“To the skin,” Jane answered cheerfully. “But,” she added, as much to herself as to him, “it was worth it!”
“Good. I thought you’d like it,” he said, pleased as a boy, and without a trace of the formal stiffness which usually marked his manner. “I say, I’m disgustingly hungry. Aren’t you?”
“Oh, why did you remind me of it? Of course I am!” wailed Jane. “And it’s hours until breakfast. What time is it?”
“Round about six,” he said, glancing at the sun which was gilding the tops of the trees. “I didn’t dare put on my watch. The least glitter would have sent these beggars off. But you won’t have to wait three hours for your breakfast. I’ve left a thermos of coffee and some sandwiches in a cache, if you’re not too wet to stop on the way back and eat them?” He looked rather ruefully at the front of Jane’s jersey and skirt, stained black with peaty water. “My dear child, you’re wet through. I should have brought a waterproof for you to sit on.”
“I won’t melt, and I never catch cold,” said Jane, and promptly sneezed.
“Come on,” said Peregrine, seizing her by the hand and dragging her into a run across the rough ground towards the fringe of trees that showed where the glen ran down between two long heathery ridges. “This’ll warm you better than anything.”
“I’d rather—have coffee,” panted Jane, as she fell into bog-holes and was hauled bodily over them. “Or—even a—cold!”
But he would not let her stop until they had reached the wall, where he hoisted her to the top with such unexpected strength that she almost fell on to the moss on the farther side.
“I won’t run another step,” she gasped, leaning against the wall thankfully. “If I do I’ll be sick.”
“You won’t have to. My cache is here, under this rock.” He stooped and brought a pleasantly plump game-bag into view from its hiding-place beneath the grey lichen-patterned stone. “Why do you feel sick?”
“Too much exercise too early. Running on an empty stomach. It’s always fatal,” Jane told him.
He laughed. “Well, you were pretty literally ventre-à-terre for a good bit of the way. Now wait till I find a decent place to sit.”
In a very few minutes Jane was sitting on the game-bag, now emptied of its contents, with her back, to the rock and the early sunlight falling warmly on her. A horn tumbler of steaming, fragrant coffee was in one of her dirty hands, a large handsome sandwich of roll stuffed with bacon and egg in the other, and she was huddled into a capacious Burberry which explained the well-filled appearance of the bag.
“This is lovely,” she sighed contentedly, taking a sip of coffee.
“Better now?”
“Better now,” said Jane. “Not that there was anything wrong with me before.”
“You look,” he said suddenly, “a great deal less forlorn than you did yesterday evening, Jane.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I say, of course,” he answered a little impatiently. “More coffee? I don’t expect you to admit that you were feeling forlorn, but you needn’t waste breath over denying it to me.”
“Well!” said Jane, and stared at him as if he were some strange species of creature never encountered by her before. “Well! There are a lot of things I could call you—”
“Beginning with Good Samaritan?” he suggested as he filled her tumbler again.
“That was not one of the ones I had thought of,” said Jane. “I was considering Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, Whited Sepulchre, Snake in the Grass, Eye That Never Sleeps, or perhaps, Changeful Leopard, for you have changed your spots a bit, haven’t you?”
“As how?”
“All that nonsense about being so shy that you have to hide behind spectacles, for instance,” said Jane, accepting another large roll and waving it at him to emphasize her words. “My belief is that they’re simply camouflage to fool the innocents around you, and all the time the Eye That Never Sleeps is summing them up, and the Snake is laughing to himself in the Grass. It must be either that or you’ve changed your spots with interesting suddenness. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes and no,” answered Peregrine cautiously.
“Very parliamentary. ‘I must have notice of that question’,” Jane mocked. “But really, after accusing me of looking forlorn—such an out-of-date air, too, going back to the House that Jack Built—the least you can do is to stop posing to me as a Mystery Man.”
“I don’t mean to,” he said. “I assure you. I’m far more astonished than you can possibly be at the change in myself when I’m with you. I am, truly and honestly, shy, especially with women. Older women are bad enough, though I can meet them as a rule without my knees knocking together and my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. But young ones terrify me. Your sister, for instance. I’d much rather be in a cage with a man-eating tiger than alone in a room with her.”
“Aren’t you flattering yourself that women are interested in you?” asked Jane a little coldly.
“Good God, no! I’ve no illusions about myself where women are concerned,” he said earnestly. “It’s just meeting them, having to talk to them and hand them cups of tea and take them in to dinner and dance with them, that finishes me!” His voice held a note of pure horror, and Jane could not help laughing.
“Yes, it’s all very fine to laugh,” he said. “A shy man always seems to be a source of infinite amusement, while a shy girl gets away with it every time.”
“Genuinely shy men are so extremely rare,” said Jane in a thoughtful tone, “that one is apt to disbelieve in them entirely. Now, a shy girl—”
“Does such a thing as a shy girl exist at all?” he retorted. “I doubt it. I should like to meet one very much.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You’d both be tongue-tied and utterly miserable. Your only hope is with girls who aren’t shy, and have something to say for themselves. Don’t you see that?”
“All I see,” he said gloomily, “is that I get into a cold sweat whenever I meet one. Except you. For some reason I feel at ease with you and have since we first saw each other. As if you were a man.”
“So what?” asked Jane sceptically, refusing to succumb to this flattery, all the more subtle because he so obviously meant what he said.
“Well, I wondered—” he began, in evident embarrassment, his hand going up and fumbling with glasses which were not on his thin, high-bridged nose, a gesture which Jane was soon to find familiar in him. “I wondered if you’d be really kind and—and give me a hand? You see, I thought if I got used to you it might help me with other women. And if I’ve got to stand for the constituency in this bl—this, er—well, this by-election that’s coming off in the autumn, I must learn how to deal with the women voters, mustn’t I?”
“It would be a good thing,” Jane agreed gravely, struggling to suppress laughter, but oddly touched too. “So you propose to cut your wisdom teeth on me, as it were?”
“If you wouldn’t mind,” he said, suddenly humble. “I’d never have suggested it if I didn’t think you were at a loose end yourself. I mean—I thought at first that you and that good-looking N.O. were—and now I think you’re not—so if you wouldn’t absolutely hate to take me in hand and make me a bit social, I’d be everlastingly grateful to you.”
“And when I’m an old, old lady with snowy hair, and hear people talking about Peregrine Gilbert, the greatest Prime Minister Britain has ever known since Pitt,” Jane said in quavering elderly accents, “I shall smile gently to myself, remembering that it was my sweet womanly influence that put him on the high-road to greatness.”
“You’re laughing at me,” he said reproachfully. “And I really mean it, Jane. I’m in earnest.”
“Oh, so am I. But you must give me a little time to think it over.”
“You’ll let me know soon?”
“I’ll ring you up this evening,” Jane said, after a short pause during which she made a resolution to herself.
Then she jumped up and pulled off the Burberry. “I mu
st go now,” she said rather hurriedly, and they parted, he to walk back to Allander across the moor, she to run down the glen with her mind full of the morning’s astonishing happenings.
It was not very easy to get John by herself, for Love clung to him as closely as his shadow, and he seemed to like it; but Jane had lost that first strange delicious shyness which prevents people in love from seeking each other out openly, and said quite firmly.
“I rather want to talk to John, Love, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, not a bit,” Love said airily. “Go ahead. I won’t be in the way, I suppose?”
“Yes. I’m afraid you will,” said Jane with complete calm, and more firmly than ever. “I won’t be long, and then we can all go for a walk until tea.”
Love stared incredulously at her, saw that John did not intend to interfere, and left the room with fairly good grace and no further argument.
“John,” said Jane as soon as the door shut. She was breathing quickly, but her small pale face was composed and still.
“Um?” John murmured, watching her narrowly through a thin blue haze of cigarette-smoke for some sign of yielding, and seeing none.
“John. It’s us. It’s all been a—a mistake,” said Jane. “Hasn’t it? We’d better call it off.”
“If you want to, Jenny,” he said.
“Yes, please,” Jane said resolutely. “I do. We shouldn’t have started it at all, and it obviously isn’t going to work.”
“Very well,” said John. From their business-like tone they might have been discussing a transaction in stocks and shares instead of their engagement. “I suppose we can go on being friends? You’ll come across to Rosyth when we have a dance, and so on, you and Love?”
“Oh, yes.” Nothing seemed to matter, thought Jane. “Certainly. And I hope you’ll come here again whenever you like. Ring up and propose yourself for a week-end or something, won’t you?”
“Thanks. I’d like that. I’ll fix it up with Love, shall I?”
“Yes, do.”
And that was all. That was the end. The end of a ridiculous dream, Jane told herself sternly. If it could be torn up as easily as that, it couldn’t have been worth much. The only apparent result was that she seemed to have no appetite for tea, which was a pity, for her mother commented on it. But Love saved her by saying: “Janey ate an enormous lunch.”
Love seemed able to save almost any situation. She made John’s departure seem perfectly gay and friendly, a mere au revoir instead of the farewell it was. But one thing she could not do: she could not help Peregrine.
As soon as John’s small disreputable car had rolled away, Jane went to the telephone, and in a steady voice called up Allander. When Peregrine answered her, she said: “Peregrine? This is Jane Cranstoun speaking. The answer is Yes. I’ll take on the job of changing the leopard’s spots, as from this evening.”
Chapter Seven
PRESENTATION
“It’s broadened me, if you know what I mean,” said Violet Graham solemnly. “I’ve slept with a man—”
“Only one? And you didn’t have to go all the way to Germany to do that, did you? Though, of course, Hitler’s pretty strong on all that.” Love’s eyes rested thoughtfully on Violet’s impressive contours, her voice expressed lively interest and more than a hint of mischief.
“I don’t mean that at all. Really, Love, you are very coarse at times,” Violet, flushing an unbecoming purplish red, sounded annoyed. “We were walking in the Black Forest, a whole lot of us, and at night we just lay out under the stars all together, men and girls side by side. One felt that the body was nothing, the soul everything. It was an experience.”
“I suppose it was,” said Love doubtfully, “It sounds awfully dull and sort of midgy to me.”
“Oh, no, Love! It was wonderful. I’m going again in the autumn, and you must come too.”
Love shook her head, smiling gently and indulgently as if at an unreasonable child, though Violet was two years her senior. “I won’t be able to. My plans are quite different,” she answered firmly. “When I go abroad again, I mean to have a husband to look after things for me.”
“A husband?” Violet’s large pink mouth opened in amazement and remained open, her large, dull, cow-like eyes were also opened to their fullest extent. “Are you going to be married?’’
“Of course. Aren’t you?”
“I—I don’t know.” stammered Violet. “It all depends on—oh, lots of things.”
“I suppose you mean you’re going to sit about and wait for some man to take pity on you,” said Love calmly. “Let me tell you, Violet, that you stand a very poor chance at home at Blanchlands, with a mother like Milly who annexes every male between seventeen and seventy-five on sight. And as for the ones you meet tramping about foreign countries—well, I don’t suppose they’d be much good. Now, I’ve picked out a husband for myself, and I mean to get him sooner or later.”
“I think you’re simply disgusting,” said Violet, deeply shocked.
“I’m not, really. Only sensible. But sense so often seems shocking to people like you. Ostriches, that’s what you are . . . Violet! Could you eat another éclair?”
Violet’s eyes brightened. She loved rich creamy cakes and ate them with a sublime disregard for her figure. “I oughtn’t to, but I could,” she admitted. “Are you going to, Love?”
“Certainly I am. Waiter! Please bring another plate of éclairs. The chocolate ones. And some cream cookies,” said Love in her confident manner.
The waiter, though trained by weary years to maintain a mask of professional calm in face of any demands, could not repress a start of surprise. These two young ladies had eaten every crumb of the lavish tea provided by the Hotel Magnificent, with an extra plate of pastries and two strawberry ices apiece, and yet they were not replete, it seemed. Still, his not to reason why, and they looked young enough and inexperienced enough to overtip him. His face resumed its impassive politeness, and with a “Very good, madam,” he hurried on his errand.
Love and Violet Graham were waiting for Jane, whose presentation gown was being fitted. When she joined them, they were all going to practise their court curtseys and the correct management of trains and bouquets at a class held for that purpose by Madame Florabelle, who had coached more débutantes and awkward, nervous wives of civic dignitaries than any other teacher of dancing and deportment in Scotland during the past forty years.
Violet, a large calf-like creature of enthusiasms as violent as they were ephemeral, and a sentimentality which accorded ill with her figure of an international hockey goalkeeper, had slept the previous night at Craigrois, and they had started early for Edinburgh, Jane driving the small car. All three were in high spirits: Jane because she loved the ‘heich triumphant toun,’ Love because any change of scene was an excitement, and Violet because she was temporarily free from her vivacious mother’s constant complaints about her size and uncouth behaviour. They made her more miserably self-conscious and awkward than ever, but she was far too tongue-tied to explain this, and remained miserably silent in her mother’s presence. Milly would have been astonished and possibly irritated if she could have seen her daughter with the Cranstoun girls. She and Love were singing loudly, and though there was no doubt that Violet looked flushed, untidy and considerably over life-size, with her smart straw hat stuck on the very back of her yellow head, she was certainly enjoying herself.
It was a June day made for gaiety and laughter, hot and sunny with a tempering breeze. Charlock was bright among the growing crops, there was a tangle of blue and yellow vetch and dog-roses in the hedge-rows, with the moon-faces of marguerites shining below, the grass fields were enamelled white and gold where daisies and buttercups ran riot; red meadow clover sent gusts of sweetness into the car as they passed. A faint mist lay over Edinburgh, so that the Castle, bold on its rock, and all the shadowy town, were touched to a soft dreaming blue, swimming in a faint golden haze, mysterious, infinitely beautiful.
Violet
, unrestrained by faint pitying smiles, liftings of fine-plucked eyebrows or delicate shrugs, continued to be the life and soul of the party. Everything was lovely on this lovely morning, and she admired it all wholeheartedly and open-mouthed, from the brilliant flowers in Princes Street Gardens to the Venetian masts erected down the length of that stately street in preparation for the impending royal visit. Having no illusions about her appearance, she was not interested in her clothes, and fidgeted throughout the trying-on of the girlish shell-pink chiffon in which her mother had decreed she should make her curtsey, to the despair of the patient fitter. Released at last, she rushed to the window and hung there, airily clad in very brief blue crêpe step-ins, watching the gay street below and the green gardens sloping to the grey rock opposite, while Love took her place on the white sheet spread in the middle of the floor, and turned and twisted obediently. The rest of the day, until the court rehearsal in the evening, was pure pleasure. No school-boy could have competed with Violet, and few with Love in their consumption of ices, iced coffee, cakes and more ices. And now they were seated in the lounge of the Hotel Magnificent, Love acting hostess, and embarking on their fresh supply of éclairs, while Violet, her mouth regrettably full, enlarged on her latest enthusiasm, the walking tour which she had recently made in Germany. For some time Love was enabled to support this saga of the great out-of-doors by her pleasant feeling of superiority: these childish crazes were not for her; but with the appearance of the new chocolate éclairs she decided that she had heard enough of the simple life at second-hand, and unmasked her own batteries.
“It all seems a little school-girlish to me,” she observed, as, languidly now, for the fine edge of her appetite was dulled, she ate slowly but still with relish. “The sort of thing one might have enjoyed in the summer holidays when one was young.”
Violet, a little dashed, but defiant, stuck bravely to her guns. “Travel broadens the mind,” she said, helping herself to a cream-cookie.
Love Comes Home Page 13
