Kissing Kin (14 page)

“I don’t know.”

“Have you any idea about his people?”

“None. All we know is that he saved Calvert’s life, he’s presentable, he has nice manners, and nothing is too good for him here.”

“Oh, I quite agree with you that he’s presentable,” said Clare, and Fabrice who, had ears like a fox, said clearly from across the hearth, “Are you talking about the new boy Calvert has sent us?
I
think he’s charrrming. Not
quite
out of the top drawer, of course, but definitely charrrming. And what shoulders!” Her big eyes rose expressively to heaven.

Not a woman in the room but looked at her with open dislike, while a little silence fell and Virginia’s hostess sense measured the reassuring distance between the drawing-room hearth and where Raymond sat behind the closed door of the dining-room. Then Sally spoke incisively.

“I have always said that you had the mind of a
chambermaid
. Fabrice, What a pity it is that you are no longer young enough to be sent out of the room when you say the wrong thing!”

“What was wrong about what I have said?” asked Fabrice with her ingénue pout. “I admire him tremendously. He would be very difficult. But I think worth some trouble if you succeeded.”

“That will do,” said Sally coldly, and Fabrice laughed round at them in malicious schoolgirl triumph,

“Oooh, I know, I know, he is for Camilla!” she assured them. “I will not interfere, I promise!” Her bright, cruel glance flicked Jenny’s still face in the firelight, reminding them all of her power. “I shall have my hands full, anyway, by ten o’clock this evening, you can be sure! I have promised Adrian every other dance, and when Gerald comes he will want them
all
himself!”

“Have you heard from Gerald?” The question came sharply
from Clare, for he was her brother and she had had no message from him.

“Certainly, a wire from London last night. It was to be a surprise. He stopped in Town long enough to clean himself and sleep and carry out some sort of wager with three friends who are with him. To-night he comes here.”

“You might have told me,” said Virginia. “Will he want to stay here?”

“It was nothing to do with you,” Fabrice shot back
tactlessly
. “He will want to stay at the Hall, of course, to be near me. I told you it was a surprise.” She glanced at the clock and took out a little gold powder-box from her beaded bag and became absorbed in her complexion.

Sally shrugged expressive shoulders. No one looked at Jenny, who sat without moving, gazing into the fire, her
untouched-up
face a mask of composure. Camilla moved closer to her instinctively, and Clare said with an attempt at casualness, “Gerald
would
wangle Christmas leave at the last minute, I never saw anything like his luck! Here come the children.”

The babies had been put to bed, but the schoolroom set were allowed to come downstairs for the presents and a few dances. It included Virginia’s Daphne, just turning sixteen and already a beauty, and her sister Irene, and Clare’s two boys, Lionel and Bertram, from Eton. Oliver’s Hermione was only ten, but had seen so little of her father lately that she was allowed to stay up a while in the hope that she would begin to adjust to his marriage to Phoebe, which she showed every sign of resenting on her dead mother’s behalf.

Phoebe wisely did not pursue her with attentions, and it was Irene who took the place beside Phoebe to ask for news of Jeff in New York, for all his English cousins were curious about Phoebe’s baby son who was living with Dinah. There had been some talk about bringing Jeff and Dinah to England in the spring, or at any rate the minute the war ended—but Phoebe knew from Oliver that far from being almost over the war was about to enter a new and terrible phase; it was
no secret at the War Office that a German spring offensive was shaping up very fast. Such a dismal subject was forbidden on a night like this, however, so she said nothing of it to Irene. For to-night the family was to feel secure, the children should be shielded from grown-up apprehensions, and life must appear to be as normal as possible. As for Dinah and Jeff, however much they were missed—and she knew Bracken’s heart was sore from their absence—however much they might feel
themselves
exiled from the places where things were being done and from the people who belonged to them, they were safe and they had the right food and they were spared a lot of things it was only right that a few cherished ones should never know.

With Irene’s hand curled confidingly in hers, Phoebe glanced ruefully at the group of youngsters lighting the candles on the tree. During the next few months Lionel would begin his military training and then go out to France. Soon Daphne would start her VAD service at the Hall. They were all growing up into it, the ones who had been just children when the war began. Not her own Jeff, of course. Jeff was only four, though it seemed twice as long as that since she had seen him last. But by the time Jeff was Lionel’s age—her mind stopped on the edge of the abyss, peering ahead—what would it be like in 1930? Where would they all be by then? Would even Oliver make a guess at that?

With relief she heard the men’s voices returning across the hall from the dining-room, and rose impulsively as Oliver entered and went to meet him, with Irene’s hand still in hers.

“Hullo,” he said, and his kind, penetrating gaze rested on her troubled face. “What have you two been talking about, to look so solemn?”

“We aren’t solemn at all, we were saying how nice it would be when Aunt Dinah and Jeff could come to England for a visit,” Irene told him innocently, and Phoebe added, “By summer-time, we were saying,” and squeezed his arm. “Dinah loves the summer here.”

“Oh, yes, by summer-time, I should think,” he agreed easily, for this was Christmas night and Irene was listening.

Camilla, supporting Jenny merely by being a loyal presence at her side, watched Sosthène go straight to Sally, needle to the magnet, and heard again in her own mind Fabrice’s thoughtless words—
Raymond
is
for
Camilla.
In her preoccupation with the overwhelming thing which had happened to her since she met Sosthène, Raymond had hardly appeared to Camilla as a man, as a romantic possibility not at all, though at one time the man to whom she owed Calvert’s life would have seemed no lower than the angels. Her awareness of Sosthène had blotted out all other men from her consciousness. Besides—who
was
Raymond
? Calvert’s friend. But before that. Before he saved Calvert’s life—who was he?

Standing beside Jenny, who was still seated by the fire, she watched him come towards her, with Bracken at his elbow, down the long room. Bracken would have to do something about Jenny—they must all do something about her—when Gerald came. Even Raymond must throw
himself
into the breach. There must be no smallest chink around Jenny for Fabrice’s darts or Gerald’s careless cruelty to penetrate.

“We’re all to sit down and behave while Hermione carries round the presents,” Bracken said confidentially when they arrived at the hearth. “She has been chosen for that office, I gather, not because she is the most popular person present, but because she is the youngest. Archie is going to read off the names.”

“Phoebe doesn’t like you to say things like that,” Camilla rebuked him. “Hermione can’t help being Maia’s daughter.”

“No, but she does rub it in, rather,” said Bracken, who had shared the family aversion to Oliver’s first wife.

Jenny looked up at him, her round chin jutting.

“Now, Bracken, do be careful, if a child like that once gets the idea that people have a down on her it can ruin her whole life.”

“
I
didn’t give her any such idea,” said Bracken contrarily. “She must have worked it out herself.”

“Sh!” they told him.

Archie and Hermione were standing by the lighted tree at the end of the room, and everyone settled unobtrusively into whatever seat was nearest and Raymond felt himself pulled down on to the fireside bench by Jenny’s kind little hand on his good arm as she made room for him there beside her.

“Your Grace—my lords and ladies—boys and girls,
whatnots
and so forths—er—pray silence,” Archie began in an exaggerated Inner Temple drawl, slim and monocled in tailored khaki, with Hermione in a white crêpe de chine dress and strapped slippers very self-conscious beside him. “On my right hand you will perceive a somewhat—er—youthful and—er—not to say beardless embodiment of Father Christmas. But I may assure you that the tokens about to be delivered to you by the hand of this—er—delightful deputy are nevertheless guaranteed all wool and a yard wide and have arrived via the usual reliable channels direct from the shop at the North Pole.” At this point he looked sharply at Hermione for confirmation and she managed to nod mutely, twisting her fingers together in an agony of embarrassment. “Therefore,” Archie continued briskly, taking pity on this incomprehensible child who, unlike his own, had no sense of fun and could not toss the ball back to him, “therefore, without further delay we will proceed to—er—proceed. Everybody must open his parcel as soon as he receives it—that is to say, no hiding it away till next Christmas, or any nonsense like that.” He stooped and lifted a square
tissue-wrapped
package from the top of the heap beneath the tree and peered profoundly at its label through his monocle. “Well, now, that’s very awkward, this first one seems to be for me. Couldn’t I just—” He made as if to tuck it well underneath at the back.

“Open it!” everybody yelled at him.

“But if I stop to open mine now it will hold up everybody else—”

“Open it!” they yelled at him, and “Oh, very well, have it your own way,” he grumbled, and plucked at the silver ribbon which tied it.

Hermione, almost forgetting herself in a child’s rapture over presents, anybody’s presents, leaned towards him, joining in the suspense. Camilla, the only one
besides Virginia who knew what was in the box, and who had herself chosen the exact spot most likely to be under Archie’s hand at the beginning, suppressed a giggle. Archie reached the box inside the paper, removed the lid, and lifted out a barrister’s wig, scrupulously copied in every detail in bright carroty red hair. A shout of joy went up, and Archie, not a muscle of his disciplined face betraying his own hysterical amusement, gazed round at them between benevolence and censure.

“I call that very thoughtful of somebody,” he remarked. “You have no idea how naked I feel without one of these things.” He adjusted it solemnly to his head, and flipped out the little ribboned queue behind. “Well, now,” he said, and caught Hermione’s eyes and winked at her so that she squirmed and sobered and remembered that she was in the limelight too. “Now if only you had a long white beard we could do this right, couldn’t we.” He stooped and solemnly chose another parcel from the heap. “Miss Camilla Scott,” he read
deliberately
, “of Richmond, U.S.A.” He handed it to Hermione for delivery, adding in an audible aside, “That will be the beautiful young lady in blue chiffon on the sofa by the fire.”

Hermione made the journey across the bare polished floor, wearing a rather smug smile and walking affectedly because everyone was watching her, and Virginia thought, “Why
is
she like that? Mine never were. Oh, God, is she going to curtsey to
each
one
of us as our turn comes?”

“His Grace the Duke of Apethorpe,” Archie read out as Hermione returned to his side again, and she set forth on the new mission to the accompaniment of rustling tissue paper in Camilla’s hands and a spontaneous cry of “
Oh
, Virginia!” as a silver filigree vinaigrette scented with very modern French
perfume came to light. “Miss Irene Campion,” Archie
announced
next, and weighed it in his hand before Hermione took it. “Feels like chocolates to me. Does it rattle?” They shook it, their heads together. “No—not a sound. Soap, maybe.” He sniffed it. “Well, I suppose she may as well have it.” Hermione was off again. “Now, this one,” Archie
continued
impressively, “this one I claim the privilege of presenting myself. You won’t need to guess whose name is on it.” He left the tree and carried Sally’s gift ceremoniously between his hands and laid it in hers with a little bow. Her upward smile into his face had all the practised coquetry and charm of a vanished era, as well as the warm, magnetic thing which was just Sally, secure and radiant in the midst of the homage she was so accustomed to that it was like the air she breathed.

The gifts went on, some beautiful, some comic, some quite valuable, all appropriate and chosen with understanding and care. Raymond, seated beside Jenny on the hearthrug bench, watched while she unwrapped first an expensive-looking little powder-box and then a bottle of French perfume—and lowered his nose obediently when the stopper was offered him to sniff. Muguet—lilies-of-the-valley. It suited her. He watched her dab it behind her ears, and the delicate fragrance enveloped them together in a new intimacy. Then he looked down to find Hermione standing before him with a ribboned parcel
extended
. He took it slowly in his left hand with a glance at Virginia as though for permission, and a quiet Thank-you to the child’s punctilious curtsey.

“Shall I undo it for you?” Jenny said, laying her own things aside, and he kept his eyes on her small deft hands while a jeweller’s box opened to reveal a gold wrist-watch with a link bracelet.

The sight of it caught him by the throat, made a stinging in his eyelids. It was the sort of gift they gave each other. And they had given it to him. The room by now was a
pandemonium
of tissue paper and joyful cries and hilarious laughter as the unwrapped gifts multiplied and no one waited any more
to see someone else’s knots untied. He looked up at Jenny, and she saw the tears in his eyes as she sat holding the watch for him.

“But I can’t take it,” he said, very low. “They shouldn’t do that, it’s much too good, I can’t—” His eyes went back to the watch. The famous name of its maker on the dial looked up at him. His inborn passion for fine mechanism made him want the watch more than he had wanted anything for years. It was the watch he had promised himself some day, and now here it was, in Jenny’s hands, while the cheap open-faced turnip-seed which his father had carried and which lost twelve minutes every day no matter what you did to it ticked in his pocket.