by Sara Seale
Nicky went back with Simon, an angry spot of color on each high cheekbone.
“Your father is impossible,” she told Simon with repressed fury. “I’m itching to see Charles’s face when I tell him the Shands don’t think the Bredons good enough.”
“You’re not used to that, are you, Nicky?” Simon said quietly.
She looked at him in amazement.
“Well, naturally not,” she said a little coldly.
“And yet you know, there is the other point of view. A line does get played out. Just as good wine will become adulterated with age and replenishment.”
“Do you think we’re not good enough for you, Simon?” she asked him slowly.
He smiled. “That’s a silly question. I was only trying to make you understand that the Bredon standards aren’t the only ones. My father is very proud of his working-class strain, but I’m quite aware that all your family will think you’re making a mésalliance.”
“Then we’re quits,” she said, suddenly childishly rude. “But I hope my family will hide their feelings better than yours.”
He stopped the car in front of the great stone portico of Nye. “Nicky, Nicky!” he said softly. “Don’t be so intolerant. I know my father behaved boorishly, but that’s only because he’s blunt and honest and doesn’t know how to hide his feelings under a mask of insincerity. That only comes with the generations.”
She got out of the car feeling gently snubbed. He followed her slowly into the great hall, its lovely roof soaring into the shadows of a winter twilight, and for an instant he had the impression of being an alien. What, he thought, had the Shands to do with the Bredons of Nye? Then Nicky, warming herself beside the blazing logs, said in her high, clear voice:
“What a jolly engagement ours is going to be.”
“Thinking of changing your mind?” he asked quietly.
She looked up and her wide-set slanting eyes were brilliant.
“I’ll marry you if it’s the last thing I do, Simon Shand,” she said. “And I hope there’ll be rows and rows of bleating little grandchildren to annoy your father every time he sets eyes on them.”
Simon’s lips twitched.
“Two or three would be enough,” he said gravely. Then his face altered. He held out both hands to her. “Come here.”
She came slowly, almost against her will, and as his arms closed around her she suddenly felt very isolated.
“Why are you marrying me, Nicky?” he asked her gently.
She tried to avoid those disconcerting eyes, but he put one hand under her chin and kept it there.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly.
He gave a little sigh.
“Neither do I,” he said, and kissed her lightly on the forehead.
The Shand-Bredon engagement was a passing excitement in Hammertye. People gave parties for Simon and Nicky and if there was gossip that the Shand thousands had played a large part in the sudden romance, Nicky, at any rate, didn’t hear of it at once.
Only Liza Coleman, her bright, mischievous little eyes darting over Nicky’s face said:
“I do so sympathize, darling. After all, everyone’s been after him for months, and the money will be a help, won’t it? But it’s rather hard on the little Lucy girl.”
“Stella?” said Nicky sharply. “There wasn’t anything in that.”
“Perhaps not for Simon, darling, but she, poor sweet, was terribly smitten, and always had such pathetic hopes, as we all knew. They were always asked out together before you came home, you know.”
“Were they?” said Nicky a little blankly. “But Stella always seems so kind of lost and vague.”
“Oh, that’s just her line, darling. Wasn’t there some affair with your cousin years ago?”
“Michael? Yes. But I think she was rather silly about him.”
“Oh, she’s a most neurotic girl, of course. But then poor sweet, what has the village to offer a girl, and poor old Dick’s much too busy making up pills to take her about. But you have all the luck, Nicky.”
Curiously enough, Stella Lucy echoed the words when she met Nicky in the village a few days later.
“Congratulations, Nicky. You have all the luck, haven’t you?” Nicky glanced at her sharply, but her little face wore its usual gentle other-world expression. Only her enormous eyes seemed larger and more elfinlike than ever.
“You never know these days if marriage is going to be a piece of luck or not, do you?” Nicky said carelessly, but Stella gave her wan, fleeting smile and said: “Don’t you? I should know at once,” and vanished into the post office.
Faintly disturbed, Nicky asked Simon how great the friendship had been.
“Someone been talking to you?” he said shrewdly. “I’m very fond of Stella, as it happens, and I was sorry for the child stuck in this village all the year around. I used to take her about a bit. Old Lucy’s a good sort, but he’s too busy to give the girl much of a time.”
“I see,” Nicky said a little thoughtfully, then she dismissed the matter entirely from her mind, and was only momentarily interested when she heard a week later that Stella had gone on an indefinite visit to relations in Scotland.
With the formal announcement of her engagement, the Bredon relations descended in a swarm. With a sardonic twinkle Charles announced they must give a dinner party to introduce the new in-laws to be.
“A meeting of the clans!” exclaimed Nicky in horror. “You can’t do it, Charles. Imagine Aunt Alice getting together with old man Shand and discussing the dear young people!”
“It’s your Aunt Alice who insists on viewing the body,” Charles said with a shrug. “Very correct is your Aunt Alice. It’s the thing to have a family dinner and drink the dear young people’s health and pick them both to pieces. I seem to remember some such happenings when I got engaged to your mother. There’s no way out, Nick. You’ll have to go through with it.”
They all came for the weekend. The Hilary Bredons, old Lady Edderton, and Mrs. Bredon-Thomas, seldom seen at other times, but always in at deaths and weddings.
“Our nearest and dearest,” Charles muttered as, on Saturday night they all filed up to their rooms to dress for dinner. “We don’t seem very rich in relations, do we, Nick? Unfortunately, the more distant and happier connections stay away.”
Dinner was an uncomfortable affair for most of them. Among them all, only Charles appreciated the effect of the elder Shands on the company. Mary, though she didn’t enjoy herself, was, in her simple dignity quite equal to the occasion, but old John, barely hiding his antagonism, glowered across the table and came out with some of his bluntest remarks. It was the first time he had ever set foot in Nye, and while he was alive to the atmosphere of the long gracious room with its mellow panelling, its portraits, and the heavily loaded table, he silently criticized the indifferent food, the badly polished silver and long waits between courses. He was aware of Charles surveying the guests with his puckish glance, Hilary Bredon, silent and inscrutable on his side of the table, and the women, nonplussed and slightly patronizing, making the best of an unfortunate position for the sake of the backing the Shand money would bring them.
Afterwards, when toasts had been drunk and replied to and the men had been left to their port and cigars, the women sat about in the cold, little-used drawingroom and made desultory conversation.
Alice Bredon, eyeing Nicky’s slender body, remarked critically, “You’re too thin, Nicky. It’s not becoming.”
Old Lady Edderton said with a chuckle, “Marriage will soon alter that. I remember when I was your age, Nicky...”
The conversation relapsed into personalities, and presently Mrs. Bredon-Thomas said:
“And of course, Nicky, you are going to keep your own name, just as I did.”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Nicky replied, glancing a little awkwardly at Mary Shand, whom they all seemed to have forgotten.
“I never kept my name when I married Hilary,” said Aunt Alice coldly, who was a
lways torn between a belief that the Bredons were the salt of the earth and a secret irritation at their calm acceptance of the fact.
“That was different, dear,” said Mrs. Bredon-Thomas blandly. “But Nicky is the last of her line and the name should be carried on.”
“Well, we’ll talk about it later on,” said Nicky, and went and sat by Mary Shand, who was thinking with longing of her own overcrowded and overheated drawing room at home.
But Mrs. Bredon-Thomas was not to be so easily put off. When the men joined them again, she said firmly during a lull in the conversation:
“I was telling Nicky, my dear Charles, that she must insist on keeping her own name as well as her new one when she’s married.”
“Why?” asked Hilary Bredon a little wearily.
“For obvious reasons. She’s the last of her line. It’s quite simple—all done at Somerset House. Don’t you agree, Simon?”
“No, said Simon, “I can’t say I do.”
He was standing a little apart from the others, smoking a cigarette, and had spoken very little the whole evening.
“You don’t!” Mrs. Bredon-Thomas exclaimed incredulously. “But good gracious me, young man, why ever not? My husband raised no objection when I married him. He said he was only too proud to have the name of Bredon joined to his own.”
“But don’t you think,” said Simon in the gentle voice Nicky was beginning to recognize as dangerous, “that when a woman marries a man, his name alone should be good enough for her? It’s the usual thing, you know.”
“Quite,” said Hilary Bredon’s dry tones behind her, but John Shand, whose color had become more and more choleric as the conversation proceeded, broke in with a roar that made everyone jump.
“I’m durned if I’ll have any nonsense of that sort,” he said, bringing one clenched fist down into the palm of his other hand. “If the name of Shand isn’t good enough for you, Nicky, then you can do without it.”
Nicky, standing straight and stiff beside Mary Shand, met his angry stare with one equally angry.
“Durn nonsense!” Shand went on furiously. “All this new-fangled talk. You don’t think the name good enough for you—any of you. That’s all it amounts to.”
“It wasn’t I who said it,” Nicky retorted.
“Don’t be a fool, Nick,” came Charles’s lazy tones. “We all seem to be very heated over something which, as far as I’m aware, has never been mentioned before. How about a four for bridge? Will you play, Shand?”
“Never learnt the game,” the old man muttered, and crossed the room to his wife.
“Oh, dear,” twittered Mrs. Bredon-Thomas, a little taken aback at the result of her remarks. “I do seem to have made you all angry. I only thought that as Nicky would have to leave Nye...” She trailed off into silence, but Nicky felt an unfamiliar stab of pain. Leave Nye! She had never even thought about it. For the first time she realized what her marriage was going to mean. She would leave all this, the heritage of five hundred years, to make her home with a stranger.
She heard Charles reply to some question she had missed.
“Oh, I shall shut the place up and go abroad again. I’m afraid our stately home of England is a bit of a white elephant really.” Charles didn’t really care, Nicky thought unhappily. He only wanted to be free to roam away the rest of his days in the pleasant spots of the world.
Simon, watching her across the room, had seen the pain in her face, a pain that sharpened her features into unfamiliar lines and found an echo in his own face. He remembered her as he had first seen her that day in early autumn running between the chestnuts, her eager feet impatient to carry her swiftly to the house, and he went over to her and put an arm around her thin shoulders.
“Come and play for me,” he said gently. “I’ve always wanted to hear you again.”
She sat down at the big Bechstein at the other end of the room and began playing snatches of Schumann. Simon, leaning against the piano, watched in silence for a little, then said appreciatively: “You play well.”
She smiled, a stiff, rather absent little smile, and he knew she wasn’t really aware of him as a person.
“My only education,” she said. “Charles always insisted upon tutors wherever we went. I think it must have been his one sentimentality. My mother played brilliantly.”
But presently, she looked up at him and said in a rather hard little voice:
“Why do you dislike the idea of carrying my name as well as yours?”
He moved a little impatiently.
“I don’t dislike it,” he said. “I just don’t think it’s important.”
“It’s important to me.”
He raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
“After all, ours is a great name, and it’s true I’m the last of my line.”
“You didn’t think of that before tonight, my dear.”
“Well, but Simon, I think you should consider it.”
“It isn’t entirely a question of what I think,” Simon said patiently. “It would hurt my people very much if I changed my name. There’s the other point of view besides the Bredons, you know.”
“But adding ours to yours isn’t changing it,” she persisted stubbornly.
That familiar note came into his voice.
“Well, it isn’t really any good discussing it,” he said quietly. “If you marry me, Nicky, you must take me as I am, and I’d advise you not to pursue the thing any further with my father. It can do no good.”
“I didn’t start it,” she said angrily.
“I know that,” Simon said with a sudden smile. “That’s why it’s so obviously foolish to take it seriously, isn’t it? Perhaps we’d better go back to the others or they’ll think we’re quarrelling.”
He met her two days later striding through the West Spinney, a pack of dogs at her heels. She wore an old pair of corduroy slacks and a vivid green sweater, and he stood in the shadow of an oak tree and watched her with pleasure as she came unconsciously toward him. She walked straight into his arms almost before she was aware of him, and unexpectedly the color flew to her cheeks. It was still so unfamiliar, to be made love to in her father’s woods,, and after he released her she said nothing at all, but stood staring at him, the heavy hair tumbling over her eyes.
“Has no man made love to you before, Nicolette?” he asked her softly.
She shook her head.
“I never liked it before,” she said simply.
He felt oddly touched, and pushed the hair back from her face with gentle fingers.
“And yet you gloried in your reputation when I first met you,” he said.
She grinned slowly, her long eyes tilting at the corners making her look very like Charles.
“Was it as bad at that?” she asked. “I suppose I used to feel I had to live up to the Bredon tradition. I think even Charles didn’t really know how far it went.”
She said it with simple pride. It had clearly never entered her head that a parent’s first duty should have been to find out. Simon reflected that in some ways Nicky was curiously innocent. She took the fact of her father’s affaires for granted, but the knowledge never touched her directly.
“I think I saw through you pretty early on,” he told her gently.
“Did you, Simon? Did you really?” she said. “How disappointing. I always hoped I’d fooled you more than anyone. I thought I had. I thought you had an honest contempt for me. You had, too, hadn’t you?”
He shook his head.
“You always interested me. You were such a mass of contradictions.”
“I feel—” She hesitated. “I feel quite often that I don’t know you at all. I don’t even know what you think of me.” There was humility in her voice and an unconscious pleading.
“You’ll have a long time finding out, won’t you, sweetheart?” he said, and the small endearment was the first she had heard from him, and sounded strange on his lips.
He turned and walked back with her, the dogs scurry
ing before them in the wet undergrowth, and presently they came out into the open parkland. Nicky sat on a gate screwing up her eyes in the winter sunshine as she looked away to the gracious facade of Nye rising from the brilliant green of its rolling lawns.
“You hated me for encroaching on your land, didn’t you?” Simon said.
“Yes.” She turned to look at him. “Sometimes I think I could hate you again.”
“For taking you away from Nye?”
“Perhaps—and other things. I can’t explain. Only I feel inside that we’re really antagonistic. When Michael and I were children we used to play a silly game called Common Enemy. When we met people we didn’t like we had a secret sign and then we baited them. It gave us a queer warm feeling inside of being united. I’ve never felt it with anyone else.”
He was silent for a moment, then he said:
“Would it make you happy to live at Nye when we’re married?”
“Live at Nye?” She didn’t understand, and he went on, watching her curiously:
“I’ve been to see your father, Nicky. I know he finds the place rather a burden, and I had thoughts of buying it and giving it to you as a wedding present. I understand he can’t sell, but he’s quite willing to lease me the house and allow me to make any improvements to the estate that I think fit. Would you like that?”
For a moment she sat very still on the gate, looking down at him, while her face went very white. Then the tears filled her eyes, and ran down her cheeks, and she sat staring at him speechlessly.
“Why, Nicky!” he exclaimed, both touched and distressed. “Does it mean so much to you?”
She slipped down from the gate and for the first time flung her arms round him and held him close. “That’s the sweetest thing you’ll ever do for me, Simon,” she said and raised her wet face to kiss him.
