Kissing Kin (2 page)

“Poor Miles
was
dull,” Sue agreed frankly. “She thought she wanted something like that. She thought it might save her, like an anaesthetic, from wanting Oliver. Because you see she and Oliver went right on being in love, no matter what they did. They were meant for each other. Sometimes it happens that way,” said Sue gently, “and then you never do get over it.”

“So she wasn’t happy with Uncle Miles,” said Camilla. “I was right, then. I never thought she could be. It was a mercy that he died, wasn’t it!”

Sue sighed.

“I don’t know, dear—if he had lived to see their baby—if Phoebe had had both him and Jeff to build a life on—she might have managed it the way she wanted to. But with Miles dying like that, so suddenly, she didn’t know where she was again, she didn’t know what to do with Jeff when she got him, or—how to go on. She didn’t
want
Jeff, I began to think, without Miles too.”

“So she dumped the poor kid on Dinah and went off to nurse soldiers in France,” said Calvert, who sometimes saw things with an uncompromising eye.

“She went to find Rosalind, because no one knew what had happened to her in Germany, and it was a good thing she did too,” said Sue firmly. “After Rosalind was saved, Phoebe just sort of—stayed on in England and France. I can see how it is. She wants to feel as though she is
doing
something. Even you feel the same,” she reminded Camilla. “And Dinah is glad to have Jeff. She can never have one of her own, you know.”

“And what about this Oliver?” asked Calvert. “Will he be wounded and brought into the very hospital she works in, do you think, and will she nurse him back to life like the
story-books
, and what about the woman he married?”

“I wish you wouldn’t be flippant,” said Sue gravely. “I suppose it does sound rather like a cinema to you—and you aren’t accustomed to thinking of your elders as able to have emotions or romance of their own, are you. Phoebe’s only thirty-six, even now. And I hope you don’t think she and Oliver are enjoying themselves, these days. He was badly wounded during the first summer in France, and is at the British War Office now, doing Staff work. Phoebe is still drudging her heart out in a hospital near Paris, and Bracken says she will write the best book of her life if she lives through it.”

“And Oliver’s wife?” Camilla persisted.

“She died in an accident during an air raid in London last winter.”

“Died?” cried Calvert. “Why, then they can marry each other after all and live happily ever after, just like the fairy tales!”

“I suppose they will marry eventually,” said Sue without smiling. “But there isn’t much time for fairy tales in Europe now, Calvert.”

“Well, it just shows you, doesn’t it,” said Camilla
thoughtfully
. “Here’s one of the oldest and saddest stories in the world, going on right in the family under our very noses. Everybody married to the wrong ones, and breaking their hearts, and living along just as if nothing was happening at all. Maybe Uncle Miles is well out of it, at that! What becomes of Jeff?”

“Bracken wants to adopt him and bring him up to inherit the newspaper, as he did from his father,” Sue explained.

“I think that would be very heartless of Cousin Phoebe!” cried Camilla.

“Why would it?” asked Sue reasonably. “It’s all in the family. And they can do more for him than Phoebe alone ever could. Bracken needs an heir and Miles doesn’t—any more.”

“Seems a bit hard on Jeff, all the same,” said Calvert.

“I don’t see why,” Sue argued patiently. “He’s only four now, and he’s got nothing to lose, and he adores Dinah—and Bracken will be a father to him.”

“Still, I should think Jeff would feel pretty queer about his family when he’s old enough to think,” said Camilla. “His own mother deserting him like that.”

“But she
hasn’t
—” Sue began, and gave it up. “It isn’t as though she had run away with Oliver, or anything like that,” she pointed out.

“No, but still—” Their obstinate young faces showed that they were not convinced. Camilla rose and returned to the letter on Sue’s desk. “It will feel very strange, meeting Cousin Phoebe again, now that I know all this,” she said. “Shall I see Oliver, do you think?”

“As he is Dinah’s brother, no doubt you will.”

“How many brothers has Dinah
got?”
demanded Calvert.

“Edward, the Earl,” said Sue, checking them off on her
fingers. “John, the M.P.—nobody ever seems to see much of him, and he has a vague wife and daughter. Oliver—he’s a Colonel now, they say. Archie, married to Virginia. And Gerald, the youngest, a captain in the artillery, I believe.”

“What a mob,” said Camilla. “All married and all got children, just to make it more complicated!”

“All but Gerald.”

“I’ll never be able to keep ’em straight,” said Camilla, to whom the ramifications of the Day-Sprague-Murray clan in America were as simple as a, b, c. “It will be nice to see Virginia again, she was always my favourite when I was little.”

“I must say I look forward to Cousin Phoebe now,” said Calvert irrepressibly. “Honestly, I never
dreamed!
Going round as though butter wouldn’t melt, and all the time—”

“Calvert,” said Sue, and “Shut up, Calvert,” said Camilla, and “Oh, all right,” said Calvert, “but all the same, it’s great fun having a dark horse in the family. The rest of us are so rotten respectable!”

“You’re forgetting Cousin Sally,” Camilla suggested, and—“You’ll never get that letter done,” said Sue.

Their mother cried a little, but took it better than they had expected, once her worst fears had materialized, and they both wanted to go. And the end of the same week found them having tea in Dinah’s drawing-room in New York.

Dinah quite understood that they wanted to go and fight the war. All of her own family were in it, and she often felt very cut off and frustrated because she wasn’t in it too. The big Georgian country house whose bleak nursery and schoolroom floor she had left at barely eighteen to marry Bracken Murray had been converted by her brother Edward, Earl of Enstone, into a hospital for wounded men. Edward was ADC to somebody on the Staff and didn’t come under fire very often. Their sister Clare worked at the Hall as a VAD, and Edward’s wife Winifred was in charge there, and ran the whole thing
very efficiently, everybody said. But then, she would, Dinah always thought enviously, for Winifred was brisk and
competent
and rather on the plump side, and running things came naturally to her—she even ran Edward, who stood six feet two and weighed a good fifteen stone. Edward’s two sons were at Eton, but Hubert the elder would soon be old enough for the Army.

The Earl’s town house in St. James’s Square, an oppressively rococo mansion, had been an officers’ hospital since 1914, and they were having quite a lively time there now with the air raids, according to Virginia. Dinah was very fond of Virginia, and they had worked together at turning the London house into a hospital, back in that first dreadful autumn of the war. Together they had taken their VAD training, and Dinah cheerfully slaved long, backbreaking hours at dull tasks in the scullery and lower regions, realizing with preoccupied surprise as she did so that in the normal course of events as the daughter and sister of the owner of the house she might never have set foot behind the green baize door which led to the servants’ quarters where she now spent her days. Not, as Virginia pointed out, that the schoolroom floor where for generations the unconsidered young of the family had slept and fed and learned their lessons offered anything as comfortable as the housekeeper’s room.

Dinah found it very hard to bear that Virginia was still on VAD duty in St. James’s Square, being bombed, while she herself had one day collapsed ignominiously in the middle of the kitchen floor and been carried off to bed and then sent back to America to recuperate. Virginia must be very tough, although she didn’t look it, to stand so much punishment, and her letters were still gay and undismayed, no matter what happened, and Zeppelins were coming down all over the place now. Archie in the Judge Advocate-General’s department was not so far in any great danger, and that was a relief—it was fantastic to Dinah to think of Archie as being considered a bit old for active service, and he was very fed up about it himself.
He was younger than Bracken at that, and Bracken as a
correspondent
saw much too much of the firing-line to suit anyone but himself, and once he had nearly been taken prisoner.

This was Bracken’s second war. Nearly twenty years ago he had gone to Cuba and followed the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill and nearly died there of a wound and fever. Dinah at sixteen had sat that one out in England, waiting for news of him, and now here she was in New York, and if Bracken in France got wounded again—

At this point Dinah would always seek the company of Jeff, who was the main reason she wasn’t by now moving heaven and earth to get back to England because she was almost well again. Jeff was a windfall, for Dinah. He had been born at Williamsburg the summer before the war began, six months after the death of his father. Lost and restless in her sudden widowhood, bewildered by her unaccustomed motherhood, Phoebe had brought Jeff and his coloured mammy to New York in the spring of 1915 and asked Dinah and Bracken to keep him with them while she ran over to Germany. She seemed to think it would be as simple as it had been before the war began, to pay a visit to Germany. She found out
otherwise
. And as the weeks slipped by and Phoebe did not return, Dinah in New York began to play a pathetic and dangerous game—she pretended that Jeff was hers for keeps. He was only two years younger than the baby she had lost would have been, and all the other wives in the family, both in England and America, had babies. It didn’t seem fair to Dinah that she alone should have failed. Virginia had had four, with apparently the greatest of ease. And now Phoebe didn’t seem really to want Jeff—everybody suspected that she had only married poor Miles Day to keep the wind away, when it was Oliver that she loved.

Bracken returned to France in the summer of 1915, and except for a few weeks in New York last winter he had been there ever since, with brief breathers in England. Now that the submarines were so bad in the North Atlantic, Dinah was quite
willing that he should not risk the voyage just to see her. They had discussed her bringing Jeff to England, and delayed for the same reason—that and a recent illness which had made his diet important, and food was now becoming a problem in England.

Jeff came down to tea in Dinah’s drawing-room the day that Calvert and Camilla arrived in New York. He was a grave, long-headed child, just turning four. Bracken had not seen him for months, but Dinah was careful that being brought up by women did not make a mollycoddle of Jeff. His light-brown hair was cut boy-fashion, his clothes were simple, with breeches and no frills. His handclasp was firm and he looked you in the eye.

He accepted a cup of cambric tea—hot water, milk, and sugar—and a toasted muffin, and dealt with it tidily by himself without interrupting or seeming to pay much attention to the conversation. Camilla’s eyes kept going back to him, and at last she said, “Honestly, how
can
she?”

“What?” said Dinah, knowing very well.

“How
can
Phoebe just
give
him to somebody else—
anybody
else—to bring up?”

“Don’t you think I’m doing a good job?” Dinah asked anxiously.

“Yes, of course. He’s wonderful. If Phoebe saw him now I bet she’d be sorry.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Dinah with a little sigh.

“Well, she can’t take him back now, can she, once you’ve adopted him legally.”

“If she ever wants him back, we could hardly stand in the way,” said Dinah, and Camilla gave her a quick, understanding look.

“Let’s hope she won’t, of course, for your sake. But what about
him?
How do you explain it to him?”

“I don’t try.”

“But some time—”

“He doesn’t miss her, you know. He loves me in her place.”

“What does he call you?”

“Diney. I’m not fooling him. He knows I’m not his mother. But he’d just as soon have me, truly he would.”

“I don’t doubt that,” said Camilla. “What’s this about Phoebe and your brother Oliver?”

“She’ll marry him, I hope. He’s earned it.”

“Has he got children?”

“A daughter. She’s nine.”

“I wonder what she’ll think!” said Camilla, and Dinah sighed again.

“She’s just like her mother,” she admitted. “I couldn’t like Maia. None of us did. I tried, but I just couldn’t
like
her.’

“Did Oliver?”

“We-ell—” said Dinah with a rueful smile. “Anyway, he likes Hermione, and she adores him.”

“Isn’t it strange and—romantic,” said Camilla unwillingly. “Imagine all this going on right in the family. Phoebe and Oliver all these years, in spite of Jeff and—what’s her name again?”

“Her-
mi
-o-ne,” said Dinah distinctly, and made a face. “Maia chose it.”

“Oh, dear,” said Camilla. “And would Phoebe live in England if she marries Oliver?”

“I can’t imagine what Oliver would do in America—he’s Army,” said Dinah. “Her books often had an English
background
, anyway. She can go on writing them there. If the war ever ends.”

“Speaking of the war,” said Calvert, bringing them back to it firmly, and disposing of women’s gossip.

When Camilla sailed for England at the end of the month, Calvert had already crossed the border to enlist with the Canadians and was training under canvas in the Laurentians. The first letters she had from him were gaily studded with Army slang and a few technical terms thrown in to impress her. It was plain that he was happy there, and was adapting himself with ease to the tough existence of a new recruit, walking his ten miles without falling dead, eating his dull,
plentiful food with an uncritical appetite, forming friendships in the oddly assorted society into which he had pitchforked himself.

Camilla was very proud of him. She had known all along that he wasn’t a sissy and would not be dismayed by bad weather or bodily discomfort and privation—but she had wondered about the strangeness, for that was her own
difficulty
. She herself was as brave as a lion, she was sure, and wouldn’t mind submarines or bombs a bit, but she did dread homesickness and separation from Calvert. He, of course, had once been away from Richmond to school. But she, even while she was still under Dinah’s wing, had felt suddenly unfledged and forlorn after Calvert went to Canada.