Lucy Lamb Doctor's Wife

by Sara Seale

  “I haven’t seen her for years,” Bart answered carelessly. “One of those foolish, clinging women, I’ve always imagined, the kind a young man of Paul’s type has difficulty in breaking away from.”

  “What will he do when Pierre is old enough for school?” said Lucy, and saw the little irritable crease come and go between his eyebrows.

  “That’s a long way off,” he answered shortly. “He can, if necessary, be educated at home until he’s ready for his public, school.”

  She was immediately diverted from her mild interest in Paul’s affairs.

  “But you’ll send him to a preparatory school first, surely?” she said.

  “Not necessarily. I have a lot of leeway to make up with my son.”

  “But, Bart, it wouldn’t be fair! To live here for the next six or seven years shut up with the three of us and then find himself pitchforked into the utterly strange life of a big school—why, it would be cruel!”

  She could see him freezing into the familiar unapproachable mood which could accuse her, without words, of impertinence.

  “My plans for Pierre are not yet made,” he said coldly. “You and Paul, between you, can cope with the early years, I imagine. When I’ve reached other conclusions I will let you know.”

  She was silent, accepting the implied rebuke. He was, she thought, becoming dangerously near to turning into a crank where his son was concerned, and she resolved to ask Paul if there were any children in the neighborhood who might be encouraged to visit Polvane and play with the little boy. Pierre was already strange and unchildlike for his seven years.

  Bart had returned to his chair and was leafing through the latest issue of The Lancet, the conversation forgotten, and Lucy sat listening to the sound of the breakers and the rising wind, thinking how desolate this house must be in winter. She thought of many things, growing sleepy as she stared into the fire; of old Miss Heap and her cats and her endless economies, of the matron of St. Minver’s who had come to her wedding, of Gaston and the extraordinary Smithers, and the unknown aunt who tied Paul to her apron strings. So many unfamiliar faces in such a short space of time, and only one to express affection for her, the little boy for whose sake she had joined her life to a stranger’s.

  “What are you thinking about?” Bart’s voice cut suddenly into her thoughts, making her jump. He was watching her over the top of his horn-rims and his eyes were quizzical as if he had read her reflections for himself.

  “Nothing,” she said, feeling guilty of intrusion. “The wind seems to be getting up.”

  “Well, it’s only March still. We get strong gales along this bit of coast. You were half asleep. Why don’t you go to bed?”

  “Perhaps I will,” she said, wondering if this was his way of signifying that he desired his solitude.

  “You said,” she surprised herself by reminding him, “that we would retire to bed like a respectable married couple.”

  He removed his glasses deliberately.

  “Did I? Well, that was a figure of speech, of course.”

  “Of course.” She had risen to her feet and stood now, blushing at the enormity of the suggestion her remark must have implied. She did not know how she was expected to bid him goodnight and, in her confusion, politely offered him a hand to shake.

  “How absurd you are!” he laughed unexpectedly and, taking her hand, pulled himself up out of his chair. “I wonder what you’d say if I took you up on that reminder.” He held her hand firmly between his own and she blinked up at him dumbly. As usual, his change of mood perplexed and troubled her.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, watching her expressive face, “I was only joking.”

  “Of course,” she said again. “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight, Lucy Lamb,” he replied, releasing her. “I’ll be up later, but don’t trouble to lock your door.”

  She closed the library door softly behind her and stood for a moment looking up into the shadows which gathered in the curve of the staircase. Once, Marcelle had run up those stairs, her high heels clicking light-heartedly on the stone, and prepared for bed with loving care, awaiting the coming of her husband; or perhaps they had gone up together, he with his arm about her, his laughter mingling with hers, for she had been gay, of that Lucy was sure. Her broken English would charm him and her beauty, would for ever guard her from loneliness ... With a small, nostalgic sigh, Lucy slowly began to climb the stairs to bed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I

  THE gales of which Bart had spoken persisted with little cessation for the rest of March. Lucy became used to the sound of the wind tearing at the house, the noise of banging doors and shutters and the sudden flaring of the lamps, but it seemed to emphasize the solitude of Polvane. Bart had no visitors; the tradesmen only called once a week, and, so early in the year, it was rare to meet anyone walking on the headland. Often it was too rough for Pierre to take his daily exercise, and then Lucy and Paul and the boy were isolated in the schoolroom.

  In the mornings she left them strictly alone, for, as Paul pointed out, lessons were his affair and she would only prove a distraction. Lucy agreed, thinking that he himself was rather like a small boy jealous of his rights, but she was grateful to him for the companionship he put at her disposal for the rest of the day. Bart was seldom at home until late in the evening, and, so far, Paul had shown no signs of following his cousin’s suggestion that he should in future consider his afternoons to be free.

  “Well, in a sense I’m taking him at his word,” he told Lucy with charming impudence, “but I choose to spend my time with you. What is there to occupy me in Merrynporth?”

  “Part-time work, perhaps, as Bart suggested.”

  “Nothing worth considering in that one-horse little place. I prefer to share your company and your responsibilities here.”

  “My responsibilities?”

  With Pierre, naturally. The house and your husband are outside my province.”

  Lucy sighed. She had no responsibilities in the house, as he very well knew. She had tried to assert her position as mistress of Polvane to the extent of arranging menus and enquiring what provisions might be needed on the next order, but her daily visits to the kitchen were not welcomed. Gaston was polite, but made it clear that the choosing of menus had been left in his hands ever since la pauvre madame had been taken by the good God, and Smithers was shocked to suppose that anyone but himself should have the task and satisfaction of ordering from the local tradespeople.

  “I feel so useless,” she told Paul. “Besides, they resent me.”

  “Are they rude?”

  “N-no, but they make me feel they have secret thoughts going on behind their blank faces.”

  “Haven’t we all? Cheer up, Lucy—most girls would be delighted to have no chores to do in these servantless days.”

  “I suppose so, only—well, one does like to be more than just a figurehead in one’s own house.”

  He looked at her shrewdly then and asked softly, “Are you only a figurehead?”

  “With the servants, I meant,” she said quickly, and felt furious with herself when he replied suavely,

  “But naturally. Who else could you have meant?”

  He had a disconcerting habit of catching her unawares, or perhaps it was merely that she was unguarded in her speech, but it was difficult not to be natural, shut up for long hours at a time, with someone who was gay and charming and of one’s own generation.

  “Is that why you married Bart—to play at housekeeping and being the lady of the manor?” he asked lightly, and she frowned upon him fiercely, hoping it would remind him that although their acquaintance had ripened with the swift growth of propinquity, he was still her husband’s employee.

  “No good!” he said with his quick, disarming grin. “You aren’t cut out for haughty displeasure, Lucy Locket, and you mustn’t mind if I’m curious. You and the great Bartlemy Travers don t seem at all suited at first glance.” She looked at him sharply. It was the first time she ha
d heard him refer to Bart with the hint of a sneer, and she did not like it.

  “Your opinion on the point is hardly important, is it?” she retorted coolly, and he made a small grimace.

  “You’re so right, of course,” he replied with a conciliatory smile, but his bold eyes ran over her with a glint of hidden amusement.

  “You look quite delightful in that new, zipped-up thing-ammy, I flatter myself that particular garment was my selection,” he said, and, despite herself, she laughed at his complacency, but also in gratitude.

  Bart had remembered that she had told him she had no trousseau and sent her off to the shops with a credit to draw on which had made her eyes grow round with wonder. The bus service into St. Minver was sparse and erratic, and in the end Paul had run her into the town in his small, ancient sports car and insisted on supervising her purchases. It had all been gay and delightful, and only Lucy had felt embarrassed when Paul had been mistaken for her bridegroom.

  “But naturally,” he had said, “a nice-looking young couple, and the lady wearing a brand new wedding ring—what can you expect?”

  Only once had she persuaded Bart to accompany her, and the occasion had not been a success. He had sat, looking bored and disinterested, while she tried on clothes and invited his approval, and the pleasure went from the day as he remembered Marcelle. Marcelle would never have taken her husband shopping in a small country town with little to offer. She would have sent to Paris and London and held her dress parades at home demanding his attention, teasing him if the bills were too high. Lucy remembered him now, writing cheques which to her seemed enormous, replying impatiently to her protestations:

  “Good heavens, child, you have to be clothed, don’t you? If you’re satisfied with what this place can produce, then forget the rest.”

  “But I’d like to say thank you,” she said shyly. “I—I’ve never had such lovely clothes in all my life.”

  His face, softened into gentleness as he looked down at her.

  “Haven’t you, Lucy?” he said. “St. Minver’s shopping facilities can hardly be the answer to the highest feminine dreams, I imagine, but if you are pleased, then so am I.” For the first few evenings she had worn her new frocks proudly and a little self-consciously, expecting some comment from him, but when none was forthcoming, she concluded that either he did not notice or, for him, the matter had no importance. It was Paul who supplied the balm and, strangely enough, Smithers, who checked over frothy piles of underclothes and put them tenderly away.

  “Very nice, if I may say so, madam—very nice, too,” he said, inspecting the new bed-jacket, the lack of which he had so much deplored. She had risen a trifle in his estimation, she thought, as he helped her on with it each morning, for despite her intention of coming down to breakfast, he kept her firmly in her room. The late Mrs. Travers, he told her reproachfully, would never have dreamed of appearing for breakfast at the hour the master took it, but Lucy privately thought that he and Gaston conspired to keep her upstairs in order to avoid any interference in the running of the house. The two servants, she discovered, indulged in periodic quarrels. Gaston would gesticulate and give vent to a flood of Gallic invective and Smithers would reply in kind according to whatever role he fancied himself in at the moment. At first, alarmed by the disturbance, Lucy had tried to intervene, when they promptly banded together against her. They were, she found later, excellent friends and merely considered she was spoiling their amusement in trying to make peace.

  “Tell me,” she asked Paul, “did this sort of thing go on in Marcelle’s time?”

  “She would have encouraged it, I don’t doubt,” he replied, looking amused. “I imagine she and Gaston, at any rate, found Polvane pretty dull.”

  “Did they not entertain, even then?”

  “Oh, yes, I believe so, but the neighborhood can’t have been exactly inspiring to a torch singer from a French cabaret.”

  “Torch singer?” repeated Lucy, wrinkling her forehead.

  “Yes, didn’t you know? She sang in various nightclubs in Paris before Bart married her, and led a pretty gay life, so one deduces.”

  “She must,” said Lucy simply, “have loved him very much to give it all up.”

  “Well, that’s a point of view,” he said cocking an eyebrow at her. “I never knew her, of course. I was barely twenty when she died.”

  The picture of Marcelle was becoming clearer, and with it, the measure of her husband’s desolation at her death. He would, thought Lucy, bear a disproportionate sense of guilt in that he had, unwittingly, been responsible. She could understand his dislike of the drawing-room with its collection of china and bric-a-brac, the stiff Empire furniture and the painted piano she had brought from France, and she wondered, sometimes, what had become of the portrait which had hung over the mantelpiece. Did it lie, forgotten, in some cellar or attic, or had it been sold to a collector who could never be haunted by a face he had not known?

  Sometimes, when she sat alone with Bart in the evenings, Lucy would be tempted to speak of Marcelle, but her courage always failed her. She was his wife, but she had no rights of trespass; she, as much as Paul, was virtually his employee, and only their legal tie permitted her to share his roof and his table, but never his thoughts.

  Their evenings had settled now into a routine. He would work at his desk while she read or sewed; often he was called out and she would dine alone and go early to bed because there was no reason to wait up. Sometimes if he came home unexpectedly for tea to find her laughing with Paul he would tend to regard her a little thoughtfully, and once he observed:

  “You seem to get on well with my young relative. You have much in common, perhaps?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lucy replied, considering, “but he’s gay and young and someone to talk to.”

  He frowned.

  “You find it lonely here?”

  “Not really. I’ve never had many friends.”

  “And in Paul you have found one?”

  “Perhaps. Do you mind?”

  “Why on earth should I?” He leaned forward in his chair, his hands loosely clasped between his knees, and regarded her gravely.

  “I realize, Lucy, that I’m little enough of a companion for you,” he said. “I can only be grateful to Paul for relieving the monotony. After all, fond as you are of Pierre, a small boy of seven can’t offer much in the way of companionship. You should get out more.”

  “The weather’s been so rough,” she said evasively, and wondered if he imagined the headland and the moor would be any less lonely than the house.

  “It’s the first of April tomorrow. The gales should drop soon.”

  “All Fools’ Day,” she said, and he countered a little sharply:

  “Are you thinking tomorrow should really have been our wedding day?”

  “No—no, of course not,” she said, bewildered. “Are you tired, Bart?”

  He leaned back again in his chair, folding his arms across his chest.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “Or perhaps I’m realizing that I haven’t been very fair to you.”

  She tucked her feet under her, carefully spreading the full skirt of one of the new frocks, and he smiled at the gesture. She looked very young with a ribbon tied round her hair accentuating the childish curve of her forehead.

  “That’s nonsense,” she said with surprising severity, “I think you only say these things because you don’t know how to talk to me.”

  “What do you mean?” he exclaimed, sounding quite startled.

  “Well, you don’t do you?” she continued bravely. “I’m a—a sort of necessary appendage. I don’t know how to talk to you, either.”

  “Good gracious me!” he said, running a nervous hand over his black head. “I assure you I don’t think of you as an appendage, necessary or otherwise.”

  “Don’t you, Bart? How do you think of me, then?”

  “I really don’t know.” He sounded irritable and she slipped to the floor beside his chair. It was al
ways easier to talk to him in the firelight before the lamps were lit.

  “Couldn’t you take us out on Sunday—just you and me and Pierre?” she said. “Paul’s not here at week-ends. It’s the only time you have for getting to know your son.”

  “And you, too, are you thinking?”

  “Perhaps. You told me that if we are to live together we must learn to know one another.”

  “So I did. You’re thinking, I suppose, I haven’t done much about it.”

  “You’ve been very busy,” she said, and he leaned forward suddenly and cupped her chin in his hand, tilting up her face.

  “You’re a good child—a charming child. We must see what can be done about Sundays,” he said, but when the first Sunday came he had either forgotten or did not care to remember, and so it was the next week-end and the next.

  Lucy was not surprised. Such moments of intimacy were rare between them, and he was, she was beginning to suspect, as untutored in the way to his son’s affections as the boy was to his.

  II

  In early April the gales still raged. There were, it was true, the odd sweet days of spring when the sea was calm, and the bracken on the moor began to unfurl and the headland was bright with the budding gorse, but it seemed to Lucy that for every still day there were three of wind and rain and the roar of the breakers, and other nerves than hers were becoming frayed.

  Smithers and Gaston shouted at each other when Bart was safely out of hearing, Pierre was fractious and difficult, and even Paul seemed moody and picked a quarrel with Lucy one day Sind took himself off immediately after luncheon. She was glad to see him go, and she persuaded the boy to rest on his bed for the afternoon. The servants’ voices began again in the hall and somewhere a shutter banged ceaselessly.

  Lucy ran downstairs, her patience ended.

  “Gaston! Smithers! Will you kindly stop this shouting and go about your business—the boy is trying to sleep,” she said, forgetting her awe of them.