Flash of Emerald

by Jane Arbor

  That meant—But no, how could it mean that in this short time of knowing the man she wanted from him the love and tenderness he showed to Barbara? At the thought, though her reason rejected its absurdity, her honesty admitted that she could not have been so hurt by his misjudgment of her that afternoon if nothing in her feminine make-up had responded to the challenge of his maleness. If the makings of the spark were not there, she could have witnessed this scene tonight with complete sangfroid; she could have felt wholeheartedly glad for Barbara, and she had not. The spark was there, but it must be quenched. For, lit and allowed to glow in fantasy, it spelled danger. She heard again his caustic, ‘You have been warned’, and the echo was like the spray of a cold shower upon her wistful thinking. She had to be glad for Barbara. She herself wasn’t even in the same scene.

  After Craig had driven away she waited for some time, lest Barbara should conclude she had been near enough to see her with Craig at the door. Or, better still, if Barbara had already gone to her room, she might get to her own without their meeting. But they met in the narrow hall between their rooms and even by the soft light of the lamp there, Hope could see that Barbara had been crying.

  ‘Business’ with Craig? No. Trouble, then? But Barbara’s stricken look daunted Hope’s asking if there was anything she could do to help. So she merely said she had been out for a walk and answered No, that she had loved it, to Barbara’s lack-lustre query as to whether she hadn’t been afraid, alone in the dark.

  That was all. They said their goodnights and went to their rooms.

  The next day Hope found that her vague misgivings and self-questions were not proof against the clear beauty of a Madeninian morning, and Barbara’s mood seemed brighter too. And evidently Craig possessed a detachment which could cut off each day’s frictions from those of the next, for his manner with Hope was as coolly positive as ever. Nothing of yesterday’s clash might ever have happened, and in face of his demands on her time, she almost succeeded in putting her last night’s awareness of his magnetism behind her. If he wanted a robot for a secretary, then a robot she must try to be!

  And it was to seem that not only to Craig was she invisible as a woman, when Victoire de Faye came into the office, according her a mere nod before addressing Craig.

  ‘I must ask you to meet Crispin at the airport when he arrives,’ she told Craig. ‘I’m flying down to Barbados for three days, to do some shopping and to get my hair done, and I shan’t be back until that evening.’

  Craig remarked, ‘I thought that was to be Tina Godwin’s function—to cope with Crispin for you?’

  ‘She can begin when we get back. I am taking her with me to run errands for me while I am down there.’

  ‘Then the idea is that I deliver Crispin to the House, without either of you being there?’

  Victoire frowned. ‘Don’t make a grievance of my being away, please. Sinbad and Doria will be there to give him a meal, and I shall be back on the evening plane.’

  ‘Very well. I’ll lay it on,’ Craig promised. He looked across at Hope. ‘Make a note in the diary, will you? What time is he supposed to arrive? I suppose he’ll be in the charge of the stewardess, won’t he?’ he asked Victoire.

  More than once during the next few days Hope made a point of going over to the coast in the lunch-break and seeing to it that she was punctually at her desk again by three o’clock. Once, she heard from one of the other girls, Craig had been enquiring for her at half-past two, and had been told where the girl thought she had gone. But on her return he made no remark, except to say he had some urgent letters to dictate, and had hoped to find her in the canteen.

  During those same days, as far as she knew, he did not visit the bungalow, nor did Barbara mention him to Hope, whose puzzled thoughts could not make their loving parting and Barbara’s tears into any pattern which seemed to fit their relationship. Last weekend, for instance—Hope’s first on the island—Craig had lunched and stayed for supper with Barbara. Yet this Sunday she suggested she and Hope should take a picnic in the mountains, and they only did not go because it rained for most of the daylight hours.

  On the day Crispin de Faye was to fly in Craig demanded Hope’s help with him. (Why hadn’t Craig asked Barbara?) ‘On his first day, the kid deserves better than to be left in charge of a couple of servants to rattle around the house until Victoire comes home,’ Craig claimed, and drove Hope with him to the airport when the child’s plane was due.

  For a boy who was nearing nine, Crispin looked young for his age. He was small, with an olive skin and delicate features under a thatch of dark hair. He spoke English with very little accent, which surprised Hope, as she had assumed until then that, while Victoire had been in Paris, he had attended a French school.

  ‘No,’ Craig told her as he introduced him to her. ‘He’s been at the English-French Lycée in London. Roland wanted that for him—that he should be bi-lingual, which Roland himself never quite managed to be.’

  Crispin shook hands with Hope. ‘You’re not the same secretary as Uncle Craig had when we went away,’ he observed.

  Craig slanted a glance at Hope. ‘Not the same by several samples, tell him,’ he advised.

  Crispin was looking about him. ‘Where is Belle-mere?’ he asked.

  ‘She had to go to Barbados, but she’ll be home tonight. Meanwhile I’m lending Hope to you, so see that you keep her amused, will you?’

  ‘Thank you. But I daresay I could have managed with Sadie and Matthew-John until Belle-mere comes back.’

  ‘Yes, well’—They were in the car-park now, and Craig was stowing Crispin’s holdalls—‘the fact is, fellow, that Sadie and her husband aren’t at the House any more,’ he said.

  Crispin’s eyes widened and the corners of his mouth came down. ‘Not there any more?’ he echoed. ‘But they were! They always have been—What do you mean—not there?’

  ‘They had to leave after your stepmother closed the house down. They took places as cook and man over at Montgaye. They would like to see you if you went over there, I’m pretty sure. You must ask Tina to take you.’

  ‘Who is Tina?’ asked Crispin.

  Driving away, Craig left Hope to explain Tina to him. As they neared the estate he began to notice and point out landmarks, and he waved to the groups of West Indian boys they passed on the road. He asked after some of the estate’s dogs he had known, and when they reached his home he claimed wistfully, ‘If Sadie and Matthew-John knew I was coming, they would have been out on the terrace to meet me.’

  But there was no one to greet him, either there or in the big hall, which struck coldly after the warmth out of doors. The rest of the house seemed strangely silent too, the explanation of which Craig brought back with him after he had gone through to the kitchen quarters.

  ‘Victoire’s couple have skipped it for the day,’ he told Hope. ‘They left a note for her. Read it.’

  Hope read, ‘Missus, gone up-island see our cousin. Back ’long time you home.’ It was signed ‘Doria’ in clumsy capitals.

  ‘What does “long time” mean? “Before”?’ Hope asked

  ‘More “about the same time”,’ Craig said. ‘That means the evening, and it looks as if either Victoire hadn’t told them to expect Crispin this morning, or as if they couldn’t have cared less.’ He turned to Crispin. ‘When did you last eat?’

  ‘There was breakfast on the plane.’

  ‘So what were you fancying for lunch?’

  ‘Curry,’ said Crispin promptly.

  Craig lifted an eyebrow in Hope’s direction. ‘Curry? Uncharted country to you? Or could you produce one?’

  ‘Given some ingredients, I think I could,’ she said. ‘Onions, butter, some cooked meats, stock, rice, curry powder, mango chutney—’

  He grimaced. ‘Heavens, what a list! But let’s see what the kitchen can offer.’

  There were no suitable cooked meats, but there was a large container of fresh prawns. Remembering that in Madenina they were shrimps, ‘Would you
settle for curried shrimps?’ she asked Crispin.

  ‘Curried anything,’ he assented cheerfully. At which Craig suggested taking him out on to the estate, leaving Hope to work alone. She told them she would need at least an hour, for curry must cook slowly.

  There was no chutney, but she mashed a couple of ripe mangoes to pulp and added a little vinegar and lemon juice. There was rice and a spicy curry powder, and a very passable curry had evolved by the time the other two returned, Craig bringing a bottle of wine from his own quarters, and there was lime-juice for Crispin.

  Not caring to use Victoire’s table appointments, Hope served it in the servants’ front kitchen, thinking as she laid the cutlery and glass that the last thing she had expected of today was to be serving to her chief an improvised meal which she had cooked herself.

  Craig queried, ‘Haute cuisine among your other efficiencies?’ To which, a little headily, she replied, ‘You consider I have some others?’ and took his casual, ‘I’ve remarked one or two, here and there,’ as praise of talents which he seemed to think he had the right to expect and to take completely for granted.

  Afterwards he left, saying he would come back in the evening to drive Hope home. The other two found that Crispin’s room and playroom had been made ready for him, which showed that only the servants had been irresponsible about his arrival. Victoire must have given them their orders.

  When Hope asked Crispin what he would like to do, he replied, ‘Draw,’ with as single-minded conviction as he had demanded curry.

  ‘What with?’ Hope asked. ‘Have you pencils and paper?’

  ‘In my valise. I’ll unpack them.’

  ‘I nearly always draw boats,’ he announced, and as Hope sat and watched, certainly some recognisable craft appeared on the paper.

  There were dinghies and yachts, an ocean-going ship and a catamaran. On the deck of one of the yachts he had pencilled in some matchstick human figures—three of them.

  ‘That’s Papa and Uncle Nelson and Uncle Craig,’ he pointed out. ‘They used to sail together, and sometimes I went too. But on board I had to wear a rope tied to my belt, like a dog on a lead.’ He sat back, surveying his work, then took up his eraser and bent again over the sketch. Using the rubber on one of the figures, he said, ‘That’s wrong for the day when the hurricane wrecked the boat and Papa and Uncle Nelson didn’t come back. Uncle Craig wasn’t there, so I shouldn’t have drawn him in the picture, should I?’

  Hope said, ‘Not if you meant to draw that day. But wouldn’t you rather draw a happier one—when Mr. Napier might have been there?’

  Still scrubbing at the paper, Crispin agreed, ‘I do, sometimes. But this picture is that day—look at all the storm-clouds coming up. And that day Uncle Craig wasn’t there. He had stayed behind. He was at Uncle Nelson’s apartment in town—with Aunty Barbara.’ He paused. Then, ‘Belle-mere was very angry,’ he added, telling Hope in all innocence things she did not care to know.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Craig had not said he meant to collect Victoire and Tina at the airport, but when he came back in the evening for Hope he brought them with him in his car. Meanwhile the truant servants had not yet returned, and Hope did not envy them Victoire’s reception of them when they did show up.

  Craig did nothing for her fury by suggesting she would have done better by keeping on or taking back Sadie and Matthew-John Bosun, who had been loyal to the Great House for years.

  She turned on him. ‘How could I keep them on? I was closing the house!’

  ‘They’d have been glad to take board-wages until you came back.’

  ‘You know I hadn’t decided whether I was coming back,’ Victoire snapped.

  ‘But when you did, they would have come back to you, if you’d made it worth their while.’

  ‘By doubling their pay, I suppose? Allowing them to blackmail me. No, thank you. When I have to creep to my domestic staff—! Anyway, as I have no intention of getting my own dinner, you can take me out. I can leave Crispin with Tina; she will put him to bed.’

  Craig said, ‘I have to take Hope home.’

  ‘—To the Poisson d’or, I think. It’s the “in” place this season. I’ll have changed and be nearly ready by the time you come back. If I’m not, you will have to wait until I am.’

  For a long moment Craig did not reply. Then he said quietly, ‘Sometimes, Victoire, you ride your privileges as if they were rights, don’t you?’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘And what do you mean by that?’

  He did not tell her. ‘I’ll pick you up in half an hour,’ he said, and ushered Hope from the room.

  When he asked her how she and Crispin had occupied themselves during the afternoon, she told him that after the drawing-session they had played Draughts and Snap, at both of which she had been heavily outclassed. Too dismayed by the child’s artless candour, she reported nothing about the subject of his drawing, and would not have mentioned it to Barbara either if, that night, Barbara had not asked, seeming to know what her answer would be.

  Barbara nodded. ‘Since his father was lost, he has always wanted to draw boats with people aboard. At first, I think, it was because he wouldn’t accept that Roland and Nelson weren’t still afloat somewhere and would come back. And now that he’s had to believe it, as we all have, it could be his way of working the tragedy out of his system. At least, that’s what I’ve hoped if he wants to draw boats whenever he is with me.’

  ‘You could be right. He spoke to me quite calmly about his father. Does he often come over to see you?’ Hope asked.

  ‘Before he went away to school, Craig would sometimes bring him, whether or not with Victoire’s permission, I never made myself ask,’ Barbara admitted. ‘I shan’t either, if Craig brings him this time,’ she added, causing Hope to wonder whether Barbara was reluctant to acknowledge how many fewer were Craig’s brief calls lately, even on legitimate errands, such as his driving back with Hope herself tonight.

  Christmas came quietly to the island, with little of the frenzied commercials and ritual feasting which led up to and away from it in England. There were parties in the tourist hotels and the cruise-ships which put in at Fort Belain and stayed over for two or three days. By contrast, the French Caribbean islands made more of the Jour de l’An, New Year’s Day, when Madenina went en fete, with all the shops closed, all the bars open, no work being done on the sugar-plantations nor in the cocoa-groves, and consequently many a hangover to follow.

  ‘It acts as a kind of trial run for the Mardi Gras Carnival which explodes just before Lent. On Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, particularly on Wednesday, when they celebrate the death of Vaval, the island’s private devil, you’ll really see something of Madenina gone mad,’ Craig told Hope, assuming, she realised, that she would still be there so far ahead, when by the London office’s unwritten agreement with him, she would be back in England, leaving him with a new secretary, trained to his needs.

  But when she dutifully broached the subject, he was obstructive.

  ‘I told you when you arrived that I should expect you to stay for as long as I wanted you,’ he pointed out.

  ‘And if you remember, I said I couldn’t promise to stay indefinitely, if my uncle wanted me back,’ Hope said.

  ‘So has he put a limit to your stay?’

  In fact, in his last letter and to Hope’s relief, Uncle Lionel had pronounced himself well satisfied with Kathy Tremayne’s ministrations. So at present she had no reason for making difficulties about staying on; there was only that odd quirk of self-protection which saw the agreement as a way of escape, before working for Craig became too important to her, too dangerously attractive. Therefore, obeying the quirk, she said,

  ‘Not yet. But the idea was, wasn’t it, that I was supposed to be training someone else to take my place? And as you hadn’t mentioned anything about it, I thought I’d better.’

  ‘Well, forget it, will you?’ His tone was dismissive. ‘While you suit me, why should I nurse along another tenderfoo
t, even with your help? So you’ll stay, I hope, at least until after the spring ratoon, which we can schedule early this year—soon after Mardi Gras is out of the way. So with all due respect, that’s what I’d like you to tell your uncle, if he should get restive about you.’

  At which the quirk insisted on her asking, ‘And after the ratoon?’

  ‘We’ll play that by ear when the time comes,’ he said carelessly and characteristically, settling the point at issue to his convenience; making no enquiry as to how she, personally, was suited with him; treating her as the robot she had resolved to be.

  For that was Craig; his assurance one of the qualities which a robot could admire, even if a mere woman might crave something less granite-like. Craved it without expecting it ‘Plain janes with their heads screwed on’ were supposed to keep their heads that way—especially this one who had been warned, hadn’t she, against dreaming romantic dreams?

  All the same, just for once she would like to glimpse the softer side of him which Barbara knew and valued—or had known, before the rift between them, whatever had caused it.

  Hope wished she dared ask Barbara about that. But on the subject of Craig there was lately a barrier between the other girl and herself—a barrier that was no more of Barbara’s raising than it was of her own reluctance to hear in so many words all that he was or had been to Barbara. Envy of something a friend had and you hadn’t gnawed worse, Hope was finding, than outright jealousy of an enemy. It asked more generosity of you; it tore you two ways.

  That New Year’s Day was a Saturday, and Friday’s pay for the week included a special Jour de l’An bonus for each worker. Hope completed and delivered the payslips as usual on Thursday, and having Craig’s permission to leave as soon as she had cleared any outstanding correspondence, was on her way to collect her scooter late on Friday afternoon, when a clamour from the direction of the boucan assailed her ears, and a shifting, scuffling crowd appeared to be intent on rushing its doors.