Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (105 page)

An angel, in marble, wings spread.
God rest her soul …

They sat quietly on an iron bench, painted white, listening to the sounds of nature, bird calls and leaves rustling. Douglas said, “I come here when I’m down, you know, down. It says something to me. That my life is only the continuation of what went on long before me. These people are my friends, and hell, a lot of them are probably my relatives. We’re an ingrown lot here.”

He bent toward her. “Don’t grieve,” he continued. “She was one of them too, and she handed down to us her own bit of history. Listen, Margo, she lived a good life, let’s hope ours will be as good.”

They walked on again, back to the car, and got in. “I just thought you’d like to see that,” Douglas said. “What we came from, why we’re alive today.” He put the car in gear and smiled, the smile that made her think of the boy’s smile of long ago.

“Now can we go some place lively?” he asked. “Have a drink, maybe two or three drinks?”

“Yes, Douglas.”

“Light me a cigarette, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, and they drove on, companionable, chatting idly, sons and daughters of the American Revolution.
Here we are
, she thought,
in the twentieth century, with all that behind us.
Humble, she looked out the window at the glory of the New World, of which she was part and parcel, a child of pioneers.

When she got home there were guests. Several women sitting sedately, and a murmur of voices. Pompey was presiding, very proper and polite, passing out little cakes on a silver tray. “Oh, Pompey, they look so delicious,” a voice said, and then Margo was spotted.

“Here you are,” someone cried, and she who had been away for so long recognized faces, grown older, but still recognizable. Women in whose kitchens she had once been given ginger snaps and chocolate chip cookies, and whose sons and daughters she had played with.

It was like a scene in a play; they sat there with their tea cups in their hands, wiping their fingers on tiny little squares of cambric. There was Mrs. John Ericson, whose son Sven had almost white eyelashes (there was a sizable contingent of Scandinavians in Cranford), Mrs. Gilbert Smythe, whose husband had sung tenor in the Methodist Church. The Minister’s wife was there too, as stout as he was lean, with feet that dangled just short of the floor.

Good and worthy women all, and they had brought offerings: currant jam, preserved peaches, home-made bread. Estimable women, welcoming her with open arms … but privately Margo would have preferred an insane chat with old Mrs. Pride. Respectability shone in their scrubbed faces, good will beamed from sympathetic eyes.

And curiosity.

Naturally.

What, for example, was she, Margo, going to do about the house? Or about anything, for that matter. After all, she was a foreigner, late of European climes. “All those years abroad,” one of the women said, leaning forward. “How does it feel to be back?”

“And doesn’t the house look lovely?” another of them asked. “Just the way it always was when she — ”

“Shush now,” a voice warned. “Margo doesn’t want to — ”

“And how are your dear parents, dear?”

“Do they know about your being left Brand House?”

“Won’t you come to church this Sunday? Matthew would be so happy.”

“There’s a supper on the twenty-third. And a Cake Fair next Friday. Outdoors, unless it rains, but we’re praying it won’t.”

They ate Pompey’s cakes, patted their mouths with their napkins, and at five promptly got up, in concert, to go. “Please come again,” Margo said. “Thank you so much for everything.”

“You’ll be all right?”

“Yes, of course.”

She saw them to their cars, looking after them, watching them drive away. She was unaccountably melancholy. Those women, with their tidy lives, they meant well, but somehow they had been upsetting. She wasn’t her Aunt Vicky, who had entertained countless gatherings such as the one this afternoon, letting the homely conversation go in one ear and out the other. She was only Margo, and somehow this afternoon, with the burgher’s wives, had been upsetting. They were on their way home, to their tidy houses and tidy kitchens, with their men returning from offices.
“Hello, dear, how was your day?”

“Well, the children — ”

“Got something cold to drink? My tongue’s cleaving to the roof of my mouth …”

The sound of the lawn mower out back interrupted her reverie. As she rounded the side of the house she saw Ben Blough at the farther end of the lawn, using the hand machine for trimming around flower beds. He saw her and waved; otherwise she would have retreated.

“Hi, there,” he called, and she walked over to him.

“Aren’t you working rather late, Ben?”

“I work whenever I have the time,” he said. “There’s a lot to be done around this place. Maybe I won’t be able to get here for another day or two, so I do as much as I can when I can.”

He turned his back on her, smiling over his shoulder, and pushed the mower in the other direction. There was something almost hypnotic in the whirring of the machine, and the lithe movement of his panther body. She watched him; at the pear tree he turned, coming toward her again, gleaming sweat on his naked torso.
If I
could paint, I’d paint him
, she thought, and suddenly heard his muttered curse.

“Goddamn bugger …”

He knelt, and bent to pick something up from the grass.

“What is it?” she asked, thinking that the meshes had hit a stone.

“Stupid goddamned frog.”

She saw the thin stream of blood, and the yellowish mucus, the writhing, dangling legs. It was a small frog, and Ben had gone over it with the mower.

Her stomach turned, she stifled a scream, darted forward with a hand on his arm. “Didn’t you see it?” she flung at him.

“I was looking at you,” he said insolently.

The half dead thing bled in his fingers, sending a trickle down his wrist. “It’s all right, I’ll finish it off,” he said, and dropped it. Picking up a good-sized rock, he raised his arm, aimed, and smashed down on the writhing creature.

“That did it,” he said.

She closed her eyes, dizzy, turned and walked away. In the distance, he snarled, “What was I supposed to do, leave it suffer?”

“It’s all right,” she said, over her shoulder. “You did the right thing.”

And he had. But she would never forget that brawny arm raised, the thud of the rock hitting skin and sinew. “Dinner will be ready soon,” Pompey said, as she walked into the kitchen; and then he had a good look at her face.

“What’s the matter, girl?”

“Nothing.”

“You don’t kid me. What’s the beef?”

“Ben ran over a frog. It’s all right, he finished it off.”

“Miss Margo, this is the country. Happens all the time. Things like that. Last week a little phoebe bird fell out of its nest. Something got at it, a cat, I suppose. Neck tore open. Nothing for me to do but put it out of its misery.”

“Yes, I know,” she said, and he sat her down and made her a cup of tea. It was good, strong tea, bracing enough, but she was thinking about victims, small, helpless creatures who had to be put out of their misery. Nature was so inexorable, she thought, and the little phoebe bird, waiting for an act of mercy …

But She hadn’t seen the phoebe bird; she had seen the toad.

Had Ben seen it too … and deliberately ran the mower over it?
Why should I think something like that
, she asked herself, but remembered the hard, pitiless face, the low forehead, a modern version of a Cro-Magnon man.
He’s cruel, I know he’s cruel
, she thought, and then heard Norma’s voice.

“It’s me again. You don’t mind, I hope?”

“Mind! Norma, hello, are you worn out, did you work hard today?”

“I work hard every day, that’s what days are for, aren’t they? To work hard? What did you do today, my pet?”

“I went to the Fair.”

“How was it?”

“Lots of fun.”

“Did you win anything, like one of those awful dolls?”

“No, a paperweight. And Douglas was there, bidding on livestock.”

“As was only to be expected.”

“He bought a bouncing bull.”

“With wicked, red eyes?”

“Oh,
such
a baleful expression.”

“I knew you went to the Fair, Pompey told me when I came over on my lunch hour. You could comment on my handiwork.”

“Norma, the flowers look beautiful. All the women admired them.”

“What women?”

“We had a kaffee klatsch. Ladies Aid, from the Church.”

“No wonder you look so pale and wan.”

“It was rather out of my sphere. However. Make yourself at home. I want to quickly bathe and change.”

“Want your back scrubbed?”

“No, but you can start the drink pitcher.”

“Righto. Go on up now, come down all beautiful and glowing. You do look rather white. Why?”

“It was the toad.”

“The what?”

“Nothing, I’ve already forgotten it.”

But she hadn’t. That arm raised, the stone smashing the wounded creature to a pulp. Well, what else was there to do? Pompey: “Had to put it out of its misery.”

She went up the stairs and opened the door to her room. Closed it and then smelled the fragrance. On top of the lowboy an exquisite arrangement of cornflowers, marguerites and asparagus fern. When she bent to it, sniffing, there was a scrawled note.

These are for you from me … Norma.

It was an antidote to ugliness and small, lonely suffering.
I
won’t think of the toad
, she told herself, and touched the flowers with a grateful hand. What a lovely thing to find … Undressing, she looked at it once again and then got into the tub, half dreaming. The smell of searing meat drifted up from below; her mouth watered.
I
should marry Pompey
, she decided.
He’s the best cook in the country.
Climbing out of the tub she wrapped herself in a huge Turkish towel and heard the words of the marriage ceremony.
“Pompey, will you take this woman in sickness and in health, for better or worse, until death do you part?”

“I do,”
Pompey said, and she threw the towel across the rack, bathed her warm, flushed face, and got dressed. In better spirits, she joined the others in the living room.

“Get busy on this,” Norma said, handing her a drink.

“Yum,” Margo said, sipping. “I’ve just had a proposal of marriage from Pompey; it was in a kind of bathtub dream.”

“Congrats, may I be a bridesmaid?”

“Yes, you’re to wear a long yellow dress with daisies in your hair.”

“I’ll start looking for one tomorrow.”

They laughed companionably. “I have my odd and sundry fantasies too,” Norma confided. “Once I dreamed I was walking naked through Britton Woods with the Minister. He chucked me under the chin and started becoming
very
familiar. I slapped his face. ‘How dare you?’ I said, and then woke up. I saw him on the street next day, and almost whopped him one. Poor thing, he looked so astonished at my mean expression. Of all people, the Reverend, poor old soul.”

“If you had the temerity to walk naked through Britton Woods,” Margo said severely. “It served you right when he got fresh.”

“I agree. Oh, I agree.”

“Listen, thanks for the flowers, Norma. I can’t tell you how lovely it was to find them there, and your dear note.”

“Just one of my small pleasures,” Norma said. “Well, here’s our friend. Hello, John, drinks are ready, help yourself. Margo went to the Fair today.”

“That’s nice.”

“It was like being a kid again.”

“She won a paperweight.”

“Well well.”

“And after that she entertained the Ladies Aid at tea.”

“Really?” He looked over at Margo, made a wry face. “So they’re starting to drop in.”

“Apparently.”

He pushed his dark hair back. “If nothing else does,
that
will drive you away.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that bad,” she started to say, and then caught her breath. What he had said … what he had said …

If nothing else does, that will drive you away …

“I suppose they brought little treats,” he went on. “They really are the salt of the earth, but just the same preserve me from them.” He raised an arm and again dashed back his hair. “That’s the trouble with this house. You can’t pretend you’re not at home. There’s always someone home. Pompey, or Ben in the garden, or Clara, cleaning. How did you manage?”

She could speak again now, though her lips were dry. “Quite well,” she said. “It wasn’t a long visit. They got up, by some apparently prearranged signal, all at once, and went chugging away in their cars. And they did bring treats, nice ones, thoughtful ones. Things they made themselves.”

The lock of hair fell over his forehead again. He was sitting with one leg thrown over the arm of a Hepplewhite chair, a long, lean leg, and his skin was lightly tanned, not bronzed from the outdoors like Doug’s, but summer-darkened. She thought suddenly,
He’s handsomer than Doug and he knows it and no, they
don’t
really look alike. It’s the personality behind the face that gives it individuality, even though nature made them from the same genes.

He
couldn’t
have meant anything by that sentence
, she told herself. It had been just a random thing to say. And a day or two ago it wouldn’t have registered.

A day or two ago …

Before the telephone calls …

Yet the very first evening she had been here he had said something else, something she hadn’t forgotten.
“Just like old times …”
She couldn’t picture Douglas saying such an insensitive thing.
What makes him tick?
she wondered, watching him.
What makes John tick?

“Dinner’s ready,” Pompey said, clapping his hands in the doorway. “Come in, you all. Before it cools. I worked my butt off. Bring your drinks in with you.”

• • •

Later, in bed, Margo thought about it again. What John had said. The words, in fact, rang in her mind:
Drive you away … drive you away … drive you away …