by Neels, Betty
‘I’ve just made the tea,’ she remarked simply. ‘I hope you slept.’ He looked as though he had—the lines had almost gone; he had shaved and he bore the well-scrubbed alert look of a well-rested man ready for anything. Well, so was she, she told herself.
He sat down opposite her and she poured his tea and handed it to him, and he in turn put the cup and saucer down again, staring at her in a silence so profound that she felt sure that he could hear her heart pounding. To forestall this possibility she made haste to ask him if he had slept well, quite forgetting that she had already done that, and when he replied that yes, he had, she added the interesting information that the beds in the cottage were very comfortable. This remark called forth no response, so Sarah took a sip of her cold tea, and picked up her embroidery frame and began unhurriedly to stitch, willing her hands to be steady, her lovely face bent to the glow of the little lamp; waiting patiently for him to tell l her whatever it was that had necessitated his travelling almost six hundred miles in mid-winter. That he would tell her as kindly as possible she had no doubt. They had been—and still were—good friends. She thanked heaven silently that she had never allowed him to see that she loved him. All the same, when he spoke, she pricked her finger.
‘It took me a week to find you, Sarah/ he said at last. ‘You see, this was the last place I thought of. You said—do you remember?—that only the direst circumstance would force you to drive up here alone. I didn’t remember that at once. I wasted precious days looking for you at your mother’s and the hospital and Rose Road. I even went to see Mr Ives...and a dozen other people. You have so many friends. I tried Kate and Dick Coles and the bank, even old Simms...’
Sarah sucked her pricked finger. She said quietly, ‘I’m sorry, you see, I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t think you’d want to know.’
He said on a sigh, ‘Sarah, my dearest Sarahl I’ve been half out of my mind.’ He stopped. ‘I love you,’ he said suddenly and fiercely. ‘I fell in love with you years ago...you were staffing on Men’s Medical. It wasn’t too difficult persuading Matron that you were just the type I wanted in OPD.’
She dropped her embroidery at that, and stared at him, open-mouthed.
‘Oh, yes,’ he went on, still fiercely. ‘Only to discover that you and young Steven... I waited three years. And then I married you, knowing that I would still have to wait while you recovered from Steven; knowing that you weren’t ready for my love. That’s why I allowed you to go on believing in that hoary legend about Janet and me.’
Womanlike, she fastened on that. ‘But you loved her’
He smiled at her, with such tenderness and understanding that she caught her breath. He said quietly, ‘Perhaps, for a year—two years.’ And she nodded, remembering how she had felt about Steven. Her heart was thudding violently now; she picked up her embroidery again and began stitching as though her very life depended upon it, pushing the needle in and out of all the wrong holes with a complete disregard for the design. Hugo got up and took the maltreated canvas from her shaking hand, plucked her out of her chair and pulled her close so that her voice was muffled against his shoulder.
‘Hugo!’ she wailed. ‘I’ve loved you for—months and months—long before I knew about it!’
Apparently this muddled remark made sense to Hugo, for he put a finger under her chin and stared down at her and kissed with slow gentleness and then, while she was catching her breath, kissed her again, not gently at all. When at length he loosed her a little she put her hands against his chest so that she could look up into his face.
‘Janet—’ she uttered. ‘Why did you bring her home after you had been so—so nice when you telephoned? And why did you go away and leave me?’
‘I thought that if I went away you might miss me—and you did, my darling, did you not? And as for Janet—my sweet Sarah, you gave me no chance to explain.’
‘You didn’t come back until after three o’clock,’ she interposed pettishly.
He kissed her again before he answered. ‘I parked the car and sat wondering how I could make you love me. You see, 1 had come home thinking... and you were quite waspish with me, dear love, and I began to think that you would never care for me.’
Sarah said in a rush of words that ended in a sob, ‘Kate said you went to St Kit’s to see Janet and you telephoned her, and you were in Fortnum’s...’ She was kissed into silence.
‘Dear Sarah,’ said Hugo. ‘Listen. If you had shown me just once that I was more than just a good friend, I would have told you everything, but all you did was to fling Janet at my head. I would have told you that she’s married and unhappy and had left her husband. That’s why we were at Fortnum’s—I persuaded her to meet him.’
‘The man on the stairs who knocked me over,’ observed Sarah, well pleased that the jigsaw of their conversation was making sense at last. Hugo lifted an enquiring eyebrow but forbore from questioning her; instead he said firmly, ‘And now you will talk no more nonsense, dear heart, nor will you leave me again.’
He drew her close, but just for a minute she held back.
‘Hugo, dear Hugo, there’s something I must tell you.’ She lifted a woebegone face. ‘I—I found a ring in your pocket and I lied to you about it and I never will again; and there was a letter and I—’ She gulped. ‘I read it—not all of it, just the first line or two, and I thought it was for Janet.’
She sniffed to hold back the tears, because if she cried it would look as though she was trying to get his sympathy.
Hugo crushed her so tightly to him that her ribs ached. ‘You addlepated woman’ Why didn’t you read the whole letter while you were about it, then you would have known that it was for you. I wrote it in America and then decided that I would give you the ring myself. Of course, I didn’t know that Janet was going to be there, or that you would ask her to stay to dinner.’
Sarah wriggled in his embrace. ‘I told you I should be silly,’ she murmured, and reached up and kissed him, to be kissed, most satisfactorily, breathless.
Outside the cottage the snow fell, unhurried and unheeded, and in the little kitchen, the stew, forgotten, bubbled fragrantly on.
