My Sister Celia

by Mary Burchell

  “I see,” he said, without enthusiasm or protest.

  “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “No, of course not. Shall I wait out here for you both?”

  “No, no. Come in.” She led the way into the house, aware that some of the sparkle and gaiety had gone out of him. But that might, of course, be in deference to the shadow over the household.

  He exchanged a few courteously sympathetic words with Mr. Vanner, while Freda and Celia went to fetch scarves and coats. But Freda thought, when she returned, that he and Brian had failed to strike any harmonious note between them.

  There were very quick good-byes then, since nothing was to be gained by prolonging them, and Laurence and the two girls went out to the car together. Celia had tears in her eyes, but she blinked them away as she said,

  “May I sit in front? I get a bit car-sick if I sit at the back. You don’t mind, do you, Freda?”

  “No,” Freda assured her. “I don’t mind at all.” But she minded very much indeed, she found. At no time had she visualized herself being relegated to the back seat while someone else—even Celia—sat in front and enjoyed Laurence’s exhilarating company.

  She was surprised to realize that this was how she described him to herself. Exhilarating—that was what he was. Even when he annoyed her or teased her he never bored her. He stimulated her and made her feel that she wanted to see more of him. It was tantalising now to see no more than the back of his head and his broad shoulders—or an occasional glimpse of his profile when he turned to smile at Celia or make some remark to her.

  Celia, for her part, soon began to cheer up and to enjoy herself. It simply was not in her to be low-spirited for any length of time. And, long before they had left London behind, her laughter—and Laurence’s too—floated back to Freda, as she sat behind in the back seat.

  Of course Celia turned several times to include Freda in the conversation. But, unless one leans forward and more or less breathes down the back of the driver’s neck, it is extraordinarily difficult to conduct a quick and lively conversation with two people sitting in front of one in a rapidly moving car.

  Freda found herself continually saying, “What was that?—I didn’t quite catch—Tell me afterwards. I think I missed the point.”

  It was not an enjoyable journey. Not, in the remotest degree, like the amusing and charming time when she had driven down with Laurence on her own. And Freda was unashamedly glad when they arrived in Crowmain, even though she had told herself several times that it was nice to see Celia’s good spirits restored.

  Once they arrived, things improved. Celia made an immediate hit with both Mr. Merry and Bill Token, and Freda was proud and happy to show her off. Laurence drove on to Crowmain Court, though somewhere on the way down, it seemed, he and Celia had arranged that the two girls should join him for lunch at the big house.

  “I usually lunch at The Peacock and Peahen,” Freda explained, a trifle put out when Celia informed her of the new arrangement.

  But Celia was evidently unaware that this remark was at all in the nature of a protest. She merely said, “Do you? Well, this will be much nicer, won’t it? Once we’ve seen the cottage—I can’t wait to see it!—we can walk up to the house. Laurence says it isn’t far.”

  If they had arrived at the Celia and Laurence stage so quickly, and were perfectly capable of arranging the day without consulting her, Freda supposed there was no more to say. But, wondering a little what had hit her, she walked rather soberly beside Celia to the cottage.

  Here, however, everything was as near perfection as it could be. The cottage had been put in apple-pie order, Freda’s choice of decorations proved even more enchantingly suitable than she had dared hope, and above all, Celia was beside herself with admiration and congratulation.

  “Freda, it’s heavenly! It’s the prettiest cottage I’ve ever seen!”

  “Well, it’s not exactly picturesque outside,” Freda said deprecatingly, in the manner of a mother admitting that her child’s hair was straight, in the confident hope and expectation that this would provoke the assertion that uncurled hair was the thing most to be desired in any child.

  Celia rose, handsomely and instantaneously, to the bait, and Freda herself could not have defended the cottage with more affectionate emphasis from any suggestion of lack of charm.

  As they went from room to room, Celia seemed to pick out the very features which had most delighted Freda herself. And when she finally asked, “Which is going to be your room, and which mine?” Freda was so overwhelmed with the pleasure of the occasion that she generously told Celia to make her own choice.

  This naturally necessitated a great deal of discussion and going to and fro from one small room to another. So that finally, when the great question was settled, Celia glanced at her watch and exclaimed, “Good heavens! Is that the time? We must hurry, or we shall be late for lunch.”

  Freda nobly refrained from saying that if they had been lunching at The Peacock and Peahen they could have suited themselves as to time. Besides— perhaps that was not correct.

  The two girls walked through the cottage garden, and up the grassy slope to Crowmain Court, Celia full of admiration for almost everything she saw.

  “It’s a lovely place. And, to my way of thinking, a very attractive owner,” she declared.

  “Well—” began Freda. But Celia magnanimously rushed in.

  “You don’t have to think the same way as I do, just because we’re sisters,” she assured Freda. “That would just be dull for both of us. I can quite see he might be aggravating if one didn’t like that lively type—”

  “I wouldn’t say I don’t—”

  “And anyway, of course,” went on Celia, absorbed in her own line of argument, “I don’t wonder you got on the wrong side of him if he wanted your cottage. I quite understand your being ready to fight him to death over that.”

  “It doesn’t seem I shall have to do anything of the kind,” Freda interjected hastily. “We’ve come to a perfectly amicable understanding about it and—”

  “You have?” Celia smiled at her sympathetically. “Well, that’s good. Though, I know just how you feel,” she added understanding. “These things somehow leave a nasty little taste in one’s mouth.” There was no nasty little taste in Freda’s mouth at all, so far as Laurence Clumber was concerned, and she was just about to say as much when Celia went on, with a half roguish, half reflective little smile, “Well, from my point of view, it’s quite all right if you still regard Laurence Clumber a trifle coolly.”

  “Wh-what do you mean by that, exactly?” Freda asked, and this time, for some reason or other, there was rather a queer taste in her mouth.

  “Just that I do like him,” replied Celia. “And it wouldn’t do at all if we both decided to like the same man rather a lot, would it?”

  For a moment Freda was so staggered that she hardly knew what to say. Even though Celia was no doubt speaking quite lightly, the words themselves opened up such unspeakably disquieting possibilities. Not, she assured herself hastily, that she wished in any way to be a dog in the manger. But—why did it have to be so difficult to make it clear that she did like Larry now?—that, in fact, it caused her the most acute and inexplicable unhappiness to suppose that he might like some one else better than herself.

  “Celia—” she began almost timidly. But at that moment they came in sight of the house, and as they did so their host, who had been standing at the open french windows, came out and walked down the lawn to meet them.

  “There’s Laurence!” exclaimed Celia, with a note of unmistakable pleasure in her voice. “I expect he’s grown tired of waiting for us.” And she waved her hand gaily to him.

  Freda would have liked to wave too. But something—a sort of shyness or self-consciousness—kept her from doing so. Celia seemed to be supplying all the warmth and enthusiasm necessary to the occasion. And besides, she was just half a step ahead of Freda at this moment and obviously taking over the small matter of
greeting Laurence and making their excuses.

  To say that she remained half a step ahead of Freda for the rest of that lunchtime would be unfair to Celia, who, Freda knew, even in her most unhappy resentful moments, had not the faintest intention of pushing her sister aside. But the fact was that Celia naturally took the centre of the scene. She had always done so. Indeed, she had a special, charming talent for doing so, and in the ordinary way Freda would have been the first to admire and applaud.

  On this occasion, however, neither admiration nor applause welled up in her. If she could have found a fault in her sister, she would have thought at this moment that Celia was just a trifle too gay and teasing and provocative where Laurence was concerned.

  Of course, neither of them ignored Freda. She was as free as anyone else to contribute her individual sparkle to the conversation. But somehow there was not much sparkle in her that morning. Indeed, her remarks must have been pretty dull, she supposed, for at one point Celia laughed affectionately and exclaimed,

  “Freda’s thinking so hard about her cottage that she isn’t really paying much attention to us.”

  “I am!” Freda protested. And she was faintly comforted when Laurence smiled at her and said, “I remembered to speak to Mead about doing the garden for you. After lunch I’ll take you out to discuss with him what you want done.”

  “Thank you,” said Freda, disproportionately grateful to hear that he had thought of her in her absence.

  And, after they had had coffee in the lovely long drawing-room, he was as good as his word. Leaving Celia to idle contentedly over her second cup, Laurence took Freda out into the garden and introduced her to Mead—a garrulous but obviously knowledgeable person, who appeared only too pleased to be consulted about the cottage garden.

  Freda had hoped that Laurence would stay beside her during the discussion, if only to help conceal her own ignorance upon the whole subject of gardening. But—either from a mistaken sense of delicacy or a genuine wish to get back to his other guest—he left Freda to settle things with Mead herself.

  It was not, she found, necessary for her to do much more than listen to Mead’s views and interject an occasional amateur opinion of her own. But so truly enthusiastic was he in his assertion that nothing could be prettier than a really pretty cottage garden—“Much more fun, if you understand me, miss, than a big place like this”—that Freda was soon lost in the pleasurable contemplation of how her garden would look when Mead had finished with it.

  Half an hour passed pleasantly before Freda made her way back to the house. And by now she saw the events of the morning in much more sensible proportion. Of course Laurence was charmed and amused by Celia. Who wouldn’t be? And who should be better pleased than Celia’s own sister? What was Laurence Clumber to her, anyway?

  And then Freda paused in the doorway to the drawing-room, frozen into rigidity by the sight of Laurence leaning over the back of Celia’s chair while she laughed up at him. Then, even as she watched, he leaned forward a little further and planted a light kiss on Celia’s smiling mouth. And, in that moment—with a rush of pain and fury which appalled her—Freda knew exactly what Laurence Clumber meant to her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  EVEN in that moment of painful self-discovery, it was not Celia that Freda blamed. It was Laurence. And, perhaps even more, herself.

  How could she have been so blind and stupid—so prejudiced and obstinate—as not to realize what had been happening to her? She should have made it crystal clear to Celia that she was herself interested—oh, much more than interested—in the owner of Crowmain Court.

  Celia was not the kind of girl to poach on someone else’s preserves, of that Freda felt certain. But when she had been assured—with emphasis and repetition—that Freda was indifferent to Laurence Clumber, why should she resist a pleasant flirtation with him?

  Laurence, of course, need not have taken his lighthearted attentions so far. Freda could have slapped his smiling face, with the greatest of pleasure. But then, most illogically, she would have wanted him to kiss her. A state of affairs which she could not possibly explain, even to herself.

  As it was—and before she could, even in some small degree, clear the confusion in her own emotions, Celia glanced across the room, saw her in the doorway and exclaimed,

  “Hello, Freda! I began to think you must be planning the whole estate.”

  She got up from her chair and Freda came forward immediately into the room, so that it must, she thought, have been difficult to tell if she had really paused and seen what had happened, or had simply arrived on the scene a split second after that laughing kiss had been exchanged.

  “Mead was full of ideas,” she heard herself say, in a perfectly composed tone of voice. “He does talk rather a lot, but he certainly makes interesting suggestions.”

  “He’s a good gardener too. It’s not all talk,” Laurence remarked. And, as far as Freda could tell, he was not even mildly put out by her appearance. So either he was sure she had not seen him kiss Celia, or else—infuriating thought—he didn’t care if she had.

  Again she would have liked to hit him. But also to be able to shed a few angry tears and then be comforted and assured that everything was all right and that, in some delightful and undefined way, he liked her better than he had ever liked anyone else.

  “Well,” said Celia, smoothing her dark hair with a careless hand, “I suppose we should go down to the cottage again, Freda. We ought to start making lists of the things we shall need in each room, ready for when we go shopping.”

  “I’ve made some lists already,” Freda replied, but in so subdued a tone that she sounded almost sulky.

  “Have you really?” Celia was cheerfully unaware of any change in her sister’s demeanour. “Then we’ll check them over together and see if there’s anything I can think of to add.”

  Her assumption that the furnishing of the cottage was in the nature of a joint enterprise would once have given Freda the most acute pleasure. Now, for the very first time, she found she almost resented it— and she hated herself for the fact.

  Of course she wanted Celia to make all the suggestions she liked. Of course her passionate interest was the very thing Freda had looked forward to enjoying. What had happened to make her feel in some way afraid?—as though Celia’s interest could almost threaten her own pleasures of ownership.

  “I’m being thoroughly grasping and ungenerous,” she told herself. And, in an access of remorse, she exclaimed,

  “Of course. It’s much more fun to have two people’s ideas to compare.”

  “Wouldn’t it be even more fun to have three people’s ideas?” queried Laurence.

  But Celia said, “No, certainly not. We’d never come to any decisions then. Besides, this is a very feminine form of enjoyment. Haven’t you come down here to do any work of your own? I should have thought the estate needed your attention, at least at weekends.”

  “I have an excellent bailiff,” Laurence retorted. “But, since you put is so pointedly, I do have to see him about several matters. Though I could do that equally well to-morrow.”

  “And use up the poor man’s Sunday leisure? Oh, no—you go and see him now,” Celia instructed, “and Freda and I will go and see about the furnishing of the cottage. Then, if you like to invite us back to tea, we’ll be very pleased to return sometime between four and five. Won’t we, Freda?”

  “Ye—es,” said Freda, wondering miserably why she could find nothing to add to that—or even the spirit to say, “No, we’ll go to the village for tea.” It was all arranged in a matter of minutes, and presently she and Celia were on their way back to the cottage, Celia at least full of good spirits and chatter.

  “Tell me about Mead’s suggestions for the garden,” she begged. And so Freda made a great effort and recalled the plans which she and Laurence’s gardener had worked out. She described these as well as she could to Celia and, in so doing, began to feel a little less bewildered and harassed.

  “It
all sounds lovely,” Celia declared. “I think it was rather nice of Laurence to let you have Mead for the work, don’t you?”

  “I shall make a business arrangement of it, of course,” Freda said almost coldly. “I wouldn’t want to be beholden to him for anything.”

  Celia looked taken aback. But nothing like so taken aback as Freda felt.

  “Now, what on earth made me say a thing like that?” she thought unhappily. That isn’t at all how I feel about him.

  For a moment there was a subdued sort of silence. Then Celia said, in an almost placatory tone, “Were you cross that I suggested going back there for tea? I’m afraid I didn’t think—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Freda asserted hastily. “I’ve no doubt there’s somewhere quite nice in the village where we could have gone. But, since we’ve already arranged to go back to Crowmain Court, we’ll go, naturally.”

  “I just didn’t think,” Celia repeated apologetically. “I must say I thoroughly enjoy Laurence’s company, and I knew he wanted me—wanted us—to stay longer. It seemed quite a good suggestion when I made it. But I’m afraid I’m too impulsive about these things and don’t look further than what I myself would like. I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter a bit,” Freda repeated, divided between a desire to kick herself for her own ungraciousness and a longing to tell Celia the exact truth—which was that she was only too eager to return to Crowmain for tea, but that when they got there she wanted Laurence to make a careless, teasing fuss of her.

  Back at the cottage they spent an enjoyable hour or so on furnishing plans, during which, if she did not quite forget the scene she had witnessed, Freda managed to thrust the recollection of Laurence kissing Celia into the background of her mind.

  Perhaps Celia vaguely sensed that there was a faint cloud somewhere on the brightness of Freda’s devotion and admiration. At any rate, during their amicable discussions, she was utterly charming and pleasing—deferring to her sister in a way that made Freda wonder how she could ever have been so unreasonable and unkind as to suppose that Celia took a little too much upon herself.