The Marrying Game (24 page)

At half past five Polly burst back into the kitchen, just as Rufa had perched on a stool with a cup of tea.

‘There’s a man begging to see you – and frankly, I wish it was me he was begging for, because he’s quite a major dish. He says he’s your godfather.’

‘Edward?’ Rufa clumsily slopped tea on to the slate counter. ‘Oh, sorry –’ She dived at the spilt tea with a J-cloth. ‘Do you mind if I –?’

She had not registered the part about Edward being a ‘dish’. All she could think was that he had buried the hatchet because of some particularly dreadful disaster at Melismate. She pushed past Polly into the drawing room.

‘Hello,’ Edward said. He came over to her and solemnly planted a light kiss on her forehead. ‘Oh, God – you’ve gone as pale as a ghost. I’m not bringing bad news, all right?’

The transformation was extraordinary. Rufa was speechless, and suddenly shy. For a fraction of a second she had not recognized the handsome, dark-suited stranger. She could hardly go on about it in front of Polly, but did not feel she could treat this man in the usual Edward way – so how was she to treat him? She glanced uneasily at Polly, who was miraculously calmed and smiling.

Edward put his hand on Rufa’s shoulder. ‘Polly, can I take her away for half an hour? We need to talk.’

‘Oh, I’m afraid I still have to –’ Rufa began.

Polly continued to smile. ‘Don’t be silly, there’s ages.’

‘We’ll only be in the coffee place across the road,’ Edward said. ‘Come and yell at me if I’m keeping her too long.’

‘Nonsense, I shan’t do anything of the sort. You must come back soon, when Berry’s here – I know he’d love to see you again.’ With a giggle, Polly tugged the J-cloth out of Rufa’s hand. ‘Rufa, do take off your apron – the neighbours will think I’m a slave-driver!’

Rufa had not admitted to herself how desolate she had felt without Edward. The relief of seeing him again almost cancelled out her astonishment that he could be so embarrassingly good-looking. It was very pleasant and restful to let him lead her across the road, into the coffee shop. The long counter at the window was crowded, but Edward managed to find a small, marble-topped table in a corner. They sat down, and stared at each other gravely.

Edward suddenly laughed. ‘Go on, say it.’

‘You look terrific without your beard,’ Rufa said, smiling. ‘I almost didn’t know you.’

‘Hmm. Is that a good or a bad thing?’

‘I said “almost”. You’re not that easy to disguise.’ She could not stop staring at his shorn face, trying to work out his age. He could not be a day over forty-five, she realized. The trappings of relic-dom had only been superficial. The eternally youthful Man had been quite a few years older than his best friend. ‘Do you miss it? Does your face feel naked without it?’

‘It feels a little cold,’ he said. ‘But it was time to get rid of it. I only grew it to see if it all joined up.’

A waitress came to the table. Edward ordered them both large cups of tea and blueberry muffins.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have asked you first. But I know you’re hungry, even if you don’t know it yourself. You look bloody exhausted. What on earth have you been doing?’

He was right, Rufa was exhausted. Despite being up to her elbows in food all day, she had not eaten since breakfast. ‘This is my third dinner party in four days,’ she said. ‘Polly’s been so kind about recommending me to her friends. She has millions of them, and they all seem to live at a perpetual dinner party.’

The muffins arrived, smelling deliciously of vanilla. Rufa admired hers, and tried to work up the energy to eat it. She liked to be looked after by Edward.

He said, ‘Nancy’s got her work cut out, if she’s making a play for Berry. Miss Polly Muir strikes me as an absolute expert at your Marrying Game.’

‘That’s what I keep telling her.’ Rufa was relieved – and surprised – to hear the casual way he slipped in the
controversial
Marrying Game. ‘Polly would never give him up.’

‘Like a German on the beach,’ Edward said. ‘She draped her towel over him at dawn.’

Rufa laughed. ‘Nance hasn’t quite grasped the amount of work involved in a marriage.’

‘Well, it’s not all beer and skittles,’ he said gently. ‘But marriage isn’t all hard work either. There is quite a bit of job satisfaction – if you do it properly.’

She drank her tea. Edward was frowning; not angry, but deeply cautious, picking out his words with tweezers. He said, ‘Rufa, I have to apologize for the way I stormed out last time.’

‘Please –’ Rufa felt she could not bear any replay of that argument, even in the form of an apology.

‘It’s all right, I’m not here to bully you.’ His grey eyes were very serious. Rufa could feel the weight of the matter, whatever it was. ‘I just want you to know what an effect it had on me.’ He smiled grimly. ‘I drove home in a fury. I didn’t sleep for the rest of that night. But by the time I switched on the
Today
programme at six, I’d more or less worked it out.’

‘What?’

‘Eat your muffin. You’ll have to be patient with me. There’s a lot of ground to cover. I think I’ll start with Alice.’

Alice, his wife. Rufa had not troubled to draw her soft edges into focus for years. She felt guilty, observing the pain in Edward’s eyes. She had not seen this expression since the terrible day of the Man’s death.

‘I had to make my peace with the past,’ he said. ‘I had to force myself to admit that time has moved on. I saw how trapped I had become.’ He cleared his throat, and
looked
down at the table. ‘I think you know – maybe you remember – how devastated I was when she died.’

‘Of course I do,’ Rufa said. She did remember. It had been an accepted thing, at Melismate, that Edward was a man with a broken heart.

‘I felt I’d let her down, in some way – that was what I couldn’t get over. I thought I was being tremendously brave, but I was actually trying to stop time. To lessen the distance between us. Which I daresay you can understand.’

‘You couldn’t allow any changes,’ Rufa said, ‘because they would take you further away from her. Changes would have been like a betrayal.’

Edward reached across the table, to squeeze her hand. ‘I should have understood, and I was too dense. That was what the Marrying Game was all in aid of, wasn’t it?’

‘In a way.’

‘And I wouldn’t admit that I’d been doing exactly the same. We’ve both been humouring the dead.’

She did not understand, and was alarmed by the undertow of pain in his voice. He would not look at her. He bent over the table, absently placing brown sugar lumps in a circle.

He said, ‘Alice and I were first cousins. She was the child of my father’s older brother. We grew up together. We fell in love and got married.’ He glanced up at her. ‘Does that strike you as odd?’

It did, slightly. ‘No,’ Rufa said.

‘There wasn’t any particular moment of falling in love. We used to say we fell in love the moment we met, when her mother brought her to the farm.’ He laughed briefly. ‘She was three, by the way, and I was four. Before she died, she told me she used to wish to marry
me
every year, when we stirred the Christmas pudding.’

‘You were soulmates,’ Rufa suggested gently.

He was grateful that she was trying to understand. ‘Oh, yes. Different in lots of ways, but somehow locking together, in a way that made each of us complete. A good marriage works because it suits both partners equally. We needed each other, and needed to be needed. Do you see?’

‘Of course.’

‘There was a tremendous fuss about us getting married. My mother loved Alice like a daughter – and that was just the trouble, she said. She thought we’d have defective babies. Though in the event, we didn’t have any babies at all.’

His face was a mask. The pain could not be expressed, only distantly described.

‘She wanted a child,’ he said, ‘more than anything else in the world. And there was your mother down the road, dropping babies right and left. That was hard for her.’

His hands became still. He studied the surface of the table, as if reading the past. Rufa waited for him to speak again.

He raised his head. ‘Anyway. That’s not what I— the only thing you have to know about is the money.’

‘Sorry?’ Rufa was lost again. He had taken another unexpected turning.

‘A brief sketch of my dysfunctional family,’ Edward said. ‘Alice’s father – my uncle – had two children. Besides Alice, there was Prudence, her half-sister. He never married her mother. Alice and my Aunt Katherine took refuge with us, essentially because they couldn’t live with my uncle. My aunt must have loved him; she never entirely left him. The two of them were back and
forth
–’ He cleared his throat, before hurrying on. ‘I won’t go into details. One of these days, I might tell you the whole story, but it’s not something I want to dwell on now. All you have to know is that he was a wicked man –’ he brought the word out forcefully – ‘and they couldn’t stay with him. He was also very rich.’

He looked briefly up at Rufa.

She said, ‘Oh.’

‘He disinherited Alice. But she was married to me. So I, as his nephew, got most of the money.’

‘What – you?’ Rufa was fascinated. Edward’s rigorous parsimony was as much a part of him as the facial hair had been. ‘A lot of money?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened to it?’

Edward said, ‘Nothing.’ He was rigid with embarrassment. ‘Alice was still alive then, and there was a condition that made the whole thing ridiculous – we even laughed at it, because it was all so Victorian. Put simply, I was only to get that bloody money if I divorced Alice and married someone else.’

Rufa was amazed. She had never suspected the prosaic Edward of having such a piece of gothic romance in his background.

Edward gazed down into the palms of his hands. ‘Then, of course, Alice died. We were still living in Germany when it all started. She went to the doctor, because she thought she might be pregnant, and we found out when he gave her a blood test.’

‘How awful. I didn’t know.’

He glanced up, trying to smile. ‘Don’t let me go off into a blow-by-blow account. That’s not the point. The point is, I wanted to die too. And the business with the
money
seemed like a perfect excuse not to even think about marrying again. I felt I owed it to her.’ He paused. ‘It drove my poor mother demented. She pointed out that Alice was dead and I was still young, and I had a positive duty to marry again. But I couldn’t bear even the idea. I couldn’t risk going through all that again.’

He was silent and motionless for several minutes, head bowed over the table. Then he straightened, and said briskly, ‘I’ve told you about Alice, and the money. Now I have to say something about you.’

‘Me?’ Rufa was puzzled.

He frowned, choosing his words cautiously. ‘I was insensitive last time. I didn’t understand how deeply you felt about Melismate. I was tarring you with the same brush as your father. But I can see now, in your case, the purely romantic isn’t necessarily bad. It took that obscene Marrying Game of yours to show me what Melismate really means to you. And – and –’ He drew a deep breath. ‘And what you mean to me.’

Heat surged into Rufa’s face. His contrition made her ashamed.

Very gently, slightly formally, Edward held her hand. ‘I can’t let you do it, Ru. It would break my heart. I’ve had a special love for you, since I left the army and came home to find you’d grown up. If possible, I’ve loved you more since you lost your father. I can’t tell you how I’ve admired the way you tried to hold your family together.’ He smiled. ‘Truth to tell, I even rather admired your determination to sell yourself. But there’s no way on earth I’m going to stand by and watch you marrying a man you don’t remotely love.’

‘How do you –?’ Rufa began, with an unconvincing show of indignation.

‘Please.’ Edward squeezed her fingers. The pressure made Rufa shiver. ‘I haven’t finished. I now realize what I was meant to do with all that money. You must marry me.’

The shock drove the breath from Rufa’s body. She was light-headed with it, casting round for some sign that she had slipped into a crazy dream.

Edward’s wary eyes left her face again. ‘I don’t, of course, mean you
must
marry me – I put that extremely badly. I mean that I would be— I would love it if you did. You’re not in love with me, in the usual sense. But I think you’re fond of me. I think you’d be an awful lot happier with me than with your Mr Mecklenberg.’ He risked looking up at her again. ‘For one thing, you’d be sure of getting Melismate sorted out – my God, I know exactly where you should start, too. The next big storm will take the roof off.’

After the astonishment, Rufa braced herself for an embarrassing declaration of passion. When it did not come she was relieved; though the relief was curiously tinged with disappointment. She wondered, before pushing the thought away, what she would do if he jumped on her. Was Edward the man destined to unfreeze her? She found that she was checking his features, one by one, for anything unattractive. To her bewilderment, there was nothing. Edward was not unattractive at all. There was bound to be a catch sooner or later, but, for the moment, he looked scarily impossible to object to.

He released her hand, and looked directly into her eyes. ‘Before you say anything, I don’t want you to think I’m doing this to— the purpose of the offer is not to take advantage of you. That’s the last thing I want to do. It
doesn’t
depend on your having sex with me. Or not.’

This was incredibly embarrassing. Rufa’s face burned. She could not reply. Their gazes met, and immediately dropped. The idea of Edward as a sexual being – that perfect self-control surrendered to passion – was impossible.

Edward seemed to feel he had got through the worst part of his proposal. He sighed. His shoulders relaxed a little, and his tone became brisk. It was the sort of tone he might have used in the army, tapping a map with a pointer and saying, ‘Pay attention, men.’

‘Let’s get this out of the way at once. This can’t be about sex, Rufa. Not because you’re not beautiful – which I think is obvious – but because I refuse to play your Marrying Game. I want to help you to save Melismate, but I can’t do it as part of a sordid exchange for sex. Everyone else will think I’m buying you, but you have to know this is the exact opposite. We would have to treat it as a business arrangement – only that sounds too cold. You were right. I can’t let Melismate die with your father. This is partly about him. Before he died, he asked me to take care of you all. This is the way it has to be done.’