Away Went Love (2 page)

Well, she could do that, of course. There was no subject on which she was more convinced or her judgment was clearer than on this question of Richard and their love for each other.

Only—she wished Mother and Daddy could have known how right it all was.

While she was thinking, Hope had been moving about quickly and quietly, putting the flat to rights. She loved this cosy, elegant little flat which her father’s generous allowance and her own quite good salary permitted her to run. At the moment it was crowded, of course, because Tony and Bridget had come here from school for the holidays, and although they were both out at the Zoo this afternoon, there were evidences everywhere of their somewhat untidy presence.

In the ordinary way, they would have gone home to the big house near Seven Oaks. Mother had been coming home specially to open that up in time for the children’s holidays. Now they would have to make quite different arrangements. As soon as she had talked everything over with Errol Tamberly (and Hope made a slight face at the thought), she would know better what to do.

Almost from the time when Hope had first started work at the Laboratory, her father had allowed her to have her own small flat in town. The Laboratory was situated on the outskirts of London, and it was not an unreasonable journey for Basil Arning—or indeed Errol Tamberly—to make on the two or three times a week they attended at the Laboratory. But for lesser fry like Hope, with regular hours every day, the travelling was too much. So Hope lived in her little flat during the week and, until her parents had gone abroad, had spent her week-ends at home.

When the children had come from school a couple of days ago. Hope’s flat naturally seemed the only home left to them. Perhaps the best solution would be for her to have a bigger flat—Well, no, of course that wouldn’t do, if she were going to marry Richard quite soon. She would have to talk it over with Errol Tamberly—She always came back to that, and she always came back to it reluctantly.

Until the death of her parents, Errol Tamberly might perhaps have been regarded as the one fly in the ointment of Hope’s pleasant existence. A big, dark, energetic fly he was too—and her father had thought ridiculously well of him. So far as his work was concerned, Hope had to admit that the high opinion was justified, but she had never been able to understand her father’s strong personal liking for his brilliant collaborator.

At thirty-three Errol Tamberly knew exactly what he wanted of life, and gave the impression of having decided that if life were not willing to yield him his ambitions easily, then he was prepared to wrench them from her with the same ruthless energy which had served him so well up to now.

To Hope there had always been something faintly repellent about his sheer drive and energy. Hard work and enthusiasm she could understand and admire, but surely they could be combined with a certain graciousness and charm and knowledge of the art of living. She knew that if she had ever got so far as saying so to Errol Tamberly he would have stared at her with those sardonically amused eyes of his and simply said that art was not his line—certainly not the art of living. And she would have known perfectly well that what he meant was that he thought her a silly little fool.

He had not wanted her to come and work at the Laboratory; she was perfectly aware of that. Not from her father, who was much too tactful a man to repeat any such observation, but, characteristically, from Errol Tamberly himself—and in so many words.

He had looked her over on her first day with that cool impatience from which amusement was never very far absent and said:

“Well, Miss Arning, I won’t pretend that it was I who wanted you here, but your father overruled me. I thought you wouldn’t be much more than a decorative time-waster, and we have no place for those here. I hope you will do your best to prove me wrong. Otherwise I might be the one to overrule your father next time.”

While she was wondering what on earth one was supposed to reply to this, he had turned on his heel and left her, and to this day she had never thought of a suitable reply—in words, that is to say. In actual fact, she took pleasure in proving him wrong every day of her life, by working harder and more conscientiously than any other assistant in the Laboratory.

Hope was no fool, and she had thought once or twice since that perhaps that had been his exact intention. She hated to think she had been made to do anything Errol Tamberly wanted—but she went on working hard, for the sake of her own self-respect, if nothing else.

When she married Richard she would probably go on working at the Laboratory for a time at least, but it would be pleasant to feel that she
was
an independent married woman and could turn her back at any moment on Errol Tamberly and his Laboratory—for it
would
be practically his, now that her father was dead.

As she reached this pleasant point in her reflections, the sharp ring of the door-bell interrupted her.

Hope glanced at the clock and saw that it was rather soon for the children to be home. It was just possible that Richard had got away a little early—

She ran quickly to the door and opened it, and her exclamation of pleasure and sudden flush and brightening of her eyes would have told the most casual observer that here was the one person in the world whom she most wanted to see.

“Oh, Richard, how lovely of you to manage to get away!”

“Darling girl, the praise isn’t due to me.” The tall, good-looking man who followed her into the sitting-room laughed and kissed her. “I hate to hand it to him, but it’s thanks to old Browning that I got away early.”

“Oh, well, it’s the same thing,” Hope declared. “Anyway, the important thing is that you’re here. The children won’t be home for half an hour at least. Shall I get you some tea?”

“No.” He smilingly put out his hand and drew her down on to the arm of the chair. “Stay here and let me look at you. That’s better than any tea. Tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself.”

“Nothing very much. I had the day off, you know, and took the children to the dentist this morning—routine, nothing else, thank goodness, but one has to do it every holiday, and Bridget declares her holidays are spoilt until that’s over. Then they went to the Zoo this afternoon with one of the older boys from Tony’s school, and I had Enid Feldon here to tea. We used to go to school together, and we’ve always kept in touch.”

“Did she know about—us?”

“No. She—she came specially to say how sorry she was about Mother and Daddy. She knew them both. We talked mostly about them. I thought of telling her, and then it seemed best to wait until I’ve seen Doctor Tamberly and everything’s arranged for the future and—”

“Is Tamberly arranging our future?” Richard smiled at her, but his tone was slightly dry.

“No. Of course not! I just thought—”

“Yes, I know. I’m only teasing you. Go on about your friend Enid.”

“Oh, there’s nothing much to say about her. She’s very warm-hearted and kind. She seemed to think the really important thing was that we shouldn’t be short of money.”

“It’s quite an important thing, I assure you.”

“Oh, yes, of course, but—it isn’t one of the
biggest
things, Richard.”

He tipped his head back and grinned up at her without saying anything, and she thought for the thousandth time how attractive those light grey eyes were in his tanned face and how much she loved the slightly untidy way his brown hair fell forward over his forehead. And when Richard smiled you knew at once that
he
knew all about the art of living, and that it was perfectly easy to work hard and enthusiastically and still preserve charm and a sense of proportion and general graciousness in life.

“Richard, why do you laugh at me when I say money isn’t one of the biggest things?” she exclaimed, half vexed and half amused herself.

“Because I love to hear how unworldly you are, in spite of your apparent common sense,” he assured her. “You wait until you are short of money and see how your sense of values changes.”

“That’s what Enid said,” Hope admitted with a smile.

“Hm-hm, our friend Enid seems a lady of worldly common sense.”

“Meaning that I have none?”

“No, darling—not meaning that at all. How should you know about something you’ve never experienced? Only you must allow a sordid-minded creature like
myself to
smile when you speak of being hard up or not hard up from a purely academic point of view.”

“Richard, you’re
not
sordid-minded!”

He laughed then, and pulled her down on to his knee and kissed her.

“Sufficiently so to know that what you speak of with such fine scorn can spoil almost anything in the world.”

“Richard, it can’t! Lack of money couldn’t spoil our love, for instance.”

“Not our love, perhaps, but our life,” he assured her, with a smile which had’ a certain element of gravity in it by now.

“You don’t really think that?” She leant back against his arm and looked up at him with wide anxious eyes.

“Don’t look like that, love.” He touched her cheek with loving fingers. “There
isn’t
a lack of money, so there’s nothing to spoil our lives.”

“Yes, but, for the sake of argument—”

“All right, purely for the sake of argument—” He smiled at her teasingly. “What do you want to say—for the sake of argument?”

“
How
could a lack of money spoil our lives. Aren’t our feelings stronger than any financial considerations?”

“Of course. But the general circumstances of living aren’t. Here we are, Hope—both of us people with rather expensive tastes. I don’t mean by that we couldn’t do without some of the things we have, but we are used to regarding as essentials quite a lot of things that some people regard as luxuries. We should feel miserable, restless, even slightly degraded without them. Go a little further down the scale and we should be genuinely unhappy, and a little further down still—and life would be impossible.”

“You mean life together would be impossible?”

“I mean, darling, that, since sixpence has never yet been made to do the work of a shilling, it would be quite impossible for you and me to live on the salary which only just keeps me afloat in that stratum of society in which it has pleased God to place me.”

“You’re laughing!”

“Of course I’m laughing,” he agreed, and did so.

“But a little bit serious too?”

“Just enough to remind you that all this need not trouble us in the least since I had the good fortune and taste to fall in love with the daughter of a wealthy
man.
But I also, as you will observe, have the bad taste to admit that the circumstance
is
a fortunate one.”

She was silent, staring thoughtfully into the fire.

“Have I shocked you?” He kissed the tip of her ear.

“No. Of course not. It’s much more sensible to look facts in the face than to pretend quixotically that they aren’t there. I was only wondering, like a sentimental heroine, if you’d love me less if I were poor.”

“And you really want an answer to that?”

“Um-hm.”

“Well, I shouldn’t. I should love you exactly the same. Only whether we should have any prospect of marrying and being happy is another thing. I should probably have to be very noble and heroic in my turn and go away without telling you I loved you, because I should know I could only offer you a life in which you’d be miserable.”

Hope looked very serious for a moment. Then suddenly her mood changed and she flung her arms round his neck and kissed him.

“Oh, how
silly
we are even to talk about it. How silly I am, I mean, because it was I who started it. If darling Daddy had lived there would always have been my allowance, and—and now I suppose I’m what you’d call quite a rich girl. So there’s nothing to worry about, is there?”

“Nothing,” he assured her with a smile. “Except that I must go now, my darling. Your two infants will be in any minute now, and since we’ve agreed not to explain me to them until after everything is settled—”

“Yes, of course. I’ll be glad when this week-end’s over and I’ve done my duty by hearing whatever Errol Tamberly has to say. It’s so dreadfully unsettling not being able to make any real decisions or look ahead.”

He laughed and lifted her off his knee and stood up. “Well, don’t get the idea that Errol Tamberly holds our destinies in the hollow of his hand.”

“Good heavens! of
course
not. It’s only that, in a way, he’ll be speaking for—for Daddy and Mother.”

“I know.”

He kissed her very tenderly at that, and kept his arm round her as they went to the door together.

“Good-bye, dearest.”

“Good-bye, Richard. I’ll ring you up as soon as I get back from Orterville on Sunday night. Or if we stay overnight, I’ll ring up Monday lunchtime.”

“Right, dear.”

As he turned away, the door of the lift at the end of the corridor opened and Tony and Bridget were firmly ejected by the lift-attendant.

“No, you can’t work this ‘ere lift. I’ve told you so a hundred times before, and I tell you so the hundred and first time now. So run along, the pair of you.”