Fantails (6 page)

Another hug and she was gone again. Alison laughed a little, blinking back the tears that trembled on her lashes.

Presently she began to lay the table for herself and Jane. The flowers were fading; she must get fresh ones. Taking scissors, she went out.

During the war the Sinclairs had given over to Fantails a long sunny border in the garden of Swan House, backing on the yard below the Selkirks’ windows. Here they had for several years grown only vegetables, but when the war ended Alison had gradually made part of it into a herbaceous border, filling it with flowers discarded in the autumn from the gardens of friends. Here grew peonies and irises, monkshood and anchusa, campanulas and hollyhocks, pinks and sweet-williams. She had also made a small fragrant herb bed where various sorts of thyme grew in company with chives and tarragon, rosemary and borage.

Alison began to cut flowers for a mixed posy. Suddenly an idea sprang to her mind, put there by the sight of their bright, clustered colours. Quickly she considered it, then, abandoning for the present her posy for the table, she swiftly heaped her basket with a quantity of flowers, hurried indoors, threaded a needle, and set to work.

Half an hour later she knocked on Logie’s door. Logie was staring in her mirror. “Come in!” she called, and swung round as the door opened. “It doesn’t fit too badly, does it?” she asked, in a carefully bright voice.

“It might have been made for you. Turn to the light and let me look at you,” said Alison, holding one hand behind her. Critically she inspected Logie. Yes, there was no doubt that grey was an unfortunate setting for her fair, fine colouring, but the frock did fit superlatively well.

“Listen,” she said. “I’ve been experimenting. Tell me, honestly, if you don’t like the result.”

The result was a short, close necklet of flowers. Alison had stitched them cunningly, each behind its head, in such a way that they made clustered circles, then threaded them together in a chain. Misty blues and rosy pinks, a touch of amethyst, a hint of yellow, they blended in a harmony lovelier than any jewels. Alison said, “I haven’t joined the ends, because I didn’t know about the length. If you try it on, I’ll hold it at the back.”

Standing behind Logie, she held the ends in place. She had guessed well. The necklet was exactly the right length to outline the neckline of the dress. Logie, facing the mirror, stared unbelievingly at her reflected face. “I’ll hold the ends. You look,” she said, after a minute, turning to face Alison.

Without the necklet she had looked pale and dim, her personality quenched by the grey frock. Now, her own colouring stressed by the deeper colours of the flowers, she seemed possessed by new vitality. Delphiniums and pinks
were echoed in her eyes and lips. Fuchsia buds Alison had discovered in a warm and early corner flattered her white skin, and by their glowing contrast deepened the honey colour of her silken hair. She was transformed.

“It’s perfect!” Logie breathed. “It’s made a dreary frock into a creation. It’s made
me
into a different being! Alison, you’re a genius! How
did
you think of it?”

“Don’t hug me or you’ll squash it! Let me join it at the back. I’ve only got to tie the ends and cut them.” That done, she studied the effect again. “Yes, I do think I really
have
been rather clever!”

“Could you possibly go on being clever,” Logie coaxed, “and fix a hair-slide for me in the same way? Is there time?”

“I can try. Give me the biggest one you’ve got. The one that keeps your hair out of your eyes at night.”

She brought the slide back presently, hidden by a flat posy matching the necklet: delphiniums, valerian, a yellow daisy, a fat fuchsia bud, closely clustered. Logie tried it here and there against her hair, found the right place for it, and clasped it there.

Jane hammered on the door. “Logie, Sherry’s come. He’s waiting for you.
Goodness!"
she stared, amazed. “I never knew a long dress could make all that difference! You look—you look sort of enchanted!”

“I feel enchanted!” Logie said beneath her breath. She took one last look in the mirror, drew a long breath of happiness. “Bless you!” she said to Alison, and squeezed her hand hard. Then, holding her head high, she led the way to the room where Sherry waited, immaculate in dinner-jacket and crisp pique shirt.

He looked at her for a long, startled moment before he rose, carefully stubbing out his cigarette. Her transformation took him by surprise. At midday Andrew’s sister had been attractive in her way, but it had been in the way of daisies and wild roses, lavender and thyme, a way that had no very great appeal for him. Odd that he hadn’t realised the girl's latent possibilities. Now, only a few hours later, she had become glamorous, distinctly captivating.

His keen grey eyes met hers, starry with happiness, as she said, “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting?”

“Some things are worth waiting for,” he assured her.

his morning she would have felt
gauche
and tongue-tied, uncertain of herself, vulnerable to criticism. Now, armoured in the radiant knowledge that she was transfigured into loveliness she had not dreamed that she possessed, she answered lightly, “You must take the correct reply for granted. I haven’t learned the art of repartee!”

“I shouldn’t learn it, then, if I were you. It’s always a mistake to try improving on perfection,” Sherry told her gravely. Over her head he looked at Alison. “I won’t bring her back too late,” he promised her. Something in his voice gave Logie a delicious sensation of being rare and precious and to be cherished.

She knew how Cinderella must have felt as she and Sherry passed through the coach-house, with its bins of hen food and logs stacked ready for the winter. “Will you be all right without a coat?” he asked her doubtfully, as she slid into the front seat of the open car.

“Perfectly! It’s far too warm for that!” she told him, knowing well enough that if it had been freezing she would have given him the same answer, since the lightest wrap must crush the flowers about her neck.

“Go straight ahead, then fork right, along the Beccles road,” she told him. They sped along cobbled streets where the tiled roofs rested at strange angles on their ancient beams, and the day’s heat lingered still below the curved Dutch gables. Her heart was filled with tenderness and compassion for the women who, their day’s work done, were standing at their doors to watch the world go by and gossip with their neighbours, the couples walking linked together lovingly, the girls who strolled in pairs, pretending an indifference they did not feel for the lads who gathered outside the Red Lion and on the bridge over the river—all the unfortunates who were not going to the Country Club with Sherry MacAirlie...

Over the bridge they passed and suddenly the little town was left behind. The air flowed past in languorous tides, sweet with the fragrance of the summer woods, hayfields, and cottage gardens. They left the main road presently, turning along a narrow side road where, among the bracken, foxgloves trooped, rose and white, and the tall hedges were scattered with wild roses and the clotted cream of elderberry blossom; then through a gateway guarded by two immense stone griffons on its pillars.

Once known as Crownall Court, now renamed Crownall Country Club, the house they now approached along a drive that crossed a park where old oaks grew in scattered groups and tansy flowered in ragged yellow patches had been the property for several generations of an old East Anglian family. Several branches having died out, their estates had come into the possession of one man. He, having no need of more than one house and finding his property expensive of upkeep, had sold two of them and let Crownall on a long lease to a company who ran it as a country club. It was a great success. Tennis and squash courts, badminton, swimming-pools, a nine-hole golf course, card rooms, a bar, a library, and a fine ballroom provided entertainment for people of all tastes and ages. All the neighbourhood for miles around came here at weekends and of an evening, and to-night Sherry found a score or more of cars were parked behind the house, after leaving Logie at the imposing Georgian front door.

Newspapers and a quantity of illustrated weekly papers and magazines lay on a refectory table in the lofty hall, and in a huge glass accumulator tank some artist had arranged a Dutch bouquet, brilliant and rich, that glowed against the panelling like a painting by an old master. Two girls were perched on a club fender chatting with a sophisticated-looking woman whose pewter hair was a masterpiece of grooming. A tall man, evidently waiting for someone, prowled restlessly up and down. Logie, possessed by a sudden wave of shyness, went for sanctuary to the cloakroom, where she made pretence of smoothing down her hair and powdering a nose that did not need it until she judged that Sherry must by now be waiting for her. She timed it well, for they arrived simultaneously in the hall.

“A drink, I think, don’t you?” Sherry suggested.

“I’d rather drink with dinner. But don’t let that stop you!”

“If you were
very
good they might let you drink now and at dinner too,” said Sherry gravely. His eyes were laughing at her, and she laughed back.

“More than one drink makes my head feel muzzy,” she explained.

“Let’s go and eat, then. Lead on—I suppose you know the way?”

“But don’t you want a drink first?”

Sherry assured her that he needed no appetiser. “This air of yours has made me ravenous. And if it’s not too far I dare say I can totter to the dining-room without a stimulant.”

It was fortunate that he had booked a table, for they had been allotted the last one on the terrace, and on such an evening it would have been anticlimax to dine indoors while a few yards away luckier people ate and drank under the summer sky.

Their table was at one end of the long terrace, by a carved stone balustrade where roses climbed. Below lay a small lake where a pair of swans swam proudly with their brood of four, and beyond that a copse of beeches. Blackbirds were fluting in the trees. A thrush told all the world to “Go it! Go it!” And farther off, most peaceful sound in all the world, a turtle-dove was crooning to his love.

“I do think it’s an enchanting place, don’t you?” Logie said happily, when they had ordered salmon, roast chicken with new potatoes and green peas, and gooseberry ices.

“I do indeed. D’you come here often?”

“I’ve only been here twice—to play tennis.”

He was surprised. “Don’t you come here and dance?”

She shook her head. “The people of Market Blyburgh don’t go in for dancing. They’re mostly far too old.”

“But Andrew’s keen on dancing. Did you never come with him?”

“One can’t without a car.”

Silently Sherry cursed himself for an uncomprehending fool. He knew the life lived by the wealthy and had imagined that lived by the very poor, but between the two extremes were many ways of living unknown to his experience or imagination.

“This sort of thing is all the more fun when you don’t do it often,” Logie told him. Something in her expression made him feel as though he were an indulgent godfather taking a child out for a treat. A very charming child ... Odd, to meet this combination of ingenuous inexperience blended with such tranquil self-possession and quite striking prettiness. No, more than prettiness, the word was too insipid. Charm? Distinction?

“Tell me,” he said abruptly, “what’s happened to you since this morning?”

“Happened to me? What d’you mean?”

“You’re different.”

“How?” she demanded, knowing well enough, yet wanting to be told.

“You looked this morning as though you’d smell of lavender and thyme. The Vicar’s Only Daughter. That sort of thing. To-night you look as though you smell of something with a glamorous name at a guinea a drop. Subtle and French. Which is the real you?”

“The real me? But is anybody only one ‘me’?” she asked thoughtfully. “I don’t think so. Surely every individual is composed of several personalities. Different circumstances and settings bring them out in turn. And I suppose some of them are never brought out at all. They just stay dormant.”
(As the present “me
”
would have slept on unawakened but for this new glamorous setting
...
)

“Think so?” he sounded doubtful.

“I’m sure of it. Nobody is black or white or rose-coloured. We’re all a mixture.”

“Then why is it that some people are so uniformly drab?”

Logie considered it. “They aren’t. They’re striped in quiet colours that give a general effect of drabness from a distance. If you got near enough you’d see the separate colours.”

“I wonder ...” He remembered unexpected generosity from a man famous for his parsimony; a sneak thief and deserter who in peril had risen to heroic self-sacrifice; men who loved birds, yet would enjoy a day’s pheasant or grouse shooting as well as anyone.

“You may be right. How did you come by all this wisdom?”

“You’re laughing at me!”

“I’m not, I promise you.”

“You’re thinking that a country cousin, buried in a sleepy market-town, can’t have had any opportunities of learning anything at all. But I believe it doesn’t matter where you live or what you are, you have equal opportunities of learning about humanity. I believe people are fundamentally the same, wherever and whoever they may be. Prime Minister, mayor of a provincial town, Archbishop of Canterbury, country curate, successful business woman, village housewife—they’ve all got some common denominator. It’s an old theme: ‘the Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady,’ you know. Nothing original about it.”

“Nothing original in all the world. But for each of us these things have to be rediscovered. You seem to have made that particular discovery rather soon in life.”

“I should have had to be extra dense not to! Working for a doctor one comes so close to people, in a rather special way.”

Silence lay between them: a linking, not a separating silence. Presently Sherry laughed. “I call it vandalism,” he said, “to waste a summer’s evening rich with nightingales and roses and a crescent moon—yes, it’s behind you, over your left shoulder—in discussing abstract problems.”

“Why, what should we be discussing?” Logie asked, then felt as though she had been fishing for a compliment. “Food?” she suggested quickly, to cover her embarrassment. “I never dreamed an ice could be so utterly delicious!”

“To mention ices, gooseberry or any other sort, is utter desecration in connection with a new moon,” he reproached her gravely.

Logie laughed back at him. “I don’t agree! Life is as mixed as human nature. Food and moonlight, flowers and pretty clothes—they may be different, but they’re all enchanting in their ways!”