The Flower Garden

by Margaret Pemberton

  Maria showed no surprise at being asked to repack after only a five day stay. When Mrs Cameron ordered Morris to bring her two extra calfskin suitcases, she dutifully filled them with the mementos and bric-à-brac that Mrs Cameron had collected and placed on the bed. There was a photograph album of Verity; half a dozen slim volumes of poetry; a cheap beaded rosary that had belonged to Mrs Cameron’s grandmother and was worthless apart from its sentimental value. Her mother’s waist-length double rope of priceless pearls lay incongruously next to it. Maria quickly averted her eyes as Mrs Cameron took off her emerald and diamond engagement ring and placed it inside the jewellery box that usually accompanied her. This time it was to be left behind.

  Maria and Morris went about their tasks quietly and efficiently and wondered if they were to accompany their mistress and where to. Twice the telephone rang and Mrs Cameron answered it eagerly. Twice she replaced the receiver with ill-concealed disappointment after making excuses for not being able to accept the given invitations.

  Her restlessness grew more acute as the morning merged into afternoon. The cases were packed and Collins was informed that they would be leaving for Boston at nine o’clock the following morning. Maria and Morris eyed each other with raised brows. Boston? They had packed enough for a trip to the Bahamas.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ Nancy said at last. ‘If Mr Cameron arrives, please tell him I’m down on the beach.’

  The camel coat was belted tightly, the collar turned up against the biting wind as she headed down towards the heaving desolation of the Atlantic.

  If Jack had wanted to, he could have been with her by now. Her high heels sank deeply into the loose sand of the dunes. She brushed a clump of clinging furze away from her trousered legs and walked straight out to the firm sand of the beach. The spray from the sea stung her cheeks and flecked her hair. Head down against the wind, she walked unseeingly.

  Jack’s non-arrival was ample proof of his conviction that Ramon had not meant a single word he had said to her. A wave ran high up the shingle, creaming around her feet. It receded, leaving the scarlet leather of her peep-toed shoes watermarked and coated with salt. She trudged on, oblivious. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps she had been gullible and naive. Perhaps even now Ramon was seducing another foolish and love-starved woman, and perhaps the name of Nancy Leigh Cameron was only another on a very long list.

  Boats bobbed emptily in the distance, their masts stark against a mackerel sky. If so, she would have to continue to live with the knowledge, at least for a few weeks or months.

  She clenched her fists tightly in her pockets. ‘Please God, let Jack be wrong,’ she said aloud. ‘Let Ramon love me. Just for a little while.’ Shearwaters flying out to sea, flapped noisily over her head.

  ‘Nancy!’

  She didn’t hear him. The letter to Verity had been taken to Hyannis by Collins hours ago. She didn’t regret it. Whatever happened she had told the truth. She had fallen in love with a man other than Jack and she was leaving Ocean View and the Cape. Nothing would change that.

  ‘Nancy!’

  She stumbled in her haste to turn around. He was a barely discernible figure, running and leaping down the high bank of the dunes. She stared in disbelief. He had come after all. He had placed her higher than the importance of his conference.

  ‘Nancy!’

  Her heart twisted and leapt. She began to laugh and cry as she broke into a heedless run. It wasn’t Jack: it was Ramon.

  He raced towards her, catching her breathlessly, swinging her off her feet and round and round.

  ‘I love you!’ she gasped, and the wind tore the words away as he crushed her to him and brought his mouth down hard on hers.

  ‘A week was too long to wait,’ he said at last, grinning wickedly as he picked her up in his arms and began to walk back towards the house.

  ‘I thought you were Jack.’ Her hands were clasped around his neck, her cheeks pressed close to his thick black curls.

  He stopped abruptly. ‘If that’s how you would have greeted him, I’ll drop you in the sea.’

  She screamed in protest as he carried her threateningly towards the shoreline. ‘No! Please! I wouldn’t have … !’

  ‘I’m a very jealous man.’ He was laughing but his eyes were deadly serious.

  ‘I know,’ she whispered, clinging to him with all of her strength. ‘And I’m glad.’

  ‘Give me your mouth,’ he said huskily. ‘I want to make love to you and this beach is too damn cold.’

  ‘What about in front of a log fire?’

  ‘A log fire would be admirable,’ he said, continuing to carry her in his arms as he strode back to Ocean View.

  There were no preliminaries. They undressed hastily and he made love to her with a savagery that left her on the edge of unconsciousness. As his climax came shatteringly and explosively, she cried out beneath him; oblivious of their surroundings, of Maria and Morris only rooms away; of Mrs Ambrosil in the kitchen; of Jack perhaps entering the house. The world rocked on its axis and spiralled into the eternities.

  Afterwards he leaned on his elbow and stroked the perfect line of her jaw with his forefinger.

  ‘I thought New York had been a mirage,’ he said, a crooked smile on his lips. ‘I didn’t dare believe it could happen again.’

  ‘It just did.’

  ‘Yes.’ He kissed her with infinite tenderness. ‘I know.’

  She pulled on her sweater and reached for her slacks. ‘Would you like some tea?’

  He grinned. ‘Now I know you’re half English, and yes, I would.’

  He was fully dressed by the time Mrs Ambrosil entered with the tea trolley.

  ‘Thank you,’ Nancy said to her and the housekeeper’s eyes widened at the sight of her mistress with bare feet and an unmistakable expression on her face.

  She withdrew hastily. Unlike Maria, her loyalty was to the senator as well as to his wife. Entertaining a man-friend at four o’clock in the afternoon was not the sort of behaviour Mrs Ambrosil could condone. Nor did she understand it. She had recognized the dark face, swarthy as a pirate’s, immediately. Ramon Sanford, Panther of the Playboys, and the man her favourite movie star had nearly married last year. He was not at all the sort of man she would have expected Mrs Cameron to be friendly with – if ‘friendly’was the right word to use.

  ‘Come back with me tonight.’

  ‘No. I’m seeing my father tomorrow. I have to tell him myself.’

  Ramon froze. It had not occurred to him that she would tell her father before leaving. He said carefully, ‘Your father will do everything he can to make you change your mind.’

  ‘I know, but he won’t succeed.’

  ‘You don’t know yet what he will say.’

  ‘I don’t care. Whatever it is, it will make no difference.’

  She crossed the room to where he stood. Without her shoes her head only reached the middle of his chest. His arms encircled her but when he stared down at her he was grim-faced.

  ‘Come away with me now, Nancy. Write to your father, or telephone him. Don’t see him.’

  ‘I have to. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t.’ She pressed herself close to him. ‘I know that he’ll be like a raging bull. I’m not expecting him to understand. I know he’s going to throw that old feud he had with your father in my face. It won’t make any difference. Why or how they fell out has no bearing whatsoever on what you and I do.’

  ‘Don’t put it to the test,’ he said urgently.

  She laughed and stood on her toes to kiss him. ‘I’ve burned all my boats. I’ve written to Verity and I’ve told Jack. Nothing my father can say or do will make any difference.’

  She closed her eyes and kissed him and did not see the frightening expression on his face.

  It was a gamble. Possibly the biggest he had ever taken. He knew the relationship between father and daughter, and he knew that if he insisted she did not see her father it would awaken doubts that would never be stilled
. Yet if she did …

  He could feel the heavy slam of her heart against his chest.

  ‘I love you,’ he said fiercely. ‘Never forget it.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’ Her love for him was so intense that her bones ached with it.

  The tea stood forgotten. He kissed her gently, caressing her with infinite tenderness. When they made love it was as if they did so in slow motion. Every moment lengthened in time: to be treasured and savoured, remembered at will. He thought: This is what it must be like when making a child, and then remembered that she could have no more children. It didn’t matter. She fulfilled his every need. She was the only person he had ever found who could make him feel; make him give as well as receive; make him hurt with longing. He thought of the small, barrel-bodied man in Boston’s City Hall; of his loudness and insensitivity; of his capacity for love and hate, and he experienced a sensation totally alien to him. One of fear.

  His face was hard and uncompromising as he looked down at her. Her cloud of dark, feathery curls shone in the firelight. Her lashes lay like soft dark wings on the smooth whiteness of her cheek. He had meant what he said in New York. He would take her away by force if necessary. Even against her own will. He would allow nothing to separate them; certainly not Boston’s sturdy-legged and swaggering mayor.

  ‘Have you packed for an island-hopping trip to Tobago or a long haul to Acapulco?’ he asked, not wanting to dwell on thoughts of Mayor Chips O’Shaughnessy.

  ‘I’ve just packed. I don’t care where we go.’

  ‘Or how?’ His eyes were teasing.

  ‘By train to Acapulco, by yacht to Tobago.’

  The smile that transformed his face widened. ‘What about by plane?’

  ‘There are no planes to Tobago.’

  ‘When you’re the pilot you can go where you choose.’

  She began to laugh. ‘So we really are going to take off into the sunset?’

  ‘Like two birds,’ he said, and kissed the delicate curve of her jaw and the fullness of her mouth. Then her lips sought his and it was a long time before they spoke again.

  ‘No pressmen, no photographers?’ she asked, her face pressed close against his chest.

  ‘None.’

  She sighed and ran her fingertips lightly over the strong muscles of his arm.

  ‘What will we do?’

  ‘Make love,’ he said. ‘Be happy.’

  ‘Won’t you miss New York and Paris and …’

  ‘… the life that late I led?’ he finished for her in amusement.

  ‘Yes.’ Her eyes held his, anxious for reassurance.

  He said quietly, ‘No. I’ve had enough of the playboy circuit. It was fun in my teens, routine in my twenties. Now I’m bored with it and have been for years.’

  The logs crackled and spat and the flames lit the room with a golden glow.

  ‘Boredom was the reason I spent four months climbing in the Himalayas and another six months on a very uncomfortable expedition to the upper reaches of the Amazon. It was boredom that made me vie for the world water-speed record; fly my Gipsy Moth as fast and as high as possible. Ria Doltrice wrote that I had a death wish. I hadn’t. I was bored. Sated by too many mindless, adoring debutantes, exiled princesses and American daughters of railroad barons and steel kings. Bored with ephemera and platitudes. Making love physically and never emotionally.’

  He drew her close, her breasts pushing against him.

  ‘I won’t miss any of it,’ he said. ‘I would only miss you.’

  ‘You’ll always have me.’ Her soft, deep voice was utterly assured. ‘Always.’

  ‘Come back with me to New York,’ he said for the last time.

  She shook her head. ‘No. Tomorrow I’m seeing my father in Boston. Saturday I’ll be in New York and we’ll have the rest of our lives together.’

  ‘It won’t be long enough,’ he said, and he was smiling.

  A knife turned in Nancy’s heart. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It won’t.’

  Half an hour later she stood in the tree-flanked drive and watched until the lights of his Daimler vanished into the night. Thirty-six hours, perhaps forty, and then they would be together again. She walked back into the house knowing that when next she left it, it would be for good.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Cameron!’

  ‘Welcome back, Mrs Cameron!’

  Nancy’s progress along City Hall’s warren of corridors was almost royal. As news of her presence spread, heads poked out of musty office doors. Everyone was eager to catch a glimpse of her, to wish her good-day. Many of the older inhabitants of City Hall remembered her being carried there, shoulder-high, by her triumphant father, when she was no more than a toddler. For them, the intervening years when Chips had stubbornly refused to run for office, had been years of exile. Now they were back in the centre of things and enjoying themselves with relish.

  ‘It’ll be a grand night, tonight,’ Seamus Flannery called to her.

  She smiled and waved. Seamus Flannery was her father’s shadow. The man who had told her bedtime stories about Ireland with such conviction that she still had a sneaking belief in fairies and leprechauns. In Chips’outer office scurrying aides halted to wish her good-day. Young Billy Williamson, who had never seen her before, watched her retreat into the mayor’s inner sanctum with a glazed expression on his face. The wide smile she gave everyone, the way she happily answered to her first name from menials like Walter Elliot, was a revelation to him. Now at last he understood the magic she exercised over those who had met her. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful. He struggled for a word and his tedious years of schooling at last stood him in good stead. She had charisma. The way her eyes tilted at the corners gave her the mischievous look of a kitten. There was nothing remote or glacial about her. He watched the tail of her fox fur disappear behind the mayor’s door and knew that he was in love.

  Nancy’s first impression was that her father was ill. The blue eyes that usually twinkled so brilliantly were curiously flat and lifeless. His shoulders were hunched and the thrusting chin had merged into a heavy jowl. Within seconds he was beaming, hugging her, and enthusiastically jabbing his forefinger at the plan for a new freeway.

  She kissed him, brushed the cigar ash from the front of his chest, sat down and said, ignoring his raptures over the freeway, ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’ His denial was emphatic.

  She remained silent and waited.

  He grinned suddenly like a schoolboy. ‘Nothing you need bother your pretty little head about.’

  ‘Then it’s not you or the city?’

  ‘I’m fine and the city’s even better. It’s going to rush into the 1940s, not creep in like a sick dog.’ He snipped the end off a cigar. ‘Leastways, it will with me as mayor.’

  She laughed, glad to see him recovering his zest so quickly. He wasn’t ill, merely tired.

  ‘It will be just like old times tonight,’ he said, clouds of cigar smoke wreathing his head. ‘It’s the firemen’s dinner. You always were a favourite with them. Tomorrow I’m speaking at the Nahant Club and a few words from you would be worth more than gold. In the afternoon it’s old Monaghan’s funeral. All the North End will be there so I must put in an appearance. After that you can play hostess to the Ladies’Club.’

  ‘Is Gloria still in New York?’ Nancy asked, stalling for time before telling him she would not be staying long enough to charm the ladies.

  Chips’teeth clenched tightly on his cigar. ‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘She’s in Jamaica Plain.’

  Nancy’s eyes widened. For the first few months of her father’s marriage she had expected Gloria to flee, or be sent away. Just when she had bewilderedly accepted that the strange marriage was one that worked, her initial instincts were proved to be right.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and understood now why he had looked so unlike himself when she had entered. ‘I see.’

  ‘You don’t, but it doesn’t matter.’

  He had turned his back to her,
his short sturdy legs braced apart, his hands clasped behind him, the fingers clenching and unclenching. When he swung round his face was free of all traces of hurt or bitterness.

  He grinned again. ‘It’s good to see you, Nancy. You spend too much time on the Cape. Now that Verity is in Europe, why don’t you come back to Boston? It would make life pleasanter for me and easier for Jack.’

  Nancy wasn’t fooled by his reassumed grin and joviality. Gloria had hurt him. It would make what she was going to say twice as difficult.

  She said carefully, ‘Where I am makes very little difference to Jack.’

  Her father’s eyes sharpened. ‘Not thinking of going to Europe, are you? Leave Verity alone for a while, Nancy. She’s chosen her life. Let her get on with it.’ He chuckled. ‘Countess Mezriczky. What would your grandparents have said to that, I wonder?’

  ‘I should think their comments would have been sharp and very terse,’ Nancy said drily.

  Chips threw back his head and roared with laughter. ‘My God, and I think you’re right! Still, I bet when they left Ireland with only the rags they stood up in they would have been well pleased if they’d seen the future. My father would never speak to your mother, but I always felt he took a perverse sort of pride in the fact that his son had married into a class that had always been as far removed from him as the sky.’

  ‘Your father lived his life exactly as he wanted.’

  ‘He did, and he was an amazing man. When I was five I was running the streets of the North End with patched trousers and bare feet. When I was ten I was leaving Beacon Hill and a house full of servants for the Boston Latin School. That’s what my father did in only a few short years. He seized his chances and he worked twenty hours out of twenty-four.’

  ‘And you’ve always lived life exactly as you pleased,’ Nancy continued.

  Chips was about to finish his often-told story of his father’s meteoric rise when he detected the undercurrent in his daughter’s voice.