Bargain Wife

by Mary Burchell

  When they finally reached the small country station he actually lifted her out remarkably easily, she thought, and while he was reaching back into the compartment for their luggage, she stood looking round, seemingly enveloped by utter darkness.

  After a few moments, however, her eyes became used to the lack of light, and she saw that there were bright, cold stars twinkling overhead and a few station lights pierced the blackness. One, moving down the platform towards them, was evidently held by the one and only porter.

  He whisked the train out imperiously, and then collected their luggage, informing them that a car was waiting for them. Tina wondered amusedly how he knew the car was for them. Then she realised that they were the only passengers, which certainly did rather simplify his job.

  Outside the station an extremely comfortable closed car was waiting for them, and soon they were driving through the dark country lanes in what seemed a warm, intimate little world of their own.

  Charles passed his arm round her and inquired:

  ‘All right?’

  And she said, ‘Oh yes, Charles,’ with the sudden, delicious feeling that everything was quite all right.

  Collier seemed a thousand miles away. Eileen had ceased to exist. And all those odd doubts and questionings which she had had on the journey down could somehow be left quite safely to whatever solution Charles chose.

  The hotel which he had chosen was the most fascinating place Tina had ever seen. Originally a country house, built on a lavish, and even luxurious, scale, it retained all the character of a country mansion while embodying every comfort of the most up-to-date hotel.

  Charles was evidently quite well known there, and was received with measured enthusiasm by one or two of the staff—almost all of whom were elderly and had the air of being family retainers of almost legendary fidelity.

  ‘You can’t see anything of the outside tonight,’ Charles said, ‘but tomorrow I’ll take you down the valley. It runs straight down to the sea. You’ll love it.’

  And Tina agreed that she was perfectly sure she would.

  They were shown into a big, panelled bedroom, where a great wood fire blazed in an open grate.

  ‘Oh, how lovely!’

  Without even waiting to take off her things she went over to the fire and stood there looking down into its glowing heart, her hands outspread towards the blaze. Behind her she heard Charles saying something to the servant about the luggage and then the man withdrew.

  ‘It’s the loveliest room I’ve ever seen,’ she spoke over her shoulder to him.

  ‘Is it?’ He stood there, smiling, his hands thrust into the pockets of his overcoat, which he had not yet taken off. ‘I thought you’d like it. It’s the room I always had when I used to come down here years ago.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind sharing it then, if you’re used to having it to yourself.’ She smiled down into the fire.

  There was a little silence. Then he came over slowly and put his arms round her from behind.

  ‘‘Do you want me to share this room with you?’ He kissed the side of her cheek lightly.

  ‘Why Charles!’ She turned her head and gave him a startled little glance. ‘I thought—Didn’t you mean to share it with me?’

  ‘There is another room for me next door if you don’t want me here,’ he said coolly, but he didn’t meet her eyes.

  ‘But my dear—’ She turned in the circle of his arms, so that she was close against him. ‘Don’t you want I mean, do you prefer to be alone?’

  He smiled slightly..

  ‘I told you you’ve come on this honeymoon with someone who wants you to do exactly as you like.’

  ‘Even to that extent, Charles?’ she said slowly.

  ‘Even to that extent.’

  She was silent for a moment, trying to decide what complicated or perhaps perfectly simple feeling had prompted that offer. Then, suddenly, on an instinct much deeper than any reason, she put her arms round his neck.

  ‘If it’s for me to choose, will you please stay here with me,’ she said.

  He bent his head and gave her a long kiss. Nothing like any kiss he had given her before, and she thought:

  ‘I was right to defy Collier. I was right to fight for my happiness. It’s going to mean Charles’ happiness too. The loveliest thing that ever happened to either of us.

  During the three days of her honeymoon Tina felt there was no one on earth whom she could envy. She even thought, in her moments of most exalted happiness, that if life gave her nothing else but this, if some sort of disastrous exposure awaited her on her return home, still this heavenly little interlude would be worth all the anxiety and fear.

  That she could be happy in Charles’ company she had always known, but that she should be so wildly, romantically in love with him she had never quite visualised. She had ceased to ask herself if he loved her in the same degree. He loved her in some sort of degree, and that was enough.

  She realised now that she had never known companionship before and that she had been emotionally lonely for most of her life. With Sonia there had been a certain sense of physical companionship, of course, but they had really had little in common. Whatever there had been between them had lain on the surface of her life. This sharing of thoughts and ideas and experiences with Charles drove deep down to the very roots of her existence.

  The odd thing was that they put very little of it into words. They went long walks in the unexpectedly brilliant sunshine which literally illumined their honeymoon for them, and they talked gaily, casually, teasingly or were sometimes contentedly silent. But Tina thought that the silence said more than the words and the actual love passages between them said more than either.

  On their last afternoon, when they were strolling through the wooded valley down to the sea, he passed his arm round her, and for a while they walked in silence. Then he said in that tone which meant, she knew, that he was smiling:

  ‘Well, my little wife, was it all rather less terrifying than you expected?’

  ‘Terrifying, Charles? I never expected to be terrified on my honeymoon,’ she protested.

  ‘No? Well, I’ve seldom seen you look more anxious and apprehensive than you did on the journey down,’ he told her with amused candour.

  ‘Did I? How ridiculous!’ She laughed and flushed. It was impossible, of course, to tell him how many and varied had been her reasons for fear and that they were certainly not all removed even now. But she pressed his hand against her side and said, ‘I couldn’t know it would be so heavenly, of course, but I don’t think I had so many fears as you seem to think.’

  ‘No?’ He kissed her cheek in that characteristically careless way which meant, she knew now, something far removed from carelessness. ‘Well, promise me at any rate that you’ll never be frightened again.’

  ‘Of you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m not frightened of you, Charles. I never was.’

  ‘All right.’ He laughed and let her have that point. ‘And you’re not to be afraid of anyone else either, because I’ll deal with anything unpleasant for you in future.’

  For a moment she savoured the full delicious sensation of that. Then she smiled a little wistfully, though she didn’t know it because, of course, the greatest fear of all could never be mentioned to him.

  ‘I’ll never let anything frighten me if I think you can deal with it for me,’ she promised after a moment. And if he noticed that she had altered the form of words, he said nothing about it.

  They left by an early train the next day and arrived in London early enough to snatch a hasty meal with Earle before driving down to the nursing-home.

  For some reason or other Earle laughed when he saw them, and said, with his drawl very much pronounced:

  ‘There isn’t much need to ask whether married life agrees with you two.’

  As they drove down through the early dusk, Tina said contentedly, ‘It’s lovely to be going home for the very first time, isn’t it?’


  ‘Lovely,’ Charles agreed with a smile. And then: ‘Do you suppose Mrs. Ardingley will expect me to carry you over the front doorstep?’

  ‘That depends entirely on what Sir Thomas did with his lady,’ Tina pointed out. ‘I feel they probably established a precedent for all time, in Mrs. Ardingley’s opinion.’

  ‘Hm.’ He sounded non-committal. ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘I can bear it if you don’t,’ Tina assured him, a good deal amused by the almost serious tone of that.

  Mrs. Ardingley received them rather in the manner of the late Queen Victoria presiding at a Drawing Room, but she was unquestionably pleased to see them.

  ‘Oh, Mrs. Ardingley, how nice to have you to come home to!’ Tina exclaimed in all sincerity, which caused Mrs. Ardingley to bend an extremely benevolent glance upon her.

  ‘Everything all right, Mrs. Ardingley?’ Charles inquired.

  ‘Everything is perfectly correct and in order, sir,’ Mrs. Ardingley assured him. ‘At least, so far as my own province is concerned. As to the patients, five, I believe, sir, so far no doubt the Matron or that flighty young person who calls herself Nurse will be better able to report.’

  ‘Nurse Unsworth has every right to the title, you know,’ murmured Charles, a good deal amused. ‘And, even if she is pretty, she is remarkably efficient.’

  Mrs. Ardingley pressed her lips together at that, and with an air of producing an entirely new and original remark, observed that handsome was as handsome did, but it was no business of hers.

  ‘Quite right,’ agreed Charles with a diplomatically absent air, and it was hard to say whether he was answering the first or the second part of Mrs. Ardingley’s observation.

  But Tina secretly decided, with a slightly guilty feeling, that if she had never liked Mrs. Ardingley before, she certainly would have had to now!

  As they turned to go upstairs there was a rustle of starched uniform on the upstairs landing, and Eileen appeared at the top of the stairs. She drew back at once, as though surprised to see them, but Tina felt certain that she had timed some errand deliberately, to bring her there as soon as she heard the sound of the car arriving,

  Her faintly shy smile of welcome was certainly one of the prettiest things Tina had ever seen. She acknowledged as much to herself with grim amusement. And the sympathetic, ‘Oh, you must have had a cold journey,’ made one feel that Eileen asked nothing better than to minister to one’s immediate comfort.

  ‘We survived it,’ Charles assured her with a smile. ‘How do you like the new quarters?’

  ‘They’re simply beautiful. It’s hard to believe one’s a nurse instead of a guest in the house when everything is done for one’s comfort like this!’

  ‘I hope Matron feels as enthusiastic as you,’ Charles told her with a dry little smile, as he and Tina turned along the corridor which led to the door cutting off their own wing from the rest of the house.

  Tina was not sure why, but as she reached the door, she instinctively glanced back over her shoulder.

  Eileen was still standing there at the top of the stairs, looking after them. Or rather, she was looking after Tina.

  But her expression was no longer shy and pretty. There was a dislike so intense that it amounted to hatred in her eyes, and if anything so pretty could be said to look malevolent, then Eileen did at that moment.

  She turned away at once and ran down the stairs, apparently intent on her errand. But as Tina went rather slowly into her new home, she thought:

  ‘That girl isn’t to be despised or laughed about, after all. It’s not a question of dislike or petty jealousy. I’m up against real hatred!’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  TINA was a good deal surprised to find how quickly she slipped into the routine of her new life.

  There were days when she saw very little indeed of Charles. Times when he was away at the hospital, operating most of the day. But she was not at all lonely then. After the first feeling of shyness and diffidence, she found herself mixing very happily and easily with the patients in the nursing-home.

  Charles had said nothing whatever to her about any share he hoped she would take in the actual work of the home perhaps because he was not sure how she would react to being surrounded by injured and disfigured people and undoubtedly his desire to have their own quarters more or less cut off from the rest of the house arose from a determination that she should not be forced into the position of living in circumstances she hated.

  But Tina found that, after the first shock of pity and dismay, she was inclined to forget any abnormalities in these people, and she sensed from the beginning that she, perhaps more than anyone else, could help them. She was entirely unconnected with the nursing side of the home.

  She really belonged to the outside world to which they would eventually return, and she inevitably represented the first link between the rather unnatural circumscribed atmosphere of hospital life and the everyday circumstances which they all slightly dreaded, after their long absence from ordinary routine.

  Almost from the first they ceased to be ‘patients’ to her and became ‘guests’. And she found, to her deep and warm satisfaction, that she had a certain instinct which almost always prompted her to handle even the most difficult case correctly.

  That all of them owed their recovery to Charles and thought him the most wonderful thing on earth naturally made the first approach specially easy. And it never failed to please her when she was informed that he was ‘ever such a wonderful person’.

  ‘Is it against hospital discipline or anything it I encourage them to ask their own families and friends to come and see them here?’ she asked Charles after the first week.

  ‘Not if you don’t take on more than you can tackle, he told her with a smile. ‘Why? Do most of them say they want that?’

  ‘No’ Tina said slowly. ‘That’s the most touching thing about them. They’re not at all inclined to express their wishes. I think they have some idea that they are under an obligation to us already because they don’t pay anything. But there are enough rooms in this house, Charles! Let’s have them do a little entertaining on their own or with me there, if they prefer that. Something quite different from “visiting day” formalities. More like the ordinary intercourse which they will have with people again some day.’

  ‘I leave it in your hands, my dear,’ Charles told her, still smiling. ‘Don’t wear yourself out with enthusiasm, that’s all, and allow Matron a certain amount of discipline too. Matrons just slowly fade away if they aren’t allowed to exercise any discipline at all.’

  Tina laughed and kissed him.

  ‘I’ll remember. And thank you, Charles, for letting me have my own way.’

  ‘Don’t I always let you have your own way?’ he inquired.

  ‘Yes. But I haven’t tested you very severely yet, have I?’ she countered.

  That seemed to amuse him, and he put his arm round her and pulled her down on to the arm of his chair. ‘How should you test me, I should like to know?

  She thought of Eileen and she thought of Philip Collier, and found some difficulty in smiling back at him. But she said quite lightly:

  ‘When your husbandly indulgence feels the strain, you can tell me.’

  Whereupon he said, ‘All right, I will,’ rather lazily, and put his head against her.

  She looked down at his dark head, and thought, for the first time since she was married, ‘Could I dare to tell him, after all? Could I?’ Would this easy, good-tempered affection between them stand the strain of quite such a confession? Suppose one were groping for words what would one say?

  ‘I think I ought to tell you that I’m not the person I’ve pretended to be.’ ‘I’m not really being generous about that money at all, because not one penny of it is mine. I just swindled you out of it.’ ‘I couldn’t bear to stay in America any longer, so I impersonated someone and pinched a legacy your legacy, incidentally.’

  No. None of those sounded very promising openings.

/>   Besides, how could one possibly tell what Charles’ reaction would be, even if one put it the very best way possible? Was he one of those rare and blessed people who just love unreasoningly, regardless of a person’s character or was his feeling for people governed by how well or ill he had reason to think of them?

  It was impossible to tell. And it would be too late, once one had confessed. That was it— confession was irrevocable. If she gambled on his understanding, and he didn’t understand, then she had lost everything. There wasn’t any rubbing out a mistake like that.

  ‘I know what it is,’ thought Tina with something like self-contempt, ‘my moral nerve has gone. I did something I knew was wrong, because I thought I couldn’t face the alternative. And now, each time, it seems a little more impossible to do the straight and difficult thing.’

  She sighed faintly, and Charles said at once:

  ‘What are you thinking about so hard?’ He moved comfortably against her without even looking up.

  ‘Oh you, I think.’ She smiled involuntarily.

  ‘Good lord! Did I cause that deep sigh?’

  ‘No, no.’ She laughed a little then.

  ‘Tell me what you were thinking about me, then.’

  ‘I suppose I was wondering—’ She stopped. ‘Charles, are you a very forgiving sort of person?’

  ‘That depends what you’ve been doing,’ he said, and glancing down she saw from the curve of his mouth that he was smiling and evidently not taking the query very seriously. ‘If you’ve only broken one of the ornaments, it’s all right, but if you’ve been flirting with someone else I’m not in the least forgiving.’

  ‘Oh Charles!’ She hoped her laugh didn’t sound as troubled to him as it did to her. ‘I suppose you mean that small things don’t worry you in the least—in this as in every other way—but that you have rather a close regard.’

  He considered that amusedly. ‘Am I really so well-balanced?’

  ‘Of course.’ She was quite serious about it. ‘I expect that’s why you’re such a good surgeon.’