Fantails (4 page)

They both laughed at her turn of phrase. “It would be pretty stupid of me if I didn’t, considering that I saw your face most days for the better part of eighteen months and in all manner of places—dak bungalows and army huts and tents.”

“Oh, I see. But that snapshot was taken when I was only about fifteen.”

“You haven’t aged too drastically,” he assured her, thinking that she looked no more than fifteen at this moment, with her ruffled hair and shining eyes and cheeks flushed with excitement.

“You will come back with me to Fantails, won’t you? Alison and Jane would love to see you.”

“Why else do you suppose I’ve come to Market Blyburgh?”

She laughed again. “People
do
occasionally come here for other reasons than to visit us, you know!”

“I can’t believe it!” Sherry teased her, as though he had known her a long while. Logie smiled back at him uncertainly. Her eyes dropped, after a minute before his amused gaze. Unused to meeting strangers, she felt suddenly at a loss for what to say next.

Sherry opened the door beside him. “Hop in!” he invited her.

“We can’t drive there. At least it’s miles round, but only a minute if we walk. If you’ll leave the car there in the shade, beside that Standard, I’ll show you the way.”

When he had parked the car he stood a moment, looking about him at the market-place and its surroundings. The picture built up in the mind from a description is often far from the reality, but the old pump in the centre, the shops with their bow-fronted windows and tiled roofs, the houses with their bricks weathered to a faded rose, their twelve-paned windows and wide white doors beneath delicately carved fanlights—these were all he had expected. Andrew had chosen his words well when they had talked together far into many a wakeful night, lying on charpoys in dak bungalows or tents that smelt of oil-lamps and crushed grass, or side by side beneath indigo star-spangled skies, the distant crying of hunting jackals making a background for their voices.

Between the high walls of the garden of Swan House and that of its next door neighbour ran a narrow lane. Here Logie led the way. The sunlight, filtering through lime-trees, patterned the way with dappled light and shadow. Sherry, looking down sidelong at his companion, thought that where she was concerned her brother’s powers of description had somewhat failed. He had expected her to be the tomboy type—possibly to a degree that would to him be unattractive—indifferent to her appearance, aggressively efficient, given to wearing shorts and bare legs and to using hearty slang. A jolly good sort. That was perhaps how Andrew saw her—even how he liked to see her from his fraternal point of view. From his own angle Sherry was relieved to find her easy on the eyes, though not at all his type. He liked a girl to be exotic. Sophistication, Chanel 5, high heels and nylons, hair by Antoine, nails by Peggy Sage, and a technique for guessing—these were what attracted him. Whereas this girl in the crisp white overall probably washed those silky bubbles of hair herself in rain water, smelt of lavender, and said exactly what she meant. Still, she was infinitely more appealing than the hoyden he had more than half expected.

Logie, without success, was trying to accommodate her shorter steps to his long stride. Not looking at him, she was acutely conscious of his scrutiny, his height and breadth of shoulder, and that he smelt of shaving soap and Harris tweed and Turkish cigarettes. Funny, she thought, how Turkish cigarettes smelt so much more expensive and sophisticated than Virginian! Desperately she hoped that lunch was something that could be eked out into four helpings—not three definitely individual dishes, such as they often had, like salads arranged on individual plates or three grilled dabs.

“Here we are,” she told him, opening a door in the high wall, and they were in the stable yard. She called up to the open window of their living-room: “Alison—I’ve brought a visitor for lunch!”

The window opened wider. Sherry, looking up, met a pair of friendly though surprised brown eyes.

“It’s Sherry MacAirlie,” Logie explained. “I met him in the market-place.” To Sherry she added, “This is Alison—I expect Andrew’s told you about her?”

“About you all,” Sherry assured her.

“Good! Bring him up!”

Alison snatched up the pair of knickers she had been cutting out for Jane from an old nightdress and thrust them with a pile of mending into a cupboard. Sensible of Logie to give her a second’s warning instead of bringing him straight up ... She met them at the door. “How nice to see you! We used to hope perhaps you’d come when Andrew told us you had left the army and come back to England—”

Sherry held her welcoming hand a moment in a light strong clasp.

“I’d hoped to come and see you long before now, but you know how it is. Time dashes past—there’s no accounting for the way it vanishes!”

He wasn’t going to tell her that he had only come now driven by a sudden impulse, out of his desperate need of flight from his own world, his own thoughts, his disillusion and unhappiness.

Alison said of course she knew just how it was. Had he come far? From London? Then he’d like to wash. Lunch would be ready in a moment.

In Sherry’s world an unexpected guest for lunch, or half a dozen of them for that matter, presented no difficulty whatever. One’s friends had farms or relatives with farms and gardens whence came hampers packed with butter, chickens, eggs, rabbits, game, and vegetables—even an occasional jar of thick cream. Then there were parcels from sympathetic acquaintances in South Africa, America, Canada, Portugal, bringing cheeses such as most of us have long ago forgotten, dried fruits, sweets, and precious cooking fat, and a variety of tinned luxuries. Nor did he know from personal experience of domestic difficulties. His own home had been staffed by servants past the age of national service throughout the war. Some of these had now retired, but there had been no trouble in replacing them. He would have been amazed and horrified to know of agitated consultations in the kitchen while he was washing.

“Jane, could you lay another place? Be sure you give me the odd tumbler and see he doesn’t have a chipped plate. Find the tin-opener, will you, Logie? We’ll have to open Spam to eke out the egg salad. Such a mercy we have a tin, but even so it’ll have to be a case of holding hard ourselves till we see how it goes. He’s certain to be ravenous after that long drive.”

“What’s the pudding?” Logie asked, busy with the tin-opener.

“Black cap. Plenty of that. I think we’d better open that tinned cheese we’ve been treasuring, though, don’t you?”

“Yes. He’s large. Probably takes a lot of filling.”

“Oh, my goodness—what do you suppose he likes to drink? There isn’t anything at all!”

“There never is. Jane had better go to the Painted Anchor for a bottle of lager,” Logie suggested.

“He mayn’t like lager,” Jane pointed out.

“Well, if he doesn’t, at any rate we shan’t have wasted much money,” said Logie.

Odd, being here, thought Sherry, returning to the room where lunch was laid on a round table near the window. Odd, seeing this place, meeting these girls one knew so well from hearsay. Like stepping between the covers of Hans Anderson or Grimm.

“Good heavens—you mustn’t wait on me!” he protested, starting up as Logie handed him egg mayonnaise in a large pottery bowl. The only house of his acquaintance where one wasn’t waited on by servants save on Sunday evenings was the vicarage at home, and one expected vicarages to be different. Until now he hadn’t realised how different was this world of Andrew’s from his own. Firmly Alison told him to sit down. “We always do it this way. You mustn’t upset our drill!”

Jane came in, flushed and breathless, holding one hand behind her as she passed him to join Logie for a moment where she stood helping herself at the side-table, then came to shake hands with him, shyly, like a polite child—which was, he realised, precisely what she was. Going through the awkward age at present, but going to be lovely one of these days.

Logie, at his elbow, asked, “Will you have lager?”

“Thank you. The perfect drink for a hot day!” Uncomfortable at being waited on by his hostess, he did not see the secret glance of satisfaction they exchanged.

He spoke of Andrew, of experiences they had shared in India and Palestine during the eighteen months they had served together—shooting trips, sightseeing, fishing expeditions. He took care that they should know how often Andrew talked of family and home, and saw that they were pleased. Presently he engaged Logie in gay argument concerning the respective merits of Suffolk and his own county, Yorkshire. Jane joined her sister in the attack. Though neither had been to Yorkshire, they were positive its moors and dales and stone-built cottages could not possess half the subtle appeal of Suffolk’s rosy villages, their tiled roofs crowned with stonecrop; marshes with their flashing lanes of water cutting channels through the whispering reeds; Suffolk punches knee-deep in fields of buttercups; windmills, and sleepy rivers, and ancient churches built of flints.

Alison sat in smiling silence, listening to their quick retorts and laughter. She was trying to remember all that Andrew had written from time to time of Sherry. Gradually fragments from letters fitted themselves together into her mind until they made a pattern. His father had been killed in an air raid in London early in the war, and from him Sherry had inherited a considerable fortune together with property in Yorkshire. He had been going to make the army his career, but now, instead, was going to manage his estate and home farm instead of employing an agent. Whether his mother were alive or dead she did not know, only that he had been an only child. That unconscious air he had, of poised assurance, one met with only in those who all their lives had never lacked for money. Odd that he and Andrew, rooted in such different soil, should have become friends ... Andrew and Logie thought alike in many ways, as twins so often do ...
Supposing Sherry were the solution to the problem of Logie’s future!

Alison reflected that the things one wanted most to happen seldom did so of their own accord. One had to make one’s opportunities. So when a chance remark of Jane’s gave her the opening she wanted, she took it.

Jane had lost her shyness. “Did you come here specially to see us? Or are you on your way somewhere else?” she asked him.

“A bit of both. I’m heading for Scotland, so I came a bit out of my way to look you up.”

Alison said quietly, “Then won’t you stay here for a night or two? You could have Andrew’s room.”

He hesitated. “That’s very charming of you, but I really should be going on—”

“Well, think it over.” (
Make him stay ... Oh, God
—
please make him stay!)

When they had finished lunch Logie and Jane began to clear away. Alison said she would make coffee, but Logie, saying, “No, you sit down, I’ll do it,” disappeared into the kitchen, followed by Jane.

Alison joined Sherry on the window-seat. She sensed a tension in him, something taut and strained and restless, and wondered sympathetically what was at the root of it. Following the direction of his eyes, she had begun to tell him, “That’s the back of Swan House, where we used to live,” when footsteps in the yard below made her lean forward and look down. “Old Mr. Chiffin come about the bottling plums. I must go and have a word with him—I shan’t be long,” she apologised, and left him.

Sherry stretched his long legs and lit a cigarette. How nice they were, he thought. How natural and friendly, kind and uncalculating—as he might have known Andrew’s family would be. People had wondered at the friendship that had grown between himself and boyish Andrew, who were so different in every way: a friendship that would never have begun but for the circumstance that for a few months they had been the only British officers attached to an Indian battalion, and so had had unlimited opportunities of growing intimate; a friendship based on differences rather than similarities, each bringing something to it that the other lacked.

Why not stay on here for a few days, as the older girl had suggested, instead of going north to cousins in Scotland, as he had intended? There was no reason why he should not change his hasty plan; he hadn’t warned them to expect him. And, besides, he didn’t feel like facing anyone he knew just yet, meeting carefully uninquisitive eyes and the studied avoidance of any topic that might prove embarrassing. Yes, he would stay a while. Not here, for a household of women wasn’t at all his line of country. And, besides, it looked as though they didn’t have much help; he’d known that they were hard up, but had had no idea they had no servants. Probably that little brown-eyed one, Alison, had cooked the lunch ... He’d stay at that pub in the market-place. Then he could take them round a bit—he’d gathered that they had no car—give them a good time, if that were possible in this back-of-beyond part of the world.

His eye fell on the
Daily Echo
that was lying on a table, still crisp and unfolded. All of them too busy of a morning to have read it, he supposed. Idly he picked it up and opened it.

A headline caught his eye. Two faces looked back at him from the front page, blurred, but recognisable. One of them was his own ... He might have guessed, he might have known they’d make a front-page story of it!

Sherry’s eyes narrowed and his mouth became a grim, hard line. He paused a moment, staring at the paper. Then deliberately he ripped it into narrow strips and then across until it was unreadable. Beside a bureau was a large waste-paper basket. A few envelopes were in it and some torn-up letters. Sherry took them out, thrust in the shreds of newspaper, dropped the rest on top. When Logie came in with the coffee a moment later he was sitting in the window-seat watching a wagtail running on the lawn of Swan House.

“Black or white?” asked Logie as she set the tray on a low table near him.

“Black, please. Look, if I stayed on in these parts for a day or two, should I be able to see something of you? Would you be free to bear me company occasionally? There must be somewhere we could have a meal and dance, or something of that sort. Or are you all booked up?”

Oh, bliss and joy and rapture! Logie tried to keep her voice steady and unconcerned as she replied: “No, I’m not all booked up. Not in the evenings, anyhow. I’m busy most of the day, but not at week-ends. And there’s a country club quite near where they have dinner dances.”