A Hint of Witchcraft (6 page)

At first she didn't recognize them. When she did it was with embarrassment as well as surprise.

‘Alex!'

‘Margot!' Linden's voice held a teasing rebuke. ‘What on earth are you doing here?'

The need to explain took all her remaining breath.

‘I must go.'

Triumph in having caught the bus soon gave way to the incurable habit of worrying about Alex. He hadn't said a word. Well, there hadn't been time: she had barely paused much less stopped to chat. He hadn't been wearing the regulation stiff-brimmed straw boater, had obviously sneaked out and should not have been there. If he did that sort of thing and was found out, he would be sent to the crammer. How could he be so silly? But worse than the silliness which normally she could have accused him of outright, was something new. She had felt it instantly: a complete separateness from the rest of the world, which she recognized as love. At least on Alex's part. He hadn't even seen her; he only saw Linden.

Musing on Linden's effect on him, Margot could only fall back on language so commonplace as to betray her own inferiority. Linden should be described in poetic words, such as spell binding. She herself had been spellbound and remained so, to some extent.

During the next two years she and Alex were to see less of each other than ever before even in the holidays when visits to friends kept them apart, nor did Linden come as frequently to Monk's Dene. A vacancy had occurred in the office of an Elmdon solicitor and she had slipped into it. The summer holiday before Alex went up for his second year, Margot had spent with friends in Devonshire, but she was at home on the eve of his departure and helped him to pack.

‘This is a good one of you.' She found the snapshot among shirts and socks on his bed. It was Alex at his most attractive, holding a tennis racquet and smiling at the camera. The smile was quizzical, a trifle self-mocking: he had outgrown his overconfident swagger. She put it on the chest of drawers, assuming it was for the family album.

‘Lance took it. He's got a really good camera. A Leicher.' Alex retrieved it and put it in his wallet. ‘It's for Linden. She's always wanted one.'

Always! The word suggested an attachment long-established. And long-lasting? She had known about it of course – it had been a lovers' meeting she had blundered on that evening by the river – but except for the fleeting impression that the young man was not Alex at all but a stranger held in some sort of trance, she had not thought it important. Wasn't he always involved in some adventure? Even in nursery days he used to say, ‘Let's have an adventure' and would stride to the front door, fling it open and draw splendid breaths of adventure-laden air – and then nothing happened.

All her life she had lived in his reflected light, a lesser planet in the orbit of a brighter luminary. Without consciously observing them, she had come to know his every mood, every change in his voice. Their relationship had been too deeply shared to be recognized by either as a relationship at all.

Even so there had evidently been things she hadn't known. The most important factor in this adventure had been absent from those early days which now seemed remarkably uncomplicated. As to why she should think of Linden as a complication it would have been hard to say. After all she herself was responsible for having brought her to Monk's Dene in the first place. She had pleaded with her mother to invite the Greys. Linden was her friend: she should be pleased that she had become Alex's friend too.

Silently rolling up socks and tucking them into the toes of shoes, Margot discovered that she was not pleased – nor was ‘friend' the right word. She felt instinctively – and how much more keenly later on – that Linden had so taken possession of Alex that he was changing and becoming somehow diminished. Indeed, enchantment must diminish a man: in loving Linden Alex would lose more than he gained. In being loved by him, Linden would gain all she could want, more perhaps than she could value. Such thoughts were as yet beyond Margot's power to formulate, but her reaction to the remark about the photograph had been one of alarm. Did Linden always get what she wanted?

When Alex came home at Christmas her misgivings were confirmed. Far from being broken, the spell held him more firmly than ever.

‘Look here, Meg.' It was his first day at home. He had arrived late the night before. Margot was on a ladder hanging paper-chains on the dining-room picture-rail. He picked up a handful of the red and green loops and draped them carelessly round
Dante's First Meeting With Beatrice
framed in oak above the mantelpiece.

‘I'm looking.'

‘You've got to co-operate. I can't hang about here for the whole vac. On the other hand, Mother won't be too happy if I slope off too often.'

‘Where do you want to slope off to?'

‘To town of course. Dash it all, I haven't seen Linden yet. It's been three months. We've written, naturally, at least I have pretty often.'

‘She'll be coming to the party.'

‘That's not till Boxing Day and the house'll be packed with people.'

‘What do you want me to do?'

‘Well, to start with I want you to come down to floor level and find an excuse for going into town. Then I can quite decently offer to go with you. It'll look better that way than if I push off on my own the minute I've got here. Surely there's something you need – or want – or have forgotten to collect?' He picked up a library book and looked at the date. ‘Do you realize that this book is practically overdue?'

‘Five days to go.'

‘You're running it very close. Just think, in five days you might be struck down by a fatal disease, say cholera or bubonic plague. Or more likely fall off that ladder and break a leg. Then where would you be? It's always wise to return a library book at least five days before it's due. That is my own invariable custom.'

‘I like to finish a book if possible. That's what I get it out for.'

‘You can finish it on the bus. A mere fifty pages according to the bookmark.'

‘There's no need to complicate things. We can just go.'

There was a coat to be collected from the cleaner's, angelica for trifles, a present to be delivered. There would be time for Alex to lure Linden from her desk for coffee at Pikes while Margot did the errands. Alex's mood as they walked down Castle Street was buoyant. Half-a-dozen people called out to him or crossed the street for a chat but he swept on, Margot hurrying to keep up, to the solicitor's office where Linden worked.

Worked? Her desk was at right-angles to the window. She saw them, got up unhurriedly and presently joined them on the pavement in hat, coat and gloves. She might have been expecting them.

‘Won't they mind?' Margot asked.

‘I don't think so.'

Margot had forgotten how attractive she was, how well her clothes became her; in this case a grey coat with deep fur collar and cuffs and a close-fitting winter hat which concealed her hair, isolating the frail facial bones and giving her the look of a medieval page. And Alex? Margot had not so much forgotten as failed to realize how handsome he was. When she left them and hurried off in search of angelica, it was with pride in their distinction as well as a variety of other emotions.

Alex leapt on to the homeward bus just as it started and took the seat behind Margot and her parcels.

‘I can't bear it.' He leaned forward, his arms on the back of her seat. ‘Not seeing her for weeks on end.' His voice was low and tense, just audible above the throb and rattle of the bus.

‘You're serious about her?'

‘Serious? Good Lord, you don't realize. She has completely changed my life. Haven't I slaved for years to get myself into something or other – some profession worthy of her?'

‘You don't know which? I thought it was definitely law.'

‘I'm not sure. Law may take too long.'

‘Too long for what?'

He didn't answer. They had chugged along for another mile before he said, ‘She's so brave about her problems. It's really touching, the way she makes light of them.'

‘What are her problems?'

‘You know – being absolutely alone in the world except for that weak-kneed desiccated mother of hers. No one she can turn to for support or financial help. Imagine her – eating her heart out in that moth-eaten office for a few shillings a week.'

Margot's imagination failed her. She could only remember her impression of Linden an hour ago – her elegance, her composure, the leisurely ease with which she had abandoned whatever she was supposed to be doing at her desk. But she understood – it was as clear as daylight – that the obvious solution to Linden's problems was a husband, and if it was clear to her, how very much clearer it must be to Linden!

‘Can't you get Mother to ask her to stay, Meg?'

‘Why don't
you
ask Mother?'

‘Linden's your friend, isn't she?'

‘Yours, too.'

‘Friend? That's not the word. You don't know anything about that kind of thing but believe me – my God! She's.…'

There were no words to describe her, or the way she had stolen into his life and changed it. Her reserve enslaved him. She was always out of reach: an ice-maiden who had never melted in his arms and so had retained the mystery that haunted his imagination. That it was the product of his imagination was nevertheless a measure of the fascination she possessed. The quest for something more than she ever gave was an act of faith, a conviction that there must be something more. How dull at close quarters the legendary sirens may have been! How wise of them to keep their distance!

‘She's the sort of girl that drives men mad.'

Margot's respect for Linden revived. There was something remarkable about a girl who could drive men to madness and at the same time inspire them to work hard at their studies. Somewhat unwillingly she did drop a hint to her mother that Linden might like to stay for a few days. The answer was firm.

‘No, I don't think so, Margot. She can stay the night after the party but that is all.'

Sarah had seen enough of the Greys to justify leaving them to make their own way. If any launching into local society had been required, Marian had accomplished the manoeuvre herself. There were in and around Elmdon a number of comfortably situated families similarly placed to Sarah's own before she married. Their sons would enter professions, or make the army their career, or in some few cases inherit land. The Greys' contact with such people must be marginal but somehow contact had been made. Linden was invited to hunt balls and to various charity affairs. Through a network of acquaintances her name had cropped up when Embleton and Son were looking for a young woman for their front office, to sort and post mail, receive clients, serve sherry or tea and set the correct tone for a long-established firm. It was assumed that young women who went to hunt balls would not be deterred by the slenderness of the wage: they were only in search of a little pocket money until they married, especially young women without qualifications of any kind.

Not surprisingly, the Greys were still renting rooms in Gordon Street, the rest of their silver still presumably in store. Sarah had some idea of their straitened circumstances and the endless contrivances entailed in living on an army pension, but she had little sympathy for their pretensions. If she had formerly been complacent in dismissing Alex's infatuation with Linden as a flash in the pan, she was now more wary. But she saw nothing in his behaviour that any reasonable parent could object to and tried to persuade herself that Alex was mature enough to know that he was too young to form a permanent attachment.

‘And you can't be much more illogical than that.' Edward was being bothered by yet another dispute with the directors, especially with his
bête noire,
Bedlow, and was inclined to brush aside the topic of young love. ‘As a matter of fact, I'm not sure why you object to the girl.' That it would be years before Alex could think of marriage seemed too obvious to be worth discussing. ‘What's wrong with her?' Quiet, rather colourless, ultimately boring, he thought.

Sarah hesitated. It was the morning after the party. Linden had just left.

‘There's nothing wrong with her.'

‘Then that's the trouble: there ought to be. The girl can't be human.'

‘She's human,' Sarah said.

Alex and Margot were relaying the drawing-room carpet which had been taken up for dancing, Alex fuming because if Linden had waited for an hour or two, he would have been free to go with her; Margot raptly happy, her grasp on her corner of the carpet erratic. She had forgotten Linden, forgotten Alex glaring at her across the room, lost as she was in memories of what had been the most wonderful of all parties.

Lance was home from Glasgow where he was studying medicine. He spent most of his time with what he ambiguously referred to as his father's skeleton and had to be dragged to the festivities. But almost at the last minute, on the morning of the very day, they had heard that Miles was home from Oxford. She and Alex had gone to Bainrigg with a belated invitation.

Miles was at the piano when a maid showed them into the drawing-room. Unprepared, he sprang up and came towards them with such genuine pleasure in his eyes and smile, and so prompt an acceptance, that the reunion after more than four years was a happy one.

Though still shy and self-doubting, he was less awkward and no longer tongue-tied: he had learnt to some extent to talk to girls. At his school, he told Margot, as he twirled her expertly in a quickstep, there had been an interchange of dances with a girls' school. He had taken a few lessons and found that dancing was one of the things (one of the few things, he said) that he could do. He played the piano for carols and for the final singsong before the guests went home. He had been the last to leave and had promised to come again on New Year's Eve, and, as he was dark-haired, he would be their first-foot.