No Fond Return of Love (25 page)

In theory, of course, divorce was not approved of in Mrs Williton’s circle, though where one’s own daughter was involved, and where her husband had turned out badly, was, in fact, a ‘libertine’, it was a different matter. Mrs Williton had even gone as far as suggesting that Marjorie should see a solicitor about the possibility of divorcing Aylwin. But when it came to presenting evidence it did not seem to amount to very much; perhaps it was not really ‘adultery’ – kissing a woman who had been helping him with his book – entertaining a young girl to a glass of sherry – the solicitor, wise and kindly though he undoubtedly was, made it all sound rather ridiculous. He hadn’t exactly said ‘I’m afraid you must do better than that,’ but he had implied it. The only hope now was Italy – Tuscany, Mrs Williton thought, lingering on the sinister associations she had given the name.

The journey passed quickly. The window was opened and shut several times, almost amid laughter, the couple in the window proving most accommodating. The furtive sandwich-eating and the bringing out of the flasks of tea was accomplished with hardly any embarrassment. At last the train began to move more slowly, and on their right the sea came into view and was greeted with exclamations all round. It looked grey and cold, and the couple in the window remarked that they wouldn’t care to bathe in that, thank you. Mrs Williton thought how mucn cosier it would be to stay in one of the bright-looking little holiday chalets than in the gloomy Eagle House Private Hotel. At Taviscombe station they had to take a taxi, though she resented the extravagance as she always did, but there was no bus that went near enough.

Mrs Forbes was waiting in the hall when they arrived.

‘That old eagle,’ she said, pointing to the bird, ‘ ‘tis losing its feathers.’

If Mrs “Williton and Marjorie thought this a strange form of greeting they were by now used enough to Mrs Forbes not to show it.

‘Well, Marjorie, how are you, dear?’ she went on, obviously making an effort to behave like a normal mother-in-law. ‘And how’s my lad? Not been behaving himself too well by all accounts,’ she added, with what seemed to Marjorie a leering smile.

To hear Aylwin called ‘my lad’ and to have his conduct dismissed in such a phrase was making altogether too light of the whole matter, Mrs Williton thought indignantly.

‘Perhaps we could see our room,’ she said rather stiffly. ‘There’ll be plenty of time to talk afterwards. Are you full with visitors?’

‘Not
full
, as you might say. I’ve got Nev here and two very nice young ladies, but I don’t reckon to do much business these days. Bed and breakfast in the season and evening meal if they want it – I’ve made my bit, you know, though between you and me I’m not going to tell those robbers in the Income Tax where I’ve put it,’ Mrs Forbes rambled on. ‘Oh, here’s Nev – he’ll take your luggage.’

Neville Forbes appeared, smiling pleasantly. The sight of him in his cassock did much to reassure Mrs Williton and she felt, as Dulcie had in the cemetery, not only the appropriateness of a cassocked clergyman among tombstones, but his essential Tightness anywhere. If only it could have been Neville that Marjorie had married! she thought regretfully.

‘This isn’t the room we usually have, is it?’ she remarked as Mrs Forbes opened a door. But what did it matter? It was, if anything, a rather pleasanter room.

‘Well, people might come, you never know these days,’ said Mrs Forbes vaguely, as if she believed it less and less. ‘I’ll leave you to unpack now. Dinner is at half past seven.’

In their room Mrs Williton and her daughter turned to each other in the way that people left together in a hotel bedroom do. Mrs Williton held up a towel with a frayed edge, Marjorie commented on the pink plastic tooth mugs and turned back the eider-downs to count the number of blankets on the beds.

‘It’s nice to have a proper wash,’ said Mrs Williton, running water into the basin. ‘You can’t really wash your hands on the train – those little pieces of soap never lather properly and the water’s never hot.’

‘I wonder who the two young ladies are,’ Marjorie said. ‘It seems funny to think of anyone staying here from choice.’

A heaviness of spirit had descended on her and she was feeling how much better it would have been to have stayed at home. As she unpacked she wished she had brought different clothes with her – the pink twin-set rather than the mauve, a nicer dress to wear in the evenings, and her new raincoat instead of the old one she had thought good enough for Taviscombe.

‘I wonder who the people who have just arrived are,’ said Viola to Dulcie.

‘Yes – I’d almost got to thinking of Eagle House as our own private place.’

‘Like the grave,’ said Viola.

‘Ah, yes, where none embrace,’ said Dulcie, catching the allusion. ‘Well, evidently not Neville,’ she added absently, for she was still shaken by the revelations at the castle, since which nothing had seemed quite real.

‘Perhaps they’ll be at dinner,’ said Viola. ‘It will seem awkward in the dining-room with other people there – do you think we’ll have to make conversation?’

‘It’ll be difficult if they’re in the opposite corner.’

‘I expect we shall all be put in the window,’ said Viola, ‘the kind of cosiness I
don’t
very much like.’

But when the gong, rung by Neville, boomed out there was no sign of the other visitors. Over roast lamb and bottled gooseberries and custard, Viola speculated as to what could have happened to the new arrivals. Dulcie was less interested in their whereabouts than in the idea of Mrs Forbes bottling gooseberries, which she found impossible to imagine.

‘But Dulcie,’ Viola persisted, ‘if they aren’t eating in the dining-room, where are they eating? I suppose they’ve gone out.’

‘Surely not on their first evening? You don’t think they could be dining with Mrs Forbes and Neville?’

‘They might be. I think they were women, judging by then voices.’

‘I know,’ said Dulcie, ‘it’s Miss Spicer and her mother come to claim Neville.
They
would naturally have dinner with him and Mrs Forbes.’

‘Oh, of course,’ said Viola. ‘But don’t forget that the mother is said to be over eighty and bedridden.’

They finished their meal and drank cups of coffee, which, as Viola commented, tasted as if it had been well boiled. They decided to go and sit in the lounge for a while and browse among the books in the glass-fronted bookcase.

‘Oh  –  how nice!’ The exclamation startled them a little, and they saw that the newly arrived visitors had just come out of Mrs Forbes’s private sitting-room. ‘We’ve met before, haven’t we? What a funny thing, seeing you here!’ Marjorie confronted Dulcie in such a way that there was no possible escape.

For a moment Dulcie thought of denying that she had ever met Marjorie, but while she hesitated Marjorie was enthusiastically recalling the occasion of their meeting – the jumble sale in aid of the organ fund in her mother’s house.

‘You bought that rather sweet little Italian pottery donkey, didn’t you. I remember I had such a time wrapping it up – the ears would keep poking through the paper,’ she laughed.

Her mother stood by with a pleased expression on her face. To hear somebody recall the happy occasion of the little sale – and it
had
been a success, over £20 profit  –  was the nicest thing that had happened since their arrival in Taviscombe. She and Marjorie had had a trying meal, with Neville not seeming to know what to talk about, and Mrs Forbes going on about the moulting eagle and how well her ‘lads’, as she would insist on calling them, had done for themselves. It was impossible even to touch upon Aylwin’s disgraceful behaviour, for whenever Mrs Williton tried to hint at it Mrs Forbes would bring out a story about some person in Taviscombe who had behaved in a similar, generally worse, manner some thirty or forty years ago. Both Mrs Williton and Marjorie were beginning to be very sorry that they had come. Even the prospect of sea air was not particularly attractive, for the weather was dull and rainy and a brisk tap on the barometer in the hall showed that it was falling.

‘Yes, I think I do remember you,’ said Dulcie, trying to gain time.

‘I’m Marjorie Forbes,’ she said eagerly, ‘and this is my mother, Mrs Williton.’

‘I’m Dulcie Mainwaring, and this is my friend Viola Dace,’ said Dulcie in return.

‘Funny – I had the idea your name was different,’ said Marjorie. ‘A shorter name, but I can’t remember now what it was.’

‘Oh, you must be confusing me with somebody else,’ said Dulcie quickly, hoping that the false name she had given at the sale would not be remembered.

‘And how do you like Eagle House?’ asked Mrs Williton, with a note of challenge in her voice.

‘It has great atmosphere, I think,’ said Dulcie.

‘It certainly has that,’ said Mrs Williton, not quite knowing how to take the remark.

‘Mrs Forbes is my husband’s mother,’ said Marjorie, as if to fore-stall any too frank expression of opinion.

‘Oh, then Eagle House must be a very special place for you,’ said Dulcie, much too gushingly in her nervousness. It seemed so odd to think of Aylwin being the husband of this dim young woman in the pale blue wool dress, with a single string of pearls and diamanté flower spray brooch. She seemed so totally unsuitable. Was it

Aylwin’s father coming out in him, she wondered. And yet Mrs Forbes, even if she had been beneath him socially, was so much a personality in her own right. What was the explanation? Dulcie supposed that, for some reason or other, he must have fallen in love with her; it was as simple as that.

The four ladies parted with mutual expressions of goodwill.

‘I expect we’ll be seeing you about the place,’ Marjorie said.

‘How strange that she didn’t appear to recognize me,’ said Viola, when she and Dulcie were alone.

‘Well, you haven’t met often,’ said Dulcie, ‘and probably emotion has somehow blotted out your appearance – you know – you are something she didn’t want to remember.’

‘It was
I
who felt the emotion,’ said Viola indignantly. ‘In fact it’s still rather painful for me to meet Aylwin’s wife. It brings it back to see how utterly unsuitable she is. How could he
ever
… but what’s the use of asking.’

‘No, some men seem to make a habit of choosing the wrong women,’ said Dulcie thoughtfully. ‘I suppose it’s because subcon-sciously they don’t really want what’s good for them.’ She remembered Maurice in the early days of their engagement saying that she was good, ‘like bread’, but who wanted bread all the time? Following up the analogy, she tried to think what Marjorie was like – some kind of fancy cake or ‘pastry’ seemed to suggest itself immediately, the kind of thing one might start and not be able to finish. ‘Rather embarrassing, really, that they should be here,’ she said to Viola. ‘Will they begin to wonder about us, do you suppose?’

‘No,’ said Viola. ‘Anybody might come to Taviscombe, and The Anchorage could only take us for one night. Don’t forget that.’ She took a letter from her bag and began to read it, smiling to herself in the irritating way that people sometimes do when they are secretly pleased by something. Dulcie supposed it was from Bill Sedge, but could not bring herself to ask.

‘All the same,’ Dulcie said, ‘I do feel a little uneasy about the whole thing. Supposing we let out that we’d been to Neville’s church or that we’d seen Mr Forbes’s grave or  –  oh, so many things!’

‘There can be an explanation for anything,’ said Viola firmly. ‘And we know that truth is stranger than fiction,’ she added, smiling down at her letter. ‘I’m sure Mrs Williton would be the first to admit that.’

SENHOR MacBRIDE-PEREIRA stood at his window with a let-ter in his hand. It was written on blue deckle-edge paper in a flowing, feminine hand and yet it was about a simple, almost humdrum, matter. Mrs Beltane proposed to raise the rent of his flat, or, as she delicately put it, ‘adjust his rental.’ He repeated the words over to himself, taking pleasure in the sound of them, which, after a few repetitions, became totally meaningless, like some quaint medieval formula.

She wants more money, he said to himself, perhaps she even
needs
more money; but it was a subject he could not possibly have spoken to her about, though he would have enjoyed the elegant circumlocutions she might have employed. Indeed, he thought ironically, it would have been less painful to both of them had he lived rent-free. The simplest way of achieving this state would obviously be by asking her to marry him, and for a moment he almost considered the idea, only to reject it before it could take any sort of practical form. Marriage was not for him, and he had now become too set in his ways to consider even the marriage of true minds. And she might well find that a little ‘tame’ (was that the word?), for she was still a handsome woman. She would not be content with the quiet life he liked to lead, and she might mock at the way he liked to sit wearing his kilt in the evenings.

Still standing by the window, he folded the letter and replaced it in its envelope. It would be a simple matter to instruct his bank to increase, no,
adjust
, the amount of the banker’s order, that flew like a kind of peaceful dove, quarterly and in advance, from his account to hers. Had their relationship been less delicate, he might have run downstairs, with the letter in his hand, telling her that he would of course be glad to pay the extra she demanded. But as it was he had to ponder on the kind of reply he could write, equalling or even surpassing hers in delicacy. He could see that she v’as in the front garden tending some pot plants, using a new watering can of some white iridescent material – plastic, he supposed – in the form of a swan. Was this perhaps a very slight error of taste, he asked himself thoughtfully, as he watched the water trickling from the bird’s beak. Not if he could turn it into poetry, he decided. ‘Lines to a Lady with a Watering Can in the Form of a Swan’ might be the title; it would be a very minor poem, perhaps even unfinished. Mrs Beltane’s Christian name was Doris, which would give it an eighteenth-century touch.

Two figures were strolling along the road, and as they came nearer Senhor MacBride-Pereira saw that one of them was the young girl beloved by Paul Beltane. The other was a middle-aged, good-looking man. Outside the house they stopped and he made some movement towards her, almost as if he had been about to kiss her. Then, evidently remembering that they might be overlooked, he contented himself with taking her hand and raising it to his lips. The girl ran smiling into the house – evidently she had been coming to see Paul – and the man turned and began to walk away in the rather lost manner of somebody in a strange neighbourhood uncertain of where he is going.