Grahame, Lucia (45 page)

"But I
don't
know," I repeated. "We have
never been close. I'm afraid ours has not been a happy marriage, Guy. In fact,
we are about to separate."

"I am so sorry," said Guy politely. He looked thoroughly
perplexed. "But why?" he finally demanded. "It's obvious that he
adores you."

"I don't think so," I said in the brittlest voice I
could manage. "We must be rather good at putting up a false front. I'm
surprised it fooled
you,
however. You were once so perceptive."

"And you care for him," persisted my friend. "It
was written all over your face."

I lifted my hands to my cheeks.

"I do," I whispered at last.

Then I lapsed into silence again, until Guy took my hand and led
me to the bench against the station wall.

We sat down.

"But enough of this," I said with forced briskness.
"Tell me, how is Harry?"

"Very well. He is at Lincroft."

"I am glad you are happy," I remarked, with a touch of
envy.

"Oh, Fleur," said Guy as if he'd caught my thoughts,
"do you think that I have achieved happiness without a struggle?"

"What struggle? You love Harry, he loves you. It seems to me
your happiness was inevitable."

"You know better than that, Fleur!" exclaimed Guy.
"Nothing is inevitable. Look at my life in England. It was an absolute
hell of duplicity and deception. I ended
that
only by resolving to
return to Paris—with Harry or without him. When I left for France, I left
alone."

"But... why are you here?" I stammered.

"Because Harry has made his choice. He is at Lincroft
because, before leaving for France, he chose to tell his favorite sister—she is
Mrs. Kendall—the truth about why he is going away. He half feared she would
never speak to him again. But in point of fact she responded by inviting both
of us to Lincroft before Harry returns to France with me."

"What an excellent woman she must be."

"And as for you, your troubles are not so different from
anyone else's," continued Guy rather brutally. "Just because love was
so effortless with Frederick..." I barely heard the rest of what he said.

Had love really been so effortless with Frederick? Yes, there was
something endearingly feckless about him—it invited love. He was so cheerfully
unashamed of his need to be shielded from all the inartistic, tedious business
of daily life! He was so openly, charmingly helpless about everything he
regarded as unpleasant, unaesthetic, and therefore beneath him. He was never
imperious—he didn't have to be. He exerted his will with sunny gaiety and
cajoling compliments, making resistance seem surly, making resentments seem
mean-spirited and carping. I could never have voiced them!

Yes, I loved him! Yes, I would have raised him from the dead! But
the Frederick of my cherished memories—the Frederick I yearned to have restored
to me—had been altered greatly from the flesh-and-blood Frederick of our last
years together. I did not yearn for drunken kisses, for scattered piles of
dirty clothing, for empty bottles and overturned glasses, for the litter of
crumbling sticks of charcoal lying about everywhere, for the filthy
paintbrushes it was my thankless job to clean, or for the mountain of debts
I
had not incurred....

"... and you can't let the rough patches get the better of
you," Guy was saying.

"Rough
patches!"
I said with a laugh, still
thinking of the hardest stretch of that old life.

Then I realized with a jolt that Guy was still, of course,
speaking of my present marriage.

"Why do you sound so bitter?" he asked.

I took a deep breath, decided to tailor my answer to his question
rather than to my private thoughts, and confessed what seemed now well on the
way to becoming common knowledge rather than a dark secret.

"I did not marry Anthony for love."

"You!" cried Guy. "Madame All-for-Love married for
a baser reason!"

"I felt I had no choice," I murmured, crimson with
embarrassment.

"And he found you out!" pursued Guy. "And now you
find that you are developing a certain tenderness for him!"

"Well, perhaps it is something like that," I admitted
cautiously.

"Well, then tell him so, for heaven's sake, you silly
creature. Very likely, he'll be overjoyed. I'm sure you won't have to humble
yourself half as much as you think. Harry always had the upper hand with me,
you know, until I refused to take it any longer. The happiest day of my life
was the day he swallowed his pride and told me that he would follow me
anywhere."

"I am so very glad for you, Guy. No one deserves happiness
more than you."

"I would be even happier," said Guy, "if I believed
you would take my advice and go to work to mend your bridges instead of burning
them beyond any hope of repair."

"I will confess, I have been considering it," I admitted
nervously.

"Well, that's better, then," said Guy cheerfully.
"Let me know what comes of it. Here is my address in Paris."

I took the precious bit of pasteboard and tucked it into my purse.

"You know, Guy," I said, "I am so sorry I failed to
answer all those letters of yours so long ago. Someday I'll tell you the
reason. But not today. Today I will take a leaf from Frederick's book: We have
so little time that we ought to dwell on only happy subjects."

"Yes, that was Frederick to the hilt," murmured Guy with
a smile.

Much too soon his train arrived.

My husband was nowhere to be seen when I returned home from my
têtê à têtê with Guy.

"Will you take tea upstairs or in the drawing room, my
lady?" inquired Mrs. Phillips.

"Oh, in the drawing room," I said absently. "Where
is Sir Anthony?"

"He has gone out. It seems that young Percy Sparling has been
shooting at our doves while the master was away, so he has gone off to have a
word with Lord Sparling about it."

"Oh dear," I said. How unfortunate to meet with nothing
but trouble as soon as one crosses one's own threshhold! But I was very glad
the poor doves had so ready a champion. "Then I will have my tea upstairs,
after all."

I drifted up the stairway to my sitting room. The brief encounter
with Guy had left me hungering for more of the intimacy that only the truest of
friendships can offer. I decided to write to Marguerite.

I sat down at my writing table and had committed a few sentences
to paper when there was a knock at the door. I supposed it would be Ellen with
my afternoon tea. But it was not. It was my husband.

"Is it all settled then, about the doves?" I asked. How
I wished my voice did not betray my nerves!

"Oh, it never is," said my husband with a sigh. "I
am afraid eternal vigilance is the price of having Sparlings for
neighbors."

"What a trial that must be."

"It is, indeed. Lord Sparling is inclined to forgive his
son's trespasses. 'Boys will be boys,' is his litany—so long as it is
his
boy
and not someone else's!"

This was true; in his role as local magistrate, Lord Sparling
seldom forgave the trespasses of less exalted youths.

"I swear, Fleur," my husband was saying, "I would
set mantraps throughout that copse if only there were no danger of catching something
more innocent than that Sparling brat."

I considered the problem presented by Percy Sparling— how I wished
I might have been able to present my husband with some neat solution to it. But
nothing glimmered in my brain. All I could think of was what a sorry homecoming
my husband had received. Well, at least the dogs must have slobbered over him
enthusiastically.

At this point Mrs. Phillips herself arrived with the tea tray.

"Would you please send up a second cup, Mrs. Phillips?"
I said quickly. And when she had left, "You will stay and have tea with
me, Anthony, won't you?"

"If you wish," said my husband after a pause, as if he
were both bestowing a favor and accepting one.

I thought he, too, seemed somewhat ill at ease. What had brought
him to my room? Now that he had fallen silent on the subject of the doves, he
seemed to have been struck dumb altogether. Perhaps he was waiting for the
second teacup to be delivered, that he might then speak without fear of
interruption. What was taking Mrs. Phillips so long?

I began to babble rather inanely about my pleasure at seeing Guy
once again. Perhaps it would have relieved any jealousy my husband might have
felt had I told him about Harry and the history of my friendship with Guy, but
to have done so, without having received Guy's express permission, would have
been to betray a confidence. And, in any case, why would my husband be jealous?
He hated me; he wanted nothing more to do with me.

Still, the more I chattered on, the more I began to feel that even
if the friendship between Guy and me had not unsettled my husband at the
outset, it must seem as suspect by now as it would have been had I assiduously
avoided the subject. There was nothing for it now but to take the bull by the
horns and confess to my husband that what had brought me to the station was my
feeble hope of salvaging our marriage. Yet I must wait for that second, laggard
teacup!

At last Ellen arrived with the overdue bit of porcelain. I fairly
snatched it from her hands, told her that we wanted nothing more, and, as the
door closed behind her, filled the cup for my husband and handed it to him.

"I would like to assure you, Anthony," I said in words
stilted by embarrassment and emotion, "in the event that you may have
suspected otherwise, there is nothing more than friendship between Mr. Hazelton
and me, nor could there ever be."

"Why have you felt it necessary to tell me that?" asked
my husband. There was no warmth in his voice, but neither did he sound
particularly hostile.

"I was concerned that you may have been unpleasantly
surprised by the sight of us."

"Not at all. To see such a smile on your face is always a surprise,
but never an unpleasant one." This he said in a most chillingly ironic
tone. "Do you think I would be so small and mean as to resent the man who
put it there?"

Oh, that stung! How could I persuade him that yes, indeed, I had
been overjoyed at the sight of Guy, but that the tremulous eagerness which had
possessed me all day and had at last impelled me to set out for the station had
been for
him,
and him alone.

"Anthony," I said, blushing, "there is so much I
must say to you. Do you think—"

But it was so difficult to find the words. I set down my cup, rose
from my chair, and turned my back on him to look out across the lawns to the river,
as if I might see the proper phrases floating past me downstream and reach out
to pluck them from the water. How could I ask for what he had told me he could
never give? Even the thought of begging for that impossible forgiveness brought
tears to my eyes.

"Do I think what?" said my husband softly. He had risen,
too, and was standing behind me.

"Oh," I said with a little sob.

His hands, the hands I longed for, dropped lightly to my
shoulders. I gasped, wincing involuntarily with pain from that still fresh
bruise I had momentarily forgotten. I jerked away and turned toward him. He saw
the tears on my face.

"I beg your pardon," he said coolly.

He was moving toward the door.

"Wait!" I said.

At the doorway he turned.

"No," he said gently. "I've waited
too
long,
Fleur."

And with that he was gone.

The courage and hope with which Marguerite and Guy had infused me
did not fare well under this latest blow. But what would my good angels have
thought of me if I were to give up so easily, even in the face of that latest
rejection?

I contemplated the curious fluctuations in my husband's manner.

Could I discount the slim possibility that he was, in fact, as
open to a reconciliation as I was? He had reached out to me, as I had to him,
and it was no fault in either of us that the attempt had failed. Only an
unlucky accident had deflected me from my purpose.

The dinner table yet awaited us, with its bright flowers and its
carefully orchestrated menu.

But when I arrived in the dining room, the table, to my dismay,
was set for only one. I swallowed my pride and asked the footman to send Mrs.
Phillips to me.

In the glare of the chandelier, it seemed to me that both Mrs.
Phillips and the flowers had a crestfallen look.

"Why does Sir Anthony not dine here?" I asked her.

Her face became inscrutable.

"He is in his study, my lady. He has a great deal of work to
do tonight and asked to have his dinner sent to him there. He does not wish to
be disturbed."