exciting people and—”

  “You mean the stinkers?” put in Jeremy.

  “Live and let live,” said Helen. “Why should—”

  “They couldn’t live anywhere but in those big cities,” said Jeremy. “Put ’em on a farm surrounded by the most fertile land in the country and they’d die of starvation. Can’t produce anything—anything but talk, that is. I heard plenty of that up there.”

  “They don’t plant corn on their roof gardens or anything of that kind,” said Helen coldly, “but your dreamers, your thinkers, your mentally productive people are there.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” said Jeremy.

  “Just because you can’t live in London,” said Helen, “is no reason—”

  “I know—live and let live,” said Jeremy. “Well, I’ll take you out to my farm tomorrow and you can apply your let-live theory there. But not in those shoes— you’ll have to borrow something sensible from your mother or from Lucille.”

  “I’ll come in these shoes,” stated Helen, “or not at all.”

  “Your show,” said Jeremy, indifferently. “You’ll look damn silly picking your way through the cow muck, but so long as I don’t have to buy you a new pair, I don’t mind. I’d like to show you some real animals before you go back to town.”

  “The trouble with you,” said Helen, losing her temper, “is that—”

  “The trouble with you,” said Jeremy, “is that you’re not in the least like your mother. Why you kept her cooped up in London all those years when she ought to have been breathing nice open air, I don’t know.”

  Helen’s face was white. “I didn’t,” she said slowly, “keep my mother anywhere. Any day, at any time, she could have gone wherever she pleased and you have no right to—to dare to make such a lying statement. You don’t know the first thing about me or about my mother. If I hadn’t worked like a horse to make her marry your father, she’d never have done it, and even when she’d married him, it was touch and go whether she ever came down to this—this—”

  “Go on,” invited Jeremy, his face now as white as hers. Helen was already going on.

  “You don’t like me,” she said, “because nobody in this place likes anybody to be orderly or efficient or to run things in a sane, organized way.”

  “I don’t like you,” said Jeremy, “for the simple reason that you don’t give a damn about your mother, and your mother’s a first-class, top-of-the-pile grand little Jennie Wren. She’d just got nicely settled and happy here when you rang up to say you’d hitched yourself to some bounder or other and—”

  “I’m engaged,” said Helen, her voice rising, “to a man my mother knows well and likes a lot. I’m—”

  “Then why,” asked Jeremy, “did she cry?”

  “I don’t know,” said Helen. “Because she always cries. Because she cried when she married William and when she came down here and when—whenever anything happens. That’s how she’s made, that’s all. She always cries. She cries all the time.”

  “So would I, if I lived with you,” said Jeremy. “You’re a bossy little thing and I can’t stand bossy women.”

  “I am not—”

  “You came down here,” said Jeremy, “to pull us together. Well, we like ourselves the way we are. We’re even more smug about being the way we are than you are about being the way you are. I’m tired of seeing you raise your eyebrows when my grandmother monopolizes the conversation. I’m tired of listening to you trying to take that poor devil of a Canny down a peg and make his position here worse than it really is. I’m tired—”

  “Will you—”

  “Shut up,” said Jeremy. “I’m tired of seeing you look down your nose at Lucille because she doesn’t come down to dinner draped in an eighty-guinea gown with four-inch heels. And I’m tired of—”

  “If you—”

  “I’m tired of you altogether,” said Jeremy. “Your mother hasn’t been really happy since you came here, because she’s ashamed of the bossy way you behave and I don’t blame her. When you go back to London you can boss that bounder of yours all you please, but we—here—don’t like to be bossed. We only like—”

  He stopped. Helen had gone out of the room and banged the door behind her.

  She had gone. But it was a long way to the door and, before she reached it, she had heard a good deal.

  She had got, Jeremy considered, quite an earful.

  Chapter 13

  When Natalie returned from the fête, she went up to her room and, slipping off her shoes and making herself comfortable on a sofa, prepared to read the letter which had arrived from William that morning and which she had not yet had time to go through thoroughly.

  A second reading confirmed the impression she had received in the morning and which had made the day one of discomfort and foreboding. William, after receiving her carefully brief account of Duncan Macdonald’s visit, had asked her to speak strongly to Lucille.

  “And when I say strongly” read the agitated Natalie, “I know that you will drop this letter on to your knee and start to cry. Well, my little Natalie, when that’s over—and I wish to God I could be there to dry your eyes—you must tell Lucille that she must get rid of her Scotsman. I’m sorry for the poor devil—but I don’t like him at Romescourt. I’m sorry to ask you to do this, but it’s right that you should—you can use my weight as much as you like—though I doubt whether I’ve any weight with my children—has anybody, these days? Tell Lucille what I think about it. It will come best from you— she writes most affectionately of you. If you’re worried about being what you call ‘interfering’, you must realize that nobody could ever possibly accuse you of ‘interfering’ in anything. Get Jeremy’s help, if you like—but the job is really yours. Tell Lucille that she’s to stop being a little fool. I’ve told her, too, in a letter which goes with this—but the man must be got rid of—”

  Natalie stared out at the wild cherry tree now in blossom just below her window. She was to take a firm line with Lucille, and get rid of Duncan. She was to exert her—her authority.

  After thinking over the matter with her spirits falling steadily, she rose from the sofa and began to get ready for dinner. She put on one of the dresses she knew Helen liked most and found that there was still a good deal of time before she need go downstairs.

  She decided that it would be a wise plan to go immediately to Lucille’s room and, with William’s instructions fresh in her mind, get the little talk over. The more she pondered on the plan, the wiser she
thought it and the less inclined she felt to carry it out.

  It was going to be very difficult. But she must do her best and write to William tonight telling him what she had done and what the results were. There would not be any results at all, but William would be pleased with her for trying.

  She knocked at her stepdaughter’s door and, going in, found Lucille curled up on a sofa, as she herself had been, her eyes on the pretty scene visible through her window, and William’s letter on her lap. She looked round, gave Natalie a smile of greeting and made room for her on the sofa. Natalie sat down and the two looked at one another.

  There was silence for several minutes and neither seemed anxious to break it. At last Natalie began nervously.

  “I just came along,” she said, “to—to have a little talk.”

  “I know,” said Lucille gently. “Daddy said you were going to.”

  “Yes,” said Natalie. “He—he asked me to.”

  There was another silence, this time one of sympathy and understanding. Lucille was as reluctant to listen as Natalie was to speak, and each felt deeply for the other’s distress. But William was waiting…

  “You see,” said Natalie, “it’s about—”

  “About Duncan,” finished Lucille wistfully. She gave a little sigh. “It’s all so—so awkward, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it’s a little more than awkward, Lucille,” said Natalie. “It wasn’t your fault in the first place—I mean you couldn’t know that Jeremy hadn’t posted the letter, but it isn’t right to have Duncan here now. It isn’t fair to him—and it’s even less fair to Philip because he is, after all, your fiancé, and it makes him look—it makes things so difficult for everybody.”

  “Yes, it does,” agreed Lucille. “But I find—don’t you find, too, that talking doesn’t do the least good?” She frowned at Natalie thoughtfully for a little while before going on. “Ever since I met you,” she continued, “I’ve been so glad to find that there was somebody else like me—somebody, I mean, who can’t decide firmly about anything and who can’t say anything that seems to mean anything to other people. Somebody who doesn’t seem to have any ideas or any conversation and who can’t think of anything to say when it comes to arguing. Most people seem so sure and so—so capable, and I was so relieved that Daddy hadn’t married somebody who wanted to—to sort of manage things.”