This Merry Bond

by Sara Seale

  She looked at him with startled eyes.

  “What do you mean?”

  His own eyes, bright, restless, and at the moment holding in them a reckless certainty, met and held hers.

  “I mean that you should have waited for me, and you know it,” he said, the laughter going out of his face.

  Nicky shivered. The blue mists of late evening were creeping up through the woods and the air seemed suddenly cold.

  “You know you only talk like this because you’re up against something you can’t have,” she said violently. “Charles always wanted the women he couldn’t get.”

  “And usually got them,” said Michael calmly. “And let me tell you this, Nick. You’re no exception to the rule yourself. You’re a Bredon the same as the rest of us, even though you have married a shoe factory.”

  There was some quality in his voice that stung her to defence of Simon.

  “You talk about Simon as if he only represented commercial commodities,” she said quickly. “What is there so amusing about a shoe factory?”

  “Nothing, my sweet,” said Michael blandly. “And if you’d been in love with the fellow there wouldn’t have been anything amusing in that either. Get wise to yourself, Nicky. What are either of you getting out of this crazy marriage, anyway?”

  She was silent, and he was suddenly on his feet and standing over her.

  “Darling, you were meant for me, and I was meant for you,” he said. “We’re two of a kind—always have been. Do you remember those ridiculous secret societies we used to have as children? Do you remember how we knew what each other was thinking before a word was said? We have something you could search the world over and never find.”

  A great quietness seemed to have fallen over the darkening country. Nicky stared beyond Michael to the sleeping woods. Do you remember? There was danger in such thoughts, for there was so much to bind these two.

  “But, Michael,” she pleaded. “We were like brother and sister—we are like brother and sister.”

  “Brother and sister!” he exclaimed. “Why, we aren’t even first cousins! You might have known I was coming back for you. ‘When Nicky is twenty-one she’ll be a woman,’ I told myself. And then I was coming back.”

  She knew he was dramatizing the situation. She was almost certain that he had never consciously thought of marrying her until he had returned to find her already married. But there was an urgency about him that stirred her imagination. Two of a kind. Perhaps they were.

  He pulled her to her feet, taking her into his arms with a roughness that was new in him.

  “What are you waiting for?” he demanded angrily against her mouth. “Don’t you know you’ll have to come with me in the end? What holds you to him? Has he ever kissed you like this ... and this? What do you know of love at all?”

  She yielded to him, too tired to resist, and for Nicky, as yet untouched by any man’s love, there was a quality in his lovemaking that aroused her to an unexpected response.

  He let her go as abruptly as he had taken her, and she stood there, exhausted and bewildered.

  “You see I was right,” he said with a slow smile. “Simon has taught you nothing, as I told you long ago. Come away with me, Nick. We’ll roam the earth till we’re old, and then Nye will be waiting for us.”

  “Nye is Simon’s now,” she said in a tired, disembodied little voice.

  “Nye could never be Simon’s,” Michael said. “He’s only the tenant. He could never belong in a million years!”

  “Oh, Michael!” She pushed the heavy hair out of her eyes with a weary gesture. “Don’t let’s be so childish. It’s all make-believe really. I can’t leave Simon just when I’ve married him!” She was trying to laugh.

  “What are either of you getting out of this marriage?” he asked again.

  She stood very straight and still, and a wave of bitter honesty made her answer without thought:

  “He’s given me all he could. Paid our debts, taken over our liabilities. But I’ve given him nothing. I thought I was right to take what I could get because he held me to a bargain. He called me a cheat. He’s got nothing out of our marriage ... nothing.”

  She saw a strange expression come into his eyes, and he said slowly:

  “I’m beginning to see. By God! Nick, I can wait now.”

  Too late she realized that she had told him the one thing that would finally seal his determination to get her. She had given him the key to the whole situation and he would never rest now in his efforts to break down her resistance. Without a word she turned and fled into the house and up the stairs to her own room.

  Long after midnight she lay tossing from side to side, waiting for Simon to come in. She must talk to him before she went to sleep, break through that reserve of his and ask for a fresh start. Michael must go. She would tell him tomorrow. There was no safety for her while he held such knowledge of her affairs.

  It seemed long afterwards that she heard him come in and listened to him moving quietly about next door. But he didn’t come to his own bed beside hers, and presently she heard the sharp click of the electric-light switch, and the thin pencil of light under the door between their rooms went out.

  Nicky woke late the next morning to find Mouse standing over her with a breakfast tray, an anxious look on her small, puckered face.

  “Sakes alive, Nicky! I’ve never known you to sleep so heavy,” she said. “I’ve spoken to you three times. It’s nearly half past ten.” Nicky struggled into a sitting position, pushing the tumbled hair off her forehead. She looked white and exhausted and still seemed drugged with sleep. Mouse placed the tray across her knees and stood watching her eat, with arms akimbo.

  “Did you have more pain in the night?” she demanded sternly.

  “No,” Nicky said. “I just didn’t sleep very well. I believe I stayed awake till after six. What a beastly day.”

  Heavy summer rain was pouring down outside her bedroom windows and the sky was gray and overcast.

  “Where’s everybody?” Nicky asked.

  “Mr. Simon’s gone to Horsham on business. He won’t be back to lunch. Michael’s taken a horse and Lord knows when we’ll see him again.”

  “In all this rain?” exclaimed Nicky.

  “Just like him. He’ll come in soaked and like as not catch his death.”

  “Oh, nothing ever happens to Michael,” Nicky said.

  She didn’t know if she was glad or not that her interview must be postponed. She would have to speak to Michael some time, she supposed, but last night’s unhappy impulse to talk to Simon seemed, in the raw light of morning, foolish and ineffectual.

  Lying there in the darkness, she had worked herself into a fever of doubt and misery, putting one construction after another on his decision to sleep in his dressing room. Had he been annoyed at Michael’s attitude? Was he shutting himself away from her more completely still? What had he and Stella talked of on the long drive home together? But now, common sense drove out those other thoughts. He had probably not wished to disturb her, that was all. Still, he might have made Michael take Stella to the dance last night, and stayed behind himself. He might have looked in this morning to see how she was.

  “Did Simon leave any message for me?” she asked, but Mouse shook her head.

  “Not that I know of. Just said he wouldn’t be back for lunch and you weren’t to wait.”

  “I see.”

  Nicky spent a desultory day doing nothing in particular. Michael didn’t return for lunch, and after tea, Nicky went into the drawing room and opened the piano. She pulled out stacks of old music, and struggled sternly with half-forgotten fugues and sonatas as if she were working for an examination. The difficult phrasing soothed her and gave her a savage satisfaction. She didn’t hear Simon come in and was unaware of him until he spoke.

  “You sound very determined,” he said, and she looked up to see him standing beside the piano gravely watching her.

  “It gets something out of my system,” sh
e said. “I must start practising again.”

  “Feeling better?” He studied her face critically, but the failing light of a wet afternoon blurred the shadows under her eyes and she looked quickly down at the keyboard, watching the fingers of one hand pick out a fragment of German lieder.

  “Oh, I’m all right,” she said impatiently. “Did you have an amusing evening?”

  “It was unexpectedly pleasant,” he said. “I think Stella enjoyed herself, anyhow.”

  “You like her, don’t you, Simon?”

  “I’m very fond of Stella,” he admitted frankly. “And I think she has rather a thin time one way and another. Couldn’t we have her up here a bit more?”

  “Ask her whenever you want,” said Nicky and began to play Chopin’s Marche Funebre in swing time.

  He looked a little puzzled, but before he could reply, Michael, his red head glistening from the rain, came into the room and stood looking at them, his hands in the pockets of his soaking coat. Nicky saw the grin of appreciation on his face. That was the sort of joke he would understand.

  She got up abruptly and shut the piano.

  “You’d better have a hot bath and some whisky, hadn’t you?” she said apathetically.

  His expression changed. He began telling them how exhilarating it was riding through the dripping woods with the rain driving in your face, how exciting the pungent smell of the horse’s wet skin, and the feel of the sodden earth under you.

  Despite herself, Nicky felt herself responding. This was a Michael she understood and a mood she understood. She began wishing she had gone with him.

  “If it’s still raining tomorrow we’ll go again,” she said eagerly, and remembered then that she must tell Michael to go.

  “You’ll do nothing of the kind,” Simon broke in sharply. “I’m not going to have you risking a chill on top of your other upset. Besides, it gives Smith unnecessary work getting the horses clean again.”

  Michael made a small grimace and went off to have his bath, and Nicky, feeling unaccountably chilled, wandered into the library to find a book.

  Dinner that night was an odd affair. Michael’s ride seemed to have affected him like wine. He was in his most inconsequent, irrepressible mood. It was impossible for Nicky not to react; she became as inconsequent as he, her depression vanishing in the exhilaration of the old akinness that had always united them.

  She was aware of Simon sitting at the head of the table and listening to them both in his grave fashion, a little puzzled perhaps, but his real thoughts as usual hidden and secret. She wondered what he was thinking, and it crossed her mind that she never really knew whether he liked Michael or not.

  But Simon, watching them, was again conscious of envying the younger man his ease of manner, that light, charming touch that in a moment, could carry Nicky with him on a wave of sympathetic delight.

  Michael was telling a long anecdote with much wealth of color, reminding Nicky of some forgotten escapade in which they had both successfully got the better of some short-tempered tradesman.

  “I don’t think that’s a very funny story,” Simon said unexpectedly.

  They both stared at him.

  “But it was exquisitely funny,” Michael exclaimed.

  “To get the better of a man who had every right to his money, just because your brain worked quicker and more dishonestly than his?”

  Michael laughed good-humoredly.

  “Don’t be such a pompous ass, Simon,” he said without rancor. “If he’d been decent in the first place, so would we.”

  Nicky said nothing, but sat crumbling her bread and looking straight in front of her.

  “A tradesman is just as worthy of decent treatment in the matter of debts as anybody else,” Simon said with a quietness that was suddenly ominous. “Don’t you agree, Nicky? After all, you once called me a tradesman—a hard-headed tradesman, I think you said.”

  There was a sudden silence, Michael, instantly aware of the hurt anger that lay behind Simon’s words, glanced across at Nicky with a lift of the eyebrows.

  She turned to face Simon, a faint flush staining each high cheekbone.

  “I’m learning to pay my debts,” she said in a clear, high voice.

  He gave her a long, curious look, and seemed about to say something when Michael remarked with that slight drawl he used when he wished to be insolent:

  “Does Nicky fling your boots and shoes at you when she wants to insult you, Simon?”

  Nicky saw his hands move swiftly with the old secret sign, and he began to bait Simon with delicate malice. She sat very straight and stiff at the table listening, and suddenly she got to her feet.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “This meal was over long ago. Let’s have some music. Michael can sing—or don’t you sing any more?”

  “It’ll be cold this evening in the drawing room,” Simon said, glancing at the rain-washed windows.

  “We’ll have a fire,” said Nicky at once.

  She didn’t understand the instinct that prompted her to keep Michael occupied doing something other than baiting Simon. She only knew the color and sparkle had gone out of the evening and she was aware once more of the new Michael.

  “All right,” he said with his crooked smile. “For old time’s sake, as they say. You shall choose my songs.”

  She was aware of Simon standing in front of the fire at the other end of the room. Sometimes he asked a question about a song that he liked, and Michael threw him some flippant reply, shutting him out in some subtle fashion of his own from the warmth of their own intimacy.

  Nicky broke off in the middle of a bar and shut the lid down over the keyboard with a crash. Common Enemy ... Michael was playing Common Enemy against Simon and expecting her to join in with him. She was amazed at the flood of protectiveness that filled her toward her husband. At that moment she almost hated Michael. She crossed the room and stood beside Simon in the circle of firelight, slipping a hand through his arm. She wondered if he was aware of Michael’s deliberate intention, but his face told her nothing, and if he was surprised at her little overture he gave no sign.

  But Michael, watching them both with eyes that saw everything too quickly, grinned suddenly and said:

  “I think I’m leaving you tomorrow. My family complain they never see me.”

  Nicky gave a quick little sigh of relief. It was so like Michael to solve the problem himself. And yet, did she really want him to go? She knew she would miss him desperately, just as she had missed Charles. It was going to be strange to be alone with Simon again.

  “But you’ll come back?” she said, in spite of herself, and became aware that Simon was looking down at her with an odd expression.

  “Oh, yes,” said Michael, his slanting eyes suddenly bright with some secret jest. “I shall come back.”

  For a moment Nicky stood quite still beside Simon. She didn’t realize her fingers had tightened on his arm. She had forgotten Michael. She only remembered that for the first time since she had known him she was ranged on Simon’s side. It had always been she and Charles, she and Michael against all comers. Tonight for the first time it was she and Simon against—what? Those who should hurt him. Michael, Charles—even herself. She was no longer a Bredon. She was a Shand and must fight the Shand battles.

  “Don’t you think it’s time you went to bed?” Simon’s voice said above her head. “You’re looking tired.”

  “Yes, I think I will,” she answered. “Give me a cigarette before I go.”

  But it was Michael who was quickest. Giving her a cigarette with a flourish, lighting it with some absurd remark, opening the door, saying:

  “I’ll mix you a hot drink and make Simon bring it up to you in bed, and tomorrow, my pigeon, you shall be taken for a drive to the highest point in Sussex and let the winds blow away your headache. You have a headache, haven’t you?”

  The little things. ... It was always Michael who thought of the little things. Nicky felt suddenly like crying, and went out of the
room.

  As she crossed the hall the telephone bell rang and she went into the library to answer it.

  “Oh, Nicky,” said Stella Lucy’s voice, eager and a little breathless. “There’s a book Simon promised to lend me. Might I come up and fetch it tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” said Nicky. “Come to tea,” and banged down the receiver.

  She was asleep before Simon came up, but in the morning the bed beside her was still as it had been the night before. He had slept again in his dressing room.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was still raining the next day. Nicky regarded the soaking countryside with distaste and thought enviously of Charles idling away the hours in a sun-baked Breton fishing village. A fever of restlessness possessed her and she half-seriously considered sending Charles a wire and joining him for a fortnight, but for the first time she found herself reluctant to leave Simon.

  Sitting in the deep embrasure of one of the library windows, waiting for tea to be brought, she listened to Simon and Stella discussing books, and thought how different he seemed with the girl. His old aloofness had vanished. He answered Stella’s eager questions with genuine pleasure, teasing her gently, responding to her interest in him with a charm of manner that was rare in him of late. It seemed to Nicky that there was a real bond of understanding between these two. She didn’t stop to think that Simon had been lonely, that the girl’s evident liking for him was in itself sufficient to break through his reserve. She only knew that she was unhappy; that for the first time in her life she was unsure of herself, that she wanted both Michael and Stella to go and leave her alone with Simon; that she dreaded Michael’s going.

  After tea she drove Michael to the station, glad to get out of the house. They stood together on the little rain-swept platform waiting for the train. Nicky stood, her hands thrust into the pockets of her mackintosh, her face and hair wet with rain. She had nothing to say to Michael.

  “Can it be, my sweet”—his voice came to her, gently mocking— “that my departure is the cause of all this gloom?”

  “I don’t know,” she said absently. “I don’t think so.”