Lake of Shadows

by Jane Arbor

  “And you like it that way?”

  “Well—yes. We’re all fond of him, and he’s lonely and adrift and I’m sorry for him.”

  “No more than that on your side? But what about him?”

  “You mean—? Oh, Basil, I’ve told you—He’s still crazy with love and regrets for his wife. That’s his trouble—he can’t put it all behind him.”

  Basil said perversely, “I don’t know. From all the signs he could be hoping you’ll help him to. Anyway, does he really have to be there when I come to lunch on Sunday?”

  Kate’s hesitation was only momentary. Then, “I’m afraid he does,” she said firmly. “I can’t possibly put him off without telling him why.”

  “Then tell him—”

  “That you choose to be jealous of him over nothing?”

  “No. That I’m jealous, to my mind with reason.”

  “You have no reason!”

  “If I hadn’t, would you need to get so hot under the collar?”

  “I am not hot under the—” She choked on the absurd denial, and suddenly, incredibly, they were quarrelling for the first time.

  When they reached the house Basil merely opened the car door for her and kept the engine running. She got out in wretched silence. She needed to moisten her lips to ask,

  “Well, do we expect you on Sunday?”

  He shrugged. “I daresay. We’ll have to talk about it,” he said coldly, and her pride let him go without another word.

  To her relief, the light in Bridie’s room showed that she was already home, and when Kate went in she was sitting before her mirror, studying her reflection as if it were that of someone she scarcely knew. Her fair skin was charmingly flushed and in spite of the sophisticated eye-shadow, her eyes were youthfully starry.

  Fleetingly Kate thought, I remember looking like that the first time Basil and I had kissed—and guessed why Bridie was knowing the same enchantment now.

  “So you’re home, pet. I’m glad. Did you enjoy yourself?” she asked.

  Bridie turned her head. “Enjoy? Oh, Kate, it was super! When can we do it again?”

  Kate laughed. “You could wait until we’re asked! I suppose Guy brought you home?”

  “Yes, but he drove right round the lake first—”

  Bridie paused, then pleaded, “Please, Kate, don’t say them, will you?”

  “Don’t say what?”

  “The things you’re feeling you should. That Guy is too old for me. That he’s the kind of man who knows all the answers. That he probably does it all the time—takes out girls and—kisses them as a matter of course. But don’t, please—please!”

  Standing behind her, Kate smoothed an escaping tendril of hair upward from her nape. “I know just how you’re feeling, and if I said any of that, it would only be because I didn’t want you to build too much on one evening out and a few kisses,” she told her.

  Bridie nodded. “I knew you’d think you ought to warn me. You forget you’ve told me it happened in much the same way for you and Basil. And if anyone had said then ‘Don’t build too much’, would you have listened?”

  “I doubt if I should,” agreed Kate.

  “Well, wouldn’t you have been right not to? Besides, even if it hadn’t worked, if you and Basil had dropped each other like hot potatoes, aren’t you entitled to make your own mistakes?”

  Rather less readily than before, Kate agreed again. “I suppose so, except that righting mistakes of that kind later on is apt to hurt a lot.”

  At that Bridie swivelled full round on her dressing-stool. “You mean jilting or being jilted? D’you know, that sounded as if you’d been through it? Had someone let you down before Basil—?”

  “What do you mean? Basil hasn’t—” Kate’s interruption was sharp.

  “Silly! Of course I meant before Basil happened!”

  “Oh—No, there was no one for me before him.”

  “Then you are only theorising? Being a bit stuffy because you think it’s your duty?” Bridie urged.

  “I daresay. Anyway, let’s skip it for tonight.” But as they kissed and parted, Kate knew that a tiny reasonless fear had been alerted by the question Bridie hadn’t meant to ask.

  The sour after-taste of her quarrel with Basil kept her from sleeping for a long time. And when she did, she woke suddenly an hour later with the phrase “Straws in the wind” running in her mind.

  What straws? In what wind?

  She would have given anything to deny that her instinct knew. But it did.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  All the next day Kate waited in vain for Basil to ring up, and when he had not done so by evening, told herself he might come over on his return from Cork.

  He did not come, and the pride which had stalked between them the previous evening kept her from ringing the hotel to ask if he was there. But the following morning brought more sanity, and she had already decided she must make the first peace move when it came from him by a means she did not expect.

  Bridie had taken the car in order to spend the day with friends in Morah Beg, and Kate was giving the henhouse its weekly disinfectant scrub when she heard footsteps on the cobbles at the side of the house, and a minute later she was being hailed from the gateway to the yard.

  “Hullo there!” called Hester Davenport’s light small voice. “Basil gave me directions how to find you, but I didn’t expect you to be quite this neck-of-the-woods, as the saying goes. Or didn’t I come the right way?”

  Kate straightened and turned, dropping her scrubbing-brush into the bucket and using her handkerchief on her sweat-dampened face. All too conscious of the contrast between the other girl’s chic brown linen suit and her own butcher’s bib of thick navy duck, she said, “If you came by road, you must have come up the ride. There’s no other way.”

  Hester wrinkled her pretty nose. “I pity your car’s back axle! D’you mean all those bumps and ridges are your only access to the road? How long have you lived here, then?”

  “All my life.”

  “And you’ve never had a proper drive up to the house in all the time you’ve had a car?”

  Kate said dryly, “Ours is so used to the ride by now that it would probably stall from spite if we got the ride macadamed. Besides, my father has such a passion for privacy that he hates the thought of strangers knowing there’s a house here at all.” Then, remembering hospitality, she added, “I’m sorry you’ve found me in such a mess, but will you come in for some coffee or a drink?”

  Hester agreed, “A drink would be nice. But don’t you want to know what brought me? A note for you from Basil. I offered to deliver it.”

  Kate came through the gate, closing it carefully against the milling hens. “For me, from Basil?” she queried, taking the proffered envelope. “What an odd way of sending it!”

  “Not so odd. He was working late again yesterday and he stayed over with us. Then when, as it was such a lovely morning, Guy and I decided to drive out in my car for a swim and lunch and perhaps dinner, Basil confessed he hadn’t phoned you as he should have done, and so I said I would play postman for him, after I’d dropped Guy at the Lakestrand. Aren’t you going to read it?” Hester asked.

  “Yes. Thanks for bringing it.” But the letter went into the pocket of Kate’s bib and she did not open it until she went to wash after showing Hester into the house.

  Her nervous fingers made a task of slitting the envelope, but relief flooded in as she scanned Basil’s note. It was short; it only confirmed that he would be there for lunch on Sunday; that he was so busy that he had straws in his hair. But it made no reference to their quarrel and there was the talisman “I love you” printed as a round robin in the bottom corner. It spelled peace for Kate.

  She went back to Hester, gave her a précis of the letter, thanked her again for bringing it and poured the drink she chose.

  Hester said perfunctorily, “All on my way. Besides, I rather wanted to see whether you were really buried as far out in the sticks as Basil said yo
u were.”

  “ ‘How the other half lives’, in other words?” murmured Kate.

  “What’s that? Oh—Well, I suppose the Lakestrand is your saving grace. But you only go over there on sufferance, so Basil says. And for the rest, I can’t imagine why, having apparently got him eating out of your hand in London, you ever risked leaving an attractive man like him to kick his heels waiting for you to go back. After all, men don’t keep indefinitely, you know,” added Hester with an air of stating a sage truth.

  “But if you know as much as that about me from Basil, didn’t he tell you too that I couldn’t help myself?” Kate asked.

  “Oh yes, though if I had been you, I think I’d have tried my utmost to get round it somehow. With you at this distance, you couldn’t blame Basil if he lost interest. For instance, in London before he came over, he—”

  Kate’s peace ebbed like a receding tide. “Just a moment—” she put in. “Do you mean you and your brother had met Basil before he came to Cork?”

  “Guy hadn’t. But when this merger thing with Kent’s was first mooted, Daddy had to go to London, about it, and I went along for the ride.”

  “Oh. And you were saying that, when you met Basil then, he was—?”

  “Well, rather what you’d expect. Going through all the motions of being loyal to you, but obviously a bit irked, if you see what I mean. Not his fault, of course. And he was trying, even at the risk of being something of a bore on the subject of you. In fact, the first time he took me out to dinner I wondered if he thought he must fob off temptation by reciting your virtues. I teased him. I told him your ears must be positively roasting and asked him whether he was that much afraid he couldn’t keep your memory green ... Only in fun, naturally, but he did pipe down after that—”

  Hester set aside her glass and flicked open the tiny ring-watch she wore. “Heavens, I must fly. Guy didn’t expect me to be long. You say I’ve no choice but to take the car back down that forest-path thing? Oh well, what’s car insurance for?”

  As thankful as she had ever been to see a guest leave, Kate went out with her. But Hester had a last question to put.

  . “By the way, is Bridie at the Lakestrand today? No?” She used her ignition key and went on, “Just as well, perhaps. Guy was hoping she would be. But he is rather naughty over new girls—takes them up with such enthusiasm and then drops them, sometimes not soon enough for their own good and too soon for their liking. Oh dear, you must think I’m in the Awful Warning business this morning! Do forgive and forget, won’t you? I do assure you, it isn’t really Me!”

  But it is, thought Kate as she retraced her way to the hen-yard. You guessed I hadn’t heard you had met Basil in London and you wanted to make sure I should. You wanted me to know, not that he missed me and talked too much about me, but that he had taken you out. What’s more, you meant me to realise—as if I didn’t, I wasn’t born yesterday!—that Bridie means nothing serious to your precious brother. You came here—you made Basil’s note your excuse—to say or to hint all that.

  Kate was convinced of it, and even the crackle of the letter in her pocket did little for the doubts and fears she ought to, yet could not, resist.

  As soon as she returned to the house again the telephone rang and Mrs. Burke’s crisp voice came through.

  “Is it Kate? It is? Well now, as it’s Bridie’s day off, what about the two of you coming to lunch with us—with Conor and me?”

  Kate thought quickly—of the two people, Hester and Guy Davenport, she least wanted to encounter at the hotel that day. “You mean—today?” she asked Mrs. Burke.

  “When else, to be sure? For isn’t tomorrow Bridie’s next day for the flowers, and she with no time to spare then?”

  “It is.” As she agreed, Kate heard the infectious Irish lilt in her own voice. She went on, “But today, I’m sorry, she’s gone in the car to visit some friends at Morah Beg.”

  “Yourself alone, then? You’ll come?”

  Kate grasped at straws. “I’m truly sorry, Mrs. Burke. But for one thing, you see, the car—”

  “What matter that Bridie has it? Has Conor so much to do, then, that he couldn’t come over to fetch you?”

  “I shouldn’t think of troubling him. I could walk or use Bridie’s bike. But you see I—That is, I’m rather expecting Dennis Regan to row over for lunch,” said Kate, making the “rather” excuse the white lie to her conscience.

  There was a pause. Then Mrs. Burke said, “Ah well. Another time, so,” and rang off. But Kate might not have cared too much for the comment with which the result of their talk was reported.

  Mrs. Burke addressed the broad back of her son, checking accounts at the desk in his office.

  “Bridie can’t come, being over to Morah Beg, and her sister won’t, having promised lunch to Dennis Regan. Now what would you say that one is at?” she mused.

  “What do you mean—at?” Conor’s pen continued to climb a ladder of figures. “Don’t we know already that Dennis is over there for this or that, most of the hours there are?”

  His mother agreed, “We do, so. And a very good thing too for the unfortunate man. But she—wasn’t she kissing another one, the Englishman with the Davenports, in our own lounge here the other night? And who was it but yourself, son, who told me that?”

  “And if she was, what about it?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you! What is she about, if she isn’t playing off the one against the other while she makes up her mind which of them it is she wants?”

  “Why shouldn’t she be playing the two of them off against a third she may know she wants?”

  Mrs. Burke considered the point. Then, “Ah, when I was young I’d have been equal to it. But have the girls either the spirit or the need for it, the way it is the men who are chasing after them these days? Besides, what third man could there be around here for Kate Ruthven to be displaying at?” she asked.

  Her son laid down his pen and thrust the sheets of accounts into a pigeonhole of the desk.

  “A good question, that,” he said. But he did not attempt to answer it.

  Later Kate was to remember that Sunday. At first it was one of the sweetest, and then the most despairing of her life.

  Basil came early and helped hilariously with the luncheon preparations before Dennis arrived by dinghy. When he did his mood was reasonably relaxed; Basil’s manner towards him was all Kate could wish. They found a common interest or two and she could almost have believed she had dreamed the quarrel which Basil had picked with her over the other man.

  The meal went well, except that Professor Ruthven had to be prised from his desk and reminded they had guests. He was mildly gracious and incurious with Basil who, as luck had it, knew well the university city where he had held his professorship. True, there was an awkward moment when the Professor remarked a little querulously that he could never know when a call to Kate would reveal her to be over at the Island, ministering to Dennis’s needs. But Dennis laughed that off by countering that whenever he wanted the domestic services of Kate or Bridie, and he wasn’t fussy which, both always seemed to be out or otherwise unavailable. He was considering applying to the Lone Males’ Union for protection from idling chars—

  When they had had coffee, he and Bridie volunteered to wash up, leaving the other two free for the afternoon Kate had planned—to show Basil her favourite walk up the lower slopes of Slieve Creochan, from which, on a fine day, the sea was visible.

  Today, however, the weather had changed again. It was cold enough for top-coats and it was good to feel Basil’s arm warm and cosy beneath hers. They had walked so for miles on many a winter night in London, and this was it all over again. What had she been afraid of?

  Their quarrel over Dennis was not mentioned, and Basil was so sure he had told her by letter of his earlier meeting with Hester that he convinced her he had. He thought Hester’s misgivings about her brother and Bridie were exaggerated. Hester, he said, rather enjoyed the image of Guy as a Lothario. Besides,
Bridie had to step out some time, hadn’t she, and if Kate were worried the remedy was at hand. When he himself left the Lakestrand in the morning, probably the Davenports wouldn’t be seen there again for months.

  That was the first cloud of Kate’s day. She hadn’t realised that negotiations which had been so urgent and pressing could have been wound up so soon. She had expected him to stay at least a week longer, and told him so, her dismay quavering her voice.

  They were sitting side by side in the lee of an outcrop of rock and Basil’s arm drew her closer as he said, “I’m sorry, darling. But the thing is all tied up now—rather a feather in Kent Junior’s cap—and now Junior has no choice but to report back to Kent Senior and collect his laurels.”

  Kate said mechanically, “I’m glad. But if it’s all settled, you won’t be coming back again?”

  “Not foreseeably, I’m afraid, though I may have to.”

  “And after this—what?”

  Basil’s response was a shrug. “Coming and going. Hither and thither. There and back. It’s my job, and it’s been that way for me ever since you’ve known me.”

  “Yes, I know, and I didn’t mind while I was in London. You always lighted back there from time to time.”

  “And I do still.” Basil paused. “Kate, I suppose you aren’t able to come back?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t possibly, as things are.”

  “But your father isn’t an invalid.”

  “Not outwardly. But he has a dicky heart and I can’t leave him alone in Bridie’s care, good and conscientious as she is.” Kate hesitated over a mild protest, then made it. “You know,” she said, “you and I would keep in touch better if you wrote a bit more fully about the things you are doing. I tell you everything I do.”

  “Do you? Remember, I have to take your word for that!” But at the hurt, rebuffed look she turned on him he tilted her chin and kissed her lightly. “Sorry, darling. I can’t bear it when you come over all wounded bird. I was only teasing. But I’m afraid you’ve got to face that I’m not much good at this remote control business and even less equal to screeds of letter writing.”