by Sara Seale
“For heaven’s sake don’t make a habit of that until you’re more practised with boats or you’ll find yourself in the drink,” Piers rebuked her sharply, then turned to greet and then accompany a couple of men with the luggage up to the house, either forgetting or ignoring her.
Lou followed them, feeling a little crestfallen and slipping every so often on the rough stones which formed steps up to a small terrace. For a moment she experienced a pang of disappointment, for the house, built of the local stone and slate, was stark and unimposing and not very big. She had, she supposed, so convinced of the story-book unreality of the past three days, expected a castle with turrets, fife and battlements and even a drawbridge. Piers, turning, saw the look on her face as she stood staring in the lamplight which flooded out of the open door, and laughed aloud.
“My poor Cinderella, were you expecting a palace?” he said. “You’ll find my home very simple and unpretentious, I’m afraid. Come on in and get the feel of the house.”
He was over the threshold, holding the door for her, and as he saw her hesitate his smile became a little mocking.
“Are you superstitious, Lou? Well, I can oblige you over one of the many conventions I seem to have cheated you out of,” he said, and picking her up, carried her over the threshold.
She was pliant and incredibly light in his arms, but as he put her down he felt her sudden withdrawal.
“That wasn’t necessary,” she said, trying to match his own barely concealed impatience with traditional customs.
“But you expected it, didn’t you? You’ve expected a good many things that I’ve failed to appreciate, I’m afraid.”
“I’ve expected nothing,” she said sturdily, blinking back the tears which she had fought back too long and too valiantly. Such a little thing to make one want to weep, such an empty gesture of convention to please a bride who knew too well that she meant little or nothing to a man who was simply paying off old scores.
“Then you must mend your ways, Cinderella,” he said softly. “If you expect nothing you get nothing—only pumpkins and white mice. Come along and meet Tibby, for you’ll need her approval far more than you’ll need mine.”
II
Lou, her courage nearly drained, did not feel that she made much of a hit with Tibby. She came from the back regions, presumably the kitchen, to meet them, a thin, rather gaunt old woman, very upright and very observant. She had, it transpired, been Piers’ nurse, but had kept house for him on the island ever since he bought it. It seemed odd to Lou, trying to make the right responses, to think of Piers with a nanny, and she, who had never known one of her own, was disappointed in Tibby as she had been disappointed in the house. Nannies, she had vaguely supposed, were plump and comfortable and, when one retired, indulgent recipients of confidences, ready to spoil because it no longer mattered, but Tibby invited none of these imageries. She welcomed Piers with pleasure but reserve, and turned an appraising eye on his bride. Lou immediately felt she was found wanting. If Tibby had ever met Melissa, indeed, even if she had not, she was bound to make comparisons.
“I’d have thought you’d more sense, Mr. Piers,” was her first uncompromising comment. “Cradle-snatching’s the first sign of old age. What possessed you?”
“I don’t know, Tibby, unless I had a sudden moment of intuition,” Piers answered lazily.
“Intuition my foot! Temper more like—I’ve read the papers.”
“You should never believe all you read in the press, Tibby dear, and you must be nice to my little bride. She has much to learn about our life here.”
“She’ll learn nothing you’re not willing to teach yourself, but that, most like, will amuse you for a time.”
“You will have gathered that Tibby has a poor opinion of me as a prospective husband,” he said, cocking an eyebrow at Lou and she had the unhappy impression that they were both merely using her as the excuse for a familiar sparring match, and she wondered how Melissa would have dealt with this old woman who clearly had little respect or patience for tender feelings. But Melissa, of course, would not have cared. She would have made a few gracious overtures because it was a good thing to be charming to servants, then written Tibby off as a tiresome old bore and tried to persuade Piers to pension her off. Too tired to pay attention to their voices any longer, Lou let her eyes wander over her new home, or as much of it as she could see from where they stood. Get the feel of the house, Piers had said, and she began to realize that the disappointing facade had been misleading. The house had a depth one would not suspect from the front, or someone had built on and created a surprising illusion of space. Stone passages led off the wide hall, high and vaulted, with steps going up and steps going down to other rooms; a great stove, ugly but efficient, radiated a comforting warmth, and oil lamps cast distorted shadows on the whitewashed walls.
“Rather bare and monastic, are you thinking?” Piers said suddenly, making her jump, and she became aware that they were both watching her, Piers with a hint of amusement, Tibby with pursed lips and an expression that could be termed pawky. It could matter to neither of them, she rejected, what she thought of the house, so she said nothing.
“You’ll be wanting your room, maybe?” the old woman said with a belated sense of her duties, and without waiting for an answer led the way upstairs.
The room Lou found herself in was high and narrow with rush matting covering the floor and a bed that looked comfortable but unwelcoming with its utilitarian air of severity and plain, dark spread. A door leading to another room stood ajar, and through it Lou glimpsed firelight dickering on Persian rugs and the gleaming patina of polished wood, a room to which this bare, impersonal chamber was clearly an annexe.
“Would you like me to unpack for you?” Tibby said, and Lou caught hostility beneath an offer which was, she was sure, not intended to be taken seriously.
“No, thank you,” she replied politely, accepting with a sinking heart the fact that the old woman seemed to have taken a dislike to her, then she became aware that Piers had followed them up and was standing in the doorway with raised eyebrows.
“Why haven’t you had the bed moved?” he asked.
“Time enough in the morning,” Tibby replied. “You’ll be needing a good night’s sleep with that bad head and all.”
“Stubborn old bitch, aren’t you?” Piers observed with the unoffensive ease of long standing. “Well, take Mrs. Merrick’s cases into the other room, and bring mine in. here. Did you give the orders where she was to sleep?”
“I put you in your accustomed room, naturally, but if madam wishes to change—”
But it appeared to Lou that Piers, too, had caught the scarcely veiled mockery behind that subservient “madam”, for his mood changed with alarming swiftness from tolerance to anger.
“We’re not back in the nursery now, Tibby,” he said with all his old arrogance. “You will have to control your jealousy if you want to remain with us.”
“Jealous! Me?”
“Yes, you, and I won’t tolerate it. You’ve been the only woman here for too long, and you know it. You might have a more generous welcome for my wife than this.”
“The wife you should have married would never have lived here,” the old woman muttered bitterly. “Rune was quite safe from her sort. She’d know her right place in your life. Threw you over, Piers, didn’t she, like her mother served your father, and, you, for sheer spite, took the little cousin who most likely doesn’t know she’s born.”
“That’s enough!” Piers shouted, and at the same time Lou, distracted almost to tears, cried: “Oh, please stop, both of you. I don’t care where I sleep, if that’s what’s started all this. Miss Tibby, I’m sorry if you resent me, but please, please go away now.”
The old woman’s shadow was gaunt and for bidding on the wall as she moved towards the door and her cold eyes flicked over Lou without sign of apology.
“Very well,” was all she said, and she silently left the room.
“Don’t
try to soften Tibby by apologizing for yourself. She’ll only despise you,” Piers said, and at last Lou’s crumbling defences broke.
She stood with the tears pouring down her face and great tearing sobs choking the words she hurled at him. Wasn’t it enough, she cried, that she had married him to save his face and her cousin’s threatened disgrace? Hadn’t she deputized long enough for another woman, wearing her clothes, borrowing her identity, asking for little in exchange but kindness and consideration?
“It’s all your fault!” she finished. “The almighty Merrick arrogance that thinks money can buy anything ... the disregard for any feelings but your own. Melissa’s well out of it... sheer spite, that old woman said ... well, it isn’t very nice to be married for spite...”
He had listened without interruption, his eyes changing from surprise to gravity as they watched her face. Once or twice his mouth tightened as if with pain, and once or twice he smiled with faint indulgence.
“Well, now—” he said when she had finished, “—how you do surprise me, Cinderella. I wouldn’t have thought you had such venom in you.”
“Venom?”
“Well, perhaps that’s a little strong—such bottled-up resentment, shall we say? Do you really think I married you to spite Melissa?”
“I—I didn’t say that.”
“But who else could I spite, if that was my reason?”
She was silent, and he took her hands, feeling how cold they were, and led her into the other room. When he had gently thrust her into a chair by the fire he fetched brandy from an old wine cooler which also appeared to hold the usual bathroom assortment of bottles and first-aid appliances, and while she sipped her drink, changed over the suitcases from one room to the other, and removed the clean pyjamas already laid out on the turned-down bed which Lou saw was a twin to the one next door.
“Yes, the other one belongs in here,” he said, observing her look. “I only had it moved out because if you sleep alone a second empty bed is depressing, don’t you think? Shall I unpack for you?”
It was such an uncharacteristic domestic suggestion that she smiled through her tears, but shook her head. He was, she knew, giving her time to recover composure by making casual, mundane observations as he moved between the two rooms, and she was touched by a forbearance she had not learnt to expect from him.
“Tomorrow we’ll get properly organized,” he said, unlocking her cases for her. “Tibby must have misunderstood my instructions.” It was a kindly prevarication, she thought, but one neither of them believed. Tibby had made it her business to ensure that Lou’s second night of marriage should be as abortive as the first.
“Better?” Piers asked, taking the empty glass from her, and when she nodded, giving him rather a watery smile, came and sat on the arm of her chair.
“Lou—” he began a little tentatively, “—I feel I should disabuse you of certain misconceptions.”
“Yes?” The moment suddenly held promise, and she rubbed her cheek against his sleeve like a little ingratiating cat.
“I don’t want you to think that spite entered into my sudden change of plans. The spite was Tibby’s, and that, I’m afraid, is a problem you’ll have to sort out between you. Tibby would have taken more kindly to Melissa because she felt it was a settling of old scores. She was very attached to my father, and I suppose she had some muddled notion that the next generation could cancel out.”
“And hadn’t you that notion, Piers?” she asked, trying to reconcile all the puzzling facets of this affair into something she could understand.
“Yes, I suppose I had. Melissa is very like Blanche at the same age, you know, and—a small g boy’s first impressions of the perfect woman can be lasting.”
“Sublimation, or something?”
“I expect so. The trick-cyclist would have a name for it.”
“They would say it was unconscious transference of a mother complex,” Lou said, and giggled sleepily at the unlikely thought of Melissa providing maternal solace to any man she married.
“Very likely,” he said somewhat sharply, “but I was not, I assure you, thinking in those terms when I got engaged to your cousin. I wanted to settle down, found a family to leave something worthwhile behind me. The old ties being such as they were, and Blanche ready and eager to bargain, my course seemed simple.”
“It’s not simple to me,” Lou said. “Why are you explaining all this? You loved Melissa, surely?”
He moved a little impatiently.
“Because, I suppose, my motives are still the same. I want to settle down, and you, my little Cinderella, are nobly filling the gap. Melissa is damned attractive and I admit to being more than narked at being let down at the last minute, but I thought I had made it clear that you were not chosen at random—added to which, you didn’t have to agree to marry me in such a hurry, did you?”
“No,” she murmured, remembering how she had thought when she had first heard him speak that his was a voice she could fall in love with. He had, she thought, evaded her question quite neatly.
“I had imagined—or was I just being conceited when I finally persuaded you—that you had a small fondness for me that had nothing to do with the Merrick wealth or reputation, or am I wrong?”
“No, you’re not wrong, dear Piers,” she said, adding humbly. “I’m—I’m sorry for the terrible things I must have said to you. I’m sorry for making a scene.”
She had thought she owed him that much, that by apologizing for feminine weakness she would assure him that such an annoyance would not occur again, but the warmth which possibly she had only imagined seemed suddenly withdrawn.
“Never apologize,” he said rather brusquely, “to me or to Tibby or to anyone who shakes your self-confidence. The world takes one at face value, you see, and it doesn’t do to be humble.”
She felt reproved and puzzled at the same time. In her childhood humility had been considered a virtue and a conceit of one’s own opinions a failing not to be encouraged. How, she wondered, did one assess one’s own potentialities, and still remain oneself?
“You don’t understand humility, do you?” she said tentatively, and he frowned.
“I don’t like doormats,” he replied with more curtness than he probably intended, and was surprised by the sudden glint in her eye.
“That,” she remarked, “was rather uncalled for, and you’ve said it before. I’m no doormat for any man.”
He had already got to his feet as if regretting his carelessly offered comfort, and he looked down at her with a hint of apology, observing the ruffled fringe which lent such an immature air to her face, but observing too the natural dignity which was often to be found in the very young.
“Yes, it was uncalled for,” he said gently. “I apologize.”
“You’ve just told me one should never apologize,” she countered, aware now only of a desire for sleep, and he flicked back the teasing fringe with an exploratory finger.
“So I did. You’re about all in, aren’t you? I suggest you go straight to bed and leave unpacking till the morning.”
“But it must be nearly dinner time. Miss Tibby will expect—”
“I’ll have a tray sent up, and for heaven’s sake, don’t address the old faggot as Miss Tibby—she’ll only despise you the more,” he said, but his impatience could hardly touch her now, for her eyelids were already heavy with exhaustion.
“Yes, of course...” she murmured, and barely heard the door close softly behind him.
She roused herself sufficiently to pick at the food which Tibby brought her later, but the old woman’s regard was so contemptuous and at the same time so triumphant at this show of weakness in the bride that Lou made no effort to placate her.
When Piers came up after a solitary dinner made no easier by Tibby’s thinly veiled satisfaction as she waited on him, he found the door between the two rooms had been left invitingly open, and the oil-lamp still burning, but Lou herself was asleep. She slept with the untroubled abandonment of
a child, one arm flung above her head, and he stood there watching her for several minutes before he blew out the lamp and went quietly to his dressing room.
III
To Lou those first days at Rune were a curious mixture of conflicting emotions. Even on the very first day she had been left alone. Piers had business on the mainland and would be back late, or possibly not until tomorrow, Tibby had told her with barely concealed malice. Lou, refreshed after a good night’s sleep, and more prepared to meet the old woman’s hostility, refused to allow dismay or disappointment to give her satisfaction. It was only polite, she thought that first morning, to propitiate and enlist Tibby’s aid in finding her way about her new home, but the small sop was not appreciated. “
“Go where you” like, the place isn’t big,” Tibby said repressively. “There’s no need for me to waste time showing you round.”
Lou sighed, wishing she had not made the offer, but she was relieved all the same that she could explore the house alone. She had seldom had to deal with servants in the past, which might, she reflected, make her own approach awkward, but neither had she met with such unreasoning hostility. She wondered for the first time what the popular press had made out of the Merrick wedding which must have provided such a boundless source of copy for the gossip writers. Piers, if he had read the papers, had made no comment, but Tibby from her remarks last night clearly had. Cinderella stuff probably, thought Lou, remembering how fond Piers was of addressing her by that absurd name, and how careful Cousin Blanche would have been to keep Melissa out of the limelight in the circumstances.
Piers’ house, Lou found with surprise, was unexpectedly simple, and his own adjectives immediately sprang to mind as she walked from room to room. Bare and monastic, he had said with faint mockery, and it was both. Plain rush matting covered most of the floors and passages, the walls were whitewashed and naked of pictures and the furniture comfortable but sparse. It was as if, thought Lou on what seemed to be a strange voyage of discovery into another’s personality, Rune was not only a refuge, a small kingdom that might not be invaded, but an escape, perhaps, from the wealthy trappings to which nine-tenths of the year he must be accustomed. Only the main living room had warmth and color with its book lined walls and the stone hearth piled with glowing peat and driftwood. Here, Lou supposed, they would spend their evenings, and here with lamplight and drawn curtains she would learn to know and perhaps love this dark stranger who was now her husband.
