A Winter's Child (13 page)

Once again she opened eyes that had a swift, feline gleam, allowing Claire to draw her own conclusions while telling her plainly that she did not care a fig for them. What did she care for? Many things, it seemed to her. But for how long? And shrugging, blinking, creating an impression of insolence half-felt, half-necessary to stave off the certain knowledge that she would not care about Kit Hardie, or any other man, for long, she reached out a narrow, listless hand to touch her amber hair, her amber furs.

‘So … He takes advantage of me. I take advantage of him. He's ambitious. I'm bored. That's the extent of it.'

She smiled almost brilliantly this time. For it was enough. It was as much as there had ever been. A handsome man who fired her senses and occupied her mind.
Now.
Today and, almost certainly, tomorrow. And when the trough of uncaring came, she would just have to deal with it, endure it until it could be filled all over again.

‘Now then, Claire Swanfield,' she said quite cheerfully, ‘and what do you think of that?'

‘If it suits you, Nola, then what has it to do with me?'

‘Suits me?' Nola was amused, a little scornful, remembering that this girl, for all her quiet sophistication, was still young enough to be sentimental. ‘Whether it suits me or not – and as it happens, it does – my dear, what
else
is there to do?'.

She meant it.

‘I don't know,' said Claire. ‘One hopes.'

‘But of course one does.' Leaning forward Nola gave her throaty chuckle. ‘One hopes. Positively for miracles no less. Every time. My dear – isn't that the fun of it?'

And having stated, in those few words, the entirety of her way of life she came suddenly, almost briskly, to the true purpose of her invitation.

‘I hear you are looking for rooms,' she said. ‘Yes. I am.'

‘You won't find it easy.'

But Nola, Claire understood at once, would help her. At a price. And could the price be high? No more, she supposed, than her services as an alibi, a safeguard for Nola who, in a provincial town like Faxby where eyes are sharp, tongues long, and adultery still a serious business, must be constantly in need of excuses. And what could sound more valid – what lie more convincing – than a visit to the new little sister-in-law? Did Claire wish to play that role? Not particularly. Yet, on the other hand, did any sense of loyalty to the Swanfields hold her back? With a certain rueful amusement she doubted it. And, already quite desperately, she needed a flat.

‘There's not much on the market,' said Nola, telling her what she already knew. ‘All those wartime marriages, you see. And now with all our conquering heroes coming back to their war brides and their war babies, accommodation is like gold. Have you found anything to suit?'

‘Nothing I could afford.'

‘Well – well – let's not despair. I have the very thing – just there, across the road and round the corner and – hey presto – a bedroom and sitting room and “facilities” all your own. Kit Hardie moved out a week ago. He lives here now and the flat is still vacant. I'll take you over to have a look at it. It's in a lovely old house. My Crozier cousins, by the way, own
that
building too.'

They stood up together, Nola having stated her terms, Claire having understood if not entirely accepted them. ‘All right, Nola.'

‘Yes, dear – so it could be. To our mutual advantage perhaps.'

‘I dare say.'

‘Let's go then, shall we, and see.'

Kit Hardie, standing among the chaos of the vestibule, an agitated tradesman at his elbow, watched them come towards him, Nola, her fox tails swinging behind her, striding through the plasterer's rubble as if it did not exist, Claire walking carefully – thinking about her shoes – but without hurry, perfectly ready to exchange a smile in passing with the workmen Nola did not appear even to see. An attractive girl, this youngest Mrs Swanfield. Not an obvious conquest, like Nola, who, in fact, had needed no conquering but had taken him by storm, on fire – he well knew – with the sheer novelty of a man like himself, a ‘common'man, he supposed the phrase still went, although even in his early days as a polisher of other men's boots, a scourer of their pots and pans, he had never felt himself to be common. While none of those who had called him so – and there had been many – had ever convinced him. Tough certainly and resilient with an awareness, acquired very young, of the need to guard his back, an ability to wring every drop of advantage from any situation with which he might be presented. But not common.

He had been, all his life, a hungry fighter, a clever fighter, not always a fair fighter of course – he cheerfully admitted that – having been brought up in a world where foul blows were only to be expected. A cruel place, the world of the ‘common man', harsh beyond the imaginings, it occurred to him, of those who had enjoyed the long childhood of the leisured classes. Jeremy Swanfield for instance who, cushioned from responsibility, would have remained a boy into his fifties. Nola, who could think of nothing to do with her privileges but squander them. All those lads who had called themselves captains and colonels in the first year of the war and had seen their first battle as an extension of the playing fields of Harrow and Eton. Rarely their second. Claire? And although his humble origins had never yet hindered him in his dealings with women he found himself wondering about Claire.

She would know, of course, by now that he had been Miriam Swanfield's butler. Nola would have seen to that. And while he had not deceived her he had done nothing to correct her mistaken impression of an officer and a gentleman born, not made; of privilege smoothly inherited rather than grappled for, cheated for, risked life and limb for,
earned.
Why should he? He was not ashamed of it. Yet how might this self-contained yet somehow fragile girl – this beautiful girl – react? Certainly she would not be excited by his plebeian attributes themselves as Nola had been, burrowing eagerly through his polish for the traces of roughness and coarseness which so intrigued her. No. He had no illusions about Nola. No illusions about anything. He had never been able to afford them. Yet it occurred to him that he would be – what? – disappointed he supposed should Claire Swanfield now be ill at ease with him like some prim little schoolroom miss or – even worse – should she be curious about the way a handsome, well set up,
common
man might make love. Like one or two of his commanding officers' wives, and Nola.

Yet her smile, when it reached him through the distractions of hammering and sawing and the muttered complaints of the builder, was as friendly and open as before.

‘You look busy,' she said, wanting simply to speak to him.

‘So I am.' And his voice too was easy, its tone warm, his eyes openly admiring, a little speculative, just a shade – because it was his habit to laugh at the world, or appear to do so – amused. These fellows keep telling me they can't be finished on time. But I've got a higher opinion of them than that. I reckon they'll manage it.'

‘Kit,' said Nola, cutting brusquely through this conversation which did not centre on herself, ‘I want your keys.'

‘Yes. I'll send Euan to open the outer door for you. It sticks. Euan – get down here will you!'

And from a plank suspended at a precarious angle between two ladders, a young man put down his paintbrush, sketched a military salute and swung himself easily to the ground, a workman in paint-spattered cord trousers, stripped to the waist, until he said in the drawling accents of the Home Counties, public school and privilege which Claire still associated with Paul, ‘Yes, Major Hardie, sir.
At
your service.'

‘All right, Euan.' Kit Hardie sounded tolerant, resigned, although with a faint suggestion behind his good humour that this form of greeting might one day fail to amuse him. ‘Just take these ladies over to the flat and do the necessary.'

‘Yes, sir. At the double, sir.'

‘Stop playing the fool, Euan, there's a good lad. And Euan!'

‘Sir!'

‘Put your shirt on.'

He grinned and began to pull a flamboyant but exceedingly shabby blue and red check shirt over his head, the upward stretching of his arms revealing a ribcage with no flesh to cover it, just thin, fair skin which looked sickly pale beside the hard, bronzed fitness of Kit Hardie, a nervous, fine-drawn body from which Claire – because of Paul – quickly averted her eyes to the sounder, steadier, muscular figure of the Major.

And this time there could be no mistake. No possibility of error. No reason, even, for astonishment – nowadays – that a gentleman born and bred should be plastering a ceiling, presumably for wages, for a gentleman new-born and self-created.

‘He's Euan Ash,' explained Kit Hardie, ‘and harmless enough. Lieutenant Ash, he tells me, and I suppose I believe him, late of Eton and Oxford and God knows where …'

‘And,'
said Nola tartly, ‘about the only drawback I can think of to the flat, since he'll be your neighbour. Although not for long, we hope and trust, since he's on his way – where is it, Euan? I forget.'

Still buttoning his shirt, he turned his head and smiled at her with the deliberate sweetness and unconcealed malice of a fallen angel. ‘Do you know, there are times when I'm not sure myself. Edinburgh? Cape Town? Sidi-bel-Abbés?'

‘Just over to the flat will do,' Kit Hardie put in smoothly, swiftly. ‘Open the door, Euan. Put the kettle on. Watch your language.'

‘Don't worry, Major. If this is the lady we've been hearing about, who was a VAD, then bad language won't worry her. And in any case I think
this
Mrs Swanfield and I may have met before.'

It could easily have been true. For the past four years his face, in its hundreds of variations, had looked up at her from those hundreds of hospital beds, his eyes sometimes blue, sometimes brown, sometimes blind, his manner jaunty, defiant, bitter, his hand sometimes clinging to hers, sometimes pushing her away and damning her to Hell as he lost his limbs, his youth, his faith, his virility. She had escorted his broken body a hundred times over to hospital ships and collected it back again from the next convoy of wounded. She had received, in wooden huts and open fields and under canvas, the full impact of his delirium, his agony, his disillusion, his obscenities, his occasional outbursts of lust, his even more troubling moments of tenderness. He had once been – a long time ago – of the gallant company of knights-errant, the seekers of the Holy Grail, which had included Jeremy and Paul. And now, recognizing instinctively that he belonged, as she did, to that numerous band of half survivors, who – unlike Major Hardie – would be very slow to heal, she smiled at him and nodded, acknowledging their affinity yet not caring to make too much of it.

He was twenty-six, she thought – Paul's age – as tall as Major Hardie but pared down to the bone, a long lean body without substance – like Jeremy's – a narrow face with a high forehead, fine pale hair and light blue eyes, a hospital pallor she recognized about his skin, something behind his pose of heedless, even callow youth that was ancient and weary and totally cynical.

She knew, without asking, that he had gone to war – like Paul, like Jeremy – straight from the classroom. She knew that now, like hundreds and thousands of other young officers, he was rootless and unsettled, finding nothing in this safe, dull,
petty
peacetime world to hold his attention, drifting until such time – if it ever came – that he could take off his restlessness, his resentment, his disorientation as gladly as he had taken off his uniform, and put the war finally away.

More than that she did not wish to know. But, good manners allowing her no alternative but to go with him, she walked between him and Nola, keeping their animosity apart, for the five minutes it took to reach Mannheim Crescent, their destination. And, from the first moment, the house interested her. ‘A gentlewoman somewhat in distress, don't you think,' said Euan Ash as he pushed open the elaborate but ailing wrought-iron gate and led her through the sad little garden with its tangle of shrubs and weeds, its overhanging screen of sinister, misshapen trees.

‘It's not bad,' she told him.

‘Oh it's lovely. It's a little corner of paradise. Every frontline soldier's dream.'

And he unlocked the door, wincing at the protesting creak it made as it lumbered inwards on heavy, overburdened hinges.

The hall was dark, and had once been imposing, designed to suit the self-importance of some early textile baron, perhaps a century ago, and then abandoned when the explosion of industry had made life in the city centre smoky and undesirable and he – or his good lady – had elected to follow their friends to the fashionable hills around High Meadows or the spacious levels of Upper Heaton. Mannheim Crescent, therefore, had lost its exclusivity and had become merely respectable, then tolerable, then finally, when its population of lawyers and doctors and small tradesmen had also moved away – either upwards to suburbia or downwards to social oblivion – had received the sorry classification of a ‘dubious address'.

Its gardens, its paintwork, its drainpipes and guttering had become neglected. Its houses – too large to be properly maintained by the kind of people who were now willing, or obliged, to live in them – had been divided, first of all into fairly substantial flats and then sub-divided, over and over again, into sets of rooms where dancing classes and music classes were held, where religious sects and political parties with unusual aims and short life-spans held their meetings and where people of no fixed abode and no serious occupation lived semi-vagrant lives of shared kitchens, inadequate plumbing, uncertain drains.

‘Splendid, isn't it!' said Euan Ash, whose accent had certainly not been acquired in furnished accommodation in Mannheim Crescent. ‘You have what used to be the dining room, I think, and the back parlour. Anna Pavlova – or so she'd like us to call her – gives ballet lessons through there, which I suppose was the drawing room. And I have about two square yards at the end of the passage, opening onto the conservatory which I use as a studio. I paint – or try to – which is my excuse for not doing much else, except odd jobs for the Major. I'll do your portrait, if you like – which is my excuse for being alone with beautiful women.'