It was at that moment that disaster swept down on them both, just as she had feared. There was a sudden rush of feet and Clinton was plucked from her and sent staggering ten yards further down the bank, and there was Rowley, looking down at her with an expression she could only think of as outraged as she began fumbling madly with the fiddling little buttons of her bodice, her cheeks flaming, her hair, shorn of half its pins, falling over her shoulders.
At that moment it was not of Clinton she thought but Joanna, feeling that she could have strangled her with bare hands for embroiling her in such a degrading situation. But Joanna, strangely, was nowhere to be seen.
When the last of the elusive buttons had been pushed into its buttonhole she scrambled up, ignoring her new bonnet that had slipped off in the struggle and now lay in a clump of primroses at Rowley's feet. Clinton, a few yards down the slope, was looking almost as embarrassed as she felt but truculent too, as he faced the glowering Rowley. But then he obviously decided to brazen it out, saying mildly, “Oh, don’t be such an ass, Rowley! It was nothing. Ask Helen if you don’t believe me. And do stop looking like the wrath of God!”
His brother, improbably, seemed to consider this statement, as though weighing its authenticity, and Helen was so absorbed in the interplay between the two brothers that for a moment or so she almost forgot her own embarrassment. Rowley said, at length, “She was telling you to stop. I heard her quite clearly from back there. Damn it, I knew you were selfish, Clinton, but I didn’t reckon on you being a cad. Do you know I’ve a good mind to punch your nose here and now!”
But the threat seemed to put Clinton on his mettle, for the last of his embarrassment faded and he grinned as he said, “No harm in trying, old boy. You’ve never succeeded in the past, have you?” On that they began squaring up to one another so that a sparring match seemed inevitable.
But then, with a rush, Joanna appeared, quite out of breath, crying, “Stop it! Stop it, both of you! What on earth are you? A couple of schoolboys?”
“He isn’t at all events,” Rowley said, quietly. “Ask Helen how he was behaving.”
“I don’t have to,” Joanna said, coolly, adjusting to the situation with what seemed to Helen amazing speed. “What on earth got into you, rushing away like that and tearing them apart… She didn’t scream for help, did she? For Heaven's sake, Rowley, do stop being so… so stuffy and self-righteous and pompous!”
It was the look that Rowley directed at her that reminded Helen of her own involvement in this ridiculous scene, played out between the four of them on an open hillside overlooking the great grey mansion below. It was the expression of a trusting child, struck by a parent for the first time, or that of a spoiled puppy at the receiving end of a beloved master's boot, so that she thought, “By God, she's hard!… And this crazy plan wasn’t hatched for my benefit, as I supposed… All she's about is to show herself to Clint as the easygoing one of the pair.” The recollection of her careful briefing returned to her like a sour taste, Joanna sitting in her basket chair beside the fire prophesying, “Within five minutes of me taking him away, Clint will kiss you and all you have to do is to protest, as loudly as you like…” and when Helen had asked how this was likely to steer Rowley her way, Joanna had hugged herself with glee, saying, “Don’t you realise, you little goose? Rowley has seen himself as a knight in armour since he was six. The very fact of you having to defend your honour against his brother will make him see you in an entirely different light… After that, of course, it will be up to you, but at least he’ll be aware of you. Apart from that, if I take Clint's part, he’ll begin asking himself what he saw in me in the first place!”
It had all seemed so clever and artful but logical too she would have said, having regard to the diverse temperaments of the brothers. But somehow it hadn’t worked out that way and now, the memory of Rowley's glance at her unbuttoned bodice returning to her, she felt so wretched and degraded that she could have burst into tears. She managed to restrain herself, however, sufficiently to turn away and begin walking along the lip of the escarpment in the direction of the village, aware only of the need to put distance between herself and the scene of an incident that involved the sacrifice of her dignity and his.
She had gone, perhaps, two hundred yards before Rowley caught her up. He was holding her bonnet by the strings and looking, she thought, very composed considering the circumstances. “You forgot this,” he said, in level voice. “Put it on before we pick up the trap and drive back. You’ll want to go straight home, I imagine.”
“I don’t care where I go,” she said, savagely, “so long as it's a long way from here!” But she took the bonnet and rammed it on, pulling the strings taut with such a jerk that she bit her tongue. He said nothing but fell into step with her as they reached the hillside path that led down to the façade of the Sidney mansion. In silence they passed through the lych-gate to the spot where the loafer they had hired to watch the horses was fast asleep, his back to the churchyard wall.
She busied herself with her hair and the removal of traces of bracken from her skirt and jacket whilst he was harnessing the pony to the trap. Then, still without a word, he handed her in and they set off, not towards Leigh and the Tonbridge road, as she had expected, but up a narrow, leafy lane in the general direction of Sevenoaks.
They had gone about a mile when the lane broadened out and he pulled over on to a verge under some mature beech trees. It was a pretty spot, the bank starred with dog-violets and wild daffodils, fallow land stretching away to a belt of woods on the horizon. Blackbirds sang and a startled hedge-sparrow whirred from her nest in a moss-lined cavity of the bank. Seeing the bird, he smiled and moved on fifty yards or so, saying, casually, “She’ll be sitting. Pity to scare her off. Hedge-sparrows often desert if it happens a lot, and it will here on a road.” And then, letting the reins go slack so that the pony could crop, “Right. Now tell me what happened, Helen.”
She was very confused now, not knowing in the least what to make of his calm and relaxed mood.
“I’ll do no such thing. You saw what happened.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, genially, “but I mean before I arrived on the scene. According to plan, that is.”
It occurred to her then that Joanna must have been so indiscreet as to give him a direct hint of how Clint was likely to behave the moment he was left alone with a girl, so she compromised, saying, “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. I wasn’t looking for help. I had no one but myself to blame. It wasn’t Clint's fault, not really.”
“I didn’t think it was. But something in the way of a rescue was looked for from me, wasn’t it? All I’m interested in knowing is why.”
She was silent, realising what complete idiots she and Joanna must have been to assume he could be taken in so easily.
“Well?”
She said, sulkily, “I’d prefer not to say. Let's drive back to the stables, and take the next train home.”
“Not on your life,” he said, “or not until I discover exactly what you were up to and what Joanna was up to. Not if I have to sit here all night, with you beside me. Then you really would be compromised and no mistake.”
She was amazed that he could threaten her in those terms but had no doubt at all that he meant what he said, and that made her regret having separated herself from Joanna, whose fault it was that she had landed herself in such a scrape. She decided to see what could be done with bluff. “If I told you the full truth,” she said, “you would be more embarrassed than I was the moment you pounced on us back there. Just leave things as they are, Rowley. I made a fool of myself and so did Joanna, but it won’t help anyone to discuss it, least of all with you.”
“No,” he said with a half-smile, “I suppose not, but it might teach me something about women and I’m beginning to think that part of my education has been very neglected. Let me clear the air for you. That detachment on Joanna's part was planned, but I was meant to come running back at a given moment. That's true, isn’t
it?”
She was silent, biting her lip and wishing the Kentish landscape would erupt like Vesuvius, or that a herd of mad elephants would come stampeding round the bend ahead, but he went on relentlessly, “Well, at least you don’t deny it, so from here on I’ll rely on guesses. Clint got down to business sooner than either of you anticipated. And also went further than you were prepared to tolerate. That's true also, isn’t it? What I don’t understand is the real reason behind the charade. Were either of you trying to compromise Clint? Has he been too slow in coming up to scratch? Something of that kind?”
She blushed to the roots of her hair. This was far worse than being caught full-length on the ground with one's bodice half-unbuttoned, and it stunned her to think he could suppose she was so much in love with Clinton that she was prepared to snare him like a desperate scullery-maid. She said, indignantly, “Do you suppose I’d throw my cap at anybody as stupid as Clinton? Do you suppose I’d marry him, if he compromised me fifty times over? You really don’t know much about girls. That's very obvious.”
“But there was a reason, wasn’t there?”
“No.”
“And if there was you wouldn’t tell me?”
“No.”
“I think you’d better. We’ve left our lunch behind and you’ll be very peckish by tea-time.”
His coolness maddened her, but then so did his blindness. He could reason this far but the main point appeared to have escaped him completely. She said, suddenly, “You insist on knowing?”
“You owe me that, Helen.”
“I don’t owe you anything,” she snapped. “You’ve neither looked at me nor spoken two consecutive words to me since you patched me up after that spill I had at Addington last September. You’ve been mooning after Joanna ever since that first day and you still are, although she's told you she isn’t in love with you. Just how does that leave me in your debt? You’re so anxious to ferret everything out so go to work on that, Rowland Coles!”
She had not meant to be so explicit but now she was glad he had goaded her into losing her temper. The blank expression on his face—until then anything but blank—was worth what amounted to an admission that she was in love with him and had been since the moment he bandaged her after that brother of his had picked her out of the ditch outside their home. He looked so startled that she could have laughed. “Well?” she taunted him. “Are you satisfied now you know? Shall we turn around and go back to Tonbridge?”
“Good Lord,” he said, at last, “I really am an idiot! When it comes to people, that is. And I’m supposed to be the brainy one, the chap who walks through exams and takes all the prizes. Now Clint never won a prize or sat an exam in his life, but in a situation of this kind he wouldn’t even have to think on it, not for a second! I mean, he’d know, wouldn’t he?” And he turned to her desperately, as though her corroboration was vital to his peace of mind.
“Yes,” she said, “he’d know all right. He probably has known, from that first day we had luncheon with your family. Joanna knows too, for that matter, because I told her the minute she told me you had proposed to her, and I daresay your parents, and certainly your sisters, guessed long ago. But all these people knowing that I would give everything in the world to be Joanna doesn’t help, does it? I see that now very clearly. If I had the sense I was born with I’d never have let her talk me into taking part in such a silly, stupid novelettish situation.”
She leaned over to lift the reins from the rest but he caught her hand, checking her. The pony went on cropping. The hedge-sparrow, after a cautious circuit or two, decided there was nothing to fear and flitted back to her nest in the hollow. He still looked as if he had been struck on the head with a croquet mallet, but there was a hint of laughter at the corners of his mouth. He said, wryly, “There would be no point in wishing you were Joanna now, Helen.”
“Why? Because she refused you? Don’t believe it! I know men better than you know women. Rejection only puts them on their mettle. You’ll ask her again. And again after that, and in the end she’ll be so flattered she’ll accept.”
“I won’t ask her again,” he said. “Both of you can be sure of that.”
“Why not? Just because she played a silly trick on you?”
“No, not really. Because the trick worked. In a queer sort of way.”
He said it quietly and without much conviction, so that it made no immediate impact on her. Yet some kind of reply was obligatory, so she said, with the same offhandedness, “Oh, there's no call for you to act the gallant any longer. I made a frightful fool of myself and I’m quite prepared to admit it, even if Jo isn’t.”
He smiled at that, a slow and very engaging smile, the first she had ever seen on his long, solemn face.
“Gallant? Who the devil said anything about being gallant? You and Joanna aren’t the only two who can play charades.”
“What can you mean by that?”
“I’ll tell you something. I came back to you and Clint before I was supposed to. I came because I was curious and for no other reason at all. I knew Joanna was up to something but I couldn’t fathom what, except that it had to do with you and with Clint. Well, I’ve found out now and, as I say, the trick worked to some extent. At least it showed me that you and I have something in common.”
“And what's that, pray?”
He dropped his reasonable tone and flashed out, “Oh, don’t sound so damned priggish! It's nothing to be ashamed of. You and I, we both make up our minds what we want and go straight at it. We aren’t easily turned aside by what stands in the way.” He looked at her speculatively. “What did Joanna tell you of what I have in mind now that I’ve qualified?”
“That you intended to become a medical missionary overseas.”
“And what did you deduce from that?”
“That you were convinced you ‘had a call,’ I suppose. That's how they refer to it, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that's what it's usually called. But it wasn’t what I had.”
“I don’t understand.”
“How could you? You would have had to have known me a long time ago. You would have had to have known my father and grandfather when they were my age. It's in the blood, like your brother Alex following the drum, and your father starting that business of his. To make something out of nothing. My grandfather rolled pills for a druggist in a country town until he was nearly forty, but he always had two rooted ambitions. To own a shop of his own, and to come to London. He achieved both. My father had a different ambition. He had it in mind to make a fortune and set up as a country gentleman, and that's just what he's done.”
“And you set your mind on becoming a missionary?”
She was listening to a very different Rowland Coles. She had never suspected that he would reveal himself as a tradesman, a man with something to sell, of the kind her father took pride in being. Yet she could discern similarities between them now. They had the same arrogance, the same prickly self-sufficiency, the identical “I’ll show you” and “Take-me-as-you-find-me” approach to the world. But he had a surprise in reserve for her. Before she could adjust to the new Rowley he said, “I daresay Joanna implied I was stuffy, didn’t she? No, that's not fair, you don’t have to tell me what she said. But the fact is, looking back, I see now she made it pretty clear I didn’t appeal to her. As a man, I mean, as well as a future medical missionary in Patagonia, or Sierra Leone. Well, that's her privilege. Clint is more her type but it took me time to admit that. All the same, I’m not that stuffy, and I’ll prove as much after we’ve had tea at a place I know in Hildenborough, just up the road. They serve rum butter, with home-baked scones and apricot jam. We’ll go there in a minute, but first I should like to prove I’m as much flesh and blood as Clint—” And he put his arm round her, holding her in a grip that made her wince and lifting his other hand tilted her chin, and kissed her on the mouth. It was not what you would call a lover's kiss, but it had about it a very definite air of proprietorship.
Se
ven
1
IT WAS THE TIME SHE CAME TO LOOK BACK ON AS THE FAMILY EXODUS. A TIME when the tempo and rhythm of Tryst faltered, changed, and reasserted itself in a way she could never have foreseen.
She had always known, of course, that such a time would come and had, in a sense, looked forward to it, seeing it as part of the pattern of fulfilment. The children, even the youngest of them, would grow up and scatter, but this was of no consequence. Progressively, marriages would take place and by the time little Margaret was tormenting her first beau Tryst would be half full of grandchildren. This was one of the hidden bonuses of producing a long, carefully spaced family. But it didn’t happen in quite that way. Instead, there was a trickle and then a rush of weddings and abdications that succeeded one another at such a speed that it sometimes seemed to Henrietta she was moving from early middle age to the evening of her life in a matter of weeks. It was enough to make any woman look over her shoulder for creeping shadows.
Alex, and his stocky little bride Lydia, had sailed for India in September but she was well-accustomed to Alex's migrations by now. This time she resigned herself to a separation of anything up to five years and looked for his reappearance with two or more toddlers in tow. A glance at Lydia's hips suggested she would have little or no difficulty in this respect.
Then overnight George, Gisela, and his two babies decamped, leaving the mill-house empty and uncared for and she could not bring herself to advise Adam to let it. This would be to set the seal of George's abdication, making it more final than she was prepared to admit, even to herself.
A few months later, Helen came romping into the house, shrieking that she had become engaged to the elder of the two Coles boys, the serious-looking one who was already a doctor, and was going to be a medical missionary and whisk her off to some Godforsaken spot halfway across the world. This had given Henrietta a jolt, for it made nonsense of her private predictions. Until then she had been convinced that Rowland Coles had no eyes for anyone but Joanna, yet here he was, fidgeting about in front of an embarrassed Adam, asking for Helen in the most formal manner imaginable! Adam, the poltroon, hastily shuttled the stammering young man on to her, which was most inconsiderate of him. He must have known that she was disinclined to encourage Helen, younger than Joanna by three years, to jump the queue in this slapdash manner.
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