Kissing Kin (17 page)

“Don’t you ever come up to Town yourself?” she ventured.

“Not often. It is very tiring for Sallee, and there is no point in her exposing herself to the raids.”

He obviously had no idea of ever coming to London without Sally. Camilla wondered if they were ever separated, but to put such a question to him would only sound petulant and childish now. She sighed, and he glanced at her over his fork.

“It might be that your brother should come here to
convalesce
,” he suggested gently.

“Yes—eventually, perhaps. And I might come with him for a few days.”

“It is lovely here later in the year. You should see
Gloucestershire
in May,” he said.

“I wonder what will be happening by then,” she murmured. “Will the war be over, do you think?”

“I’m afraid not so soon.”

“They think there will be another offensive, don’t they—by the Germans.”

“Any time now.”

“Sosthène—we
are
going to win this war, aren’t we?”

“But naturally,” he said with conviction. “Only not just yet. Germany has not yet sufficiently spent herself. We must have patience.”

Their eyes met across the table—the old world and the new—wisdom and youthful folly—discipline and ardour—and once again there passed between them that current of complete comprehension, in which he recognized the tribute she paid to him, and with a sense of inevitable desolation allowed it to lie there unclaimed.

“Yes,” said Camilla, obedient to his discretion. “I will try to be patient.”

She was trying now, as she sat in the railway carriage with Phoebe and Oliver. She was telling herself that her time would be very full when she got back to London, and with Calvert coming as well she would have a lot of extra things to do. She was trying not to think about Gloucestershire in May, or to promise herself that perhaps in four or five months she could go back with a good excuse—Calvert’s convalescence—and see Sosthène again. She knew that any letters which passed between them must include Sally—there was nothing he did that did not include Sally—and the knowledge of Sally,
unsuspicious
and content, in secure possession of his company morning, noon, and night was the hardest part of all to bear.

At Farthingale, Raymond progressed slowly with only one brief relapse. Sir Quentin made another visit and expressed satisfaction. Winifred set aside the yellow bedroom at the Hall for Raymond’s use after the operation, and as it was a slack time she undertook to leave the two other beds in the room empty for a few days, inquiring sardonically on the telephone if she should also have the red carpet laid down for his arrival. To which Jenny replied easily, “Shut up, darling, you know we promised Camilla nothing would be too good for him.”

“And I suppose,” said Winifred in a resigned sort of voice, “she wants you to look after him while he’s here.”

“Well, yes, she did, rather,” Jenny admitted, though she hadn’t meant to and instantly regretted it, and then drew a breath of relief because after all Winifred had suggested it herself.

She was finding Raymond not a very easy person to nip in the bud—not because he was at all obstreperous but rather because he was the opposite. There was nothing to rebuke him for. He never tried to catch her hand, for instance, he never asked favours or wanted to beg off the things that were required of him—he was always polite and docile and
respectful
. But his eyes, grey as a winter dawn, missed nothing she
did and seemed to follow the least movement of her hands and the changes of expression on her face with affectionate care as though memorizing what they saw. And his smile, when it came, was as intimate and possessive as a caress.

He always woke at least once during the night while she sat beside the bed, and she gave him broth or tea and a cigarette, and they exchanged a few quiet sentences, and he slept again. He made very little trouble even for his day nurse, Virginia reported, and when he did not sleep seemed still withdrawn into some quiet world of his own, disinclined for conversation, mute about his experiences in France, until Virginia said to Bracken that she had never known a man more courteously untalkative than Raymond was. She asked him if he wanted to read or be read to, and he listened gravely while she read off a dozen titles from the bookshelves in the corner of the room. Most of the miscellaneous collection which had found its way there obviously meant nothing to him, but he recognized with pleasure an old Jules Verne which he said he had read with his father years ago, and asked to see it again.

Virginia brought the volume to the bed, mystified, and he at once became absorbed in it. She noticed that he read slowly and thoroughly, turning the pages without haste, handling the book with respect, closing it and putting it out of harm’s way under the edge of his pillow when the tray with his dinner arrived. He was taught to take care of things, thought Virginia with a maternal tenderness. Books were not easy to come by in his father’s house. It was another fascinating clue to his
unknown
background—that books were not casual possessions to be thrown about and left with odd markers in them. Virginia herself, well educated as she considered herself to be, had never opened a volume of Jules Verne in her life, and could not imagine anyone, except possibly Archie, who might have done so. Barrie, Bennett, Wells, Kipling—he passed them all up. But Verne was an old friend. I’d better try him with
Swiss
Family
Robinson,
thought Virginia.

Before December thirtieth the family party had dwindled,
but neighbours were coming in for the evening and the rector was invited to dinner, and there would be champagne to see the New Year in. Raymond dozed off that night by nine o’clock, and roused again a little before midnight to find Jenny in the bedside chair reading his Jules Verne.

“Do you like it?” he murmured, the first indication she had had that he was awake.

“Yes, I do,” she said stoutly, though it had bored her a little, and she rose to take his temperature and pulse.

He surveyed her with visible amusement, his lips pursed over the thermometer which silenced him. When she removed it he said gently, “You’re awful cute sometimes.”

It was the sort of remark she knew it was wisest to try to ignore, so she began to heat his broth on the spirit stove, her back to the bed. When she returned with it he lay looking up at her in his unembarrassed absence of chatter, and she heard herself saying, “What’s cute about reading Jules Verne?”

“It’s no book for a girl,” he explained, still amused.

“I suppose you think I can’t understand anything but
The
Prisoner
of
Zenda!”

“Who was he?” said Raymond.

It was the sort of
impasse
she had encountered with him before, when to explain seemed ridiculous and to try to pass it off was embarrassing. Sometimes it was almost as though they had been educated in different languages, so that things which were commonplace to her were complete blanks in his mind, and the things which must have held a similar place in his own experience were to her as remote as Mars. When this happened she always pointed it out to herself as evidence that it was quite impossible for them to fall in love with each other, as they had nothing upon which to base even any sort of permanent friendship. She had always heard that in order to have any real success with a man you must have interests in common and if possible mutual friends, and above all that you must never step out of your class. So by all the rules she and Gerald had been perfectly suited to each other, and look what
happened. The same thing was not true of Gerald and Fabrice, and that was one of the reasons that their affair was frowned on. And yet the gulf between them was nothing like so wide as the one which separated herself and Raymond.

She would get this far in her fine reasoning, sometimes, and then the whole thing would collapse into a desire to laugh a
reckless
, giddy sort of laugh which meant
What
of
it?
Or it would dissolve slowly in a warm wave of feeling which meant
I
don’t
care.
But nothing of all this ever showed in her serene, smiling face with its tilted chin, and she would answer as she answered now, almost without inflection, saying the obvious thing.

“That’s the kind of novel schoolgirls have to hide under the mattress.”

“Did you?” he asked interestedly, and she nodded. “What is it about?” he insisted with curiosity.

She found herself trying to describe to him the intricate plot of Rudolph Rassendyl’s impersonation of the Ruritanian king, and to her surprise Raymond followed it acutely. When she bogged down and gave it up he asked to read the book all through, and she promised to find him a copy for after the operation.

At this point Bracken arrived in the doorway carrying a tinkling bucket of ice with a half bottle of champagne in it and two glasses. He peeked in cautiously and then when he saw that Raymond was awake he entered, and set the bucket and glasses on a table.

“We’re getting ready to drink the New Year in,” he said. “Here’s yours. Mind you join in when we start singing.” He wrapped a napkin round the bottle, popped out the cork for them, waved his hand and hurried back downstairs. Raymond looked inquiring.

“Don’t you do that in America?” Jenny asked. “Here we always open a bottle of champagne, and when twelve o’clock strikes we join hands to make a circle and sing
Auld
Lang
Syne,
and then everybody kisses everybody all round and drinks a champagne toast and the New Year is officially in.”

“It sounds like a nice idea,” Raymond said, and the clocks all over the house began to strike and downstairs somebody started
Auld
Lang
Syne
on the piano and broke off abruptly as the player was gathered into the singing circle.

Jenny’s hand closed warmly on Raymond’s as she stood beside the bed, and her clear voice rose to join the others which floated up the stairs. At the end of the verse she bent and kissed him.

She had meant it to be just a quick friendly gesture—she had no idea how by a slight turn of his head on the pillow, a tightening of his fingers on
hers, it became a declaration, by both of them, of a full-grown devotion neither of them could deny. The demand of his lips on hers reached far deeper than any kiss of Gerald’s during all the months of their engagement, left her warm and shaking and brimming with heedless
happiness
. When she straightened at last, beyond his reach, and stood looking down at him, pink-cheeked and with bright, defiant eyes because she didn’t care what happened to her now, she was enveloped in his smile.

“Happy New Year,” said Raymond softly. “And as they say in your army, what price champagne!”

Lightheaded, lighthearted, beyond doubt or reflection, Jenny brought two full glasses to the bedside and gave him one.

“In France,” said Raymond, lifting it to the light, “they tell me they kiss the brim instead of touching glasses.” He did so, his eyes on hers, and she did likewise, and they laughed
contentedly
and drank. “That’s wonderful stuff,” said Raymond on a very cheerful note. “It does a lot for you, that stuff. Anybody’d think I’d already had mine, wouldn’t they!” He sipped again, and laughed again, to himself, and his face was young and gay and—as Virginia had already noted—beautiful. “How I had the nerve!” he marvelled. “I never thought I had the nerve. You might’ve murdered me.”

“No,” said Jenny, and sat down in the chair and leaned her head against the back, holding her half-empty glass. “No—I liked it.”

“Did you, dear?” He lay very still, watching her. “Oh, Jenny, did you—honest?” His eyes, when she only turned her head against the back of the chair and gave him a long, silent, shining look, were anxious. “It’s hard for me to believe,” he said simply. “I—know what I know now, but it’s hard to believe.”

“What do you know, darling?”

“You feel the same way about me—that I feel about you. Don’t you. And it’s not the champagne. Is it?” And when she only sat smiling at him mistily, the half-empty glass in her hand—“How could it happen, like that?” he wondered. “You don’t know anything about me. I didn’t even save your brother, because you haven’t got one. So far as you’re
concerned,
Jenny, I’m just something the cat brought in.”

Her head moved slowly, lazily, in negation, against the back of the chair. She felt relaxed, at peace, safe in some
unimaginable
haven, but it was not the champagne.

“You’re what I love,” she said steadily, for Jenny never could do things by halves. “I didn’t want to. I tried not to. I never meant to love anybody again.”

“I know. Camilla told me. But it won’t be like that with me.” His dark, expressive face was full of compassion.

“I don’t care,” Jenny murmured, smiling. “So long as it’s you—I just don’t care. I’m lost—nothing matters—I’m past praying for, darling. I don’t know how you did it, but—it’s done.”

His brows drew together in a half scowl, his lips tightened, and he looked at her straightly under his lashes.

“I’m kind of surprised myself, you know,” he said with a gentle belligerence. “On my side, I mean. I’ been around quite a while without anything like this happening to me.”

“You weren’t—you haven’t got a girl back home?” She looked down, turning the glass in her fingers.

“No.” It was a simple statement, truthful and sincere. “There’s nobody got any claim on me, if that’s what you mean. Nowhere.”

“I’m glad.”

“Not that it would have made much difference if they had, I guess. This would have wiped it out. Any sort of claim. Knowing what I know now. Good thing I’m free, though, isn’t it. Dear—” It seemed to be the strongest word in his vocabulary. “I don’t feel quite right about this, not till I get my wings. Everybody’s been swell to me here, don’t think I don’t know that. I don’t want to seem to take advantage.”

“B-but—”

“When I’ve got a commission, like that fellow at dinner—when I can fly, I’ll feel different about it then. But honestly, I don’t dare face your people before then, they’d have a right to kick me downstairs. Do you understand what I mean?”