Cuckoo in the Night

by Pamela Kent

  She suddenly realised that he was sitting on the side of the bed, and she was sitting upright against her pillows in an all but transparent nightdress that, in addition to everything else, was slipping off one of her shoulders. She reached frantically for her dressing-gown that was lying across the foot of the bed and draped it hurriedly about her shoulders, and Tim Hannaford smiled, and she was not at all sure it was a pleasant smile. It had a curious, lazy, indolent quality, just as his brown eyes had an indolent, amused gleam in them. It seemed to her he was taking advantage of a situation that was horribly unconventional in any case.

  “What an end to a perfect day,” he remarked. “The Folies Bergère in my own room … or a room I have always looked upon as mine. It might interest you to know that I once lived in this house. My innocent little boyhood was passed in this room.”

  Janine clutched her dressing-gown around her, and blinked in the brilliance of the light that streamed from the overhead bulb. With a sudden show of consideration he put it out and put on the bedside light instead.

  “That better?” he asked, his tone almost placatingly gentle. “I do apologise if I jerked you out of the arms of Morpheus somewhat rudely. But I wasn’t to know you were here, was I?”

  “How did you get in?” she asked, wishing he would have the consideration to avert his eyes for a moment. For the first time in her life she was thankful that she never smeared her face with cream before she went to bed, and her hair waved naturally so she never had to do anything about it that involved putting it up in curlers at night.

  “I have a key,” he explained. “I don’t mind admitting that I retained it after the sale of the house, but Stephen and Chris know about it, and they don’t mind. By the way,” staring at her with greater curiosity, “who are you? You remind me of someone, and it could be Chris.”

  “I’m her sister, Janine Scott.”

  “Janine? Quite sure it’s not Jane? I’d prefer it if it was, because it’s so uncomplicated. I’ll call you Jane, if you don’t mind—?”

  “Really,” she exclaimed, “this is ridiculous!”

  “Not at all.” He was smiling at her lazily. “It’s the only time I’ve become acquainted with an attractive young lady in the middle of the night … and while she was in bed, too! If I was a thinker I’d say there was something profound about that, something significant! It could indicate a remarkable friendship, or possibly something even closer. But we won’t go into that now, because I can see you’re not in the mood. However, I do think you are very attractive, and although you’re like Chris in a way you’re not like her. For one thing you look healthier, and you haven’t got that red hair … and green eyes always make me feel uneasy. Yours,” he bent to peer into them, “now what colour are yours?”

  “As if it mattered!” she returned, her ire getting the better of her. “Mr. Hannaford,” with extreme firmness, “this highly unconventional interlude has gone on long enough. Will you be so good as to remove yourself from my room? You may be wide awake, but I’m dying to resume my interrupted sleep … and since you know the house you’ll no doubt fit yourself in somewhere. What about a couch in the drawing-room?”

  “Too elegant,” he assured her. “I’m over six feet tall, and it would collapse under my weight.” As she glanced up at him she was suddenly impressed by the fact that he was very tall. “But I could doss down on the one in the library, which is a less fragile affair.”

  “Then do so, please,” she requested, with as much patience as she could muster.

  He smiled at her again, and waved a casual hand.

  “Very well. Since it seems that you and I must part … I’m sorry I alarmed you, but not sorry I disturbed you.”

  She dragged the bedclothes up to her chin because he seemed curiously loath to remove his eyes from her.

  “By the way,” she said, feeling ridiculous in such a situation, “do you happen to make cuckoo noises when you’re walking through a wood? And do you also have a weakness for emulating nightingales?”

  He looked surprised, and then amused.

  “Sometimes,” he admitted. “It’s a habit I formed in my boy-scout years … Keeps you company when you’re on your own.” His brown eyes regarded her thoughtfully, speculatively. “So you can’t have been asleep very long when I burst in on you.”

  “Shall we say I was just beginning to enjoy my beauty sleep,” she replied, in a distant voice.

  He shook his head.

  “Quite unnecessary, lady. You are beauty personified, I assure you. And in that fetching thing you’re wearing under all those bedclothes you represent quite an eyeful.” She blushed scarlet, and hugged the bedclothes closer to her. His brown eyes grew gently amused. “I feel as if I’ve been permitted a kind of preview.”

  And then, because she looked so angry, he darted away to the door.

  “Goodnight, Jane, I’ll see you some time,” he said, and to her infinite relief she heard the click of the door closing after him.

  In the morning he had gone. He didn’t even wait for breakfast, and he must have managed to get his car started because there was no sign of a car when she went searching for it as soon as she was bathed and dressed.

  She went to Chris’s room to find out what sort of a night her sister had had, and to her relief Chris was looking really rested and she smiled at her happily as she entered the room. A tray of breakfast was slung across her bed, but the contents of it were not very substantial … orange juice and black coffee, and some wafer-thin pieces of toast.

  Janine surveyed the tray critically.

  “No wonder you’re thin,” she said. “You ought to eat more.”

  Chris smiled with the complacence of a sleek, red-headed cat.

  “You forget I earned my living as a model before I married,” she reminded her sister. “And the one thing a model simply must not do is over-eat.”

  Janine sat down on the foot of the bed.

  “Well, in your case you don’t have to model any longer,” she said. “And as for over-eating, you’ll fade away altogether unless you do something rather more along those lines.” She bent to admire a rose on the breakfast tray. It was an enchanting, blush-pink rose, and still fresh with dew. “How nice!” she exclaimed, sniffing it. “Stephen?” she asked.

  “Good heavens, no.” Chris sounded faintly contemptuous. “The day when Stephen got up early in the morning to pick me roses before the sun was up is long past. No; this is a kind of acknowledgement for a night’s shelter. Tim Hannaford spent the night here last night because his car broke down, and he picked the rose before he left. He’s quite an unusual young man,” and she removed the rose from its glass of water and held it thoughtfully up against her face.

  Janine watched her.

  “Tim Hannaford?” she echoed, wondering how much Chris already knew.

  But Chris merely nodded her head.

  “Hope he didn’t disturb you,” she said. “He spent the night on the library sofa, and slipped out as soon as it was light. He’s done it before, but that was when the room you’re occupying was empty, and he spent the night there. It would have given you rather a shock if he’d burst in on you while you were asleep, wouldn’t it?”

  Janine nodded.

  “A nasty shock,” she agreed.

  Chris smiled up at her, still holding the rose against her face.

  “I expect you’ll meet him some time,” she said. “Lady Hannaford is bound to ask us over while you’re here, and if Tim is staying with her you’ll meet him, too.”

  “I feel I can hardly wait to meet him,” Janine said, with a dryness that only partly surprised her sister, because she was fairly certain she imagined it.

  Just before she entered the dining-room for breakfast with Stephen one of the maids handed Janine a note.

  “Mr. Hannaford asked me to give you this, miss,” she said, with the merest suggestion of a smirk in her eyes.

  Janine ripped open the envelope. On a single sheet of notepaper—Chris’s notepap
er—Tim Hannaford had written:

  “You made my night for me, Jane! The library sofa was quite comfortable, but I hardly slept a wink because I was trying to decide upon the exact colour of your eyes. I’ve a suspicion they’re grey … dove grey.

  “Have you a dove-like disposition? I shall make every effort to find out before long. Au revoir!”

  The note was signed Tim, and Janine stuffed it back inside its envelope. Tim Hannaford, with his blush roses for her sister and his compliments for herself, was quite a character … apparently a Don Juan! No wonder the maid looked intrigued when she handed over the note.

  Chapter V

  WITH her sister’s arrival Chris quite definitely improved in health, but that didn’t mean she bounded back to health simply because Janine was there to boost her morale. Her morale had suffered badly in recent months, and Janine was at a loss to account for it, for Stephen had by no means slipped into the habit of neglecting his wife, and if anything he treated her as if she was someone still very special, for whom he entertained a warm and protective regard.

  When he took Janine into the small market town to do some shopping he surprised her by emerging from a local antique shop with a delicate piece of Chinese pottery which he had decided she would like. And before they turned for home he darted off to the florist to pick up a rare plant and some specimen rose trees which apparently he had ordered beforehand over the telephone.

  “Chris has become quite knowledgeable about roses,” he said, on a curious note of pride. “And anything beautiful appeals to her. That’s why I bought the porcelain. It cost me far more than I can afford at the moment, but that doesn’t matter.”

  Janine glanced at him curiously as he started up the car. She had been shopping for personal things, and her packages were in the back of the car. The porcelain, on the other hand, was being carefully nursed by her in her lap.

  “I don’t know much about husbands,” she said, a faintly whimsical note in her voice. “But are they always as attentive after two years of marriage as you appear to be? There’s an old saying that warns of the Greeks bringing gifts. I don’t wish to imply that you’ve a guilty conscience, but is it partly an attempt to make up for … well, not being on hand all the time?”

  Stephen, who was concentrating on the road ahead, allowed his level grey eyes to swing round to her for a moment. It could have been her imagination, but it seemed to her there was a tiny glimmer of displeasure in them.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I’ve told you, I’m not in a position to judge.” She had unwrapped the parcel on her knee, and was fingering the raised flowers and the exquisite design of birds and leaves that were all part of the motif of the long-dead Chinese craftsman. “This is exquisite!” she declared. “If I were Chris I’d go into raptures when I received it.”

  “Then you must get yourself a husband,” he returned, with some dryness, “and perhaps he’ll discover a means of sending you into raptures.”

  Janine sat back in her corner of the car and studied him with some amusement.

  “On the lips of a man who once jilted me badly that doesn’t sound nice somehow,” she told him coolly.

  Instantly his shapely brown hand came out and touched her knee apologetically.

  “You’re right, Jan,” he agreed, compunction in his tone. And then, with a strong note of curiosity in his voice: “But it didn’t take you long to get over me, did it? What was it you said? Three months?”

  “Almost to the day.” Her eyes smiled at him provokingly. “How’s that for your ego? Bad?”

  “Not at all. I’m perfectly prepared to believe that all females are by nature as promiscuous as men.”

  She looked puzzled.

  “Not Chris, surely? Before you came along she wouldn’t look at a man seriously, and after you came along … well, you know what happened!”

  “But Chris is very feminine … a true daughter of Eve.”

  Her puzzled look grew.

  “You don’t mean you ever suspected her of having a divided allegiance?”

  He frowned at the road ahead.

  “Suspicion is a strong word, but there was someone who was pretty good at flattering her when we’d been married a few months. We used to row over him as if a crisis had been reached in our lives. Of course, Chris retaliated by accusing me of taking attractive clients out to lunch …”

  “And did you?”

  “I have to, sometimes.”

  “What happened to the flatterer?”

  “He vanished altogether, I’m thankful to say, and since then has never reappeared on our immediate horizon!”

  She wrapped the vase up neatly. She was weighing his words carefully.

  “And as a result of that little incident you decided it would be a good idea to secrete Chris away somewhere?” she suggested. “Somewhere like Dartmoor?”

  Stephen frowned. He had always had a habit of frowning very blackly when he was either embarrassed or disturbed.

  “You mustn’t misunderstand me,” he said, with emphasis. “Chris, when we knew the baby was on the way, was not at all well. The doctor said she needed a good air. It was suffocatingly hot in London. And besides, she was beginning to hate the London flat. She said it was too small, although the rent was fantastically high.”

  “So instead of looking for a larger flat at a moderate rent you decided on Sandals … which probably cost you the earth, anyway.”

  “It was pretty expensive.”

  She studied a group of ponies beside the road—they were wandering about as if there was no danger from passing cars—and all the time she was aware of the strange, compelling, almost unearthly beauty of the moor. To-day was cloudy, and it was a sinister moor. But it did something to her that made her wish that she was the mistress of a house like Sandals, and if she were she was quite sure she wouldn’t mind any of the inconveniences that resulted from living in such an out-of-the-way place.

  She put her question with deliberate caution, nevertheless.

  “Do you know Lady Hannaford’s nephew, Tim Hannaford, very well?”

  Stephen looked surprised, even a little taken aback.

  “Very well,” he answered. “He and I were at the same prep school together.”

  “I understand he spent the night at Sandals on the night I arrived.”

  “Yes. His car broke down, or something of the sort … I don’t know, I didn’t see him, but he left a note. He often does that sort of thing. It was his house once, you know.”

  “And you don’t mind? When he just makes use of a convenient latch-key, and establishes himself on the library sofa?”

  One of Stephen’s well-marked eyebrows went up.

  “Did he do that? Oh, well, it’s a strong enough sofa. It’s not likely to buckle under his weight.”

  “I was wondering whether he does it when you’re not at Sandals. Wouldn’t it be a bit inconsiderate of him—if you were not there?”

  Stephen frowned in his unmistakable fashion again, and then threw back his head and laughed with amusement.

  “Good lord, no! For one thing Chris hasn’t the smallest objection, and for another …” And then he fell silent.

  “Well?”

  “If you knew Tim you’d understand why neither Chris nor I mind,” he said, rather curtly. “And another good reason why we shouldn’t mind is that his grandmother, Lady Hannaford, is my godmother … a grand old lady who typifies the best in a breed that is dying out fast. I’ve no doubt you’ll meet her soon. And, possibly, you’ll meet Tim, as well. But until you do meet him don’t get any false notions about him. He,” as if it was important that this should be made clear, “is no wife-snatcher, if that’s what you were hinting at just now. And, as a matter of fact, he likes his lady friends to be numerous rather than to have any particular qualifications. We always say that Tim is a born bachelor, because no woman will ever trap him. He’s gregarious rather than selective, but that’s because he recognises the danger of being sel
ective. He’s civilised but untamed, a cat who prefers to walk alone.”

  Janine, who had met him on one occasion only, under somewhat unusual conditions, thought that the description probably fitted him very well.

  “What does he do for a living?” she asked. “Or doesn’t he have to do anything for a living?”

  “He’s interested in exploration, and is a bit of a mountain climber. I don’t think he takes anything very seriously. And fortunately for him Lady Hannaford will leave him everything she possesses when she dies.”

  “And she possesses a good deal?”

  “She’s well off … rich, in fact. It’s an expression I dislike, but very applicable in her case.”

  “Lucky Tim!” Janine exclaimed, and she wondered why she was being so extraordinarily secretive about the fact that she and Tim Hannaford were already acquainted, and that he was the only member of her masculine acquaintance who had ever found his way into her bedroom.

  It might be awkward for her if Tim himself let the cat out of the bag when they met officially, especially as there was no particular reason why she should conceal the truth. It was just something that she couldn’t explain to herself.

  Chris was delighted with the Chinese vase, and she was delighted with the specimen roses. For the rest of that day she seemed to bloom, as if she was recapturing some of her former healthy outlook on life, and as a result was as lovely as she had ever been. She saw to it that that night the cook served them up a very special dinner, and Stephen opened a bottle of champagne, because, he said, they had something to celebrate. Janine had had such a beneficial effect on his wife’s health that he wanted to toast her in the sparkling liquid that always caused Janine to sneeze a little after she had carried her glass up to her lips, for somehow or other the bubbles got up her nose, and that set everyone laughing and looking extremely relaxed.

  It was, in point of fact, a highly successful meal, and for the first time since the elder sister had deprived the younger of her fiancé Janine felt capable of meeting her brother-in-law’s eyes with real gaiety in her own, and there was no longer even a lingering regret in her heart because it wasn’t she who had married him.