by Sheila Burns
They were eating roast fowl and courgettes most attractively cooked, for Mrs. Baker was highly efficient.
‘I shall get so fat,’ said Joan Headley; ‘still, one may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, and here goes!’
‘You’ll regret it tomorrow,’ Dr. Archer told her.
‘How typically doctor!’ and she laughed.
When they finished the meal they had coffee at the table, then went out into the garden, for it was such a lovely evening. The sea was pearl, and the moon just rising was palely gold. The men played some fantastic game of croquet which seemed to require a lot of running about, and the women sat and talked. Not that Elisabeth Cooper talked, for she was a great ice barrier of a woman.
I like Joan most awfully, Lindy was thinking, she is a darling with eyes like violets, and a heart so big that I wonder it doesn’t burst inside her.
The Coopers left early, for their baby-sitter could not stay late, and somehow nobody missed them when they had gone. It was midnight when Lindy went upstairs with Joan to get her coat. It had been laid on the bed.
Joan turned to her, and she said, ‘Learn to love this house, for it is a fine house, and it will love you.’
‘I got scared the first moment I saw it.’
‘But why?’
‘I suppose it was because it is a bit of a blockhouse, old and grey, rather grim, and I got cold feet about it.’
‘It was not the feeling that Simon had had other wives here? The first one never came down here at all, she died six months after their marriage, poor girl.’
‘I think that marrying her was the loveliest thing that Simon ever did.’
‘Yes, it was. Edna lived here at odd times. I knew her by sight, no more.’
Quite eagerly Lindy said, ‘Tell me something about her, because I do so want to know. No, it is not that I am jealous, I’m not a jealous person at all, but I’m worried about her. Sometimes I feel that she could be the woman who weeps.’
‘I should not have thought so, for Edna wasn’t the weeping kind. She was a very determined person. She had come into this world to get what she wanted out of it, and she did get it every time. She wanted to be my Lady. She wanted a lot of money, and I should have said that she had every bob from Simon that she could get. You have no reason to be jealous of Edna, for he could not have loved her, seeing the way things worked out.’
‘I’m not jealous. It isn’t that at all, it is just a way I feel.’
Joan put an affectionate arm about Lindy, tenderly compassionate. ‘You’ll be right as rain here, my dear, remember that, and glory in it.’ They went down the stairs together almost triumphantly.
‘I want to see more of you,’ Lindy said.
‘Come to my house. Magisterial work keeps me busy, of course. I took it on because I thought that I ought to be doing something for the world in which I lived, and I am doing something. I hope I help them. I do sometimes, but not always,’ and then as they came to the foot of the stairs, ‘Don’t worry too much about your cousin.’
‘Poor Alan! He came here for a holiday, I don’t suppose he would ever have thought that Simon would not want him.’
‘Did you want him?’
With some horror Lindy admitted, ‘Not very much. I’m afraid Alan is one of the most unattractive men I know.’
‘Then maybe it is all working out for the best. Don’t let it haunt you. Let it go. You did your best. Send him some magazines and some grapes tomorrow, and go and see him. But don’t worry too much.’
When Lindy and Simon had waved away the last of the guests, she turned to him on the very threshold of the door. ‘I do so like your friend Joan Headley, she is a darling.’
‘I thought you’d like her.’
She paused. ‘Something quite awful has happened. I only found out just before dinner. You know that Dr. Archer was late arriving. He had to see a patient who had broken his left arm, and he went to the Crown. The patient was Alan.’
Simon closed the door behind them. They faced each other in the hall with the shallow stairs rising to one side and the amber carpet gleaming on them. ‘Well, well, well! What do you know!’
‘Simon, it’s awful. Quite dreadful. He will have to come here tomorrow. We must have him.’
‘Aren’t you being rather silly? Do understand, I don’t want him here.’
‘But if he’s ill?’
‘Load him up with grapes and magazines. A bottle of champagne might buck him up, but I do not want him here in this house. He’d be a lot of nuisance, and he would stay here for ever.’
‘He would have to go back to his job, you know.’
‘Not with a doctor’s certificate, and Alan is the sort of man who would get that doctor’s certificate whatever happened!’
‘It worries me,’ and she walked slowly to the rising stairs. He went after her and put an arm round her.
‘Be sensible over this, my darling, because to get him ensconced here would be utterly appalling. Forget it.’ He put his arm closer round her. ‘I love you so much,’ he said, and she repeated those five words knowing that they meant everything to her.
Chapter Twelve
Lindy rang up Alan and was rather surprised that he could speak to her in person. He was quite nice at first, then he adopted the attitude of blaming them for what had happened. If he had never come down to the Crown, where they had that awful torn drugget on the landing, it would not have happened. He caught his foot in the thing, put out a hand to save himself and missed his hold. It was a disgrace. He stressed the pain. He had not had a wink of sleep with it, and what did he do?
Lindy cut short the argument. She was ashamed to behave like this, but it was very like Alan to cook up a good story and blame the whole world for his personal misfortunes.
All the same it was possible that she would have gone down to the Crown to see Alan immediately after breakfast save for the fact that other things happened at Fiddler’s Hill.
A child came running up the drive and burst in through the open door, screaming for Mrs. Baker. The child’s mum had sent her along to tell Mrs. Baker to come quickly, because her old man had had a stroke. He had always been an irritating old man and in fact some of Mrs. Baker’s stories about him gave the idea that long ago she had sickened of him, but the moment she heard that he was ill she changed her tune. He might have been the Romeo in her life, and she his Juliet.
Mrs. Baker was all of a tizzy. The child told her that her husband was lying on the floor making funny noises, and one side of his face looking awful! Her sister had gone for the doctor and the nurse, whilst the child came for her.
‘Oh, my Gawd!’ said Mrs. Baker. ‘Whatever do I do? If he’s bad, I’ll die myself. What will I do?’
Simon took her round immediately in Lindy’s runabout; she was weeping profusely. Everybody knew that they had never got on, and the thought of death could not be that nightmare that she made it out to be, but how she wept!
Half an hour later Davies went round to see what had happened. The old man had been got to bed, he said, and was still unconscious, and although the doctor had tried to get him into the hospital, there wasn’t a bed for him. The district nurse was with him, doing everything, whilst Mrs. Baker sat and howled.
At this moment Lindy hardly liked to confess that her worry was what would happen about today’s supper?
‘We’ll go down to the hotel for it,’ said Simon, and then remembered that Alan was at the hotel and they could not possibly go there. ‘We’ll go into Colchester,’ he corrected himself.
By teatime it was quite obvious that Mrs. Baker would not be returning for a very long time, if ever. Felix Archer dropped in on his way back from the cottage. The man was bad, very bad, he doubted if he would ever do much again, but one never knew in these cases. However, the district nurse could manage, and Mrs. Baker would stay with him.
‘Mind you, if she gets two or three years of the old man lying like a log, she won’t be so keen,’ he said, ‘but she is a
loyal old girl, and for the moment only too anxious to do the best she can for him.’
‘What about us?’ Simon asked. It wasn’t that he wanted to force the poor woman to leave her husband, but they would have to make some arrangements.
‘It’ll be some time,’ Felix Archer shook his head.
‘I don’t want to make her furious by going off to some agency and getting someone to take her place before we are sure that her place will have to be taken. If we were lucky the old boy would go in the night, and it would be the best thing for himself too. I hate seeing them hang on.’
Felix Archer had a drink, then he went back to his surgery. The two of them faced each other.
‘We can’t get someone immediately,’ Lindy said.
‘No, we’ll feed out for a week, then come to some decision. Some temporary arrangement, we could call it. I would not like to think we were actually parting with Mrs. Baker, she has been a great help here, and I like her cooking.’
Next day there was little change in the old man’s condition, though his heart was staying strong. One did not know what to do. Lindy went down to visit Alan, who was full of self-pity, of course, and still reproachful. He did not mention the bottle of champagne which Simon had sent round for him.
There was a week of difficulties, of dining out when suddenly the thought of dining in was the only thing they wanted. At the end of that week old Baker was much the same, but one thing was certain, he was going to live.
Lindy went to the local employment office, but it had nothing and nobody. There were good advertisements in the papers and she wrote to a Norwich agency. They had no one suitable for the moment, but for a fee they would register her name.
Davies found a local girl who offered to come and cook the dinner for them. She stayed but the one night, because it was only too plain that she couldn’t cook. She blamed them, of course, she said it was the stove when most certainly it was herself, and she did not know what she was doing. Ethel volunteered one night, returning after her day’s work was done to undertake the cooking, but after she had gone, Davies served poached eggs all round, and they were glad to eat them.
You would not have believed that the stroke which had laid low Mrs. Baker’s husband could have made such a difference. Sitting back on the sitting-room couch, Simon said, ‘Where should we be without Davies?’
He caught Lindy in his arms. ‘We’ll worry through. What about shutting up the place and going off to the Adriatic for a long holiday, and coming back when old man Baker decides whether to live, or die?’
She shook her head. ‘The bother with running away from a trouble is that one has to come back to it. We can find a cook, it is just the matter of looking for her properly and then engaging her.’
‘Yes, of course.’
In the morning she phoned a couple of well-known London agencies. They had inserted very promising advertisements in The Times and the Telegraph, and had given her fresh hope. But when it came to discussing the points with some haughty manageress, it was not so simple. Fiddler’s Hill was too far from the shops, the cinema and that sort of thing. Anyway Alderson Point was a very small place, wasn’t it? Had they a car which the staff could use when they wanted to get away? She asked Simon about this, and it went against the grain, he disapproved of it. He could give no real reason, just that he disliked it.
The wages were excellent, yet still the London agencies could not promise them so much as a nibble. She hung up again.
‘Simon, whatever do we do?’
‘We’ll run down, have a bathe, and forget all about it. Come along.’
They went out of the door and across the wild land, down the earth cliffs to the beach below. It was her first bathe of the season, and heavenly! Nobody was about. They had a good mile of beach to themselves, firm golden sand, a half tide coming in, merely a curved ripple along the sand. They sat down in the looser sand at the cliff foot, amongst the parched dry grasses and bushes, and undressed in the hot sunshine. She pulled on a brief white bikini.
‘You look marvellous!’ he said.
‘I feel marvellous.’
‘I’m the luckiest man in all the world to have married you. To think I might have missed you! That would have been my whole life’s tragedy. You’re the loveliest girl I have ever met.’
She wanted to ask about Marigold, and about Edna, but she was tongue-tied. Maybe he saw in her eyes the question that she dared not ask, for he said, ‘No, there is no comparison. Marigold was so ill, poor child! Edna and I fought like cat and dog at times. You are the only one,’ and he kissed her.
They ran across the firm sand hand in hand, and she swam beside Simon, and later came back to dry beside him half sheltered by the sedges and the straggling weeds. They sat there drying, the only two people on the whole desolate beach, with the tide sneaking in, just a little more with every wave, and to her the world was far, far away and all the cooks with it.
As long as she had Simon, nothing in the world mattered.
‘Do you know that I’m desperately in love?’ she asked him.
‘So am I, only a little more desperately.’
‘How did I live without you?’
‘Or I without you?’
Then he took her into his arms again, and kissed her repeatedly. The world was theirs, for they were each other’s. Nothing could change it, nothing could come between them, and in this her happiest hour she felt that it did not matter if in Fiddler’s Hill there were moments when a woman wept. She did not weep here. Nobody wept here. This was sweet sunshine, warmth and love, their love for each other.
Next morning he received a letter which despatched him to London for a couple of days on business. As he was going by car he suggested that he picked up Alan from the Crown and took him up to London with him.
The day that Simon went off to London and took Alan with him was a red-letter one, when Lindy got a cook. She was a stout woman who arrived from an Ipswich agency who had explained on the phone that she was a first-class cook if one could tolerate a rather awkward manner. When she arrived walking from the far bus stop by Ronald Forbes’s thatched bungalow, she looked formidable.
That night she served up some burnt soup, followed by a rather leathery and extremely flat omelette and a repulsive fruit pie. Lindy did not dare complain about it. She would never have got any breakfast at all save that Davies came to her rescue, but when lunchtime came the woman who looked like the Rock of Gibraltar in a parson’s hat said that she felt too ill to do any cooking.
She returned to Ipswich that evening.
It was when Lindy was having a good cry over it all that Joan Headley appeared out of the blue and came to her aid. This could not go on, she said. She knew a young woman who lived on the far side of Alderson Point, and wondered if she would be any use. She rather liked cooking. But there seemed to be very little that she could do efficiently, and Ethel did not like her, which was the casting vote. She left that day.
At first Simon was terribly nice about all this, and more than kind, but after a short while it was obviously irritating him and making him restless. He was the sort of man who must have an even background. Lindy knew that this upset him more than it would upset most men, and that somehow or other she must smooth it out for him.
She had never thought that their first real row would come over anything so menial as a badly cooked lunch, but this was what happened. It coincided with trouble in the States. He had, he said, perhaps foolishly invested some money there and it was being a confounded nuisance. It had to date produced a good income; now there was trouble over it, and he could not make out what the root of the trouble was.
After receiving this news he had gone out on to the cliff with Dixie and Tessa the spaniels, and disappeared for hours. He did not come home to lunch until very late indeed, and there had already been difficulty about keeping it hot for him. The fact of the matter was that it was very far from hot when he arrived.
Lindy knew that in this mood he could be his m
ost contrary, and almost a stranger to her. She had to pander to him, she must not ask where he had been or what he had been doing; once he had told her that ever since childhood he had always gone off alone to worry when anything had upset him. It was the only way he could master difficulties.
When he arrived it was a disastrous lunch. He just could not eat the meal. She had got a woman in from Alderson Point itself, someone Ronald knew of, and she also did not know what she was doing.
‘Simon, I am sorry. She is furious because you are late and warned me the meal would be spoilt. Now you are angry with me because it is awful. What am I to do?’
He got up in a rage. For the first time he was almost biting. ‘Learn to cook!’ he said.
‘I’ll try, I will try …’ She was almost in tears.
Angrily he said, ‘It’s absurd. All women can cook. Even Edna, and God knows she was grand enough, but she cooked well,’ then he walked out of the room and had gone.
He did not return until the next day.
That was a terrifying night. Lindy went out on to the cliffs praying that she would be able to find him. When the twilight came with the wind rising, it was eerie out there. There was no trace of him, or of Trixie or Tessa, and she thought he had both of them with him.
She got scared and went home. Davies made her an omelette supper, and brought it to her in her room. He was an understanding man, the one who knew best of all how she felt, yet he did not dare to comfort her.
In the end she went up to bed and heard the sound of the woman weeping again, a pathetic meaningless sobbing which hurt. She took a sleeping pill, for somehow she must sleep.
At breakfast Simon and the dogs did not reappear, and she rang up Joan Headley, and Joan came along at once. They sat down in the dining-room to talk things over.
‘He was furious about the lunch yesterday. I admit that it was bad, but he was so late and when I said so, he walked out.’
‘He’s bound to return, if he hasn’t fallen down and broken a leg so that he can’t get up. But the dogs are with him, and he would have sent one of them home. Try to cheer up. Being miserable never helps.’
