by Jane Arbor
The aside was only for Tessa’s ears, and at the dismay in the light voice Tessa turned round to see that Sir Bartram was not alone. Neil Callender was there too, and she guessed, as Lady Catterick must have done, that he could hardly have missed hearing the reference to himself. Indeed, his expressive glance in Tessa’s direction confirmed it.
But it seemed to have escaped Sir Bartram. He sketched to his wife an introduction of the younger man, saying: “We had a lot to talk about, so we’ve been sharing a nightcap in my study,” before adding briskly: “What’s this? Tessa with no escort home? Then we must send her back in the car with the chauffeur. I’ll get Challis up if he’s in bed. Or no—” As a thought struck him—”Callender, you are driving back to the city? You’d see Miss Greve home, wouldn’t you? Not too far out of your way, I mean?”
“Not out of my way at all, sir. I was just about to offer—”
To which Sir Bartram’s comment of: “Good man,” and Lady Cattericks gracious: “So kind of you, Dr. Er—” without reference to herself had the effect of making Tessa feel like a piece of left luggage now disposed of to their satisfaction.
Her own murmur—that Rex would surely soon be back and that Dr. Callender must not trouble—went unheeded. And when her godmother suppressed a tiny yawn behind her fingers she saw that she was expected to accept the situation without more ado.
With Lady Catterick’s arch parting advice to “give your Mr. Girling a thorough scolding” she lost touch with the last remnants of her poise. And seated beside Neil Callender in his car, she braced herself to meet his comments on the knight-errantry which Rex had forced upon him. Somehow she sensed that he was in no doubt of her own humiliation and chagrin. But let him try to pity her she thought, clenching her teeth. Just let him dare!
But no comment came. Instead he made some general conversation about the evening which lay behind them, and though he filled in some details of his acquaintanceship with their host, he told her that it had also been his own first visit to Usherwood.
They agreed in admiration of the dignity of the house. Then he asked: “I wonder what you made of the decor which was calling forth so much admiration from all sides?”
Tessa smiled into the darkness: “That’s an unfair question. It forces me into the admission that I’m rather of the ‘I-know-what-I-like’ school of thought!”
“An honest Philistine, eh? Well, that permits me the carping criticism that it appeared to me likely to have even less future than it had a past. As if it might be cleared away tomorrow for no better reason than that a newer fashion had come in.”
“Rather,” ventured Tessa, “like a film set—a facade without anything enduring behind it?”
“Very like,” he agreed. And went on to muse: “What is it, I wonder, which gives a house that quality of being lived in, a queer sort of patina conferred by its being loved and really used?”
“Books, perhaps?” Tessa suggested. “Furniture that’s worn as much by elbow-grease as by age; a bit of forgivable untidiness; even just one chair that had adapted itself to somebody’s shape—”
Her companion’s nod was an agreement. “You are quoting from memory,” he challenged. “Your own home, I’d wager? Wherever it was, is it still there for you?”
“Not any longer.”
“I’m sorry. Because you had drawn the outline of mine too, and that isn’t there any more either. But I suppose homes have fulfilled their function when they’ve sent people out into the world remembering them with regret. Did you have a garden? Or keep animals?”
After that the car sped towards the city to the sound of “Did you?” and “Do you remember?” For Tessa an exchange which owed nothing to the vexations of her evening was a reprieve which earned her gratitude. What was more, she realised with a little shock that she was recalling for this comparative stranger’s interest more of her childhood memories than she had ever shared with Rex. Rex had told her often enough that he loved her just as she was. He had never been particularly interested in discovering what had gone to make her so.
At the entrance to her block of flats she smiled: “Goodnight. And thank you—” and held out her hand.
His pressure of her fingers was close but brief. But instead of turning away he asked with no more than a detached amusement: “You know, I’m wondering why you needed to repudiate me so thoroughly to Lady Catterick? How did the report go? ‘Just a doctor she happens to work with.’ ‘Of no interest to her whatever.’ That did refer to me, didn’t it? If so, I warn you I’m quite unrepentant at having overheard it!”
Tessa stammered: “I didn’t say it! At least, not in those words. Lady Catterick is very vague and she had been thinking all the evening that you were Mr. Girling. I suppose that somehow you must have missed being introduced to her.”
“On the contrary,” he corrected drily. “A mutual friend did the honours soon after I arrived.”
“Then that shows you how vague she is!”
“Even so,” he persisted relentlessly, “she could hardly have invented that bit of disparagement which she reported to her husband.”
“But she did. Until you appeared with Sir Bartram she believed it was you I was waiting for, and I’d only explained that she had got the whole thing wrong.”
“Why should she have got it wrong?”
“I can’t imagine, except that she had seen us together for the short time we were talking to each other.” Without elaborating on the details of Lady Catterick’s error, Tessa added: “When you came in I had only just succeeded in recalling Mr. Girling to her mind.”
“I see. And the very idea that we could be confused must have seemed to you to amount to an absurd comparison between dry bread and currant bun. And who doesn’t prefer currant bun?”
For a moment the blue eyes met hers, steadily but unreadably. Then is a gesture which took her completely by surprise his fingertips went in a light touch to her cheek. He said: “All right. I forgive you for putting me firmly in my place as a mere professional colleague. Only—don’t keep Judith at the same distance, will you? I’d rather like you two to be friends.”
As he strode back to his car and the night porter opened to Tessa, she wondered why that mention of Judith Wake—whom she liked so much—should have newly jarred upon nerves which had calmed and quietened during the last hour.
CHAPTER FOUR
Though Tessa undressed and went to bed determined not to count each minute until she could expect Rex’s apologies and explanations, she lay sleepless and with every nerve alert until the telephone did ring.
She snatched up the receiver. “Rex! What happened? Are you all right? Vexed as she was, she could not keep anxiety for him out of her voice.
“All right? Of course. Why on earth didn’t you wait for me?” His tone was injured, as if it were she who owed the apologies, not he.
Tessa protested: “Rex, be reasonable! No one at Usherwood knew when or where you had gone, nor when you were likely to come back. I had to get home, and when Dr. Callender offered me a lift—”
“—you skipped off in the company of your knight-errant with alacrity! Do you realise that you could hardly have turned out of the drive before I was back?”
Tessa bit her lip. “I couldn’t have known that. The only thing we could guess at was that you had gone somewhere in your car, probably with Camille Lejour.”
“And, being sore about that, you lost no time in trekking off with Callender!”
“I’ve told you—he was leaving, and I had to accept his offer or outstay my welcome.” More deliberately Tessa added: “It’s for you to say whether I had cause for being ‘sore’ about—anything else.”
“My pet, of course you hadn’t. It was the silliest thing—Camille had never seen an Astra car, so I suggested she should fetch a wrap and we’d go and look at mine. When she asked if she might drive it sometime, as a joke I said she could worm it out of the mess of cars round it in the courtyard. But when she’d made quite a decent job of getting it
out, she sped off down the drive and hared for the open country. Cross my heart, I couldn’t stop her.”
“How hard did you try?”
“Darling, don’t be waspish. Sort of wrecking the whole outfit—quite hard.”
“Did you tell her you had to take me home?”
“Of course.”
“What did she say?”
“She wrinkled her absurd nose at me and said that was all right, because she had an idea you understood jungle law. What did she mean by that?”
“I haven’t an idea,” said Tessa wearily. “How did you stop her in the end?”
“I didn’t. I gave her the head, and after about twenty miles’ scorching she pulled up and asked what I’d give her to change seats.”
Tessa said: “What did you give her?”
“What she wanted—to be kissed, of course. After that I drove hell for leather and, as I told you, only missed you by minutes.”
“Wasn’t Lady Catterick angry?”
“Apparently not. She made me have a drink for the road, and she wasn’t peeved with Camille. The wench is spoilt, obviously. But maybe that’s all to the good,” Rex added cryptically.
Tessa said nothing. Why can’t I see the funny side? she was thinking. And knew that she could—if she believed that Rex had been held to the ransom of a kiss, which she did not. Even if it was true that Camille had “kidnapped” the car, his eagerness to enlist her interest in himself had made him a willing passenger, Tessa knew. He had probably even kissed Camille for that end. But she must not let herself picture that coldblooded embrace. She must not—
Rex’s slightly aggrieved voice broke in on her thoughts: “Are you still there? Haven’t you got anything to say?”
“Only—” Tessa could not resist the bitterness of it—“that you must feel you’ve made strides with Lady Catterick and Camille. And that was your idea, wasn’t it?”
His ejaculation was impatient. “Heavens—are you still harping on that bit of nonsense I told Camille? Did you go off in high dudgeon with Callender to pay me out for that?”
“Of course not.”
“Anyhow, forget it. It doesn’t exist any more. Camille knows by now that I made it up on the spot. Does that satisfy you? Or are you determined to go on putting me in the wrong about it?”
“No. It doesn’t matter.” Tessa felt too dispirited to argue the ethics of lying for a purpose, then telling the truth once the purpose was achieved. She had made her stand, and if Rex had been sufficiently impressed to have disillusioned Camille, then let the whole thing drop. It was not the first time she had realised that in some matters she and Rex had different values. But knowing it, and loving him all the same, she regarded as the ability to accept him as he was. And accepting people without striving to remould them was an adult achievement, she had been told.
The idea that he must have cared a little for her opinion enabled her to add more cordially: “We really ought to ring off, Rex. It’s awfully late. Or rather—early! But when shall we see each other again? On my next off-duty day?”
He met her olive branch with: “That sounds more like my Tessa! When is your next day off?”
She told him, willing to agree for once that, even so far ahead, he would keep it free for her. But when, more definitely than usual, he said, what a nuisance, but he had arranged to go with a friend to Cheltenham Races, she was instinctively ready with alternative plans, so that he should not guess she was inordinately disappointed.
In that case, she said, she would return Lady Catterick’s hospitality by asking her to tea at her flat. Rex agreed this was a good idea, and pleased and surprised her by reminding her of a date still further ahead.
“By the way, the Rugger Dance as usual?” he asked casually.
“Yes, of course,” she agreed. The end of the winter season of staff sports was always marked at St. Faith’s by a dance, and for Rex and herself it was practically an anniversary. He pleased her still more by telling her to let him know in good time what colour she would wear, so that he could send her flowers to match, and they finally rang off, with the tension between them eased.
But by that time-sleep, for Tessa, was further off than ever. And as she tossed and turned in despair of it she wondered how she had ever found stimulating the thrust and parry of periodical stormy passages with Rex. Or was it only lately that they had been at odds over things which really mattered?
In answer to her note, thanking her godmother for the party and issuing her own invitation, Lady Catterick replied that she would be delighted to visit Tessa in her “lair”. (As if, thought Tessa wryly, she expects to gnaw a bone with me by the light of a charcoal fire!)
Except for having Nurse Hatfield to tea and a friend or two from St. Faith’s for drinks, it was the first hospitality the little flat had offered. Determined to show it to its best advantages, Tessa was up as early as on a working day and had swept and polished everywhere before, on a spring morning of high wind and sun, she went marketing for flowers and the things she had planned for tea.
Only at the dairy was she disappointed. The double cream she needed for filling and topping a plain sponge was not to be available until the afternoon, which meant that she had to slip out for it before her guest arrived.
On her way back she hastened her steps when she saw that a car had already drawn up outside the flats. But drawing nearer she recognised it for Neil Callender’s and saw that he was seated at the wheel, reading a medical journal.
Tessa paused by the car’s nearside window. “Good afternoon, Dr. Callender,” she said.
“What? Oh—it’s you!” She saw him glance from her bare head to her tailored suit before he added: “You are not on duty today then?”
“No. I have Lady Catterick coming to tea with me,” she told him, and then upon an impulse to make return for his coming to her aid on the night of the party she ventured: “I suppose you wouldn’t join us?”
He closed the journal. “I should like to,” he said. “I’m keeping a rendezvous with Judith Wake. She is on her round, with her last call here in Clive Mansions, after which we hope to get in nine holes of golf before dark. To save time I arranged to meet her here. But she isn’t due yet, so I’ll leave a note for her.” She tore a sheet from his diary, poised his ballpoint pen. “What’s your Christian name?” he asked.
“My? Oh—Tessa,” she said, wondering at his need to know it, since to Judith Wake she was surely just Nurse Greve.
But she saw him write: “My dear. Collect me in Tessa Greve’s flat if you turn up. Neil.” Then he twisted the paper about a spoke of the steering wheel and was ready to accompany her.
In her living-room he looked about him—at the flowers she had arranged in a couple of rough pottery jugs, at her books, at the tumble of embroidery silks escaping in gay cascade from her workbasket at the reflections leaping among the tea-things on the table drawn up to the fire.
He turned to Tessa. “You certainly understand what we were both talking about the other night,” he said.
“Do you like it?”
“Very much. It’s—home to you by now?”
Tessa smiled. “Becoming so, gradually.” She glanced at her watch. “Could you amuse yourself here, do you think? There’s a cake waiting for this cream to be whipped, I’m afraid.”
He reached for the carton. “Lead me to the kitchen and I’ll whip it. I ply a pretty beating-fork, I’m told.”
“There’s a wisk,” Tessa offered in the kitchen which, tiny enough, seemed to shrink even more when he entered it.
“I prefer a fork.” As she effaced herself between the baby cooker and the sink, he accused: “Don’t tell me you are of the school of thought that takes a whisk to omelette eggs as well?”
“But of course!”
“You should never beat an omelette!”
“I always do,” declared Tessa stoutly. “And my omelettes—”
“—‘are the best ever.’ I know. Like mine. Like every other cook’s. In fact, I wou
ld point out the solemn truth that the perfect omelette has never yet been made—except by oneself! Tell me—do you add water? And are you a separate-white-and-yolker?”
They were still arguing amicably when Lady Catterick arrived, driven over from Usherwood by Sir Bartram’s chauffeur. She raised lorgnettes to survey Tessa’s flat, appeared to approve it, and accepted her fellow guest almost as if she had expected him to be there. During the conversation over tea she frequently referred to him and Tessa collectively as “you both,” and Tessa wondered whether this was to smooth over her gaffe on the night of the party, or whether she did not realise he was the same man at all and supposed that he and Tessa were close friends.
Against this there was Tessa’s firm knowledge that he had been introduced to her godmother twice already, so even her absent attention could hardly have forgotten him so soon. Add to that, that his appearance was not to be confused with any other man’s But on that thought Tessa gave up, hoping that he did not find as embarrassing as she did Lady Catterick’s assumption of an intimacy between them which did not exist.
Tessa had brought in tea-things for Judith Wake, but she did not come to use them. And when the earlier bright promise of the day turned to heavy rain Neil Callender said to Tessa with a shrug: “That’s good-bye to golf. Even if it stops raining, the light won’t be good enough now.”
Lady Catterick pounced on the remark. “You poor dears! You were saying, of course, that you were planning some golf after I’d gone!”
Tessa began: “Dr. Callender was hoping to play, Godmother. I wasn’t—” But across the table the flicker of amused sympathy in his eyes and the faintest shake of his head advised as plainly as words: “Don’t try to unravel that one. Hopeless from the start!”
So Lady Catterick’s voice flowed on: “Such a pity for you, after so bright a morning. And Camille at the Races too—”
