Bargain Wife

by Mary Burchell

  ‘You know Charles very well, don’t you, Earle?’ she said slowly.

  ‘I should do. I’ve known him for a good while, at any rate, and yes, we’ve always been pretty good at understanding each other’s thoughts and points of view.’

  ‘And you think honestly that I’m very much the right type of girl for him?’

  ‘I’m not talking of types,’ drawled Earle, with more than usual emphasis. ‘Types don’t mean much to a man like Charles. It’s individuals that count. And you’re the one individual girl that’s right for him.’

  Tina smiled slightly with sheer pleasure at his view. But she answered seriously:

  ‘Only we said once, you know when you and I were discussing him some time ago that he didn’t know much about falling in love, or something of the sort. That he was rather inclined to be amused by anything he had never had to take seriously.’

  ‘That’s still true.’

  Then I don’t see—’

  ‘Don’t you? Hasn’t it struck you that he’s at any rate beginning to take you seriously?’ Earle broke off and laughed a little uncomfortably. ‘That sounds rather a funny thing to say to a girl who’s just going to get married. Something of an understatement, I suppose. But—’

  ‘No, no, you needn’t apologise,’ Tina said almost absently. ‘I know he wasn’t taking me specially seriously when we when we first fixed this thing up. But if you think that now—’

  ‘I do think,’ Earle stated firmly. ‘And here he is to confirm that for you himself.’

  Tina glanced quickly across the lounge to where Charles was standing looking round for them.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ she pleaded quickly. ‘Not even in joke, I mean.’

  And Earle, who possessed that rare quality the understanding of when a joke ceases to be a joke nodded in a matter-of-fact manner and said:

  ‘Sure. I’ve forgotten everything you said to me.’

  Charles came over then, with an apology for having kept them waiting, and they all went in to dinner.

  It was quite a bright meal, in spite of Tina’s secret preoccupation. Earle took it as a matter of course that they were excited and happy about their approaching marriage, and Charles insensibly slipped into the role which Earle appeared to think natural for him in the circumstances.

  To Tina there was a sort of perilous pleasure about it all. She felt a feverish excitement because of all that Earle had said, and yet the sheer joy of discovering that there was so much more to Charles’ feelings for her made the thought of losing him all the more poignant.

  It seemed to her that she was never again to know tranquil happiness in any form. There would always be this insecure joy, alternating with breathtaking fear.

  But as she looked at Charles across the table now, she thought, ‘Even that’s better than losing him.’

  He was a good deal relaxed at the moment, listening amusedly to some of Earle’s nonsense, his handsome, slightly arrogant mouth curved in a smile and his eyes sparkling.

  Even as she looked at him, his glance met hers, and quite unexpectedly he put his hand over hers as it lay on the table, and kept it there until Earle had finished what he was saying.

  Then he said:

  ‘What did you do with yourself today? Were you trousseau-buying, or don’t you go in for that sort of thing?’

  ‘Oh, Charles! Of course I do,’ she protested with a smile. ‘But I wasn’t buying it today.’

  No?’ He smiled at her with a curious touch of indulgence in his expression. Then he added as an afterthought, ‘Oh no, you were in the wrong district for that, weren’t you? Who were you seeing off at King’s Cross this afternoon, by the way?’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHARLES asked his question almost idly certainly without any suspicious intention of frightening unexpected information out of her but she could hardly have been more scared or dismayed if he had struck her.

  Only with the greatest difficulty did she conceal how agitated she was, and completely unable to think out a satisfactory reply, she parried with a rather feeble:

  ‘Who told you I was at King’s Cross this afternoon?’

  ‘Nurse Unsworth did, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Nurse Unsworth! When did you see her?’

  Tina was really only playing for time, but she saw Charles’ eyebrows go up at that, and she thought distractedly: ‘Oh, I’m sounding like some petty, suspicious little idiot who doesn’t like her fiancé to speak to another woman.’

  Presumably Charles thought something like that too, because his tone was distinctly dry as he said:

  ‘Well, my dear, since you ask me, I called in at the hotel on my way along. I thought I was earlier than I actually was, and intended to pick you up. Nurse Unsworth and her sister were in the lounge, and when I asked about you, we had a few moments’ conversation and she happened to mention that she saw you seeing someone off at King’s Cross this afternoon.’

  ‘ “Happen” my foot!’ thought Tina rudely, knowing that things only ‘happened’ to Eileen Unsworth just as she intended them to. But she was recalled by Charles saying softly, and with a touch of amused impatience:

  ‘Explanation satisfactory?’

  ‘Oh, Charles, of course!’ She flushed and managed to laugh. ‘I’m sorry. Did I sound—’

  ‘A little bit,’ he told her with a smile.

  ‘What a shame!’ By some extraordinary exercise of self-control she was beginning to assume an air of casual amusement herself. ‘I was really thinking of something else. In fact how odd it is that one can’t see off a tiresome acquaintance even in a place the size of London without someone “happening” to see one. He was some wretched man I met on the plane. He was in London for a day or two and looked me up to have lunch with him today before he went back north to his own people. Rather a bore, really, only he he’d had a good deal of bad luck since he landed. I suppose it was a sort of general sympathy that that made me give up an odd half-hour to see him off on his train.’

  There was a short silence. Then Charles said:

  ‘Well, we seem to have disposed of Nurse Unsworth and the mysterious gentleman at King’s Cross.’

  ‘Oh, Charles, he wasn’t mysterious!’ She was unable to hide her distress. ‘He was just—’

  ‘My dear, I know.’ He was surprised and contrite. ‘I was only teasing you. Forget it.’

  He turned immediately to say something to Earle, and Tina was left wondering feverishly if she had magnified the whole incident in such an unfortunate way that it would stick in Charles’ memory very effectively.

  She felt distractedly that it was impossible to go on like this. And then, after conversation had flowed quite normally again for ten minutes, she knew that it was not only quite possible to go on, but that there was literally nothing else she could do. Not after what Earle had told her.

  Only the effort would sometimes be almost more than she could bear.

  When Earle said goodnight to them that evening, he added:

  ‘And I suppose the next time I see you will be when I come to play my part as witness.’

  ‘Not until then?’ Tina smiled at him, though the sudden nearness of that occasion seemed to come home to her very forcibly as he said that.

  ‘I’m afraid not. Work’s pretty heavy just lately, you know. I’m lucky to be sure of getting away for the wedding.’

  ‘I know.’ Charles made a grimace. ‘I’m lucky to be almost sure of three days for my honeymoon.’

  Tina hugged his arm suddenly and said:

  ‘Then I’m lucky to have you both spending your little bit of spare time on me.’

  Charles laughed and kissed her lightly.

  ‘Nothing short of half a dozen “emergencies” shall interfere with that,’ he promised her.

  After that the last few days slipped away with a peculiar uneventfulness. Tina heard nothing further of Collier and saw nothing further of Eileen, since she had already gone down to the nursing-home to take up her duties th
ere.

  Audrey made her a present of her company on several occasions, but as she was cheerful, good-tempered, and undemanding, she made an engaging companion for the few shopping expeditions Tina had to make and the last-minute arrangements.

  ‘It must feel funny to have no one of your own at a time like this,’ Audrey remarked reflectively one afternoon. ‘I mean, you expect a terrific gathering of the clans for anything like a wedding, and you can’t even produce a second cousin or an aunt by marriage, can you?’

  ‘No,’ Tina agreed somewhat crisply. ‘Not one single relation.’

  She thought of the remote connections of her own parents who, mercifully, knew little of her and cared less. They had no idea that she was back in England, still less that she was going to be married. And, as things were, she couldn’t see that she was ever likely to have any connection with them again. One could not indulge in inexplicable relations however remote if one were impersonating someone else.

  Still, as Audrey said, it did seem strange to be so entirely without connections, and for a moment she felt isolated and lonely. Then she remembered that her very loneliness was her safety. And anyway, in a very short time now she would have Charles for her nearest relation and that would be sufficient.

  ‘I suppose,’ Audrey said, ‘ that any relations you have are in America?’

  ‘‘No.’ Tina wished she were not perpetually presented with the confusion of her relations and Sonia’s relations, who somehow had to be reconciled into a credible family and then dismissed en bloc. ‘Any close relations I had are all dead. And I suppose one loses sight of the remote ones.’

  “I suppose so.’ Audrey sucked her underlip thoughtfully. ‘Even Mr. Linton isn’t really your relation, is he?’

  ‘No Just a cousin by well, I suppose, by adoption.’

  ‘Funny you should meet like that and just fall for each other,’ Audrey remarked. ‘But romantic, of course,’ she added as an afterthought, and Tina rather supposed she had resigned herself to the fact that Eileen had lost him, since the circumstances were what Audrey herself chose to regard as romantic. There was a short silence and then Audrey said: ‘I don’t want to say anything, I shouldn’t, but you’ve been nice to me, and I shouldn’t like things to go wrong for you—’ She paused, and Tina smilingly inquired:

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Only that Eileen hasn’t entirely given up any thought of Mr. Linton just because he’s marrying you, you know.’

  ‘But, Audrey,’ Tina felt her tone of reasonable protest expressed rather more amused confidence than she really felt, ‘even your determined sister can hardly expect to make much headway, shall I say? with a newly married—’

  There’s such a thing,’ Audrey pointed out obstinately, ‘as making trouble between husband and wife. And I know it sounds piggish to say it of one’s own sister Eileen isn’t above doing that. You see, she has a theory that if a girl can’t keep her husband or fiancé or whatever it is, she just deserves to lose him.’

  ‘Our old friend jungle law, in fact,’ murmured Tina. ‘Well, I’m not altogether surprised, Audrey, but don’t worry about it. I don’t think she will have much opportunity of exercising her theory. Charles isn’t exactly stupid, you know.’

  ‘No,’ Audrey agreed, ‘and he’s very fond of you. One can see that.’ (‘Can one?’ thought Tina, amused and gratified.) ‘I only meant be careful not to give Eileen any handle against you.’

  ‘That is to say, if I have any dark secrets, keep them secret,’ Tina said, hardly knowing why she put it quite like that.

  ‘Exactly.’ Audrey seemed to think the description fitted the situation admirably, and she dropped the subject after that, leaving Tina to wonder what trouble, if any, Eileen could make out of that chance glimpse of Collier.

  But nothing occurred to upset the tranquillity of those last few days. And on a singularly bleak November day, Earle and Audrey Unsworth and rather surprisingly Mr. Medway foregathered to witness Tina being married (in a false name, when one came to think of it) to Charles Linton.

  ‘A most ah happy termination to your trip to Europe,’ Mr. Medway said affably to Tina, when he was congratulating her after the short ceremony.

  ‘Not exactly a termination, Mr. Medway. Surely a beginning?’ protested Earle with a smile.

  ‘Ah, well, in the sense only of “a happy ending”,’ Mr. Medway insisted on making himself entirely clear. ‘I remember when Mrs. Linton’ he bowed to Tina in acknowledgment of her changed name, ‘first came to see me after her arrival in England, and I apprised her of her good fortune in the matter of her legacy, she was so much exercised on behalf of her cousin that her pleasure in the legacy was almost obscured.’

  ‘Exercised on my behalf? Why should she be?’ Charles wanted to know.

  ‘She had the idea and, if she will allow me to say so, it was an idea that did her heart more credit than her head—she had the idea that some injustice had been done to you, Mr. Linton, by her inheriting the money. Now she need have no misgivings of that sort.’ Mr. Medway beamed upon Tina, rather as though he himself were in some way responsible for the satisfactory solution. ‘The happy ending as I have observed is complete.’

  Charles laughed, and the look he gave Tina was tender.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think even her most generous scruple can be satisfied now.’

  Tina managed to smile in return, but she wished that she would not be pursued even on her wedding-day by a reference to the fraud she had practised which, of necessity, must always appear to other people as the height of generosity!

  To her surprise, she felt overwhelmingly tired by the time the party broke up, and she was thankful beyond expression when all the goodbyes had been said and the good wishes expressed.

  Charles and she had a long journey before them, for they had decided that, even for three days, it was worthwhile going to some spot in Devonshire which he was anxious to show her.

  ‘England is your country again now,’ he had told her. ‘It’s time you got to know it.’ And she had had to pretend a pleased curiosity on the subject of a part of the country she knew well.

  She found that, in an apparently casual way, he looked after her admirably. Without being told, he seemed to sense that she was tired and suffering from a certain amount of strain. Presumably he put it down to the excitement of the wedding and the uncertainty that was bound to attend this venture on an entirely new life. At any rate, he asked no awkward questions, appeared to require no explanations, but simply saw to it that she was very comfortably ensconced in the corner of a first-class compartment.

  If she had no wish to talk, she was welcome to be silent, watching the wintry light fading over the hills and fields, and thinking her own thoughts.

  She glanced across at him and, meeting his eyes, smiled.

  ‘Happy?’ he wanted to know. And when she nodded he seemed quite satisfied. Charles could be curiously undemanding for such an arrogant man, she thought.

  It was hard to realise that she was really his wife now. That their lives, for good or ill, were irrevocably bound together. She began to wonder not for the first time, but with added urgency now what Charles expected of this marriage of his. Whether, in the beginning at any rate, he rather thought they would continue their pleasant, friendly, slightly impersonal relationship, or whether there would be much more to it from the very opening of their married life.

  She glanced across at him again and thought worriedly, ‘I wish I knew.’

  He was looking out of the window too now, and she could not gather much from his profile. He looked as though his thoughts were rather far away perhaps with his patients instead of his wife! There was a certain firmness about his jaw which made one feel that things would be as he wished, rather than as anyone else wished, but Tina was not sure that was not corrected by the essentially sweet-tempered set of his mouth.

  Charles was sweet-tempered, she reflected with a smile. She had never seen him really irritable or ill-natured. Earle’s desc
ription of him fitted extraordinarily well ‘gay and slightly outrageous’. There was something reassuring about that, even when one had just married him and was wondering, quite crudely, what was going to happen next.

  Most couples, she supposed, ‘had things out’ beforehand. But then their engagements were probably of a very different order. All romantic impulse and intimate discussion. She could not recall that she and Charles had ever discussed anything specially intimate, and for a moment she thought in panic: ‘Have I married practically a stranger?’

  Then she remembered that Charles had never seemed quite a stranger to her and that, from the moment he had made his unconventional proposal, she had known that to go with him and be his wife would be the most wonderful and exciting adventure, whatever else might be involved.

  She supposed afterwards that she must have fallen asleep and slept for a long time. Because when she opened her eyes again it was quite dark and all the blinds in the compartment had an air of having been drawn long ago.

  Charles was reading, the strong, handsome lines of his face slightly emphasised by the light cast from the lamp immediately above his head. Bui whatever his book was, it could not have been commanding more than perfunctory attention, because the moment she stirred he glanced up.

  ‘We shall be in in about a quarter of an hour now,’ he told her.

  ‘Oh, Charles, I must have slept a long time. I’m sorry,’ she murmured, still rather sleepily.

  ‘Why?’ He laughed at once. ‘It’s the best way of passing the time on a journey.’

  ‘Even a honeymoon journey?’ objected Tina with a smile.

  ‘A honeymoon journey isn’t different from any other, except that you’re with someone who wants you to do exactly as you like,’ he said with an oddly deliberate air.

  She didn’t know quite what to say in answer to that, so she was silent, but she had an idea that he had said it with the definite intention of reassuring her.