by Jane Arbor
Jenny added tentatively, ‘Supposing he can’t really get a bed at the hotel?’
‘Dear, please—will you go and change?’
‘Yes, I’m going.’ But a few minutes later, as Bridget was on her way to the kitchen, Jenny reappeared at the top of the stairs, pulling a skirt over her head. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t consider letting him stay if he wanted to? For good, I mean—now that you’ve decided the room at the other end of the house would better for the children than the garden-room?’
Bridget looked up the stairs. ‘That,’ she said crisply, ‘is something even he hasn’t had the nerve to suggest!’
‘Or has he?’ Jenny’s chuckle was muffled in her skirt. ‘I thought he said something about “unpacking later.” He couldn’t exactly have meant to do it in the street!’ She scuttled back to her room without waiting for Bridget’s reply.
Determined not to face any purpose of Dion Christie’s until she had to, Bridget went into the kitchen. In the larder she found bacon rashers, eggs, butter, bread, milk, tea—all the ingredients of a simple meal when they were ready for it. But first she must see to the airing, because Jenny must go to bed early.
She pressed down the switch of the electric fire. Nothing happened. She tried the light switch. That also was dead. Going back to the foot of the stairs she called to Jenny: ‘Try the lights up there, will you? Nothing works here.’
A moment later Jenny too reported failure. ‘Perhaps we’re not connected yet?’ she suggested.
‘But we are, I know. It’s a main fuse gone—or a power cut. A power cut—in May?’ Together they went through the house trying switches and were in the garden-room when Dion Christie, cat-basket in one hand, portable typewriter in the other, came in by the veranda door.
‘One cat, delivered to instructions,’ he said. ‘I came up on him just past the gate of Cion Eigel.’
‘Oh, thank you.’ Jenny clasped the basket ecstatically. ‘I’ll take him to the kitchen and give him something to eat.’
Dion Christie stood looking about him. ‘You haven’t made any changes here,’ he said.
He had known of Jenny’s illness, so Bridget concluded that he must know of the rest of her plans. She said, ‘No. I’d thought of it for the Cion Eigel children, but the other small room was sunnier for them.’
‘Good. I always preferred this one. There’s the dark-room, and I can lock it against Kate when she is clutched in the grip of the idea that it should be tidied. Kate is coming back too, isn’t she?’
That ‘too’ dropped like a stone into Bridget’s consciousness. But to her chagrin she could not deal forcefully with it while she needed his advice. She said flatly, ‘There’s no electricity. What could that mean?’
He echoed Jenny, ‘I suppose you’re connected? Anyway what do you want it for? It’s not particularly cold, and it won’t be dark for hours yet.’
Bridget explained about the airing, also that she had to cook a meal.
‘Why can’t we manage with blankets for to-night? I prefer them myself.’
Bridget bit her lip. ‘I meant to air the blankets too. Meanwhile, I still have to cook, and we shall need light later on.’
‘Haven’t you still got the lamps we used? You should have kept them for emergencies. O’Hanlon sells paraffin, and you can cook over the fire. Still, I’ll go and see if O’Hanlons are off too.’ A minute or so later he came back. ‘The whole place has been cut off for twelve hours from eight this morning. They do it when they are connecting up new premises. You’d have been notified, only the Post Office doesn’t deliver letters to an empty house. I asked to have mine kept back until to-morrow.’
‘Eight?’ Bridget looked at her watch. ‘That’s more than three hours!’
‘It is.’ A pause. ‘Now would you like the kitchen fire lighted?’
‘I can do it.’
‘With a stack of newspapers, sticks and a load of small coal? Can you do it with turf from scratch? Or, along with the lamps, did you get rid of the store of turf we had too?’
‘No, it’s still there,’ said Bridget in a small voice which she despised.
She stood watching while he crumbled a block or two of turf to make a lightness of surface on which to build, then stacked other blocks expertly in a kind of card-castle to create a powerful draught. A single match, and the flames were leaping up from an already reddening heart of fire.
Bridget’s nostrils took the lovely, homely aroma with delight. Involuntarily—she would have said it to anyone who stood at her side then—she exclaimed, ‘Burning peat has an unforgettable smell, hasn’t it?’
Dion continued to gaze at his fire. ‘Peat is an English word,’ he said.
Bridget flushed. ‘What does it matter? And I couldn’t have known.’
He looked at her with infuriating indulgence. ‘You could not, to be sure. And you’ll learn. Meanwhile, you’d better go out and look up at the chimney. Here and there it’s thought lucky for a woman to see the first curl of turf-smoke rising from her own hearth.’
If only to escape being patronised, Bridget went. When she came back he was kneeling to tend the fire. Over his shoulder he said, ‘You shouldn’t now be promising yourself the good fortune that’ll win you the next Hospital Sweepstake, you know.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Because it’s a tricky luck anyway. It doesn’t always work unless it’s the woman’s own man who has lighted the first fire. Look—this is the way you need to mend this one when it slackens. I’ll leave you to it.’ When he had left the kitchen Bridget went upstairs to collect the bedding. With her arms full she hesitated over the trunk where the sheets were still packed. Then she took more blankets and another pair of sheets and went down again.
Jenny was in the kitchen. ‘He’s unpacking like mad,’ she reported. ‘Everything out of that car has gone into the garden-room in piles!’
‘Oh, Jenny, no!’
Jenny nodded. ‘True. Are you wondering what to do?’
‘Of course I’m wondering what to do!’ With nervous fingers Bridget plucked the sheets into place before the fire. ‘I ought to have acted at the very first hint he gave—when he said he “had to know” when we were arriving. Since then he has said other things—about not minding sleeping in blankets and not wanting Kate to tidy the garden-room, and about his letters. I heard them all, and I couldn’t say a thing while I wanted him to help me about the electricity and then with the fire. Oh, how humiliating dependence on the wrong people can be!’
‘I wasn’t humiliated when he offered to bring Masterman back,’ murmured Jenny. ‘Supposing we hadn’t had him to fetch Masterman and to light the fire? Couldn’t you feel grateful, not humiliated at all?’
‘We should have managed. The telephone has been invented, and I could have lighted a fire, even a—a turf one. Heavens!’ Bridget exploded, ‘just for that must we have him as an Old Man of the Sea on our backs for the rest of our lives?’
Jenny had begun to turn the airing bedclothes. ‘You mean us to be warm,’ she commented innocently. ‘Such a lot of blankets and yes’—she laid a calculating finger to her lower lip—‘six sheets!’
‘In case it was true that he couldn’t get a room at the hotel to-night,’ muttered Bridget. ‘It doesn’t imply that he’s staying.’
‘But for to-night he can?’
‘He seems to have decided that for himself!’
‘And you won’t say anything to-night? Anything final, I mean, about not staying on? Let’s stay friendly for to-night and you can beat it out between you in the morning. Although you know’—for all her artistic sensibility Jenny shared something of Bridget’s practical streak—‘even with the children and Kate, we’ve got bags of room, and having him as a paying guest could help.’
‘And can you imagine living with him, carping and criticising and judging at every turn?’ demanded Bridget.
‘Yes,’ said Jenny gently. ‘I can imagine living with him very well indeed.’
It was cle
ar that the fire needed banking very high to heat the hot-plates which could be drawn over it for frying. So instead of the eggs and bacon she had planned, Bridget set some tinned soup to heat slowly and poached eggs in a saucepan. Jenny made buttered toast for the eggs, and they had some fruit left from their journey.
When Jenny went to summon Dion Christie she returned to say that he was stacking books and sorting papers and that he said he had a nature article to do that evening for a Dublin paper. But he came to join them promptly and appeared entirely at ease and oblivious of Bridget’s rather studied reserve.
His sole remark upon the meal which she regarded as something of an achievement in the circumstances was that the soup came out of a tin, didn’t it?
‘Of course. Did you suppose I’d had time to prepare stock for it?’ asked Bridget with forced calm.
‘Oh, it’s good enough. I wasn’t criticising,’ he said with almost disarming mildness. ‘Only it hasn’t the flavour of Kate’s, that’s all. That woman has a superb way with her over soup. You must get her to tell you how it’s done.’
Bridget bristled in silence and Jenny hastily interposed to ask where people in Tullabor shopped.
‘O’Hanlon sells most things and he’ll scour Dublin for anything he doesn’t stock,’ Dion told her. ‘He has a commission system of his own; how cheerfully you pay up depends on how much you need the goods.’
‘Where can we get our hair done?’
Dion glanced briefly at Bridget’s brown curls and at Jenny’s stranded gold. ‘Depends on the prinking you want for it. I believe Miss O’Hanlon, Tim’s sister, wields the scissors for the local colleens.’
Jenny pulled a little face. Both she and Bridget could shampoo their own hair, but her hair-style called for expert cutting. She turned to Bridget. ‘They could advise us at Cion Eigel, couldn’t they? Mrs. Steven must have a hairdresser visiting for hers, if, as Mrs. Steven says, she doesn’t leave her room much; there’s sure to be a resident matron, and didn’t Mr. Meath tell you there was a Miss Steven too?’
‘No—she’s married and not at Cion Eigel—’ began Bridget, flinching suddenly at the harsh shriek of the legs of Dion Christie’s chair upon the stone floor as he arose abruptly.
‘Sorry about that.’ He pushed in the chair and strode from the room just as the light, for which they had switched on in preparation, flashed into being at last.
‘You’d think,’ commented Bridget, beginning to collect plates, ‘that if he’s a bird-watcher he’d have learned to move quietly!’
‘Darling, you are prickly! He did apologise.’ Jenny’s clear brow puckered momentarily. ‘I got the impression that he hadn’t liked something we’d said. But we were only talking about hair, weren’t we?’ Before Bridget could reply the telephone rang. It was Mr. Steven, ringing to hear of their safe arrival and to tell her that her two charges, Pegeen and Minna Brett, would be arriving the following day.
‘I shall keep them here with their brothers as long as possible and send them over in charge of my secretary—a new man, Gordon Trent, joining us this term—at about tea-time, if that suits you? Of the two, I think Minna, who is six, will settle down more easily than Pegeen, who is eight and very reserved. I plan to leave them with you entirely for a few days before they join our kindergarten class for the mornings. We have two other little girl day-pupils to keep them company. And now tell me about how you’ve settled in? Had I ordered everything you needed?’
Bridget gave him a brief sketch of their day, and thought this was the time to mention Dion Christie to Mr. Steven.
‘Christie? Isn’t he the naturalist who was your uncle’s paying guest?’
‘Yes, and I think he’d like to continue to work from here. Should I be cutting across any contract with you about the children if I arranged for him to stay?’
From the other end of the line there was a longer pause than she had expected. Then, ‘No,’ said Mr. Steven. ‘We know him, and of course he’s doing very valuable work in his particular field. I expect he could help your finances and you would be breaking no contract with me.’
‘Thank you. I just wanted to know. I hadn’t decided yet.’ They rang off then and Bridget went back to Jenny to suggest that they should not be long before going to bed.
Dion Christie did not reappear. Bridget had meant to read herself towards sleep, but instead she lay listening to the faint staccato tap of his typewriter keys.
Had she decided?
Jenny liked Dion. Why couldn’t she? She tried to imagine what future daily contacts with him would entail, and as she began to drowse came upon an idea which satisfied her. There were chemical allergies between people, just as there were chemical attractions, so that surely you could fall ‘in dislike’ of someone at first sight, as you could ‘fall in love.’ That was what must have happened between herself and Dion Christie—At that point she was only conscious enough to flick off the bedside light. The problem was shelved until the morning.
Next morning, having braced herself to the coming interview, it was something of an anti-climax to find that there was no Dion Christie available to be interviewed.
Jenny said that she had heard him go out early and had peeped to see him striding down the back lane past the farmyard, hatless and in shabby tweeds and with his camera slung across his shoulder.
They had breakfast without him, and it was not until mid-morning, when Jenny was practising and Bridget was making jam buns for the children’s tea, that he came back.
The kitchen had not been well planned and an unexpectedly warm sun had added to the inevitable warmth of baking. Bridget was pushing a damp curl back from her forehead as he appeared at the door.
‘May I come in?’ Unnecessary question. He was already in and sitting on the table-edge.
Bridget said a little curtly, ‘We’ve had breakfast—a long time ago.’
‘No matter. I don’t always trouble with it. I’ll have a glass of buttermilk and one of those things you’re making. Where’s Jenny?’
Bridget handed him the tray of buns. ‘Practising. Can’t you hear her?’
He took two buns and cocked his head to listen. ‘What is she playing?’
Bridget listened. ‘Debussy—La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin—The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.’
‘Thanks for the translation,’ he said gravely, contriving to make her feel that it had been both smug and unnecessary. ‘It describes Jenny herself, doesn’t it? What about some buttermilk?’
‘There’s only the new milk they delivered from the farm this morning,’ she told him.
‘Well, I know buttermilk is supposed to curl the hair and put roses into the cheeks—according to how much people want to force it down your throat. But I happen to like it. If you’ll give me a can I’ll go down to the farm and collect some.’
Bridget had no milk-can, so she handed him a jug. The sight of him turning away stiffened her resolve. She said, ‘Mr. Christie, I think we ought to understand each other—’ He dangled the jug from a finger. ‘Don’t we?’
‘Not,’ said Bridget firmly, ‘about your return here without having made any previous arrangements with me. If Mr. Meath gave you the impression that you would be welcome he had no right—’
‘You can’t blame Meath. He didn’t give his blessing—just the facts. That you weren’t selling after all. That you were going to take some children from Cion Eigel, and that you were due back yesterday. It suited me. I do go away from time to time—to lecture in Dublin and to do an occasional broadcast, and to the west coast or out to the Isles for the bird migration seasons. But Tullabor is my centre for most of the year, so I was glad to come back.’
He seemed surprised that anyone could question the sweet reason of his argument. And faced by it, even Bridget felt herself losing ground. She said, ‘But why presume you could come back here? You moved to the hotel altogether after—after you left before, didn’t you?’
‘After you turned me out,’ he corrected. ‘And how did you know I went
to the hotel?’
‘I—happened to hear,’ she had to admit.
‘Ah—Yes, well—it was only a stop-gap. It wouldn’t have done for good. Besides, you didn’t throw me out yesterday, and you hadn’t made any changes to my room.’
‘I was taken by surprise yesterday, and you were very kind about Masterman, the cat. And it was only chance that the garden-room appeared to be waiting for you to return to it.’
‘What a precarious footing for me! I’m allowed to stay only by luck and by the grace and favour of Masterman!’
Bridget ignored that. With all the dignity she could summon she said, ‘It’s simply that, as we have the accommodation for you, I’m unwilling to interrupt your work by asking you to go elsewhere.’
‘Then that’s settled.’
Bridget began to collect her cooking utensils. ‘I’ll let you know about terms,’ she said distantly.
‘Couldn’t we have the same arrangement as I had with William? We took turns with the household expenses—month and month about.’
‘Of course we couldn’t!’
‘Why not? Are you afraid I’d always pinch February for myself?’
She glanced up at him and caught in his eye the gleam of his intention to goad her. ‘I meant, of course, that it wouldn’t be fair to you. The circumstances are quite different, with the children and Jenny and myself added to Kate on our side—’
‘I didn’t know we were taking sides. However, have it your own way. I’ll pay whatever you like. I’m going for the buttermilk now. Shall I bring some for you and Jenny?’
‘No, thanks. It’s a taste we haven’t acquired, I’m afraid.’ She turned away towards the sink, but turned back for a moment to intercept that gleam again.
‘You will!’ he nodded with that maddening assurance. ‘Even a taste for buttermilk— among other things—you will!’
After lunch Bridget and Jenny went for their first walk together.
