The Lynmara Legacy
Page 28
‘Why ‒ why didn’t you tell me all this sooner? I would have understood. I would have understood about your aunt ‒ about a sort of promise you made your mother. Though I think sticking to that sort of promise, the kind that a kid is often forced to give, is sheer madness. But you didn’t trust me enough to tell me. God damn it, Nicky, that’s no basis for marriage.’
‘I know. I know it now. But, Lloyd ‒ you don’t understand how hard it seemed. I just couldn’t get my tongue around it. All the sort of things that stood in my way when I was growing up were all there still. I’ve never been able to talk to anyone like this in my life. Don’t you understand! You’re the kind of person Anna was trying, in her own way, to push me towards. You’re the sort of man she was hoping I’d meet if she could just get me through college ‒ with Lucky Nolan paying the bills. I was ashamed. I knew I’d have to tell you, but I thought just a few weeks … I wanted to go on playing the game just a bit longer. Perhaps … yes, probably I was afraid you might just walk away from me. The background was so phoney, so painted.’
‘But suppose you had married Blanchard, or married Ashleigh. Would you ever have told them?’
‘Well ‒ I suppose I knew that you were the only person I could have told it all to. That’s why I’ve been getting so desperate as the wedding got nearer. I didn’t want to deceive anyone ‒ especially someone like David. But you ‒ you know what America’s like. You’ve been in places like Brooklyn. You know. That sort doesn’t. It was first just an honest and fairly ordinary ambition my mother had for me, though she was going to fairly extraordinary lengths to achieve it. And then that old man in Yorkshire made that hateful will, and my mother agreed to the conditions. You see, I don’t think she ever got over this English thing. She suddenly saw a chance, a hope, that I’d be able to do what she’d never been able even to try. I’d have a chance to do it in England. If she hadn’t agreed to the terms of the will, she’d have had to go on with Lucky Nolan, with him paying all the bills, trying to hide him away from any friends I made. And she knew I hated Lucky Nolan. At least I thought I did. I was such a snob. I took everything his money would buy me and I looked down on him. She knew that. So she just took herself out of my life ‒ pushed me over here and into Iris’s arms. She wasn’t really to know that Iris had ambitions of her own.’ She laughed suddenly, rather hysterically. ‘Between them, what these women have made of me. And I agreed. That was what I wasn’t quite able to tell you.’
He watched the tears streaming down her face, she who never cried. ‘You were pretty young, Nicky. And you must have been about the loneliest kid in the world.’ He was thinking of the child left at school during the summer, the silent walks with Anna during the two vacation weeks each year, the weeks during which the piano practice was never allowed to lapse; he could feel Nicole’s shock as she had seen Lucky Nolan that first time. He marvelled at the extent and intensity of the bitterness that Anna Rainard had carried through her life that its effects could still be so startlingly visible in the face of the girl seated opposite him. And yet he was forced to a reluctant admiration for this unknown woman. She had lived her life in a tight discipline, and had brought her daughter up the same way. When the chance, and the change, had come, they had both been ready.
‘It’s time you had some company, Nicky ‒ really close company. Like a husband. Like an ordinary husband, not one who puts you into a house with miles of corridors and old enemies for company. Oh, I don’t doubt that Ashleigh would have tried to give you company. But he’s pretty young, too. He couldn’t help the place where he put you. God knows, he wouldn’t have known that he was just some sort of a grand pattern that had been worked out. He’d never know that you were there because your mother had been more or less kicked out … I’d say Manstone’s a pretty poor sort. He should never have let it happen … not first with your mother, or now with you. Whatever he did, he should have stopped it.’
Nicole brushed her hand across her cheeks. ‘It wasn’t planned. I’d hardly thought about Lord Manstone ‒ not as a person, until David sort of fell into my path. Even then I did nothing about it. I didn’t try to make him fall in love with me. That morning I wanted you to come to Euston ‒’
He passed his handkerchief across to her and groaned faintly, ‘All right. I know I made a stupid mistake. But how could I guess all this was behind it? You always seemed faintly mysterious to me, but I assumed you were the ordinary middle-class New York kid who found herself mixing in pretty high society, and was smart enough to keep her mouth shut, and play the part beautifully. I couldn’t have known that what I thought of as your ambition was an ambition you’d inherited, some sort of crazy promise you’d set yourself to keep.’
‘That morning at Euston, that was when I decided to let David Ashleigh fall in love with me, to go along with the whole thing. Perhaps I even had the hope that I’d fall in love with him too, and forget all about you. I won’t say it wasn’t some sort of consolation to be able to ram it home to Lord Manstone whose daughter I was. I would have loved to tell the same thing to the Countess, and watch her squirm. But that wouldn’t have been fair to David. So … I just let happen what happened. It all seemed so extraordinary. I didn’t plan it ‒ I swear that, Lloyd. It came my way. It seemed something that was fated. I’d lost you, but because of that I was free to go ahead and give my mother the greatest gift of all. I even had the faint hope, the thought, that one day she might even come to Lynmara, though I don’t suppose she would have agreed to that ‒ not so long as Manstone was alive. But it seemed as if I’d been set on a course, and there was no turning …’
’My God, you’re far more Russian than anyone would ever suspect. You thought it was all some part of the inevitable turn of the wheel of fortune. There you were, about to become mistress of the house they’d virtually thrown your mother out of. Everything I’ve ever read about Russians convinces me they’re obsessed by fatalism. What is to be, will be ‒’
She smiled, and the last of the tears was gone. ‘I’m afraid I said something like that to Lord Manstone. I actually believed it. If Judy hadn’t come this afternoon and told me about the photos, and what you’d said ‒ that broke through the idea that it was all fated.’
‘Well, you see, some other things are fated too. Now, don’t you think we’d better start doing something to untangle this mess? Look, I’ll get the bill and then start to do some telephoning. You’d better get yourself into the Ladies and wash your face. We’ll start with Manstone. If he’s at home, we’ll go there. And so much the better if Sir Charles can be there also. It’ll save a double explanation, and save you having to face your aunt tonight.’
‘And us? ‒ what happens to us?’
‘We’ll get married just as soon as we can get a licence. In the meantime, we’ll go to Fenton Field.’
The growing happiness registered on her face made him a little sick to watch, sick at the thought of what he had failed to comprehend, of what he had almost missed. He was a doctor, and doctors were supposed to be perceptive of things like that. He felt humbled and ashamed because his own blindness had almost cost him the chance of his whole lifetime. Never before had he felt the tenderness he felt for this girl, never before the need to protect and cherish, to banish the memory, even the thought of loneliness. He felt as if something incredibly beautiful, but infinitely fragile, had been placed in his hands. She had trusted his love enough to break the silence that had closed over her whole life, the shell of bitterness and discipline and a kind of fear. If he could cause this trust, this love she offered him, to grow and flower, he might, some day, call himself a successful man. The effort to control his emotion made him almost brusque when he spoke to her. ‘Better go and wash your face. Here’s some money for the attendant.’ Signalling the waiter for the bill, he suddenly turned back to her, ‘God, you’re going to need some looking after, aren’t you?’
In the cab on the way to Belgrave Square Lloyd held Nicole close to him in the beginning of the protectiveness t
hat he was at last coming to know she desperately needed. He knew he faced the task of trying to take her back to being a child, to learning to trust, and building all over again, until she became a whole woman.
It was of that part he was thinking when he said, ‘We’ll have to try to find your mother. There are ways …’
‘She won’t like that.’
‘How do you know? Perhaps she’s been waiting …’
‘No ‒ she’d never go around the terms of the will. If she wants to see me, she’ll be in touch with the New York attorneys when I’m twenty-one. She’s always known that. That miserable old man up in Yorkshire, my grandfather, must have calculated that I’d be completely alien to her by then. I suppose he could have made it a condition that she never saw me again, but perhaps he didn’t dare be quite such a monster. If there was going to be a break between us, it would have happened before I was twenty-one. He seemed to know everything there was to know about us both, so he probably knew we weren’t at all close. After all, how could we be? We hardly ever saw one another …’
‘But you’ve done all this, and you’ve sounded as if you’ve done it for her.’
‘In a way, I have. Don’t you think I felt humiliated by that story too? Don’t you think I haven’t wanted to smash that arrogant old woman’s confidence, because she did it to Anna? Don’t you think I despise Manstone because he was so weak, so cruelly thoughtless? But no ‒ we mustn’t push to get in touch with Anna, to find her. She’s a very private person. She’ll find out about me, I’m quite sure of it. Why do you think I encouraged all these bits in magazines and newspapers? I knew that she’d be watching ‒ she’d be watching for something. In the last resort, she’d look up Burke’s Peerage. I knew from time to time she’s done it before. She knew all about whom Manstone married, and about there being only one child. I thought the present I would give her was my marriage to David. But I’ll find a way to let her know that this is a much better present. The best of all. Until I’m twenty-one, that promise still binds me. If I try to see her before that, I may shatter something she’s been building up. For all I know, there may be some provision about her having to return the money if we are in contact. Lloyd, you say your family lost money during the crash, but honestly, you don’t really know what it’s like not to have any money at all. You think you’re all poor now … love, that’s one thing I could teach you something about. No, leave things as they are. On my twenty-first birthday I’ll be in the office of Fairfax & Osborne. If they have no address for her, then we’ll start looking …’ She jerked forward as the taxi came to a stop. ‘Oh, we’re here.’ In sudden panic she held him tightly. ‘Oh, God, what am I going to say?’
‘Just you be quiet, and I’ll talk.’
She relaxed into the almost unbelievable luxury of realizing that she would never be alone again.
John Manstone and Charles were waiting in the library of the house in Belgrave Square. Although the room was sombrely immaculate, a fire burning brightly, it still had a feeling of deadness, of disuse.
John Manstone was standing, smoking, near the fire. Charles sat in a leather chair facing him, a drink in his hand. They both turned expectantly as the door opened. ‘Miss Rainard and Dr Fenton, my lord.’
Manstone gestured them to chairs. Nicole seated herself as close to Charles as she could. Lloyd, refusing a drink, remained standing. He leaned back against the desk, seemingly quite at ease. For the first time it occurred to Nicole that she was seeing him in some sort of professional light. He was ready to tell a story, give a verdict, a prognosis, to fend off questions if that was necessary.
He talked quietly, and for quite a long time. Manstone let him go on, uninterrupted. Nicole began to grow more nervous from the very lack of argument.
As Lloyd came to the end of it, right down to the last things they had said to each other in the station buffet, Manstone tossed his cigarette end into the fire, and immediately lighted another. ‘If this were a Shakespearian comedy, there’d also be someone for David to be paired off with, once we got the ill-matched lovers sorted out. But it doesn’t go that way. For a time he’ll be very hurt. He won’t ever understand why this has happened. Unlike you two, he can’t, not for a while, go marching off into the sunset holding hands with someone. Well, London’s been having quite a bit of chatter about Blanchard. Now there’ll be the same sort of talk about David. Only this time you almost went right up to the wire. You almost married him. And that would have turned the comedy into a tragedy. Thank God you didn’t do it.’
Charles’s eyebrows shot up. ‘You’re being generous …’
‘Generous ‒ not a bit of it!’ Manstone snapped. ‘I never wanted this marriage, but I saw no way to stop it. David really is, as we say, head-over-heels. Nothing on God’s earth I could have said would have made him change his mind, once he was convinced that Nicole really did love him. Now he’ll know otherwise.’
Nicole spoke softly, as if she hardly dared to take the role of spokesman from Lloyd. ‘You could have told him about Anna. You threatened to. You said you would humiliate yourself in any way if it would stop this marriage.’
‘Once I said that, I knew the reverse was true. Telling him the story of Anna would have driven him more firmly than ever into your arms ‒ should I say arms, or clutches?’ Nicole could not prevent herself from wincing at the word.
It brought a growl of protest from Charles. ‘I say, Manstone, that’s ‒’
‘All right, all right,’ he conceded wearily. ‘I shouldn’t use such harsh terms. She’s still a young girl. Why should I expect wisdom, as well as brains? I suppose it was the sheer instinct of decency and survival which drove her to Fenton today. That’s something I can be thankful for. I’ve experienced a loveless marriage, and I don’t want to see it repeated for my only child. I realized, once I’d made my threat to tell David the whole story, that he would react like a young man in love. In short, he would never believe that it was a contrived situation in which Nicole did not return his love, but that it was the perfect example of justice being done, but a generation later. The young can be very idealistic. He would think of the wronged mother, and he would champion the daughter all the more. No, on consideration, I had to admit that I was helpless. Whatever action came, could come only from Nicole. Now it’s come, and even though David will be severely hurt, I’m glad it’s come.’
Now he gave his attention wholly to Nicole. ‘Don’t think I haven’t studied you. I’ve done little else. And I saw no prospect of the marriage working out. You’re the sort who has to be passionately dedicated to something … or someone. Whatever chance an ordinary girl would have had of making a go of it, there would have been very little for you. Without an intense involvement, the source of that rather surprising strength you display would, I think, have dried up. I didn’t think you could ever feel that passion for David, and without it, you’d have either burned up, or sought it elsewhere.’
‘I think you’re wrong.’ Nicole held up her hand. ‘No ‒ let me speak. I admit I didn’t have that feeling for David, otherwise I’d never be here with Lloyd this minute. I could have had it for Lynmara. Yes ‒ for Lynmara I could have had it. But when it came down to it, what I feel for Lloyd was greater.’
He stared at her steadily for almost a minute. For the first time, she thought, she was seeing his features without that guarded, wary look that had characterized them since the moment they had met. He looked tired, but in a normal fashion, not as if some terrible tension knotted him, so that everything he did and said seemed false. Then he looked to the others. He held out his hand towards Charles’s glass. ‘I’ll give you a refill. No ‒ let me. I’m having one myself.’ To Nicole he said, ‘Shall I get you a drink? I’d like you to stay a few minutes longer. There’s something I’d like to say to all of you.’
They were seated then, Lloyd and Nicole on a sofa together, Charles and Manstone in opposite chairs. Manstone sipped his drink and seemed to consider how he would choose his words.
Lloyd stirred restively, ‘I appreciate that, Lord Manstone, but I don’t see …’
The older man held up his hand. ‘Wait … just a few minutes. I won’t try to apologize at this late date for what I did to Anna, but now at least I can tell the truth. I think I would have married her, in spite of whatever opposition my mother put up. Anna was not only a very beautiful woman, but extremely intelligent. She would have learned our ways very quickly, as she would have learned much better English. She’d already shown great courage in the way she’d handled her life. She could have come to terms with our system, our peculiarities. I used to think what children we’d have. That mixture of Russian and English ‒’ Again he nodded towards Nicole ‒ ‘as you are. The prospect excited me. I wanted very badly to see a horde of little Tartars rushing about Lynmara. The house so badly needed life in it …’