Sheltering Rain (3 page)

Alice had been relaxed there, too, had blossomed in the dry heat, where everyone spoke her language and the tall, bronzed men flirted disgracefully. There, Alice's manners had been the peak of refinement, her clothes so far beyond anything they had seen, and she could appear as she had wanted to appear: chic, cosmopolitan, exotic by way of her exile. Plus, Marcelle was younger than Alice, and enjoyably deferential in all matters of taste and style. This elevated sense of goodwill had meant that Alice had been much less “bothered” by Joy than usual, had waved her off to the beach or to the mall with barely a backward look, unlike in Hong Kong, where she was permanently preoccupied with the deficiencies of Joy's appearance, manners, and the potential dangers, in an uncivilized country, of letting her out on her own.

“I hate my life,” she said out loud, letting her thoughts flood out and hang, like brooding clouds, in the air before her.

“Ma'am?”

It was Bei-Lin, standing in the doorway. “There is a gentleman to see you.”

“For my mother?”

“No, ma'am. He ask for you.” She grinned, meaningfully.

“You'd better show him in.”

Frowning, Joy smoothed back her hair and stood. Company was the last thing she wanted.

The door opened, and in walked a man she had never seen before, dressed in a white, short-sleeved shirt, and cream-colored trousers. He had short, neatly cut, reddish hair, a longish, patrician face, and pale blue eyes. He was also tall, and stooped unnecessarily, seemingly out of habit, as he came through the door. Naval, she thought, abstractly. They always stooped through doorways.

“Miss Leonard.” He held a straw hat in front of him, clutching it with both hands.

Joy looked blankly. She couldn't work out how he might know her name.

“I'm Edward Ballantyne—sorry if this is an imposition. I just wanted—I just thought I'd see how you were.”

Joy gazed at his face, and suddenly flushed with appalled recognition. She had seen that face only in duplicate before. Her hand rose unconsciously to her mouth.

“I took the liberty of asking your friend your name and address. I just wanted to make sure you got home safely. I felt rather guilty about letting you go on your own.”

“Oh, no,” said Joy, looking determinedly down at her feet. “I was fine. You're very kind,” she added, after a pause, aware that she was being rude.

They stood for some minutes, until Joy realized uncomfortably that he wasn't going to offer to leave. She felt so uncomfortable that her skin had begun to prickle. She had never been so embarrassed as she had been last night, and now it was repeating on her, like a too-strong taste. Why couldn't he just leave her alone? Leave her to her private humiliation? Bei-Lin kept loitering anxiously in the doorway, but Joy studiously ignored her, damned if she was going to offer him a drink.

“Actually,” he said, after a lengthy pause, “I was wondering whether you would like to go for a walk. Or a game of tennis. Our commander has been given special permission to use some courts down by Causeway Bay.”

“No, thank you.”

“Perhaps I could ask you to show me some of the local sights? I've never been to Hong Kong before.”

“I'm very sorry, but I was just on my way out,” said Joy, who found she still couldn't look at him.

There was a long pause. He was definitely staring at her. She could feel it.

“Anywhere nice?”

“What?” Joy felt her heart thumping against her chest. Why wouldn't he go?

“You said you were going out. I just wondered . . . well, where?”

“I'm going riding.”

“Riding?” Here she looked up, hearing the eagerness in his voice. “Are there horses here?”

“Not here,” she said. “Not on the island, anyway. In the New Territories. A friend of my father's runs a stables up there.”

“Would you mind if I tagged along? I ride a bit back home. Miss it terribly. In fact, I haven't seen a horse for nine months.”

He said it in the wistful way that most servicemen talked about their families. His whole face, she realized, had sort of opened out, all the rather severe planes of it softening and lifting. He was, she had to admit, terrifically handsome, in a grown-up sort of way.

But he had watched her disgracing herself over the balcony.

“I've got a car. I could drive you. Or, just follow you, if that was more—er—convenient.”

Joy knew her mother was bound to be horrified when Bei-Lin told her that Miss Joy had disappeared in a car with a strange man, but the aftershocks probably wouldn't be that much worse than if she had stayed under her feet all day, providing a verbal punching bag for Alice's hangover. And there was something rather delicious about skimming along the quiet roads with this strange, tall, freckled man, who, rather than making her feel awkward and clumsy with words, as most officers did, simply talked and talked himself, about his horses in Ireland (curiously, he didn't have an Irish accent), the wildness of the hunting country where he lived, and, by contrast, the endless claustrophobic boredom of being confined to ship, stuck in the same tiny world, with the same people, for months and months at a time.

She had never heard a man talk as he talked, free of the endless clipped observations that characterized most of the officers she spoke to. Edward's speech was uncluttered and frank. He spoke like someone deprived of language for a long time, whole sentences coming out in gasps, like a drowning man gulping at air, and his laughter punctuated his sentences with huge, bellied guffaws. Then periodically he would stop, glance at her as if embarrassed by his own lack of reticence, and be quiet until the next thought bubbled out of him.

Joy found herself laughing, too, at first shyly, her own self gradually liberated by this strange man, so that by the time they arrived at the stables she was glowing and giggling in a way totally alien to her. After a forty-minute absence, Alice would not have recognized this daughter at all. In fact, Joy hardly recognized her, sneaking glances at the man next to her, averting her eyes coyly when he met hers, generally behaving—well—like Stella.

Mr. Foghill said he would let him ride. Joy had been secretly hoping he would, and once Edward had stood in the small yard with him, talking in reverent tones of great hunters he had known, and agreeing on the evident superiority of Irish bloodstock over English, the little widower had lost all his initial stiffness, and even recommended his own horse, a towering young chestnut with a crafty buck. He had demanded Edward take him around the manège for a couple of circuits, just to check on his seat and hands, but what he saw evidently satisfied him, for they were then riding slowly out of the gates, and up the road toward the open country.

By this stage, Joy didn't know what had come over her. She found it impossible to stop smiling, and nodding, and yet was struggling to properly hear anything he said, above this unfamiliar pounding in her ears. She was grateful to be able to hold on to the reins, and legitimately gaze at the long gray neck in front of her, stooping and rising in time with the sound of hoof fall, because she couldn't quite concentrate on anything. She felt simultaneously distant from everything around her, and acutely aware of the smallest thing. Like his hands. And his freckles. And the way he got two lines in the side of his jaw when he smiled. She didn't even notice when the mosquitoes zoomed in back on her neck, trapping themselves under her tied-back hair, and feasting on pale and tender flesh.

Best of all, he could ride. Properly ride, in that he sat tall and relaxed in the saddle, his hands moving gently backward and forward so that his reins didn't pull back against the horse's mouth, one occasionally reaching forward to stroke, or to bat an unsuspecting fly away. Joy had been to the stables only with one other man she had liked, a shy banker friend of her father's, and her fragile crush had dissipated like smoke on the wind when she saw him lurching around on the horse's back, unable to hide his fear when the horse moved into a slow trot. William she didn't even want to bring near. There was nothing to put you off a man like seeing him on a horse. It was only now, however, that Joy realized the potent appeal of a man who could ride well.

“Ever been to Scotland?” said Edward.

“What?”

“These mosquitoes. They're like midges,” he said, slapping the back of his own neck. “Bite you anywhere.”

Joy blushed and looked down. They rode on.

The sky grew darker, and sank lower, so that Joy was unsure whether it was the damp air or sweat soaking her clothes and making stray pieces of grass and seeds stick to her skin. The atmosphere seemed to muffle everything, cloaking the sound of the horses' hooves as if they were wrapped in flannel, enclosing them both in a warm, wet blanket. Above them, high against the backdrop of Lion Mountain, even the buzzards seemed to hang in the air like black drops of moisture, as if movement itself were too much of an effort, while the leaves that brushed against her boots left trails of water, despite the lack of rain.

If he noticed her thoughts careering chaotically, or picked up on the fact that she blushed repeatedly, found it hard to speak, or that her horse kept taking advantage of her absent-mindedness to snatch the odd mouthful of shrubbery, he said nothing. She became more composed when they cantered along a bridle path alongside a paddy field, and again when he pulled up at a roadside shack in order to get her a quarter of watermelon, but it was apparent only in that she could now gaze at him without embarrassment. It was at this point that she realized her ribbon had come out, and that her hair hung in ungroomed, sweaty strands around her shoulders. But if he noticed that, he didn't show it, either, and merely reached out, as he handed her his handkerchief, in order to push a piece away from her face. She felt the shock of that touch electrify her skin for minutes after.

“You know, Joy, I've had the best time,” he said, meditatively, as they walked the horses back toward the yard. “You don't know what it's meant to me, being able to ride.”

Joy was conscious that at some point she was going to have to speak, but she felt that if she opened her mouth, she would say something gauche and inappropriate, or, worse, that she would somehow reveal this strange, aching longing that had sprung out of nowhere. If she said nothing, what was the worst he could think of her?

“I don't know many girls who can ride, either. At home, the girls in my village are, shall we say, a little on the beefy side. Village girls. Not the kind I'd normally ride with, anyway. And wherever we dock, the only ones I meet want to go to cocktail parties and be witty, and to be honest I'm not much cop at all that stuff. I had a girl once—and she was a bit like you—but she . . . well. That's all gone. And I haven't met anyone who I could actually relax with for an absolute age.”

Oh, but Joy wanted to kiss him. I know, I know, she wanted to shout. I feel that way, too. I feel all the things you feel. But she just smiled and nodded, sneaking glances at him from under her wet hair, simultaneously berating herself for her sudden transformation into the kind of girl she had always despised. She didn't know what she wanted in a man (it had never occurred to her that it was up to her to do the wanting), and now she found herself drawn to him not because of specific qualities, but because of a whole list of negatives: his ability not to make her feel awkward; the fact that he didn't look like a sack of rice on a horse; his tendency not to look at her as though he wished she were someone else. Something swelled and grew in Joy; it was bigger than nausea, but just as incapacitating.

“Thank you. Anyway. Because I've had the best time.” He rubbed at his head, so that his hair stood up in front, and looked away from her. “And I know you didn't really want me to come.”

Joy stared at him in horror as he said this, but now it was he who looked ahead. She couldn't think of a way of conveying that he had misunderstood, that it was the being-sick thing that she had been running from, not him, without bringing it all back again, and she didn't want him to remember her for that. Oh, where was Stella when she needed her? She always knew how to talk to men. By the time she had decided that a short denial was the best response, it was somehow too late, and they were heading back toward the yard, their horses' heads stretched long and low in front of them, nodding wearily as they headed home.

Edward offered to help put the horses away, and Mr. Foghill suggested she might like to refresh herself in the ladies' rest room. On sight of her reflection, she realized that he had been being solicitous. She looked a fright. Her hair was a frizzy, wet tangle, a hair ball in a bathplug. When she tried to run her fingers through it, they halted only inches from her scalp. Her face was both sweaty with humidity and smeared with dust from the trail, and there were green spittle marks on her white shirt, where her horse had attempted to rub his head on her after she had dismounted. She rubbed furiously at her face with a wet hand towel, almost in tears at her inability to remember something as simple as a comb, or spare ribbon. Stella would never have forgotten something like that. But when she walked out, Edward merely greeted her with a broad smile, as if there were nothing remiss in her appearance. It was then that she noticed his own trousers were streaked with sweat and red dirt, clean only from the shin down, where Mr. Foghill had lent him a pair of boots.

“Your carriage awaits,” he said, grinning at his own appearance. “You'll need to direct me back. I haven't a clue where we are.”

Edward was a little quieter on the way home, and Joy felt her own silence more acutely. She could issue directions, but, despite the ease she felt in his company, could still not muster up anything interesting to say. It would all feel somehow shallow, when what she wanted to convey was that in the space of four short hours he had shifted her very world off its axis. In his eyes she saw other lands, green fields and hunting dogs, eccentric villagers, and a world devoid of cocktail parties. In his voice, she heard a speech free from artifice, and cleverness, continents away from the mannered, moneyed language of the Hong Kong expat. In his broad, freckled hands, she saw horses and kindnesses and something else that made her stomach constrict with longing.