Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (131 page)

With Anthony Cavendish it was different.

I was almost relieved when he spoke again. “You don’t want to
char
, do you?” he asked lazily.

I had a watch on my wrist. “It’s only been a half hour.”

“Still the water might cool you off nicely.”

I raised my head. “I was in the water before,” I told him. “I’ve done that. Now I want to get some color.” I looked into his lazy, laughing eyes and lost my temper.

“What I really intended was to be alone,” I said. “I thought I would be, but the best laid plans of mice and men.”

He laughed at that, his white teeth glinting, and his warm, brown eyes catching the light from the sun. I caught my breath.

Why did he have to be so wonderful to look at?

“It’s clear no one wants me today,” he said, and bent his head in a gesture of resignation. “Very well, I’ll go off and leave you to your lonely idyl. I shall go into the garden and eat worms.”

He got up and I did too. “All right, let’s have a swim. I apologize, Anthony. I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m sorry. Forgive me, do.”

“An excess of sympathy might make me weep,” he warned. “Cast as I am from pillar to post.”

“Oh, poor dear. Don’t cry, it would tear my heart out. Come, let’s see who’s the better swimmer.”

“How can you be so foolhardy? All those Greek beaches? I was swimming when I was under two years of age.”

“Show me,” I said.

He took my hand and we walked to the water’s edge. “Water is my natural element,” he said. “I’ve often thought of swimming the Hellespont, like Byron.”

“It would be poetic,” I agreed.

He plunged in and struck out, and I saw at once that he was in his element. He seemed to glide through the water, with a minimum of exertion, and was so far ahead of me that I was shamed.

He waited while I caught up with him. “You must have been born with gills,” I said breathlessly.

“All a matter of breath. Wind. As I said, it’s a heritage, really.”

It changed a few things about my feelings for him. I couldn’t help admiring his mastery of the water. He was superb. He was not just an effete dilettante, or merely Caroline’s lapdog. He was, at least in the water, a magnificent athlete.

Back on the shore we lay laughing, toweling our streaming hair. Then we lit cigarettes and sprawled, talking idly. After a while he said, “When we catch our breath, what are we going to do this afternoon?”

“I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I’m going to — ”

“Yes?” he said, waiting.

“Oh, I have a lot of things to see to.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I thought we might do something together.”

“Caroline will think up something for you.”

“I thought I’d explained that Caroline is suffering on a bed of pain. She has an all day headache.”

“Then I think you should wait patiently until her headache goes away.”

He laughed, and gave me a reproachful look. “Why, you’re more pleasant to Tom, that little bugger,” he said. “Or Peter, that mundane personality.”

“Peter’s not mundane! He’s a … a gentleman.”

“How bloody boring.”

“I won’t have my friends maligned.”

“Then I shall never criticize them again.”

“Thanks very much.”

“You’re quite welcome. By the way, I’ve decided what we’ll do.”

“What do you mean?”

“What we’ll
do
. Now that you’ve warmed up to me.”

“Who says I did?”

“I do. Now here’s the plan. We’ll rent bikes and do some exploring.”

I had to admit it was an attractive idea; why hadn’t I thought of it before. I thought about it, and couldn’t bring myself to refuse.

“Okay, I guess I’d like that.”

“Good. Then let’s take your car and get ourselves into the village.”

“All right, but how is it you don’t rent a car while you’re here, Anthony?”

“Scarcely any need to. Caroline isn’t exactly keen on my going hither and you by myself. She wants me
there
. You do see that, don’t you?”

“You don’t seem like a prisoner to me.”

He gave me a half smile. “I rather like my thralldom, you know. Don’t fancy I’m complaining. Freedom has its penalties. I suppose I
should
get into mischief without Caroline’s restraining hand.”

“You’re not
that
young.”

“I’m not even as young as you think me.”

“You’re … thirty … two, three.”

“A bit more,” he said, smiling. “But that’s as much as you’ll get out of me.”

On the way to the village I asked him what he did.

“Manage my estate,” he said.

“Does it provide an income?”

“Some. The place is open to the public. One of the ‘stately homes of England’. It brings in some loose change.”

“And for the rest?”

“Are you interviewing me? My dear girl, in spite of what our friend Caroline will tell you, I can safely state that I am not on the point of bankruptcy. I shouldn’t like you to worry on that account.”

“Actually, I was just making small talk,” I told him politely. “Simply trying to be courteous.”

“Oh, is that all,” he said, feigning to be vastly disappointed. “And here I fancied you were screening me as a candidate … with a view towards a permanent union between us.”

“Unions between two people aren’t always permanent.”

“You mean divorce. True.”

“It doesn’t have to be divorce. It wasn’t divorce with me. It was a broken engagement. More or less on the eve of the wedding.”

“I say.” He eyed me. “Sorry, love, really sorry. You do appear to have recovered quite well, however.”

“Recovery was essential. I had no other choice.”

“Oh. You do look blooming enough.”

“You’d prefer to find me wilting?”

He laughed. “I cherish you American girls. You’re so acid-tongued. Though I do feel a bit sorry for your American men.”

“I doubt we make them suffer unduly.”

“Our women are more … diplomatic.”

“I’ve always found them very outspoken.”

“We don’t agree on many things, do we? So you wouldn’t care to marry me, I gather.”

“It never entered my head to think of marrying a total stranger.”

“A stranger? I do feel that’s a damned unfriendly thing to say.”

“Not that I’d mind having a title,” I teased, eyeing him in the rear view mirror. “That might be fun. Like having a great deal of money. I’d like money, but my own, not as a result of marrying. As I’d enjoy being a Viscountess, but not through — ”

“Through me?”

“Through anyone.”

“You want your cake and eat it too.”

“Everyone wants that.”

“Yes,” he said, and sighed. “Everyone does.”

“Including you?”

“Including first of all me,” he said, and I saw his face, in the mirror, change, becoming for a moment hard and bitter.

Then his expression altered again, and he was once more composed, handsome Anthony Cavendish. Shortly after that we came to a bike rental place, and a quarter of an hour later were on our way.

I welcomed the exercise of biking, and we found some very winsome side roads. After a couple of hours, and many miles later, we found a pleasant little inn, of white clapboard with Cape Cod blue shutters, and had drinks which we shamelessly nursed, because it was so delightful to sit by a leaded window, in a cozy booth, and rest in the sun-dappled nook.

We talked about England: I confessed to being a longtime Anglophile and said that, if it weren’t for the damp gray climate, I probably would have moved to London, at least for a few years.

“It’s just that I’m a sun-worshiper,” I told him. “I would miss this.”

“I like your summer climate,” he said. “We have few summers that could compare to yours. I love the sun, too. After all, I’m half Greek.”

“Do you visit there very often?”

“Greece? Once in a while. Whenever I have a financial windfall.”

“Is that often?”

“Not as often as I’d like.”

“If you don’t work, how can you expect to — ”

He became a little bit impatient with me. “My dear girl, our values are disparate,” he said. “Working one’s fingers to the bone is not my idea of living in a state of grace. You Americans put such an emphasis on the work ethic; it’s the puritan in you. We British have a quite different idea of things. We believe in a ruling class, the aristocracy, if you will. It’s a workable system, cherished by all, master and servant alike. Everyone knows where he stands, there’s no guessing about it, no
confusion
. Some work, some do not.”

“And a gentleman does not.”

His answering glance was distinctly chilly. “As you say, a gentleman does not.”

“Yours isn’t the only country in the world with a class system,” I said sweetly. “There’s India, for example.”

His face smoothed out, and he smiled broadly. “There you go again,” he said, and laughed aloud. “I do find your tartness refreshing.” He gave me a long, lazy look. “What I should like to do,” he confided, “is tan your lovely hide.”

I gave him a long, lazy look back. “I didn’t have you pegged for a brute,” I said. “Mercy, are you, basically, a cave man?”

“You might be surprised,” he said, and after a while I had to look away from his prolonged gaze, which made me much too aware of his masculinity.

I fielded the hand which reached out to find mine, and his slid away, to return to his lap again. “So I must assume you have means of your own,” I ventured. “And that you don’t need to work.”

“Certainly I have means. What did you think I lived on?”

“
That
seems to be having your cake and eating it too.”

“Ah, but my means are far from what I should like them to be. I must tell you, in deadly earnest, that my estate eats up a staggering amount of capital.” He moved restlessly. “Everyone is in the same boat. British taxes are astronomical.”

“All taxes are.”

“Oh, but ours!”

“Yet you’re managing.”

“For the moment, yes. And naturally, I’ve expectations. There will come a time — ”

He abruptly fell silent. I waited, but nothing more was forthcoming. I had a swift thought. Those “expectalions,” did they have anything to do with Caroline Lestrange?

But he didn’t enlighten me, and reluctantly, we put our drained glasses down and ordered lunch, which was served promptly; there was no longer any excuse for lingering.

We biked farther and then, glimpsing an enticing meadow to the left of the road, I suggested we stop off for a breather. We pulled our gear into and beyond the bushes bordering the road so that they would be screened from view, and pushed through brush and grass until we gained the meadow.

“What a nice, sweet lea,” Anthony said. “How awfully pleasant.”

“We say meadow,” I told him. “But it’s nice to hear someone say lea. It makes me think, you know, of Gray’s ‘Elegy.’ ‘The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea …’”

There were daisies there, and buttercups, and crisp, fragrant grass, and moss at the bases of trees. We sat down under a spreading elm and made ourselves comfortable. Anthony plucked some blades of grass and split them, whistling into the interstices, and I gathered some daisies and made a chain.

It was serene and rural, and good to rest my muscles, which were a bit out of trim. We didn’t say much, just sat there leaning against the tree, having an occasional cigarette and listening to a bird call.

I watched the progress of a large insect on the ground, a beetle of some kind that moved methodically and patiently through the grass, which to it must be like skyscrapers, as it made its way through the canyon-like openings between the blades. It approached one of my fingers, stopped thoughtfully and then, not recognizing this alien thing, moved aside and proceeded elsewhere.

I lay further back and looked up at the sky, where fleecy clouds moved slowly, leisurely, and where the fierce disk of the sun, blazing in the blue, was a fiery orb at once benevolent and terrible.

I thought of those ancients who, bent on some self-wrought destruction, sliced off their eyelids and stared up at the glaring eye of the sun … and went blind.

I shivered at such a frightful idea.

“You can’t be
cold
,” Tony asked, and I sensed rather than felt his movement toward me. For an almost unbearable second I sat, waiting tensely, and then quickly, protectively, put both palms on the ground and sprang up, so that his arms came to rest, not on my shoulders, but about my legs.

He looked foolish, then irked, and, when I laughed, so did he. “Ever on the alert,” he said, and bounded up too. “You
are
a wary girl.”

“Something learned at mother’s knee,” I answered, and stretched. “We had better get started back, Tony.”

I started off, looking over my shoulder at him. “The prisoner must return to his keeper,” I said. “The holiday’s over.”

“This one, perhaps.”

“I doubt there will be others.”

We reached our bikes.

“As to others,” he said, “we shall see about that.”

I laughed, and then he did too, but there was a challenge in his eyes. I suppose I must watch my step, I thought, but it didn’t matter much. I had escaped involvement: I knew, in my heart, that I had given a quick thought to letting myself go into Tony Cavendish’s arms: I was not in the habit of conning myself.

But I hadn’t gone into them, and therefore the whole matter was academic.

We stopped off only once more, for cokes, and reached the Lestrange compound at around five.

“See you later, perhaps,” Anthony said.

“It depends on how Caroline feels.”

He said, abruptly, “I liked being with you. I liked it very much.”

I said thanks, that I had liked being with him.

He started to add something else, but we both caught sight, at that moment, of two people standing not very far from us, quite near Kathy and Lester Lestrange’s house, close together and not talking. They were up against a large pear tree whose once-white flowers had been totally shed, and were now turning a rotting brown, forming a moldy mass at the tree’s base.

It was Emily and Toussaint.

They were just there, as if painted by some bucolic artist, the only two figures in a rustic landscape. Both were so still and inert that they seemed like papier mâché toys, unreal and flat.