by Susan Barrie
For forty-eight hours they saw nothing of Claire, and then she arrived in an enchanting all-white outfit, and carrying a large basket of fruit and a supply of magazines and paperbacks. By that time Richard had grown more accustomed to descending the stairs, and he was sitting on the terrace when she arrived. The way in which they welcomed one another was not observed by anyone, for Charlotte was upstairs at the time dusting the bedrooms, and Hannah was in her own room writing letters. Charlotte, when she emerged on to the terrace with Waterloo walking beside her, found them engrossed in conversation… Or rather,
Claire appeared to be talking earnestly, and Richard was listening with the by now customary well- marked frown between his brows.
Apart from that frown he looked much better and more like himself, if rather thin and fine-drawn… And in fact, his fine-drawnness often brought a little ache to Charlotte’s heart.
When her footsteps sounded on the terrace behind his chair he looked round quickly, and even seemed relieved by the sight of Waterloo, who was always most friendly and welcoming whenever he saw him. Miss Brown, puffing a trifle agitatedly at a cigarette, threw it away and crushed it out beneath the heel of her immaculate white shoe, and also looked up frowningly at Charlotte.
“I hope it will be convenient for me to stay to lunch to-day,” she remarked.
“Perfectly convenient,” Charlotte answered.
Claire continued to frown.
“What do you think of him?” she asked, as if the patient was not capable of overhearing. “Is he really making progress? I’m a bit worried, because he still seems to find it difficult to remember anything that happened in his very recent past at all clearly – ”
“You mustn’t forget that I’m suffering from amnesia,” the patient himself remarked with a curious air of being perfectly complacent about his affliction.
Claire bit her lip in obvious exasperation. “Yes, I know, darling… But it is a bit trying sometimes,” she confessed, as if she really found it extremely trying. “I shall have to have a word with your doctor myself, and if he expresses any anxiety about you I shall insist on getting a man down from London to see what he can do for you. After all, if there is any brain injury you should be having treatment -” “Brain injury?” Charlotte sounded shocked and alarmed. “But of course Mr. Tremarth has no brain injury,” she protested, “or any other serious form of injury.
He is simply affected at the moment with a loss of memory, but Dr. Mackay says he may recover it at any moment…”
“Dr. Mackay!” Claire exclaimed, as if she had very little faith in him. “He’s the local G.P., isn’t he? And he’s probably had very little experience. I’m not at all sure Richard should be left to his tender mercies in any case.”
“I’m sure Dr. Mackay is perfectly competent to deal with this case,” Charlotte defended the local practitioner with a good deal of stiffness.
Richard put his head back – and it was such a shapely sleek, dark head in the sunlight and smiled at her.
“Oh, Mackay’s a very good chap,” he agreed. “I quite look forward to his visits… And as for Nurse Hannah, she’s wonderful. I’m surprised that she ever thought of giving up nursing.”
“And what about Miss Woodford?” Claire enquired, a trifle arctically. “Do you think it’s fair that she should have to devote so much of her time to looking after you and cooking for you? After all, there is no reason why she should do anything of the kind! ”
“True.” But Richard was still smiling lazily up at Charlotte, and to her slight confusion there was almost a caressing look in his eyes. “Do you mind very much, Charlotte?” he asked suddenly. “Looking after me, I mean? And making all those junkets, and things?”
“Of course not,” Charlotte asserted sturdily. Richard spread his shapely hands in a Continental gesture.
“Well, there you are! ” he exclaimed. “Charlotte doesn’t mind.” “Miss Woodford is far too polite to admit that she minds,” Claire declared with a good deal of emphasis – and particularly on the „Miss Woodford’. “So far as I have been able to gather she inherited this house and its contents from her aunt, and came down here to enjoy life and take advantage of living beside the sea. But all she has been permitted to do since your arrival has been climb the stairs many unnecessary times a day and fetch and carry for you. And that on top of having to literally dig you out of the wreckage of your car and bring you here.”
“Did you dig me out of the wreckage of my car?” Richard asked Charlotte, still smiling in a provocative and mildly quizzical manner. “Or is the story that I bounced out of it myself and landed quite literally at your feet rather more truthful and exact than the other version?”
“I certainly didn’t go anywhere near your car,” Charlotte assured him quietly. “For one thing, it was blazing like an inferno! ”
Miss Brown shuddered.
“How horrible!” she exclaimed. Then she looked at Richard as if for the first time she marvelled that he was alive. She bent forward and laid a hand caressingly on his knee. “Poor Richard,” she said very softly. “What a frightful thing to happen to you! ”
“I am alive,” Richard said shortly, and moved his rug-covered knee very slightly, so that her shapely white hand fell away. “I personally am extremely grateful for that – and grateful to Miss Woodford and Nurse Cootes for their care and succour.”
Miss Brown started to frown again – and the frown bit into her very white forehead like a cleft.
“There is still this question of your memory,” she pursued the subject unrelentingly. “It’s no use listening to people like Dr. Mackay and waiting for the moment when you remember who you are and everything else that is connected with you____________________ I do honestly think it would be best if we removed you to a nursing- home in London, and then I can go ahead with the arrangements for our marriage. It would, probably solve all sorts of problems if we got married immediately, and then I can devote myself to the task of looking after you.”
“Inside a nursing-home?” He lay back in his chair and regarded her queerly, with a cold, half humorous smile curving the comers of his mouth, and a rather unkind gleam of interest in his eyes. “Are you suggesting, Claire my dear, that we get married and spend our honeymoon in a nursing-home of your choice? Because I’m not at all sure what the rules and regulations are concerning that sort of thing! ” “Don’t be silly, darling.” She flushed and looked annoyed, and then almost immediately recovered her sense of purpose and returned to the attack with renewed determination. “You know perfectly well that what I meant when I said I could look after you was that I could do so in your flat if we are married. Naturally; while we are still only engaged I can only visit you in a nursing-home – or here so long as you remain here. But I feel quite strongly that you have made yourself a nuisance to Miss Woodford long enough.”
Once more Tremarth put back his head and looked upwards quizzically at Charlotte.
“And you agree with that, Charlotte?” he asked her again. “If you are honest, I mean?” “No.” She shook her head quite firmly. “I’d like you to remain here for as long as you choose to remain here, and I’m sure Dr, Mackay is of the opinion that you are already benefiting by the sea air. After all,” as if she was defending a secret urge to keep him there, and which she was quite sure Claire suspected her of being capable of attempting to do for some reason that was not yet quite clear – not shatteringly clear, that is – to Charlotte herself, “you haven’t been ill very long, and you haven’t given yourself a chance to feel steady on your feet, let alone regain your memory after such a frightful accident. Hannah and I both feel that you should take things a bit slowly for a time.”
“By which, of course, you mean that you wouldn’t recommend matrimony as yet? Not until I’m steady enough on my feet to take my bride in my arms and lift her over the threshold of my somewhat uninspiring London flat?”
Charlotte flushed brilliantly – far more brilliantly than Claire had flushed a moment ago as
she hastily denied any such imputation.
“I think you’re steady enough on your feet… or you will be in a very short while if you continue to maintain improvement at your present rate; but not knowing very much about yourself – ”
“Or about my bride-to-be, if it comes to that!”
But Claire refused to look embarrassed by this reminder.
“You might be better off if you – if you stay where you are for another week or so, and allow us – Hannah and me – to look after you.”
Claire’s remarkable blue eyes developed a sparkle of pure malice as she put forward the suggestion:
“We could of course get married at once and honeymoon here! If Miss Woodford has no objection! If we did that I could help her and Nurse Cootes to take the very best possible care of you. Between us you’d be bound to make a remarkable and complete recovery in the shortest possible space of time! ”
But Charlotte, without realising it herself, looked so appalled by the prospect that Richard himself decided to end the discussion. And he did so in a suddenly curt and decisive manner.
“For goodness’ sake, Claire,” he begged her sharply, “stop talking about me as if I presented a problem, and do please get it into your head that I’m not exchanging my estate of bachelorhood at the present time for anyone – anyone, do you understand? And when I do get married I hope I’ll do so in a sufficiently fit condition to require neither nursing nor consultations about my state of health. Now, is that a tanker out there? It seems to be fairly close in shore, or making for the shore. Let’s hope it’s not planning to pile up on the rocks. This is a nasty part of the coast! ”
He placed a telescope, with which Charlotte had provided him, to a somewhat irritable eye, and the two girls glanced at one another for a moment, and then assumed an interest in the aspect of marine life that was temporarily engaging all his interest. Charlotte had the feeling that Claire was subduing a keen sense of frustration, and as for her… She only knew that she was conscious of a sense of respite. She was going to keep her patient for a little longer, and he certainly didn’t strike her as in any condition to get married, even had the girl he was contemplating marrying seemed somehow more suitable.
That night she took him a soothing milk drink before Hannah took over with his sleeping tablets, and somewhat to her embarrassment he returned to the subject they had been discussing that morning on the terrace.
“The whole point of my present situation is that I’ve got to recover my memory before I take any decisive steps,” he said to her. He was once more frowning and looking worried. “It seems absurd that I can’t even be absolutely certain that I did once propose to Claire,” he added.
“She would hardly say that you had done so if you hadn’t,” she replied, smoothing his top sheet as an excuse to keep her hands occupied.
“You don’t think she would?” and he stared hard at her.
“Would any woman as attractive as Miss Brown? There must be a lot of men in the world who would like to marry her.”
“You think she’s as attractive as all that?” “You said yourself only a few days ago that she’s almost unbelievably attractive.”
“So I did and so she is.” He lay back against his pillows and smiled at her – not as if he had anything very much to smile about, but as if he was suddenly rather drily amused. “I suppose I ought to consider myself an exceptionally fortunate man because she’s consented to become my wife! ”
“Well, don’t you?”
He smiled more widely, and even more drily.
“I don’t know. I feel like someone groping a perpetual fog, and although all that I see of Claire is very easy on the eye I simply can’t manage to recollect her… as I should be able to do if she’d ever made a very great impression on me.”
“When I first saw you at the Three Sailors you were very anxious to buy Tremarth. Was it because you were planning to get married, do you think, and you wanted somewhere familial where you could set up a home with Miss Brown?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t know.” His eyes twinkled. “But I do know this house affects me in a most extraordinary way. I know that I’ve been here before, often – and I know that I always wanted to return to this place.”
“You can’t remember visiting here when you were a schoolboy?”
Another shake of the head answered her.
“You can’t remember my aunt? You were a little afraid of her, I believe, but in a way I suspect you were fond of her, too. She was quite a personality.
“And you? You tell me that you were often here during my visits?”
“On more than one of your visits. I treated you abominably, but you were always very kind to me – quite exceptionally kind considering I was such a little beast.” She looked concerned by the memory of her own beastliness, and the little she had done to repay him for his determined cherishing of her. “Even Aunt Jane thought I treated you rather shabbily.”
“And yet you refused to sell your house to me when I asked you to do so! ”
Startled, she looked at him.
“You – you remember that?”
His eyes avoided hers. He stared out of the window at the moonlit sea.
“I didn’t say so. I think you must have told me so yourself.” He frowned at the shimmering pathway that was lying like a golden sword-thrust across the gently heaving indigo bosom of the restless Atlantic. There are occasions when, I suppose, you could say that I do remember some things… Not very relevant, perhaps.” “What sort of things?” she asked, with a queer sort of breathlessness.
He looked up and directly into her eyes.
“I remember a little girl with red hair.”
“Me?”
“Since your hair is very red now it must have been as remarkably red when you were a child! ”
“Then your amnesia must be getting better. You are recovering! ”
He shrugged against his pillows as if he was not prepared to agree with her entirely.
“You can say that if you wish, but it is when people are growing older that they remember in detail the things that happened to them when they were a child. I can remember nothing at all that has happened to me in recent years – not even your refusal to sell to me this house.” She felt a trifle perplexed by the slight perverseness of his attitude.
“But perhaps if you tried a little harder_”
“Do you think I’m not constantly trying to penetrate the fog that is all I’ve got left of a memory?” he demanded, with such a spurt of irritation that she practically recoiled noticeably. “Especially when it seems that short of a miracle happening I’m doomed to become a married man within a matter of a few weeks, possibly less.”
“Then you honestly don’t – don’t want to get married?”
All at once his grey eyes were disconcerting hard grey pools of mockery. “What gives you that impression?” he asked. “Something I said about a miracle depriving me of the opportunity to become the husband of one of the most delightful and enchanting young women I’ve ever set eyes on? Substitute the word ‘disaster’ for ‘miracle’ and you’ll realise that the one thing I’m looking forward to is getting married! In fact, I find it hard to wait… And that’s easily understandable, isn’t it?”
Charlotte felt herself turning a dull, but rather painful, red. He was amusing himself at her expense… She realised that. And although she couldn’t quite understand the reason he seemed to think it was no more than she deserved that she should be treated unkindly. Between the almost feminine fringes of his thick black eyelashes his eyes held her in a sort of contempt… And with her knowledge of all that she had done for him in the past few days, including the sacrifice of her own bedroom
– that seemed to her a little unfair. In fact, unreasonable, unless it was the result of his amnesia.
She stared back at him suddenly a little critically and curiously. Just how much did he remember of his past?
A little girl with red hair!
>
“I was a very plump little girl,” she remarked suddenly and soberly. “I had a large number of freckles, too.”
“You had nothing of the kind… And you were as slim as a sprite! ” “When you came here the other day to look over the house Waterloo behaved in a most extraordinary manner. He was most unfriendly towards you! ”
“He was not.” He seemed complacently satisfied because he was able to make the admission. “He was almost effusively friendly.” She gathered up the empty glass that had held his hot milk drink, and made for the door.
“Good-night, Mr. Tremarth,” she said softly. “I hope you have an absolutely undisturbed night, and are very much better in the morning!”
When she joined Hannah in the drawing room she was both looking and feeling extremely thoughtful, but Hannah was curled up on a settee in front of the television set that had been installed a few days before, and was not in a mood to be distracted. Her attention was, in fact, glued to the television screen, and she answered abstractedly when Charlotte spoke to her.
“Sit down,” she advised, “and put your feet up. Looking after invalids in a house of this sort is rather more than a trifle exhausting. If we were to go in for it in a big way we’d have to have a lift installed.”
Charlotte ignored her advice, and wandered rather aimlessly about the room. She was in no mood to talk, but there was something she might have asked Hannah if the latter had not been so obviously wrapped up in the development of an exciting television drama. But what was really rather remarkable was the way she fairly sprang to her feet and blushed like an eager schoolgirl when a tap came on the open French window and Dr. Mackay, without waiting for an invitation to do so, walked in between the quiet grey falls of brocade curtaining and greeted them with the coolness and assurance of an old and well-tried friend.
“It’s a wonderful night,” he observed. “I wondered whether one or other of you would care for a breath of air? I realise you’ve got a parent to attend to, but it doesn’t need two of you to sit with him and hold his hand, and in any case I imagine by this time he’s settled down for the night?” and he looked directly at Hannah as he spoke.
