Iris whisked her into a shoe shop to buy cobwebby silver-gilt sandals, and then insisted on her having what she called a “brightening rinse” at the hairdressing-establishment close to their flat where Virginia had already submitted to be shorn in accordance with the prevailing fashion.
Iris was so selfless about all these preparations for her sister’s important evening that Virginia was quite touched, and asked her what she would do with herself during the hours that she had to be left alone at the flat. Iris looked a trifle confused, and then admitted that Meg Andrews—the Bayswater friend—had a brother home on leave from the Near East, and that he was a “bit of a pet!” Iris had already accepted an invitation to go to the cinema with him that night, and she had been hoping that Virginia would raise no objections.
Virginia decided that she couldn’t very well raise them in face of the fact that Iris had already accepted the invitation, but she felt a little anxious in case Iris was preparing to pour out more adoration over a man who might not be quite the same type as Charles Wickham—a man, moreover, whom she herself had never met!
But as Iris was already nineteen she could not be old-fashioned enough to demand to see him first, even if that had been possible.
By the time they were both ready for their individual evenings excitement prevailed in the flat. Iris dressed herself in her black grosgrain suit and departed, looking radiant, in a taxi for Bayswater, after promising her sister that she would not be late. Virginia, able to take full advantage of the luxurious bathroom, and linger in the bath—once she had cleared up the debris Iris had left behind—dressed herself more slowly, but was conscious that her fingers were shaking a little with' unusual excitement when she finally added a dab of perfume to the lobes of her ears. Her mirror told her that she had never looked more attractive.
If only, she said to herself—if only it was Charles who was taking her out for the evening!
And then felt ashamed of herself because Martin was so nice, and she liked him tremendously, and he had already taken her out to lunch with him. She made up her mind very firmly that she would forget Charles for this evening—she would endeavour to forget that he even existed!
When Martin called for her she could tell at once that there was nothing wrong with her appearance. He looked extremely attractive in a white tie and tails, and that, she realised, indicated that he was not taking her to any hole and corner place for dinner. But as Martin probably never visited hole and corner places this was nothing unusual, and nothing that she could take specially to herself as a kind of compliment.
But she wondered, when she found that there were dark red roses on their table, whether he had ordered them specially, and she realised that he had plainly given careful instructions about the champagne that awaited them.
"Virginia had only tasted champagne once before in her life, and that was at a school friend’s wedding, and she wondered whether it might go a little to her head; but if it did the sensation was so pleasant that she ceased to worry about it. Martin apologised for not taking her somewhere where she could dance, but he had wanted the evening to be one when they could talk together quietly, and get, as he said with his charming smile, to know one another, and that suited Virginia admirably. She was by no' means anxious to test her dancing abilities with such a finished performer as she felt sure he would turn out to be himself, and she found talking to him a pleasure.
He wanted to know all about her life, and the things she had done, and when she confessed that she had done very little his expression grew gentle and almost caressing.
“You will do one day,” he assured her. “The world is wide, and you’ll see a lot of it, Virginia.” He touched her hand very gently, where it rested on the white cloth. “Do you remember Captain Valentine Brown, in Barrie’s Quality Street? He likened the heroine to a garden, and he wanted to wrap her up in cotton wool and treasure her. You remind me of your own garden down there beside the river, as I saw it that day when I came to visit you and Charles, and if I don’t want to wrap you up in cotton wool, I would like to show you many things, and provide you with many fresh experiences.”
“Would you?” She looked at him with a shy glow of pleasure overspreading her face. “I can’t think why.”
“Perhaps that’s the reason,” he responded, with a faintly whimsical smile.
She looked down at the wine in her glass, and her fingers toyed with the stem of the glass.
“I’m afraid I’m extremely ordinary,” she said, not in the least as if she really minded, or had ever hoped to be recognised as anything different. “Iris is the beauty in our family, and I’m hoping one day she’ll do great things as an artist. She really has talent.”
“Would you like me to look at some of her stuff and advise on it? Or I could get someone who really could advise on it to give you an opinion.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, looking up at him gratefully. “That would be kind.”
“Not at all,” he replied. “I’m afraid you’re rather burdened with that young sister and brother of yours.”
“Midge isn’t my brother,” she explained. “He’s my nephew—my only brother’s child. My brother was killed in Korea.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“So, you see, Midge is rather a—special charge!”
“Of course,” Martin agreed, and his eyes softened still more as he looked at her.
Presently he asked, in a non-committal way:
“Did you find Charles an easy patient?”
Virginia’s eyes smiled a little.
“He was rather an arrogant patient. Colin—our local doctor—wanted to put him into a nursing-home.”
“I’m not surprised,” he replied.
She looked at him quickly, and then away.
“But, .on the whole, he was very good. Nurse Howard coped with him admirably.”
“But I think, with your local doctor, that he should have been removed to a nursing-home. It wasn’t fair to you, Virginia, to have the responsibility of him—to have him inflicted on you like that! And now he’s got your house, and you’ve been turfed out of it during the best months of the year! Oh, I know,” as she looked at him in faint surprise, “that I asked you specially to let him have it, but that was for purely selfish reasons. There were two things I wanted—Charles to get on with the music for Summer Symphony, and you to come to London. But now I’m not so sure that I should have advised you to give way to him like that.”
“Why?” she asked, sounding puzzled.
Martin shrugged slightly,
“Oh, I don’t know... At least—” And then he smiled rather oddly and looked at her, and the picture she made in her midnight-blue dress, with one of the dark-red roses he had removed from the vase and persuaded her to fasten into the front of the gown looking very dark and velvety, and a little like heart’s blood, against the whiteness of her skin. “Let’s stop talking about Charles, shall we? Charles, when he creeps into a conversation, is apt to monopolise it, as he so often monopolises attention, and cuts everyone else out of a picture! Unless, of course, you like talking about Charles?”'
He was looking at her very shrewdly, and she knew that the look was deliberate. She felt her cheeks grow warm under it, and if she had answered him truthfully she would have said, “I could talk about Charles all night, and not grow tired! I have listened to his mother talking about him, and it was sheer bliss, and for that reason alone I liked Lady Wickham! I know that if ever I see her again she will talk about Charles, and I’m hungry to hear all I can about him! Charles!...”
The colour began to palpitate in her smooth cheeks, and she felt that it was burning under her hair, and her eyes, she was sure, were completely revealing, but she couldn’t help it. She looked down at the glass about which her fingers were entwined and carried it a little shakily to her lips.
Charles! ...
“Let’s talk about something quite different,” Martin said in rather a strange voice, as he continued to watch her.
“The Bahamas, for instance, where I’m proposing to go for the winter—partly on business, partly on pleasure...”
Virginia was partly diverted.
“The Bahamas?” she echoed. “Oh, how wonderful!...”
But it was one thing to dismiss Charles from their thoughts while they were having dinner, and quite another to keep Charles himself out of the picture altogether. When they returned to Charles’s flat, within a few minutes of midnight, Martin once again accepted an invitation to step inside with her for a few minutes, and in addition to stepping inside he went ahead, preparing to switch on the lights.
The hall was in darkness until his hand touched the switch, but the lounge, when he opened the door, was glowing softly with honey-gold light And in his own particular chair Charles, in a dinner-jacket, was lying very much at his ease; he even looked a little sleepy, as if he had been dozing recently.
CHAPTER TEN
Virginia looked completely taken aback. Martin frowned, and his eyes gleamed with displeasure.
“I understood,” he said, “that you bad passed over the tenancy of this flat temporarily to Miss Summers? I didn’t understand that the arrangement included your retaining a key!”
Charles looked up at him lazily, and then stood up with one of his languid, graceful movements. It was a curious, feline movement, and to Virginia, who had never seen him in evening clothes before, he looked devastatingly handsome. She felt his eyes flickering over her, taking in every detail of her own appearance, but in what way that appearance affected him she was unable to tell, for his sherry-brown eyes gave away nothing, and he even smiled a little languidly, as if in faint surprise.
“Why shouldn’t I retain a key?” he asked. “It is, after all, my flat, and Virginia, for all I know to the contrary, still retains a key to the Meadow House. In any case, she’s welcome to walk in there whenever she chooses.”
“The situation here is rather different,” Martin replied. “Miss Summers and her sister are alone here.”
“At the moment, there doesn’t appear to be a sister.” There was just a touch of insolence—which might have been deliberate insolence—in Charles’s voice. “I’ve been sitting here for an hour or more—a couple of hours, I should think!—and I began to think that the place had been abandoned. But the explanation now is clear enough. You, Virginia, have been hitting the high spots under the expert tutelage of Martin here, and no doubt Iris has found someone to assist her to do the same thing. Only she’s keeping even later hours.”
“Oh, but she ought to be back by now!” Virginia was so concerned for her sister that she forgot everything else for the moment. “She was merely going to the cinema.”
“It must have been one that releases its patrons at an unusual hour,” Charles remarked dryly.
But Martin strove to reassure Virginia.
“If she’s with friends, she’s probably having supper with them. I shouldn’t worry. She’s not an infant.” Then he looked almost coldly at Charles. “Was there something you particularly wished to see Miss Summers about?”
Charles looked at Virginia under almost sleepy lids.
“I was calling Miss Summers Virginia before you even knew she existed, Martin,” he observed.
“Very likely,” Martin replied. “But I don’t suppose you bothered to ask whether she objected?”
“Did you object, Virginia?” The golden eyes gleamed—it could have been amusement, Virginia realised, that was peeping at her between the thick eyelashes—but the suggestion of intimacy in his smile brought a sudden, hot blush to her cheeks. “I can understand that you possibly objected when I called you Jinny, because that’s Midge’s pet name for you, isn’t it?”
Virginia was trying to think up something to say that would stop Martin looking so sternly disapproving, and Charles so insolently self-satisfied—like a cat who had already lapped up most of the cream, and had no objection to leaving what little there remained for someone else—when the telephone rang suddenly, and answering it she heard Iris’s voice speaking to her apologetically at the other end of the line.
It seemed that Iris had been persuaded to stay the night with her friends, and she hoped that Virginia didn’t mind very much. If Virginia did mind she would try and get hold of a taxi and come home straight away, but if only Virginia would understand that it was fun being asked to stay for the night...
Virginia, immensely relieved that her sister was apparently quite safe in the bosom of her old school-friend’s family, said at once that of course she didn’t mind, and when she returned to the lounge Martin smiled at her warmly.
“I told you she was all right, didn’t I?” he said.
But Charles said with rather an unpleasant note in his voice:
“Knowing Iris, as I think I do reasonably well, I have a certain sympathy with Virginia’s anxiety,” and then returned, although he had not been invited to do so, to his chair.
Virginia, avoiding his eyes, suggested:
“Shall I make some coffee? Would you both like some?”
“I’d love some,” Charles replied instantly.
Virginia looked across at him for an instant, and during that instant there was complete seriousness in his expression, and behind the seriousness—unless it was purely her imagination—a suggestion of reproachful hurt.
She turned away quickly to make the coffee, but Martin raised an objection.
“I don’t think it’s fair to expect Virginia to make coffee at this hour of the night—or, rather, morning!” he stated clearly. “What have you come up here for, Charles? I understood you were working hard.”
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” Charles returned, a little dryly. “I was inspired with a similar idea as the one which seized you, Martin—only, unfortunately, I was the one doomed to disappointment! I thought I’d persuade Virginia to have supper with me somewhere, but I left it a little late. I should have telephoned earlier.”
“Virginia would have had to refuse you,” Martin said, in his distant, disapproving manner. “She accepted my invitation to have dinner to-night yesterday afternoon.”
Charles smiled rather quizzically.
“Really? I’m a little too casual, aren’t I? I shouldn’t leave these things to chance.” For the first time he calmly inspected Virginia’s new evening-dress, took in the fact that she had a new hair-style, and that her appearance was in some way altogether different, but betrayed no evidence of admiration of any sort or kind. She even sensed something dispassionately disinterested in his manner, and that odd little smile still clung about his mouth. “I’ll push off now. I’ve booked a room at the Savoy, Martin, if you’d like to have a talk about how things are going? How about lunch, if you can spare the time?”
“That will suit me excellently,” Martin admitted, a little more amiably. “And, by the way, how are things going?”
“Oh, very well—very well indeed! Annette is in transports.”
“That’s highly satisfactory, since so much depends on Annette.”
“I agree,” Charles murmured smoothly. “So much depends on Annette!”
He picked up a light rain-coat from the back of a chair, and turned to Virginia.
“Thanks for being willing to make coffee for me, Virginia. Are you coming to my concert on the 22nd?”
“I—I’d love to,” Virginia admitted, thinking with a kind of anguish that if only he had telephoned! ...
She looked directly up at him, and she wasn’t sure how much open appeal there was in her eyes to make him understand.
“Then I’ll expect to find you amongst my audience. No, don’t drag yourself away too soon,” as Martin offered to give him a lift back to his hotel. “I left my car in the garage, but I’ll soon pick up a taxi. Good night, Virginia!”
When he had gone, accompanied by Martin—who ignored the veiled inference in the “don’t drag yourself away too soon”—and she was alone in the flat, Virginia had a feeling rush up over her like one who was suddenly despairin
g.
She realised perfectly that Charles’s whim to take her out to supper had been nothing more than a whim—he had quite expected to find her sitting quietly in the flat waiting for him—and the fact that he hadn’t found her there had provoked some rather childish resentment which had flamed at her, for just an instant, from his eyes. And his reference to Annette had been deliberate—deliberate because he wanted to drive home to her how important she was in his life! Whereas she, Virginia, was just a pleasing diversion for an idle moment.
But, just the same, Virginia felt she wanted to cry over a lost evening—lost magic! She felt defrauded, bitterly unhappy.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The night of the 22nd arrived at last. Virginia felt she had been waiting for it ever since Charles put in an unexpected appearance at his flat, and she had not been there to receive him.
In the interval she had seen nothing of him. He had not telephoned, and Martin had very little news of him. Annette, it appeared, was making The Wheatsheaf, in Little Mallow, her headquarters for the time being, and Virginia felt fairly certain that she, at least, was seeing a good deal of Charles.
Their musical interests, and their interest in the same show, would naturally unite them. But there were other interests—Virginia had long realised that. She had had no doubts of it when she saw Annette’s photograph so prominently displayed in the main sitting-room of the flat, and when she also discovered that Annette had a key to the place something inside her had curled up as if it had received a blow.
A Nightingale in the Sycamore Page 10
