Annette looked at Charles.
“I disapprove of the whole thing,” she said.
Charles stopped frowning rather noticeably, following the progress of the other two as far as it was possible across the lawn to the corner where the garden chairs were set up, and flashed a curiously brilliant smile lit her.
“Then don’t, my pet,” he begged her. He, too, stood up, and drew her with him. “Come across to the drawing-room, as Virginia persists in calling it, and let me play you some of my music—the music for Summer Symphony. After that,” confidently, “you won’t find it possible to disapprove of anything!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
It seemed rather a long day to Virginia, and rather tiring, because in addition to acting hostess, she had to attend to the wants of her visitors, and to devote a good deal of time to Martin Sutherland. He really was most anxious to see all that there was to be seen of her house and garden, and he fell in love with her small herb garden, and congratulated her on the way it was kept. When she admitted that she did most of the work herself he looked down at the slender figure, unostentatiously clad in simple white linen, with a red belt providing an effective contrast, moving at his side along the flagged paths, and his distinguished face reflected sudden thoughtfulness.
“You must work very hard here,” he observed.
“I’m afraid there’s no one else to do very much.”
“That sister of yours is very attractive, but I shouldn’t think she’s much help to you. Why do you stay on here?” he asked, with sudden curiosity.
Virginia sighed, and looked wistful.
“Because I love it,” she confessed.
“That’s a good enough answer!” His hand rested for an instant on her shoulder, and he thought how the sunlight gilded her bright hair, and when she turned her small face up to him it seemed extraordinarily free from make-up. “But things like love often make unreasonable demands on us, and it isn’t good to be always giving way to them, You can do with a change, I’m sure, and if Charles he’s made up his mind that he can work here, then I do sincerely hope you won’t do anything that will cause him to feel frustrated. He’s fifty per cent, temperament, and fifty per cent, sheer genius, you know, and as you’ve already put up with him for weeks, can’t you give way to him over this? I’d be awfully grateful if you would, Virginia!”
Somehow she didn’t resent his use of her Christian name in the way that she sometimes resented Charles’s use of it, and as she looked up at him she thought that his grey eyes were kind and understanding, as well as persuasive. She wondered whether the persuasion was because Summer Symphony, and its chances of success, meant a lot to him, or because Annette was mixed up in it—just as she seemed to be mixed up with Charles’s life.
His hand was still on her shoulder, and he pressed the shoulder slightly.
“I meant it when I said it would give me pleasure to have you in London,” he told her. “I want to see more of you.”
She knew that she flushed faintly, but she did not know how intensely it increased her attractiveness.
“I hardly know London at all,” she admitted. And then she added almost inconsequentially, “It would be fun to be amongst shops.”
“Then grasp at your fun! And there are other things besides shops. Do you ever go to the theatre?”
“Hardly ever.”
“Ever go out to supper and on to a dance?”
She shook her head.
“You do dance?”
“I’m afraid I’d be very rusty on a dance floor.”
Martin smiled at her.
“We’d soon put that right. And then there are Charles’s concerts—he’s giving a series of them, you know, at the Arcadian Hall. They had to be postponed, but he’s fit enough now to remember his commitments. You mustn’t miss those.”
“No,” Virginia agreed, “I wouldn’t like to miss those.”
“Then the answer is ‘yes’?”
She smiled up at him.
“I expect so.”
When they returned to the house Colin had looked in, and Iris was entertaining him in the dining-room, while Annette and Charles were still shut up together in the drawing-room. Charles’s music floated out through the open windows on to the stillness of the sweet summer air, and Iris was plainly listening entranced, while Colin merely looked bored. His expression registered a complete transformation, however, when Annette joined them for tea—although Charles did not follow her—and Virginia realised that she had never seen such an expression on his face before. The inference was that he was slightly stunned, and Annette certainly looked good enough to eat in lime green and white, with dizzily high-heeled white sandals on her exquisitely arched feet, and an enormous white pouch handbag swinging from her slender arm. To-day her hair was loose on her shoulders, and it was palest wedding-ring gold.
When Colin recovered slightly from his stunned condition he displayed a desire to wait on Annette, and Virginia felt secretly amused as she contrasted his devoted manner with his normal air of casual, kindly condescension. Annette’s enchanting French accent seemed to complete his subjugation, and possibly because she took a passing fancy to his red hair and intense masculinity Annette chattered away to him with barely a pause until the time arrived when he had to tear himself away. But Virginia felt certain that on his round of his evening patients Annette travelled with him, and she felt rather uneasily certain that he would not forget her in a hurry.
But the uneasiness was not for herself, only Colin.
She carried Charles a cup of tea into the drawing room, but he scarcely seemed to appreciate the attention, and he made no attempt to persuade her to stay, as Annette had stayed with him during the afternoon. But, so far as she had been able to observe, the effect Annette had on him was not particularly devastating—unless it was that at the moment he was wrapped up in music. When music, and the desire to create music, claimed him, he plainly had little use for any sort of human company.
When the visitors had departed, the house seemed strangely quiet, and it was particularly quiet after dinner, because Iris had promised to spend the evening at a friend’s house, and she went off on her bicycle. Midge retired upstairs to bed with a book he was hungrily devouring at the moment—Midge was a great reader when other preoccupations failed—and Virginia made coffee for herself and Charles in the kitchen.
This was the night when Mrs. Banks went to the cinema in Little Mallow, and the kitchen always felt deserted when she had taken her departure. Virginia, although accustomed to spending many hours alone when the members of her family were scattered far and wide, was glad to carry the coffee cups back to the drawing-room, and to feel that there was a man in the house. There was something strangely consoling about a man’s presence, she thought, and sighed as she remembered her father going his rounds of the place, and winding up the grandfather-clock as a final duty before going upstairs to bed. Her father had never forgotten the grandfather-clock, and now it was she who had to wind it, and secure the bolts on the stout front door when everyone—including Bartholomew, who slept on the foot of Midge’s bed—had retired for the night.
It would be difficult to imagine Charles performing ritual tasks like winding the clock, and waiting at the back door for Bartholomew to make his often unwilling appearance. When Charles took over the Meadow House—and she supposed she would have to let him have it—his manservant would see to things like that. It would be next door to impossible to imagine Charles involved in family disputes, dealing with crises as they arose, distributing advice, and laying his commands on those around him, in the same manner as her father, or any other head of a household; but it was pleasant to see him lying back in a comfortable chair, looking relaxed even if he also looked very thoughtful, and waiting for the moment when she set his coffee cup down at his elbow.
He hardly noticed the coffee-cup, but he did seem to be watching her hands as they placed cigarettes near to him, and matches in case he had left his beautiful gold lighter up
stairs in his bedroom. She had often observed that lighter, and it was so very ornate that she wondered whether it was a present from Annette.
“Do you know, Virginia,” he said suddenly, languidly, “if you ever possess a husband you’ll ruin him completely.”
“Will I?” Virginia sank down on a large round pouffe and felt faintly breathless as she carried her coffee-cup to her lips. “But I’ll probably never possess one.”
“You’ll be wise if you avoid the complication of sharing your life with someone else. I don’t think it ever works out—unless, of course, you’re the type who likes to share things!”
Which, she thought, she was. She loved sharing things. It would be good to share every waking and sleeping moment of one’s life with someone who revelled in the sharing!
The room was filling gradually with a kind of soft twilight, a benediction left by the afterglow. The french windows were standing wide, and they could see a young crescent moon lifting itself into the sky, and a few stars twinkling in a serene haze. There was a pottery vase filled with Madonna lilies on a writing-table near the window, and the scent of them was mingling heavily with the sweet hot scents that were drifting in from the garden—tobacco plant, and night-scented stock, and dew-laden grass. Virginia stretched forth a hand to switch on a reading-lamp, but Charles stopped her.
“Don’t!” he said. “Don’t spoil things!”
He lay with his head buried in his cushions, his eyes filled with dreams as they gazed out into the garden. Virginia thought, hollowly, that she might just as well have not been in the room. He had no need to share the beauty of this hour with her, or anyone.
And then she remembered Iris crouching at his feet on the night that she had returned from London. On that night he had been occupying the very same chair that he was occupying now, and Iris had been crouching on the rug in the middle of which Virginia’s pouffe was placed now that he and she were alone together. Iris, without any inhibitions of any sort of kind, had probably crept gradually nearer to him on the rug, and he must have been aware that her eyes were gazing up at him adoringly.
Virginia, with all sorts of wild thoughts flocking through her mind—released like a flight of birds from a nest and disturbing the tranquillity she treasured—wondered what would happen if she shifted her own position ever so slightly. Whether, perhaps, he would become aware of her—and becoming aware of her recognise that in her eyes, too, as they stole with a kind of shivering delight upwards from the elegant perfection of his well-shod feet resting on the rug to the dark, disturbing attractiveness of his face, there was a kind of adoration. Something that gave away her yearning to be noticed.
And then, because her thoughts shocked, alarmed, and all but caused her panic, she set down her coffee-cup hastily and stood up. She made, with a murmured excuse, for the open window.
“Where are you going, Virginia?” he demanded, at once.
“Outside—for a breath of air,” she answered, and hoped that her voice sounded normal.
“Oh, no, you’re not!” His hand moved out swiftly and caught her. His voice sounded as if there was a faint laugh in it—nothing in the least dreamy—and he held her so strongly that she couldn’t possibly escape. “You’re not, you know, Virginia!”
She made a desperate movement to free herself, struggling so violently for a few seconds to snatch away her arm that it brought him up out of his chair, and he stood looking down at her through the dusky grey light with gentle amusement in his eyes. Then he caught her almost violently into his arms, and she felt the hardness of his body as she was crushed against him.
“Let me go!” she demanded, her voice choked with emotion. “I’m not Iris!”
“No, you’re ten times sweeter than Iris! You’re many, many times sweeter than Iris!” He was crooning over her, rubbing his cheek against her chair, his mouth groping for her mouth. “You’re Virginia of the shy grey eyes, the soft pink-petal lips, the adorably gentle ways!”
His mouth found hers at last, and she collapsed against him suddenly, unable to do anything but surrender completely, every thought of resistance fled. They swayed together in a kind of ecstasy—an ecstasy that was new and timeless and almost terrifying to Virginia, whose mind it dulled, and whose strength it sapped until her whole body was trembling like an aspen, and when Charles finally lifted his head she found that she was actually clinging to him. In a dazed way she went on clinging.
“I—” she tried to say.
But he whispered to her:
“Don’t talk! There’s nothing to talk about! Kiss me.”
She wasn’t quite sure how they got there, but she knew that she was lying in his arms in his big chair, and that although he had enjoined her to silence he went on whispering to her in a caressing way, and that his lips discovered every available inch of her face, as well as her slender white column of a throat, at the base of which a pulse was beating away wildly, with hammer strokes. And every time his mouth closed over hers the world was blotted out, and nothing mattered, because this was something she had been hungering for for days—for days?—ever since Charles had recovered consciousness in the Meadow House! She had been secretly craving for this moment, and terrified that he would guess!
It didn’t matter just then that she was just another Iris—just another Annette! ... But without the bewitching loveliness and the talent of Annette, and the power, apparently, to hold him! ... For Annette’s look always suggested that she was supremely sure of him, although he had given away her roses! It didn’t even matter that she was just one of a series of women who fell for him, betrayed the fact almost immediately that they had fallen for him, and of whom he quickly grew tired. Women, as his mother had said, who embarrassed him, and complicated his existence! ...
Only later on she would despise herself so much that life would be almost insupportable! When these magic moments were over! ...
She had no idea how much time passed, but vaguely by degrees, she began to realise that they were in darkness, and that to anyone returning to the house—such as Iris—it would seem odd to find that the room was without lights. That the whole house was without lights! ...
She could picture Iris’s look when she came upon them together—very much like her own look when she had returned from her day in London! Only Iris was young and vulnerable, and she would be desperately hurt—the sort of hurt that might not heal easily! Virginia began to find it difficult to shut her ears to the voice that had never stopped whispering inside her, although she had declined to heed it, that the moment must arrive when she would have to summon up all her resolution and put an end to this fantastic situation which could harm other people—which could only end by doing herself immeasurable harm!
She began to struggle slightly, but Charles held her strongly. He murmured reproachfully when she struggled harder, and more determinedly, and then when she heard the sound of footsteps outside on the flagged path she made a superhuman effort and tore herself free. She saw a man’s tall, dark figure appear in the opening of the french window, and hover there uncertainly; and then as she darted across the room to the electric-light switch and flooded the room with light she made the discovery that it was Colin who was looking in at them, blinking his eyes rather stupidly.
“Couldn’t make out why there were no lights!” he muttered. “You don’t usually go to bed so early...” And then he saw that Virginia’s hair was wildly ruffled, her face a picture of guilt, and looking towards Charles—-managing even in that moment to look faintly amused in his chair—full realisation of what he had interrupted struck him with almost staggering force. He said bleakly, “I seem to be slightly de trop!” and turned and walked back down the path.
Virginia called after him:
“Colin!”
But he did not come back.
Virginia looked towards Charles and demanded agitatedly:
“Oh, what will he think? Why did he have to appear just then!”
Charles shrugged his shoulders slightly.
He was looking rather pale, but his eyes gleamed up at Virginia between his thick eyelashes.
“Does it matter what he thinks?” he asked languidly. “Come back here, my sweet!”
“No, no, no!” she returned, and seizing the opportunity fled away out of the room.
CHAPTER NINE
The flat contained everything that justified the description luxury-flat, and Virginia and Iris, making their first detailed inspection of the place immediately after taking possession of it, were glad, when the inspection was over and they returned to the lounge, that Midge had not accompanied them after all.
Midge, when the time drew near to turn his back—even if only temporarily—on the Meadow House, had begun to look not merely wistful, but utterly cast down. The thought of leaving behind two Belgian hares, one half-blind tortoise, a bowl of gold-fish, a pair of white mice and Bartholomew was almost more than he could endure, and London had few charms that could offset the anxiety such base desertion would almost certainly have filled him with. So when a school friend pressed him to stay with him, together with his collection of pets—with the exception, that is, of Bartholomew, whom Harwell had promised to look after—he begged Virginia to look at things from his point of view. And Virginia had wisely decided to part with him, at any rate for a few weeks.
A Nightingale in the Sycamore Page 8
