“I didn’t say quite that.”
“You said she ought to go in for it on a larger scale. And that’s just what she did. When I saw what she’d done to those rooms of hers, I thought she’d gone crazy—or you’d gone crazy to encourage her.”
“If you’re going to collect Paul,” was all Grant said, “isn’t it almost time you set off?”
“Who’s coming with me?”
In the end, Lotty, Claire and two dogs went with him. They arrived at the square-built, lawn-surrounded school to find parents’ cars keeping up a busy two-way traffic on the drive; those on their way out carried a cargo of small boys in grey flannel suits and red caps. A tall, white-clad Matron stood on the steps with a school list in her hand, marking off the names of those departing, and guarding a small group of those still to be called for. From among these, Claire had no difficulty in distinguishing Lotty’s son. Dark as were some of his companions, none had his olive skin, his large black eyes and unmistakably foreign look. The Matron had some difficulty in securing his attention.
“Paul. Paul! Paul Summerhill—your mother has come for you.”
Paul, cradling in his arms a small parcel, came with more politeness than eagerness to the car. He gave a hand to his uncle, a cheek to his mother, a hasty handshake to Claire and then, depositing his parcel on the floor of the car, exchanged warm and noisy greetings with the dogs.
“Grieves and Temperley,” he informed his mother presently, “aren’t going out. Can I bring them home with me?”
“If you want to,” Lotty said.
“No, no, no. Thank you,” said the Matron, coming down the steps to the car, “but the Headmaster is taking them out to lunch, at their parents’ request; I’m afraid they can’t accept your kind invitation, Mrs. Summerhill.”
“They don’t want to go with him,” said Paul, with his uncle’s frankness.
“Hush, Paul. Go inside,” directed the Matron, “and get your cap and your case, and say good-bye to the Headmaster.”
Paul went with manifest reluctance, pausing to express to Grieves and Temperley his regret at leaving them.
“So much,” said Richard, “for the illusion that children pine for their parents.”
Paul, climbing into the back of the car beside his mother, guarded his parcel with care. A more self-possessed little boy, Claire thought, she had never met; he seemed to have struck a balance between his mother’s detachment and his uncle’s directness. On arrival at the house, he clambered out of the car, still holding his parcel, and allowed Mrs. Peel to kiss him.
“Well, well, well,” she said. “Nice to see you. What’ve you got in there?”
“A bomb,” said Paul.
“A …a what?”
“I made it myself.”
“Will you kindly,” requested Mrs. Peel, “take it straight to the pond and—”
“It isn’t ready to go off yet,” Paul said. “I’m going to do it with Pierre.”
“No, you’re not,” Richard said. “You can hand it over to me for safe keeping and disposal. Come on.”
Paul, handing it over reluctantly, went in search of his pets and of Pierre. After lunch, he went over to the farm to see Ronnie Pierce, and brought him back to tea; tea over, Richard tested the lawn for dryness, and then organized a game which turned out to be a compromise between cricket and baseball. He directed, Lotty and Mrs. Peel watched, while Paul, Claire, Ronnie and Grant ran.
It was the first violent exercise Claire had ever seen Grant take, and she joined in Richard’s opinion of his unfitness.
“Totally out of condition,” Richard said, carrying tea things on to the terrace. “Claire, how could you have let him get so rotund?”
“I was waiting for the summer; I was going to make him play tennis on our court, and swim, and climb up and down to the beach.”
“No wonder,” said Richard coolly, “he’s thinking of going to Canada. Paul, bread and butter before cake—didn’t anybody ever tell you?”
It seemed to Claire that he was deliberately setting out to make this afternoon—the first social occasion since Mrs. Tennant’s death—as gay and as noisy as possible. Something—perhaps Mrs. Peel’s occasional lapses into forgetfulness, when she begged them all to be more silent—told her that there had never before been cricket on the lawn, with loud cries and pounding footsteps and yells of encouragement or derision. Watching the group at the tea- table, she saw for the first time the reason for at any rate part of the dead woman’s hostility to her stepson. She could not have been expected to forgive the lean, sophisticated, carelessly elegant Richard his ability, however unconscious, to make Grant’s slowness appear as stupidity, to make his observations sound like boring platitudes. Neither Mrs. Tennant nor Mrs. Peel, who also loved Grant, could be expected to welcome Richard Tennant to the house.
Sunday was not a restful day. Claire saw it as a succession of swiftly changing scenes: a rather noisy family breakfast followed by a visit from Ronnie, followed by a two-car party to Church, followed by a cold lunch out of doors, followed by a long walk, followed by more cricket. At six-thirty, Grant and Claire drove Paul back to school, and returned to an informal supper served by the drawing-room fire.
The week-end, Claire realized, was almost over, but Grant, who had come down with the intention of talking to Richard, had said nothing to him, nothing more to Claire or to Mrs. Peel. There had been no discussions, no plans. There was time, she knew, before Richard’s return to Paris, for many meetings with Grant, but she had a feeling that Grant had made his decision.
She was to remember, afterwards, the extraordinary beauty of the evening, the brightness that drew Grant, chilly as it was, to suggest a walk after supper. He and Claire put on coats and walked back with Ronnie Pierce; leaving him at the farm, they came back almost in silence, her hand clasped lightly in his.
“Do you like Richard?” he asked as they neared the house.
“Yes,” she said after consideration. “In a way.”
“Is that all the impact he made?”
What other man, she wondered, would waste a night like this, an opportunity like this, discussing another man? They were alone, and the night was beautiful and he loved her—and he was talking, thinking about Richard Tennant.
He left her when they reached the gate; Pierre was out, and he had promised to close the greenhouses. Left alone, Claire walked towards the house; ahead, she could see Lotty’s uncurtained room and, silhouetted against the window, Richard’s tall form.
It was not until she was close that she heard Lotty’s voice, louder than usual and full of protest.
“I told you, Richard! I—”
“My God!” His tone was one of horror and incredulity. “My God, Lotty! You mean you . . . you actually kept it?”
“Of course I kept it. Wouldn’t you have?” Her voice was a wail. “But I’ve just—”
“If anybody had found it, come across it, read it—good God, have you any idea of what could have happened?”
“I’ve just told you, Richard. I hid it! I—”
Claire, acting purely from instinct, turned and walked swiftly round the side of the house and then stopped, waiting for her heart to stop pounding. Her mind raced with a hundred confused impressions; the words she had heard, without warning, fused with other words, other sentences spoken by Mrs. Peel, leading her to conclusions as wild as they were groundless.
She went slowly on at last, and entered the house by a side door. She walked along the carpeted corridor towards the hall—and as she entered it, stopped abruptly. Almost exactly opposite, in the room that had been Mrs. Tennant’s study, she saw Richard at the desk, hurriedly pulling out drawers and searching…
She made a sound, a step, and he swung round to face her. They stared at one another for some time—and then he broke the silence.
“Been running?” he asked.
“No.”
“Something frighten you?”
“No.”
“Then why the p
allor and the breathlessness and the look of fear in the eye?”
“Just…something I heard.”
His face lost some of its colour, but he spoke steadily. “When—and where?”
“I was passing Lotty’s room, and—”
“Was Grant with you?” he broke in abruptly.
“Grant was locking up the greenhouses. I heard Lotty say she had lost something. It wouldn’t”—she hesitated, and then plunged to a conclusion—“it wouldn’t have been a letter, would it?”
“Lotty,” he said, “is always losing things.”
“If you look for them, do you usually look in desks for them? I think Lotty lost a letter, and I know that Mrs. Tennant got a letter on the day she died. She—”
“You mustn’t,” he said, “let your imagination run away with you.”
“It needn’t run very far. If Lotty hid a letter, Mrs. Tennant could have found it. You know what was in Lotty’s letter, so you can tell me whether it had, or hadn’t, anything to do with the change of Will.”
“Nothing whatsoever,” he said.
“Perhaps Grant would think otherwise.”
“I don’t think you’d be wise,” he said, “to say anything to Grant about this.”
“You told me,” she said slowly, “that Grant had a sick mind. If he has, he got it by worrying week after week, month after month, over the Will his mother made on the day she died. Now you’re asking me to—”
“I’m not asking you. I’m simply telling you that Lotty’s letter was an entirely private one and had nothing whatsoever to do with Mrs. Tennant’s Will and that telling Grant about it would make him worry more, not less.”
“If it’s a clue—”
“It isn’t a clue. It’s just a rather unfortunate coincidence. I’m simply looking for a letter which Lotty shouldn’t have kept, but did keep, and shouldn’t have lost, but did lose. It was very careless—in fact, it was criminally careless, and while I’m here, I shall do my best to find it. I’d rather not be seen looking, because if I am, I shall have to talk about the letter, which I’m not prepared to do. What I can do, and will do, is to give you my word that the two letters can have had nothing to do with one another. If Mrs. Tennant had by any chance found Lotty’s letter, it would have been a matter for the two of them, and nothing whatsoever—nothing remotely to do with the other members of the household. I’m not asking you to enter into a conspiracy of secrecy against Grant; if you want to tell him I’m ransacking all the desks in the house, you can—but I’d rather you didn’t. He’s got enough on his mind. But I can hear him coming; you can stay here and—shall we say?—denounce me, or you can go upstairs as quietly as you came in, and do me the honour of believing what I’ve just said. Giving me, in other words, the benefit of the doubt.”
Something told her, in the tense seconds that followed, that a good deal depended on her action. She knew that Richard was watching her closely, but there was nothing in his expression that gave her any clue to his feelings.
She had heard horror in his voice; she had come upon him searching swiftly, furtively among papers that did not belong to him—but in spite of this, she found herself believing him when he said that the two letters could have no connection with one another. She did not know him, did not fully trust him—but she believed the statement he had made. And now she could stay here and drag Grant back to a contemplation of his mother’s last act—or she could take Richard at his word, go upstairs, and say nothing.
The deciding factor, she found at last, was fear—her fear of involvement. She was not built for situations of this kind. She had no desire to become an amateur detective and to pit her wits against people as clever and as deep and—it may be—as devious as Richard Tennant. She had been given a choice of going or staying, but she had no wish to stay.
She turned and went upstairs. At the bend of the staircase she looked back. He was standing still, looking up at her, but she was aware that his mind was no longer on her; he was shut away, deep in thought, his eyes intent and keen and searching.
She did not sleep until the early hours of the morning. She lay staring into the darkness with the realization that, for the first time in her life, she was out of her depth. She had found herself against a dark, thick curtain and she had been afraid to pull it aside, afraid to walk into the unknown territory behind it. Life had flung her a challenge, and she had ignored it.
Or perhaps, she thought, before falling into an uneasy sleep, the challenge had been flung by Richard Tennant—and she had been afraid to accept it.
She did not see him at breakfast; she and Grant and Mrs. Peel had a rather silent meal, and then Grant brought round the car and put in the suitcases. Only then did Lotty and Richard appear.
“You’ll ring me up?” Grant said to Richard.
“I’ll do more than that,” Richard said. “I’ll look you up—but not for a day or two. I want to go and see old Corinne.”
Something took Claire’s mind back to her conversation with her stepmother on the day of the wedding, and she spoke on an impulse.
“She isn’t by any chance in Gisborough Hospital, is she?” she asked.
She saw them all look at her in surprise. It was Richard who answered.
“She can’t be,” he said positively. “I would have heard.”
Chapter 5
She had wanted Grant to talk. On the journey up to London, he talked to some purpose. He had been uncommunicative for some time after leaving Spenders. Then, in a quiet, conversational tone, he broke the silence.
“I didn’t,” he said, “say anything to Richard.”
“I know.”
“There was no need to talk to him. As soon as I got down to the house with you on Friday, I knew that talking to him wouldn’t make any difference. It was my problem and I had to solve it. And so,” he ended, “I did.”
She waited. His eyes were fixed on the road ahead of them; he was driving fast and steadily, but his hands were gripping the wheel with a force that whitened his knuckles.
“I’ve never been much good at facing things,” he said. “I think I knew as soon as that Will was read, that it had finished things for me. Finished the house for me. I don’t want it. I don’t want to own it. I don’t want to live in it. I don’t even want to see it any more. It’s . . . it’s poisoned. I ... all I want is to leave it. Leave it to Lotty, or Paul, or Mrs. Peel or to anybody who wants it.”
“And you?”
“To Canada.” The quiet words held something she had never heard in his voice before: resolution. He sounded, for the first time in her knowledge of him, like a man who had made up his mind—for good. “To Canada. I liked it, and it suited me. I felt alive and free and . . . entirely different to this man you must have been getting pretty tired of these past few months. I’d like to go there—with you. But I know you’re not the easily uprooted type, and so during the week-end, I decided to tell you this and give you time to think it over and make your own decision. I love you. I want to marry you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in this world—but I want to leave this country.”
She had nothing to say. The months of waiting were over. The suspense, indecision, had resolved themselves into this quietly-spoken summary.
She recognized, vaguely, the streets in the neighbourhood of her aunts’ flat: they were almost there. He drove round a corner, crossed an intersection, and drew up before the large, old-fashioned block. He did not switch off the engine; he got out and went round to her side of the car and opened the door, and the porter came out and took her suitcase. Grant bent and kissed her.
“You’ve got a week,” he said. He drew off her glove, slipped his ring off her finger and pressed it into her hand, closing the fingers over it. “Don’t wear it,” he said, “until you’ve decided. You must be free—free to decide in your own way. When you’ve decided, tell me. Will you think it over?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll think it over.”
And there was nothing, she found, to
think about. She would go, since she loved him. Perhaps there was more strength in his decision to give up what he loved, since it had come to him in a way that warred with his sense of justice, than there would have been in an obstinate clinging to old associations.
And in the meantime, there were five more days to be spent with Netta and Ettie. Five strenuous days, for in her absence, the middle of July had become fixed in their minds as the date of her wedding, and they were not to be dissuaded from proceeding with their preparations. A splendid afternoon was spent at the jeweller’s choosing a suitable personal present for the bride. Ettie, remembering that Claire had no mother, made elaborate arrangements with a caterer, and Netta was obliged to cancel them. There were heady half-hours in linen departments, surrounded by sets of towels, sets of sheets, sets of exquisite table mats. There were furniture shops to be visited, and cover and curtain materials to be fingered and priced. In between visits to shops, there were lunches at a variety of restaurants. There were also exhibitions to visit.
“Not,” Netta said, leading the way out of the Cedric Turnbull exhibition of ceramics, “worth coming out of our way to see.”
“You’ll have to ask the poor Turnbulls to your wedding, all the same, Claire,” said Ettie. “Your father always insisted on including them because he thought it was kind. I never knew why everybody always referred to them as the poor Turnbulls; they were very rich indeed.”
“They were killed,” Netta said, “during the war.”
“Ah, so that’s why. I shall wear grey and white for the wedding, Netta. I wish I could wear blue, because I used to look so well in it, but I’m too old for it now. I dare say Constance Rees will appear in red as usual.”
“Constance Rees,” Netta said, “will not appear. At least, I trust not.”
“You’re not going to tell me that she’s dead?”
“She died eighteen years ago.”
“You’re quite mistaken, Netta. You’re getting very morbid. She asked us to lunch recently, and gave us Greek food that made you ill. It made her ill too, but she got well again.”
Letter To My Love Page 8
