Kissing Kin (23 page)

After tea she escorted him punctiliously through the picture gallery, famous for its Van Dycks and Gainsboroughs and a glowing, breathing Opie of the fifth Duke as a boy. Raymond took it all in gravely, and no one would have suspected that it had never before occurred to him that paint and canvas could survive in beauty and grow in value for two hundred years. He thought the Romney Duchess looked exactly like Jenny, and she admitted that her father had always thought so too.

Finally, in ever-increasing constraint, they set out again down the avenue and through the gates in late sunshine on the bicycles. When they had come almost in silence to a secluded grassy spot in the lane, already in deepening twilight,
Raymond
reached out and caught her handlebars and brought both machines to a halt. She looked round at him doubtfully, still astride, one foot on the ground.

“Come and sit down,” he said, feeling for a cigarette, and he sat down first under some trees, motioning her to the place beside him. Jenny followed him obediently, her back very straight. His lighter clicked, he returned it to his pocket, and took both her hands in his. His face was soft and smiling now, but Jenny’s eyes were on their hands, and she did not see.

“You feel pretty bad, don’t you,” he said gently, watching her. She did not answer. “Don’t, Jenny. Don’t feel bad about me, please. If I had any doubts before, and I hadn’t, I’m sure now. You and I—we just don’t belong together. It’s tough now, I know. But you see what I mean—don’t you. When I look at that house of yours—and then think of Indian Landing—”

“I don’t think houses have much to do with it any more,” she said, looking down.

“They have a lot to do with it. I’ve been hard on you today—hard on myself too—I had to be. You’ll forgive me, some time. It’s the only way I could do it.”

“Do what?” she asked quickly and caught his eyes, and saw his face gentle and young as she loved it. “Oh, Raymond—I thought you’d stopped loving me!”

He made no answer, maddeningly, where denial was
urgently needed, but sat playing with her fingers in his, his face turned from her again.

“But you haven’t,” she persisted. “I saw it again just now. You
haven
’
t
.”

“I’m no good to you,” he said slowly. “I’ve told you that, can’t you see? There’s a guy back there at the house where we’re going that’s right for you. Forget about me, why don’t you. I’d only make you sorry you ever heard of me.”

“It’s Calvert I’m sorry about,” she said.

“Why? He’s going to get well. He’s your kind. I’ll be going back to France in a few weeks, with a job on my hands. You don’t want anything to do with that, you’ve seen how it is for these women with men in the Flying Corps. You know what can happen as well as I do!”

“So I should fall in love more comfortably with a man who is going to stay in England, and not have anything to worry about!” she challenged, and again he was silent. “That’s
childish
of you,” said Jenny with some heat. “As though I was shopping round for the easiest way to be in love! As though I could change overnight for my own convenience! What do you think I’m made of?”

To her angry amazement he looked up at her and laughed, he caught her chin between his thumb and finger and turned up her face to his and kissed her lightly on the lips and let her go.

“Got your dander up,” he remarked with satisfaction. “I can always get a rise out of you, can’t I. You can make it sound that way, I guess, if you try,” he went on seriously, “but it’s not what I mean. I’m only trying to think of you and your future.”

“Without you I haven’t any future,” she told him simply. “Without you, I would go back to where I was before you came—”

“Just where was that?”

“—where I had nothing to look forward to but what I’m doing now, turning myself into a kind sort of machine to make wounded men as comfortable and happy as possible—other
people’s men—trying not to think beyond that, day after day, trying not to have any emotions of my own, or any hopes, or any memories. Just being alive from day to day, without any particular reason, because there was nothing else to do—”

“Was it as bad as that?” he said incredulously, watching her. “You’re too young to feel like that. What makes you think I can change it? What makes you think you’d be any better off with me?”

Jenny looked up at him.

“Because I love you,” she said.

It was one of the cues he did not take up, wrapped in his own dark thoughts. He shook his head slowly.

“Now you do,” he said. “But things are all out of joint now. There’s a war on. If you’d met me in the ordinary way, none of it would have happened. If you hadn’t saved my life that night—”

“Phoebe was there too, to save your life. I didn’t do
anything.
”

“It wasn’t Phoebe I saw beside me every time I came up.”

“I terribly wanted you to live. Even then, I—couldn’t let you go.”

“Why?” He waited, his eyes on her face, patient and kind and puzzled. “Why me? What is there about a guy like me for you to—” He stumbled and evaded. “—to care about?”

“I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s nothing to do with you, or me, separately. It’s bigger than that. I don’t see how you can draw so sharp a line between us, anyway, we aren’t so different as you seem to think. We speak the same language, we come of the same stock. Do you know anything about your ancestors?”

“Not very much. There’s no picture gallery at Indian Landing.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said patiently. “In Virginia they have a phrase I love, I heard it first from Phoebe—if people have got the same blood to some degree of cousinship they’re kissing kin. If your great-great-grandfather was a
younger son, he may have gone out to America to make his fortune. Lots of them did. Your great-great-grandfather and mine may have been cousins—neighbours, anyway. Most of America has got to be in some degree related to most of England, because in the beginning they were, and their descendants must be still kissing kin. Perhaps you’ve only come back home after a couple of hundred years—Cousin Raymond.” She lifted her face for a kiss.

“I don’t stand a chance with you,” he said, muffled, and his arms went round her, and he tipped her back against the grass and buried his lips in her throat. Jenny lay still, spent and flooded with happiness. His lips moved upward across her cheek to the edge of her hair, and he drew her closer against him with a swift, cradling movement. “I give up,” he
whispered,
against her hair. “I don’t know what’s best any more. I only know I love you.”

He had said it. She stirred a little to slide an arm around his neck, for Jenny never could do things by halves, so that soon it was Raymond who drew away, rather abruptly, and sat up, feeling for his cigarettes. As he lit one,
his fine-fingered hands with their neglected nails were not quite steady. The sun had gone down and the lane was dark and deserted.

Jenny lay on her back, gazing up into the boughs above their heads. Relief and a sense of release were sharp as a pain, within her. Everything was all right now. He had said it. He loved her. Still.

“We’d better get moving,” he said, sitting beside her with his cigarette.

“Not just yet,” she sighed.

“What are you thinking?” He leaned on one
hand, so that his face hung above her, shutting out the treetops and the sky.

“Just—Raymond,” she said, and he kissed her again and again drew away voluntarily from her response.

“You’re lucky it’s me,” he said. “Don’t kiss anybody else like that, will you, in a dark lane.”

Jenny laughed confidently, lying where she was.

“I’m not likely to,” she said. “Shall we tell them now, at Farthingale?”

“No,” said Raymond, his face turned from her in the twilight.

There was a silence.

“I’d rather,” she ventured then.

“There’s nothing to tell,” he said, and Jenny sat up.

“But you said—”

“I know, I said I give up, didn’t I. And I do. If you still feel like this when the war is over, and if I’m—still worth anything to you—we’ll get married.”

“When the war is over!”

“That’s what I said.”

“B-but,
Raymond
—”

“I bet you’d marry me next week, wouldn’t you.”

“Yes—of course I would,” she answered breathlessly.

“Not me, you won’t,” said Raymond. “It would be awful easy for me to take you up on that, the way you are. But I’m not going to. Remember those two guys they put into my room at the Hall? The one with the burns, and the one with his face shot away? D’ya think I’m going to take a chance on handing you something like that myself?”

“It’s a chance everybody has to take these days.”

“You don’t have to. Because I’m going to see to it you don’t. Understand?” He turned to her and found both her hands and gathered them hard into his till it hurt. “Don’t think I don’t want you, before I go. But this is going to be just between you and me—till we see how things come out. Then, if anything happens to me, you’re still free, and there’s still Calvert, or somebody else. And if I come through all right, and you want to go on with it—we’ll see.”

She leaned against him, her forehead pressed against his sleeve, her hands in his.

“It’s not—
enough
,”
she said. “I’m proud of it—I want everybody to know.”

“It’s the only way I can do it at all,” he said. “Even that
way—don’t seem quite right to me. But it’s the best I can do now. You got right under my guard, didn’t you. I had this thing all figured out a different way. Doesn’t do much good to make up my mind with you around, does it.” He raised one of her hands and held it hard against his face, not kissing it. “You know how to make it pretty tough,” he said.

“And there’s another thing,” she said against his sleeve. “I don’t think it’s fair to Calvert.”

“It’s just as fair to him one way as another,” he maintained. “Besides—he’s going to live through this war. He can afford to take it easy for a while.”

“Raymond—don’t get any sort of idea that if you’re killed I’ll marry Calvert and be happy,” she told him shakily. “I couldn’t—possibly.”

“He’s a lot easier than I am,” he warned, and her head came up with a jerk.

“I told you I wasn’t looking for something easy!” she cried in exasperation, and he caught her up, laughing, his cheek against hers, rocking her in his arms.

“Don’t get so mad,” he said delightedly. “Gosh, you’ve got a temper!” He held her a moment, tense and silent. “We’re going to do this my way,” he said then. “That don’t seem right to you, does it. I ought to be the one to give in. Lots of people would always let you have your way about everything. I’m not like that, and that’s your bad luck. When I come up against something I don’t quite know how to deal with, I always get the bit in my teeth. That’s what I mean about being hard to handle. See?” She was silent, crumpled in his arms, her face hidden. “Want to quit now?” he asked gently. “There’s still plenty of time.” Jenny shook her head. It was the only move she made. “Remember what I said, then. If anything happens to me, you aren’t committed to anything, and nobody ever needs to know we were in love with each other. This is just a dream we both had, but you aren’t to go on thinking about it, if it ends. You’re not to grieve, Jenny, I don’t want to be the cause of any sorrow for you, dead or alive. That’s why I was
so leary about this whole thing, dear, I couldn’t see anything in it for yon but trouble, one way or another. Don’t think I mind a little trouble for myself—I’ve had trouble, I’m used to it. But I don’t want you to cry, Jenny, I—” He broke off, and bent his head. Jenny was quivering with sobs, soundless, but her slight body was racked with them in the circle of his arms. He put his fingers to her cheek and they came away wet. After a moment’s horror, he sat holding her quietly, his face against her hair—and it went through his mind that if he lived a week or a century, he would never know complete
forgetfulness
of this moment in the lane with Jenny crying against his heart. He had never known anyone to cry like that before—without a sound, but shaking and trembling, and tears coming like rain. In all his compassion, it never occurred to him to alter his own decisions or soften his inflexible
determination
not to see her bound to him in any way until he was sure of his own survival, whole. Their life together, if ever they had one, would be complicated enough, at best. And at the back of his consciousness crouched the relentless knowledge of the odds against him, piled up now for over three years. It was fantastic to suppose that they would see each other again, after he went out to France the next time. And in that case, the less he took from her now, the freer she would be when it was over. And it seemed to him that life itself ran out through his fingers like water into dry sand, while he held Jenny and waited for her to stop crying.

They were late to dinner, and explained that Jenny’s bike had broken down and Raymond had repaired it by the light of the lamp on his own. He gave a highly technical description of the trouble, and no one questioned its veracity.

That evening he heard Jenny play and sing for the first time, in the informal concert she and Camilla did so well at Calvert’s insatiable request, and Raymond knew a further enchantment, for he had a deep, untutored love of music. He sat listening with a pipe between his teeth, his head a little sunk, guarded,
almost mute, while every now and then the memory of those moments in the lane played through him like lightning
shimmering
down a cloudy sky. She would have been his, he had only to take her. He dwelt recklessly on
the idea, while Jenny sang. Fire and trust and joy, submission and rapture, were in that eager little creature for his claiming. For no one else the same. She had never felt like that for Gerald, he knew. She had learned it because of him. Dizzied, but obstinate, he clung to his determination to leave her free. Even if she never felt quite the same again—was it just being romantic, he wondered, to think that neither of them ever would?—something would come to her, someone was sure to make it up to her, in some degree. Better if she came to that without a ghost in the way. So he sat, withdrawn and silent, smoking, aching with love of her, convinced of his own doom.