Ivy Tree (9 page)

I raised an eyebrow. "Sure. Straight as a corkscrew. Try me. Well, let's have your 'awkward' news. It's been sticking out a mile that there must have been something extra-special about that last row with Con, doesn't it? What had finally gone wrong?"

That little smile again, tight and secret and—I thought, startled— malignant. "Annabel," she said. I stopped with the cigarette half-way to my lips and stared at her. The pudgy hands lay without moving in her lap, but somehow, now, they looked complacent. "Annabel?" I said sharply. "I don't follow."

"It was a vulgarism, I'm afraid. I shouldn't have allowed myself to use it. I only meant that the girl had played the fool and got herself pregnant."

"What?"

"Yes."

They say that words make no difference; it isn't true, they make it all. I found I was on my feet, looking, I suppose, as shocked as I felt. "Oh, my God," I said, "this is . . . this is. . ." I turned abruptly and went over to the window and stood with my back to her. After a bit I managed to say: "I quite see why you didn't tell me sooner."

"I thought you would."

Her voice sounded as calm as ever, but when after a moment or so I turned, it was to see her watching me with a wariness that was almost sharp enough for apprehension. "Are you so very shocked?"

"Of course I'm shocked! Not at the fact, particularly—I should have expected something like that, after the build-up— but at realising, flat out, what I've let myself in for. It didn't seem to be really true, till I heard it in so many words."

"Then it had occurred to you? I thought it might. In fact I hoped it might."

"Why?"

"I should say, I hoped it had. Then I knew that you'd thought about it, and still decided to go on with this."

"Oh lord, yes," I repeated it almost wearily, "I said I would, you needn't worry. I'd look fine, wouldn't I, proposing to lie and cheat my way into the share of a fortune, and then holding up hands of horror at a lapse from grace eight years old." The setting sun was behind me; she couldn't see me except as a silhouette against the window. I stayed where I was. After a moment or two more, I managed to say, quite evenly:

"Well? Go on. Did they find out who it was?"

She looked surprised, "Why, good heavens, Con, of course!"

"Con?"

"Well, of course!" She was looking at me in the blankest astonishment. Then her eyes dropped, but I had, for one moment, seen the flash of an emotion more shocking than anything which had passed up to now.

"Who else?" she asked in a flat colourless voice.

"Well, but Lisa—!" I stopped, and drew a long steadying breath. "Con." I repeated it softly. "My God . . . Con."

There was a very long silence, which Lisa didn't attempt to break. She was watching me again, and the firelight, striking a gleam from her eyes, made them brilliant and expressionless. I stayed where I was, with my back to the now fading sun, I had been leaning back against the window-sill. I found that my hands were behind me, pressed hard against the edge of the wood. They were hurting. I drew them away, and began slowly to rub them together.

Lisa said eventually: "Are you very upset? Why don't you say something? "

"That," I said, "was what is known as a silence too deep for words."

"Annabel—"

"And you thought I might find it a little awkward, did you? I really can't think why." She sat forward almost eagerly. "You mean you don't mind?"

"Mind? A little thing like that? My dear Lisa, what a—a fusspot you must think me!"

"You don't have to worry about Con's being embarrassed, because he won't be. He ..." I said shakily: "I—I'm glad to hear it. D-don't let's embarrass Con, shall we?" She said suddenly: "You're laughing!"

"No, oh no, Lisa. I—I'm only struggling to control myself. I mean, there are possibilities that I feel you can't have thought of. You know, I quite see why Con was being the least bit coy about telling me himself." She said, sounding almost resentful: "I can't imagine why you think it's funny."

"I don't, really." I left the window at last, and came across to the table. I pulled a chair out and sat down.

"Don't imagine I was amused at what happened eight years ago; not for a moment. It's my own part in this that has its funny side. I'd have thought you'd be thankful I was amused, Lisa, instead of filled with pious horror at the thought of playing the part of someone who once, in your own charming phrase, 'went wrong*."

She gave a little gasp. "Then it won't make any difference? You do really mean you'll still do it?"

"I said I would. Though this isn't going to make it any easier to face Con again, is it?"

"Con won't mind."

"So you said. Big of him. But Grandfather's the one who matters. Did he ever know?" "Oh yes. Con told him." "Con told him?"

"Yes. You see, after she'd run away, he had to give some sort of explanation to Mr. Winslow. The old man knew she'd been with Con that night, before she came running to him. She'd told her Grandfather that she and Con had been quarrelling again, and that this time it was serious, but when he asked why, all she would say was that she wasn't going to stay in the same house with Con any longer, and she begged her grandfather to send him away. Well, of course, Mr. Winslow wanted a reason. He knew Con had been wanting to marry her, and when she wouldn't say anything further, he seems to have assumed that Con had just been—well, too importunate, to put it mildly. He wasn't sympathetic. Then, when it was found in the morning that Annabel had run away, of course Con had to supply an explanation. A mere 'lovers' quarrel', as you've said, wasn't enough. In the end, Con thought it was better to admit the truth."

" 'In the end'?"

"Well, yes. Con didn't tell his great-uncle straight away, naturally. The old man was in a dreadful state, and he might easily have fired Con."

"Unless he'd kept him there, to make him marry her when she came home."

"There was no need to 'make' him. Mr. Winslow knew that.

Con would have married her all along. You're not to think it was that."

"I believe you. There was Whitescar, after all." A quick look up under her lids, surprisingly unresentful.

"Yes, there was."

"So Con didn't tell Mr. Winslow straight away? When did he actually confess about the baby?"

"Much later, after it became obvious that she really was gone for good. When she finally wrote from New York, and it was obvious she really meant what she said about not coming home. Con was furious. It made him look such a fool."

"Yes," I said, rather drily, "I see what you mean. So after that, he told Mr. Winslow that Annabel was probably going to have a child, and that he was the father?"

"Yes." She stirred in her chair. "He had to, don't you see? It had obviously been so much more than just a violent quarrel. He simply made a clean breast of it, said he'd been her lover, and was still willing to marry her when she came home. Of course there was a terrible row, with the old man raging at Con, as you might expect; but Con stuck to his guns, and swore he'd been ready to marry her any time, and still would. So, in the end, Mr. Winslow accepted it. I don't think it occurred to him, then, to send Con away. He was the only one still at home, you see."

"I see."

"They waited to hear from her again, but nothing happened. I told you about that. Just the one note, to say she'd taken a job with a friend who'd gone to the States, and that she was never coming back. That was all."

"No mention, then, of any baby on the way?"

"No."

"And she hadn't told her grandfather, the night she left home?" "No."

"In fact, it never came from Annabel at all?" "She told Con."

"Ah, yes," I said, "she told Con."

A quick glint from under her lids. "I don't quite see—" "Never mind. Only a line of thought. But there's still something / don't quite see, and we'd better get it straight. Go back to when she told Con. The night of the quarrel. You'd better tell me exactly what happened."

"I don't know just what passed," said Lisa. "Con won't say. Maybe he'll tell you, now that you know the worst." Her lips tightened again into that thin travesty of a smile. "I'd better tell you all I know, as far as he told me. He says that she had just found out that day about the baby. She'd been into Newcastle that afternoon to see a doctor, and had been told she was pregnant. She got back late, and it was dark. She came back to Whitescar across the fields; there's a path that leads to the footbridge below the garden. She met Con by chance, somewhere along the river, where the path skirts it high up, under the trees. I suppose she hadn't had time to regain her balance or self-control; the news must have been a dreadful shock to her, and when she ran into Con she just told him, flat out, and then, of course, there was a scene, with Con trying to persuade her to listen to him, and Annabel half-crazy with worry about telling her grandfather, and raving at Con, and just refusing to listen when he insisted that now they would have to marry, and that it would work out right in the end."

"You know, it's not the end of this affair that's the bother," I said, "it's the beginning. From all I've heard, I can't imagine how it ever started."

She gave me a glance I couldn't interpret. "Can't you? With Con so handsome, and Annabel, from what I hear—" an infinitesimal pause. "She was very young, after all. I suppose it was one of those short, wild affairs that can blow themselves out as violently as they start. She'd never let on in public that she cared for him. No one knew—though people must have guessed, I suppose. But it seems she was never prepared to settle down, not with Con. And when this happened, and she blamed Con, and said that she still wouldn't marry him, she could never live with him, and now one of them would have to leave the place . . . well, Con had had a shock, too, and he's terribly hot-tempered, like all the Winslows, so I gather that the scene just went from bad to worse. Eventually she broke away from him, and ran home, shouting that she'd tell Mr. Winslow everything, that it was all Con's fault, and that she'd see he was thrown out."

"But, in fact, she didn't tell Mr. Winslow 'everything'."

"No. Her nerve must have failed her when it came to the point. It seems that all she did was cry, and rage about Con, and say he must be sent away; and because Mr. Winslow wanted her to marry Con anyway, all he would do was tell her not to be a fool, and that the sooner she made it up with Con the better. I think he suspected, even then, that Con was her lover. That's all I know." Her hands moved on her lap in a little soothing movement, as if wiping something away. "And all I want to know, I must admit. But I think it's enough, isn't it?"

"Quite enough." I sat looking down at the table in front of me. I was thinking: "And I know, too. Something you don't. Something Con never told you. I know just what did happen that night, in the dark, above the edge of the deep river ..." I remembered Con's face, and the smooth voice saying: "// doesn't necessarily have to be midnight, does it, when you and 1 go walking at the edge of a cliff with water at the bottom?

Remember?" I remembered the look in his eyes as he spoke, and the poison-bubbles of fear pricking in my blood; and I wondered how Con would equate that with the story he had told Lisa and Mr. Winslow. I looked across at Lisa, who was watching her hands. Yes, for her it was enough. Whatever Con had done, Lisa would accept it, shutting her eyes. Even if there had been no subsequent letter from New York, to show that the girl was still alive after she vanished from Whitescar, Lisa would still not want to know more.

The silence drew out, while I watched the flickering of the flames in the grate. A coal fell in with a dry, crumbling sound. A rocket of yellow flame shot up past it with a hiss, and died.

"That was all?" I said at length.

"Yes. People talked, but it's forgotten now, and nobody ever actually knew anything. Only Con and Mr. Winslow. Con never even told me, till now."

"I see." I straightened up, saying briskly: "Well, that's that, as far as it goes. All right, Lisa, I'll play; but on my own terms."

"Which are?"

"The obvious ones. I'll accept everything, except this last thing; and that, I'll deny." "But—you can't do that I"

"Meaning because it might make Con look a fool? All right, you tell me, where’s the baby?"

"Dead. Stillborn. Adopted. We can easily invent—" "No." At my tone, I saw her eyes flicker, and that wary look come into her face. I said slowly: "Lisa, I've said I'll go the whole way with you and Con. But I can't, and won't, take this. I'm not going to invent for myself the sort of tragedy that— that's totally outside my experience. Apart from everything else, it would be too difficult. It's a—a raw sort of situation, and I'm not prepared to react to it. Don't you see? I'm not prepared to play, in front of Grandfather, the part of someone who's borne a child, living or dead, to Con. It—that sort of thing—matters too much. Besides, if it were true, I should never nave come home. Con as ex-lover; yes. Con as—this; no. That's all." "But what explanation—?"

"It's perfectly simple to say that it was a mistake. That by the time I found out I was wrong, I'd gone abroad, and was too proud to come home—and too unwilling to face Con and Grandfather again."

"And the other thing? You'll accept that?"

"Having had a lover? I said I would."

Lisa said, watching me: "You are—what did you say? — 'prepared to react' to that?" I looked at her straightly. "I've no objection, if that's what you mean, to having Con as my ex-lover. As long as the emphasis remains on the 'ex."

She dropped her eyes again, but not before I had seen, quite clearly, what had now and then stirred those unexpressive features with that sudden gleam of malignancy; it was jealousy, still alive and potent, of an unhappy girl whom she had believed dead for years. And by the same token, I saw why Lisa and her brother had all along accepted the fact that I was prepared to come in with them on what was at best a crazy and hazardous adventure. Their need was obvious; but I was under no compulsion. The very fact that I was what Lisa had called 'straight' might make me safe to employ, but should have made them pause to wonder why I had thrown my lot in with theirs. I had been sure all along that they didn't really think of me as the type who would do anything for money. And even this last disclosure had not been expected to put me off. Lisa had been wary, even uneasy, but never downright apprehensive. But now I saw it, simply and infuriatingly through Lisa's eyes.