“I thought you would see sense, Samantha.”
He picked up my cup and saucer and took them into the kitchen. Then he came back into the bedroom, took off his dinner jacket and put it over the back of the chair.
He undid his shoes, took them off and stood for a moment looking at me.
I always think there’s something very attractive about a man in a white shirt without a coat and David’s evening shirts, as I had seen when I packed them, were made of silk. He wore gold cufflinks with his crest on them.
“Are you quite happy about this Samantha?” he asked. “You wouldn’t rather I went into the sitting room?”
“No,” I said quickly. “I would much rather you were near me and, please, will you lock the door so that no one can creep in on us when we are asleep?”
“They wouldn’t surprise me because I am a very light sleeper,” David replied, but he locked the door and then walked to the other side of the bed.
“I think you’d better get under the eiderdown,” I said. “It gets cold at night. After all, it is October.”
“That would also be a sensible thing to do,” David said in a calm expressionless voice.
He lay down on the bed and pulled the eiderdown over him. I realised that there was a big gap between us.
“Shall I turn out the – light?” I asked in a nervous little voice.
“I think you might find it difficult to sleep if you kept it on,” David answered.
“Yes, I would,” I said and turned it out.
I lay on my back and found it difficult to breathe.
I could hardly believe that we were lying side by side and that David was with me again. David, whom I had been so afraid to see that I had been trying to hide from him ever since I came back to London!
In fact, before I returned, I had made Giles promise on his most sacred word of honour that if I went back to the studio he wouldn’t tell David where I was living.
After a moment I said,
“I hear your film is a great success.”
“So I am told,” David replied.
“You don’t sound very excited about it.”
“I’m not,” he answered. “There is only one thing I have been trying to do these past months.”
“What was that?”
“To find you.”
I was very still.
“What do you – mean?”
“How could you disappear like that? Where the devil did you go to?” David asked. “I nearly went mad trying to find you.”
“You – wanted to – find me?” I said in a very small voice.
My heart had started beating again with heavy thumps like a hammer.
“Of course I wanted to find you,” he said. “Do you suppose I didn’t realise – ”
He stopped. There was a pause.
Then he said very very quietly,
“I wanted to find you, Samantha, so that I could ask you to marry me.”
For a moment I felt that I must have dreamt that he had said it and then as I didn’t answer he went on,
“Will you marry me, Samantha? There are so many things we have to say to each other and a lot of explaining to do. But that is the only one that really matters. Please, say yes, Samantha.”
I gave a little cry.
“I can’t, David! I can’t! I want to marry you – I’ve always wanted to – but it’s – impossible! Oh, David – why do you – ask me – now?”
I heard my voice ringing out in the darkness and then there was silence until David said in a voice that was slow and almost expressionless,
“Will you tell me why you won’t marry me?”
I drew a deep breath.
“It’s too soon, that’s why I didn’t want to – see you. I wanted to wait until I was – different – until I had – changed myself to what you – wanted me to be, but at the moment – it’s hopeless – quite hopeless!”
“I may be very dense,” David said, “but I can’t quite understand, Samantha, what you are trying to say to me. Perhaps you had better start from the beginning and tell me what happened to you after you left me in the flat. I ran after you, but you just vanished.”
“I jumped into a taxi,” I said. “I went back to the boarding house and packed and then I went home.”
“I thought that was where you had gone,” David said, “but you see, you never told me where your home was. I knew it was in Worcestershire, but that was all.”
“I didn’t think you would be interested,” I said.
“I was sure that you would have gone to the boarding house when they told me you hadn’t been back to the studio.”
“How did you know that?’ I asked.
“I telephoned from Southampton,” he replied, “and Miss Macey said you hadn’t come back and that Bariatinsky was furious.”
“I went – home,” I repeated.
“I had no idea that you had left London,” David said, “so I sent my telegrams and letters to the boarding house.”
“You wrote to me?”
“Nearly every day.”
“I wish I had known.”
“I think it was one of the biggest shocks of my life,” David continued, “when the woman showed me all my letters to you unopened and done up in bundles with elastic bands round them. She had telephoned Giles to ask him where she should send them, but he didn’t know either where you were.”
“I meant to write after I went home and say I wasn’t coming back.”
“Eventually he went down to the Vicarage to find you, as I did, when I returned to England,” David said, “but you had disappeared.”
“You went to the Vicarage!” I exclaimed incredulously.
“Giles told me where you lived and I couldn’t believe that you wouldn’t be there,” he answered. “But there was a new incumbent – a pompous old fool who told me that your father had died weeks before he moved in and as far as I could make out he didn’t even know you existed.”
“Why should he?” I asked weakly.
“Where were you?” David questioned. “I asked a woman called Mrs. Harris who did say you had gone with a lady who came to the funeral.”
“That was Aunt Lucy,” I said. “My father’s sister.”
“And where does she live?”
“Near Southampton,” I answered. “She is the Mother Superior of a Convent.”
“A Convent?”
There was no doubt of the surprise in David’s voice.
“You see,” I began, “two days after I went home, Daddy – died of a – heart attack.”
Reflection 18
It sounded such a cold explanation spoken like that and it was impossible to explain, even to David, what a shock I had when I walked into the Vicarage and found Daddy looking so ill that it was almost difficult to recognise him.
“What have you been doing to yourself?” I asked.
“I have had some rather unpleasant pain lately,” he answered. “I thought it was indigestion and Dr. Mackintosh gave me some white mixture, but it hasn’t helped very much.”
I was horrified not only at his appearance but also at the condition of the Vicarage. I had never seen such a mess.
Mrs. Harris was never a good worker and, although the kitchen was fairly clean, the rest of the house was dusty, dirty and untidy.
Because I hadn’t been there, there had been no one to put away the Church magazines, the prayer books used by the choir or even the objects left over from the bazaar that were still in the hall, where the stallholders had dumped them.
Daddy’s study was thick with dust, the ashes needed raking out of the fireplace and I don’t think his shoes had had a brush or a polish for weeks.
As I had arrived at supper time, I went into the kitchen to see what Mrs. Harris had left for him, but all I could find was a plate of cold mince, which not only looked but smelt unappetising.
There was nothing else except for a few eggs from the chickens in the garden with which I made an omelette.
> He ate it nervously, because he kept saying that he was sure it would bring on his pains again.
“I’m going to send for Dr. Mackintosh in the morning and insist upon his sending you to a specialist in Cheltenham or Worcester,” I said. “You cannot go on like this.”
I didn’t want to frighten him, but he seemed to have aged by years since the last time I had seen him and there was a look about his face I didn’t like.
I also noticed when we went upstairs to bed that he found it difficult to breathe.
Because she did not know that I was coming back, Mrs. Harris had not bothered to change the sheets on my bed and the room certainly hadn’t been aired since I went away.
It smelt musty, so I opened the windows and when I looked out on to the quiet and peace of the garden I thought of David on The Queen Mary sailing to America and I told myself my life was over.
I wished I had never gone to London and I thought perhaps all that had happened was a punishment because I had not stayed at home to look after Daddy.
But I didn’t cry. I still felt numb inside – a horrible heavy numbness that made me feel as if I was watching somebody, not really myself, move about and talk.
I got up in the morning and started to clean the house. At nine o’clock I sent a boy down to the village to ask Dr. Mackintosh to come up and see Daddy.
I gave the boy tuppence to run the errand and he came back an hour later to say that Dr. Mackintosh was away until Sunday evening.
This was something I had not expected – people seldom went away at Little Poolbrook. But I knew that there was nothing I could do except wait for his return and then insist that Daddy should see a specialist.
When Mrs. Harris came, I sent her off to the butcher to buy a leg of lamb and I cooked Daddy a really good lunch.
He just sat in his study and I could see he felt too ill even to walk round the garden. I wondered what I ought to do about the Church Services the next day, because I felt certain that he was not well enough to hold Communion in the morning or to take Matins at eleven o’clock.
He had some lunch and seemed a little brighter and at about five o’clock he told me he thought he would go to bed.
“I’ll go and get it ready for you,” I said, “and I’ll bring up your dinner.”
“I don’t want any, thank you,” he answered.
“I insist on your having something,” I said firmly. “And, Daddy, don’t you think I had better go and see the old Rector and ask him if he’ll take the Services for you tomorrow?”
The old Rector was very old indeed. After serving in a Parish the other side of Worcester, he had retired to a small cottage on the edge of our village, and sometimes during Christmas and Easter he would help Daddy with the Services.
He was, however, over eighty and his hands were very shaky.
“I’ll manage,” Daddy said firmly.
“I don’t think you ought to,” I argued.
“No, I want to go to Church,” he said. “It’s your mother’s birthday next week, Samantha, and I always say special prayers for her both the Sunday before and the Sunday after.”
At that moment I wished, as I had never wished before, that Mummy was with me. I felt worried not only about Daddy but also about myself.
I had thought on the way home that perhaps I would tell Daddy about David, but, when I saw how ill he looked, I knew that I couldn’t worry him with my troubles.
“Why have you come home, Samantha?” he had asked.
“I’ve been given a few days’ holiday,” I answered, “and I thought you would like to see me.”
“Of course I want to see you,” he said. “You look very pretty – very pretty indeed, Samantha. Are you enjoying your job?”
‘Yes,” I lied, “but it’s lovely to be home.”
This was not the moment, I felt, to tell him I wasn’t going back and that I could never face London again.
I expected to lie awake all night thinking of David. Instead I slept from sheer exhaustion.
I awoke to hear myself call out his name because I had dreamt that he was sailing away from me down a silver river in the moonlight.
‘He’s sailing away, all right!’ I told myself.
I wondered if he had slept last night in Lady Bettine’s bed and felt sure that he had.
I heard Daddy getting up, so I went downstairs and made him a cup of tea. He usually wouldn’t eat or drink anything before Communion, but this morning I insisted on his having the tea.
He raised no objections, so I felt that he knew he needed it.
He sat down at the kitchen table to drink the tea, although I had meant to carry it into the study. When he finished he said,
“Thank you, Samantha. I hoped you would come to Church this morning.”
I was just going to answer him when he gave a sudden cry, clutched at his chest and collapsed on the floor.
I knelt down beside him and tried to loosen his collar, but it was difficult because it fastened at the back. Then, as I touched him, I knew that he was dead!
Reflection 19
“I am sorry about your father,” David said in a quiet voice beside me.
“It happened so quickly,” I answered. “And I suppose it was shock that made me behave as I did after the funeral.”
“What did you do?” he asked.
“I couldn’t stop crying,” I answered. “I just cried and cried, and Aunt Lucy, who was the only relation I sent a telegram to about Daddy, took me away with her.”
“To the Convent?”
“I didn’t realise it was a Convent for some time.”
“Why not?”
“I think I had a kind of brainstorm,” I answered, “or perhaps it was a nervous breakdown, I don’t know. But whatever it was, they only stopped me crying by keeping me more or less unconscious.”
“Poor Samantha,” David said. “I suppose I am at least partly to blame for that.”
“I think it was everything happening at once,” I answered. “After all, you and Daddy are the only people in the whole world I have to love.”
There was silence for a moment and then David said,
“Go on with your story, Samantha, I want to know exactly what happened.”
His voice was gentle and because we were alone in the dark I found it easy to talk in a manner that would have been far more difficult at any other time.
Not being able to see David, but knowing that he was there, was comforting and yet, at the same time, it was almost as he had been in my dreams.
Always when we had been together before I had been afraid of saying the wrong things, showing my ignorance or just upsetting him.
I expect it was because he was such an overpowering and vital personality that by contrast I felt insignificant and insecure.
But now because it was dark we were both as it were, disembodied, so that I felt able to talk to David as I had always wanted to, as if we were equal.
So I began telling him how when I became conscious I had found that the nun looking after me was French.
She was a refugee who had escaped from France when the Germans were advancing on Paris and she hadn’t gone back after the War.
She told me that “The Order of the Little Sisters of Mary” were Teaching nuns and there was a school attached to the Convent where she taught French.
I thought about this after she had left me to go to sleep and when she came back I said,
“Sister Thérèse, will you teach me to speak French? I know a little, but I am sure I have a terrible accent and no grammar.”
She was delighted at the idea and she insisted that I always spoke French to her whenever she came to my room.
It was then that the idea came to me that I must change myself into being what David wanted. He had said I was ‘abysmally ignorant’ and, of course, it was true.
My education, I realised, had been lamentable. I had been sent to Worcester High School for about three years, but my attendance had been very spasmodic.
> If there was something extra to do at the Vicarage, I stayed at home. Also, if the weather was bad, I would find it difficult to get to school.
The station on the direct line to Worcester was three miles away and the only method of going there was by bicycle.
In the summer I rather enjoyed the ride, but in the winter when it was pouring with rain or snowing or there were strong winds, I dreaded having to bicycle off early in the morning and bicycle home when it was growing dark.
I think Mummy worried about my going alone in the train. She was always very insistent that I must find a carriage marked Ladies Only, and she made me promise that when I arrived at Worcester Station I wouldn’t hang about but hurry as quickly as I could to the High School.
Anyway, what with one thing and another, I have a suspicion that I was absent from school more times than I was present.
Before this I had a Governess, who had retired to live in a tiny cottage in Little Poolbrook, which she had inherited from a relative.
She was very old, rather disagreeable, and she used to get very cross when I didn’t understand what she told me the first time she said it. So rather than upset her, I would often pretend to have grasped the subject when I really had only the vaguest idea of what she had been trying to teach me.
I suppose if we had owned an extensive library I would have read lots of books. But apart from a set of Dickens and one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, most of the books in Daddy’s study were bound sermons or religious treatises that I found extremely dull.
Often Daddy would read extracts from the newspapers to Mummy in the evenings when she was sewing or embroidering, which she did so well, but I cannot say from that that my general knowledge was much to boast about.
In fact, David was right in everything he said about me and perhaps that was what had made me so angry.
No one really likes hearing the truth about oneself.
Lying in my bed in the little room in the Convent, which was really one of the nuns’ cells, I made up my mind that I would start to educate myself.
When Aunt Lucy came to see me, I told her what I intended and because she was so glad I was taking an interest in something and no longer crying, she went to a great deal of trouble.
Say Yes Samantha Page 12
