Sunshine Yellow

by Mary Whistler

  Penny clambered up from her knees and looked at him, appalled.

  “But I—I love them!”

  “You,” he said, almost scornfully, and turned his face away from her, “you’re nothing but a child still. And half of that collection of hopefuls out there are children as well. You’d better take a handful of silver and dole it out amongst them, and they’ll depart.” When Penny returned from distributing the silver and thanking the singers for their efforts, Stephen seemed to have withdrawn into such a state of moody aloofness that she couldn’t think of anything to say to penetrate his reserve. There was one thing she badly wanted to say, and she got it out at last, while she knelt to add another log to the crackling, hissing blaze of logs in the grate.

  “I haven’t got anything for you, Stephen. I—I didn’t know what to get you.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, as if he were merely bored. “You haven’t got anything for me...?”

  “A Christmas present!”

  “Oh!” He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s all right. I’m not interested in Christmas presents for myself.”

  “But I wanted to get you something...” Her voice was almost a wail. The truth was that he kept her so short of money she simply hadn’t enough to expend on anything worth while. It had probably never occurred to him, since she was housed and fed and generally well looked after, that she needed money for clothes, and the small things a woman depends on if she is to maintain her appearance, such as hair-does and cosmetics and things like that. Her Aunt Heloise had made her a tiny allowance that was so very tiny she had never found it possible to save any of it, and ever since she married Stephen she had been hard put to it to buy herself the small necessaries. And now that Christmas was here, to her bitter regret, she couldn’t even buy him a present.

  Unless she asked him for the wherewithal! And she hadn’t been able to find the courage to do that.

  “I said forget Christmas presents,” Stephen said harshly. “Shove those pearls away somewhere where they’ll be safe, and wear them when you want to. But you needn’t regard them as a present from me. You’ve a right to those things now that you’re my wife.” Penny felt as if the tears in her heart rose up and congregated in her throat. In the hall the grandfather clock chimed the hour of ten, and Stephen made one of his impatient movements.

  “Let’s go to bed,” he said. “By this time tomorrow night Christmas will be nearly over, and I shall be glad of that!”

  Penny found her voice again.

  “Have you never enjoyed Christmas?”

  “Oh, yes. When you’re heart-whole and fancy-free, Christmas is a wonderful time! Why, only last year...”

  “What did you do last year?”

  “Veronica and I went to some grand Christmas Eve ball, and then on Christmas Day, if you’ll remember, I had lunch at Grangewood. In the evening we went out again—”

  “To a party?”

  “Yes; it was quite a party!” He spoke reminiscently. “Quite a party!”

  “And you enjoyed it?”

  “Every minute of it,” he assured her, almost solemnly. Then he rang the bell for Waters. “Let’s go to bed,” he repeated. And at the foot of the stairs he turned to wish her mockingly:

  “A happy Christmas, Penny!”

  On New Year’s day he developed a chill which kept him in bed for several days, and Penny sat beside his bed and read to him and strove hard to prevent him feeling bored.

  He was not a good patient, and he resented the incarceration in his room. He was not yet able to perform his toilet without aid, but the mere act of dressing and going downstairs to the sitting-room was a diversion. And he liked sitting with Penny in the evenings, feeling the warmth of the fire on his face, and not always appreciating the tiny sacrifice she made when she refused to put on the light because he couldn’t see it. And if she couldn’t do anything else to help him, she could at least share the dimness of the quiet room, with the leaping flames which at least he could feel, and the sense of snugness while the sea thundered unceasingly without.

  For, fine weather or foul, the sea was always beating itself against the granite cliffs, striving sometimes frantically, and at other times with a monotonous leisureliness, to make some impression on the unyielding wall.

  Penny sometimes thought that, however long she lived, and whatever happened to her, she would never forget the Cornish cliffs, and the Cornish seas.

  She would never forget the stormy nights, and the bright, ice-clear days of January and early February, when the first primroses appeared in sheltered lanes, and the hart’s-tongue ferns hung green and dripping above them. When the sea started to croon instead of to roar, and the sky was blue for hours at a stretch.

  By the end of February the days were growing warmer, and by the middle of March Stephen and Penny could sit out of doors for the better part of a morning. Stephen recovered completely from his attack of influenza very early in the year, and grew steadily browner, and more fit-looking. When he removed his dark glasses the scars above his eyes were scarcely noticeable.

  Roland Ardmore finished painting Penny’s portrait, and Stephen bought it. Penny had no idea what he paid for it, for Stephen could still sign his own cheques when Waters presented his cheque book, but Ardmore was plainly very satisfied.

  The picture hung in the sitting-room at the cottage, until one day it disappeared and reappeared in Stephen’s bedroom. It was standing on the floor and had its face to the wall.

  “I’d like to keep it there,” Stephen said, for no sound reason that Penny could think of.

  They neither of them discussed the day when he was due to see Robert Bolton again. That was still weeks away, and in the meantime Ardmore said good-bye to them.

  “I’m going to London,” he said, and I shall probably stay there for a while. Perhaps one day we’ll meet again—” he said this to Penny, when he said his final good-bye to her outside the cottage. “I don’t suppose your husband will want to renew the lease of this cottage, but we may meet ... at any rate, I hope so!”

  “In London, perhaps,” Penny answered, wondering why he looked at her so hard. His eyes were every bit as blue as Stephen’s, but they were a much lighter blue ... and they could see her and the wistfulness that grew more noticeable every day in her eyes.

  “Why in the world did you marry him, Penny?” he demanded suddenly, as if the words were torn from his throat. “He may be badly incapacitated, but he doesn’t appreciate you, and your life is just ... well, it’s no life at all!”

  And then he walked away from her, and when she went inside the cottage Stephen was standing before his chair with his dark glasses in his hand, and the burning directness of his blue gaze gave her quite a shock.

  “Poor Penny!” he said dryly, mockingly. “You’re going to miss him, aren’t you?”

  “You mean Mr. Ardmore?” she returned, in an even voice.

  “Who else? You’ve enjoyed sitting for him, and he enjoyed painting you. And now he’s gone away!”

  She picked up the morning paper and started to read the headlines to him. Impatiently he told her he wasn’t interested in the world’s news.

  “I’m not interested in anything. I don’t care about anything any more. I don’t think I feel anything...!” Penny stood watching him as he collided with various articles of furniture while he made in a kind of frenzy for the door.

  Perhaps, she thought, while her eyes grew dark, it would be better if Veronica did come.

  CHAPTER XII

  Veronica, however, stayed away.

  Aunt Heloise wrote a bare fortnight before the date when Stephen had an appointment to see Sir Robert. She wrote to say that she had personally seen to it that Old Timbers was ready for their occupation, and she took it for granted that, after the visit to the great eye-man—and whatever his verdict!—they would be making Old Timbers their permanent home.

  “The garden is full of crocuses,” she wrote gushingly, “and I have filled the house with bowls of hy
acinths, which I brought along myself. I have been through every room and every corner of the house has been aired, and is ready for you at any hour of the day or night. Of course, when you do arrive, I shall wish to be there, so please notify me of your plans as soon as you can, and I will make my own arrangements accordingly.”

  There was a postscript added, and it ran:

  “I have found you an excellent cook and a parlourmaid, and a woman to help with the rough work.”

  “Waters will enjoy that,” Stephen remarked dryly. “He likes to run an entire place himself.”

  “But surely Old Timbers is rather large, isn’t it?” Penny said diffidently. “Waters would find it too much of a task to run it himself.”

  And although she was to be the mistress of the house she couldn’t imagine what there would be for her in a house that had been intended for Veronica.

  “Yes, it is rather large,” Stephen admitted. “We were expecting to do a lot of entertaining, and we wanted something large.”

  Penny felt as if she herself was dwindling until her proportions were utterly insignificant.

  “We shall feel rather lost in it,” she heard herself say nervously, “after this tiny cottage.”

  “If we go there,” he returned unexpectedly. “Do you want to go there?”

  “I ... It doesn’t matter to me.”

  She thought that he smiled rather cruelly.

  “But it does matter to you ... or it should! Your aunt has devoted a whole paragraph to the reasons which she considers good enough in themselves for you—a young married woman who must begin to make friends, as she puts it!—to take up your residence at Old Timbers. Presumably the main reason is that you should live surrounded by well-meaning friends!

  She spoke quickly.

  “If you don’t want to go and live at Old Timbers ... if you would prefer to go on living here...!”

  “No!” he said sharply, and at once. “I should loathe to go on living here! I detest it here!”

  For Penny there were several poignant moments when she said good-bye to the endless crooning voice of the sea, and to white-walled Trevose Cottage, that had sheltered her throughout the whole of a wild winter. She had come closer to happiness at odd times during her stay in the cottage than ever before in her life, and she felt that she owed it something. At least one lingering look over her shoulder when they drove away, and a half-formed wish that one day, one day, perhaps, she would see it again.

  But Stephen sat stiff and withdrawn beside her in the back of the car, and he never even turned his head towards the sound of the sea. The green-clad cliff was left behind, the smell of the wild thyme and coarse grass and clean winds, and they turned inland towards the commencement of another stage in a strange married life.

  Aunt Heloise had begged them to break their journey at Grangewood, at least for one night. But instead they spent a night in London, and arrived at Old Timbers in time for tea the following day.

  Penny had not quite recovered from the extraordinary experience of sharing a luxurious hotel suite with Stephen, and being a mere useless looker-on while Waters did everything for him, when they arrived at Old Timbers. To her acute relief Aunt Heloise had found it impossible to be there to greet them, but the cook and the house-parlourmaid were already installed.

  Old Timbers was an exceptionally mellow old house that sought to hide its Tudor chimneys in a grove of Lombardy poplars not far from the river. It had diamond-paned windows and a beautiful black and white facade, and the front door reminded Penny of the door of a church. Inside, Aunt Heloise had filled every available container with golden tassels of mimosa and impressive sheaves of white lilac, and she must have incurred quite a bill at the florist’s in her efforts to give her niece and nephew by marriage a flowery welcome. A welcome that would, perhaps, take their minds off the tragedy of Stephen’s homecoming, for although he couldn’t see the flowers he could certainly smell them.

  He crinkled his nose in the long drawing-room where the afternoon light lingered like a caress and asked Penny sharply to open the windows.

  “I can’t bear the smell of mimosa,” he said, and she wondered whether it had some special significance for him ... whether, perhaps, Veronica was very fond of mimosa, and he had once bought her large quantities of it.

  And this house, after all, was to have been Veronica’s home. She had chosen so much of the soft furnishings, and so many of the elegant pieces of furniture, that to the man who knew about it this moment of coming back to the knowledge that she would never live in it after all must be a moment of pure bitterness, and in a sense a refinement of the torture he had had to live with for months.

  There was a bright fire burning on the hearth, and Waters went straight out to the kitchen to interview the as yet untried domestics, and assert his authority at the outset on the other side of the green baize door that shut off the kitchen quarters. It was he who brought in the tea, and Penny tried hard to make Stephen relax in one of the room’s most comfortable chairs. But Stephen wanted neither to rest nor to drink tea and eat buttered crumpets—which he enjoyed, when his mood permitted him. And Penny glanced anxiously at Waters.

  The manservant barely inclined his head, as if to reassure her, and then went out and returned with a tray bearing whisky and a syphon of soda. He poured his master a reasonably strong drink, and Stephen muttered appreciatively. Then he lay back in his chair and closed his eyes behind the dark glasses.

  Penny sipped her China tea in the silence of a room that struck her as almost suffocatingly oppressive. She longed for the roar of the sea outside, and the simplicity of Trevose Cottage. Here, her hand shook a little as she handled the fragile china—selected, she felt certain, by Veronica—and blinked at the brilliance of the glittering silver tea-tray, and brand-new spirit kettle.

  A little later she went upstairs to the room to which her own personal luggage had been carried, and wished still more that she was back at Trevose. It was plainly the main bedroom of the house, beautiful and light and airy, with satin draperies and quilted satin headboards to the pair of deliciously comfortable-looking beds. And it was after staring at the two beds that she made the discovery that not only her own luggage had been carried to the room, but Stephen’s.

  One of the new maids must have done it, and it was almost certainly she who had unpacked for Penny and laid out her prettiest nightdress on her bed, while the bed in which Stephen was apparently expected to sleep had his blue silk pyjamas lying on the pillow.

  Penny whirled round and looked at the dressing-table. Stephen’s brushes were there, side by side with her own. And when she looked at the door his dressing-gown hung on a hook, and was swinging slightly in a light current of air.

  Stephen’s voice spoke from the doorway to the bathroom. She had no idea how he had found his way there, but he was standing and looking very slim and straight in his dark suit, with his immaculate linen showing up the tan he had acquired in Cornwall, and the rosy light from one of the bedside lamps shining across his black hair.

  “I’m afraid there’s some slight confusion,” he said stiffly. “I believe they’ve brought my things here to your room, although I told Waters quite specifically to make certain there wasn’t any muddle.”

  Penny stood very still in the middle of the pale rose carpet—that Veronica must have chosen—and the only thing that struck her about her husband’s voice was that he was angry. He was coldly, implacably angry.

  She took a deep breath, and swallowed something in her throat at the same time.

  “This is a large room,” she said. “I imagine it’s the principal bedroom? I don’t suppose Waters was responsible for bringing your things here.”

  “Then it must have been that idiotic girl! ... the new one.”

  “I don’t think she’s idiotic. She just—I don’t suppose she thought...”

  “You mean she thought along too conventional lines, and decided that husbands and wives always sleep together?” His voice had a rasp in it. “
Seventy-five out of every hundred probably do, but we’re amongst the twenty-five who don’t. And because some slow-thinking girl makes a decision, that isn’t going to let Waters off.” He shouted for him loudly and furiously. “Come here, Waters, and clear all my stuff out of Mrs. Blair’s room!”

  Waters appeared, looking faintly perturbed, but the sympathy in his eyes was for Penny. She had often wondered what he thought of the unusual relationship that existed between herself and her husband, but Waters was not the type to betray himself by so much as a flickering eyelash at inappropriate moments, and even now it was impossible to be absolutely certain what he was thinking. His voice was very gentle, however, as he addressed his mistress. “I’m very sorry, madam. That girl, Janet, is new to private service, and, I suppose my instructions weren’t specific enough.”

  He started to gather up the handsome pigskin suitcases.

  “I made them specific!” Stephen said in an icily displeased tone.

  “I’m aware of that, sir.”

  “Then another time do the job yourself if you can’t trust underlings!”

  “I will, sir,” Waters promised evenly.

  As he made for the door with the cases Penny stopped him.

  “Where is Mr. Blair going to sleep, Waters?”

  “There’s a kind of dressing-room next door, on the other side of the bathroom. I’ll sleep there,” Stephen instructed.

  “But you can’t! I mean, if it’s only a small room...”

  “I don’t require a large room.”

  “I don’t either.” She spoke with unusual firmness. “If anyone’s going to move out of here, Waters, it had better be me. I’d much prefer a little room of my own, and Mr. Blair’s things can stay here...”