Kissing Kin (15 page)

A light hand fell on his shoulder.

“That’s from Calvert,” said Virginia. “Let Jenny put it on for you.” The hand patted him once, and she was gone again.

Jenny lifted the watch from its white satin bed and held it out, waiting. He raised his left hand to her and felt the cool metal bracelet click into place.

“They’re only trying to thank you,” said Jenny. “Put
yourself
in their place. They only want to give you the earth.”

“You think it’s all right for me to keep it?”

“Of course.”

“Well,” he said, still doubtfully. “Whatever you say.”

Archie’s pleasant voice droned on, more presents came to Jenny, and to Raymond came the tortoiseshell cigarette case and the lighter, without initials, and a large mechanical insect made of tin which when wound up with a key clattered futilely along the floor waggling its large green wings but unable to take off. Next to the watch it was his favourite gift, and he made Jenny wind it again and again, as pleased as a child that it actually performed, even in his hand.

He was beyond surprise now, beyond an uncomfortable sense of obligation, beyond anything but a kind of speechless bliss he had never encountered before. He was one
of them, lost in the happy, careless shuffle, submerged in the family tide
of laughter and bad jokes and good fellowship. He wasn’t a guest. He wasn’t a stranger. He was inside. Accepted, ignored, pampered, forgotten—one of them. Just like they said in the beginning. One of the family.

“It’s wonderful,” he said to Jenny, his eyes wandering over the bright, noisy room. “Aren’t they wonderful? I never knew there was anything like to-night in the world.”

“I know how you feel,” Jenny said quickly. “I feel the same way about this house, because I never had a family. My mother died when I was born.”

“That’s queer,” said Raymond. “So did mine.”

They stared at each other. It seemed a very deep, inevitable bond between them.

“I should have been a boy, though,” she added finally.

“I think I like you better as a girl,” he remarked
consideringly
, as though the choice rested with him, and her eyes crinkled up in her laughter.

Somebody dropped the needle on the gramophone and the dancing began. Jenny was carried off into a waltz by Bracken, and was taken from him by Archie, who still wore with dignity and unconcern the red barrister’s wig. Oliver danced with his daughter Hermione, and the Duke led out a rather flustered Irene, and Adrian danced with Daphne, who lost her heart to him as utterly as only a sixteen-year-old girl can, and when he guessed her age as seventeen her evening was completely made.

Word went round that the cold buffet was ready in the dining-room, mostly potted meat sandwiches—not rationed—and sweet biscuits, but there was a punch bowl as well, and a beaming maid had begun to circulate in the drawing-room with a tray full of sparkling champagne glasses.

A machine is a machine, and before long Raymond was running the gramophone. They had gone through all the dance records once and were beginning on them again when he found Jenny standing beside him with a glass of champagne in each hand.

“I’m sorry you can’t dance,” she said. “Let somebody else
tend that thing for a while.” And she offered him one of the glasses she carried.

“I just had some of this,” he said, but he thanked her and took it, and they drank while their eyes held across the brims and the record came to an end. He had to set down his glass to start a new one, saying into the opening bars of
The
Merry
Widow,
“I could dance left-handed.”

“How do you mean?” She set down her glass and faced him, willing to try.

“Like this.” He slipped his right arm out of the sling, leaving it bent up towards his shoulder, and put his left around her waist. “You hold my right arm up,” he said, and her hand closed quickly on his as he backed her neatly on to the dance floor.

“So you’re ambidextrous,” she said, surrendering easily to his guidance.

“What’s that?”

“It means you can use either hand equally well.”

“Oh, yes. I was a left-handed kid, and at school they made me learn to use my right instead. It’s kind of convenient sometimes.”

“Have you ever danced the wrong way round before?”

“No, that never came up before. Does it go all right with you?”

“It goes perfectly.” He had a strong natural rhythm, and she leaned confidently on his encircling arm at the turns. “Are you sure you ought to?” she asked after a minute.

“You know something?” said Raymond, ignoring her question. “I can feel your fingers in mine. There was a long time I couldn’t feel anything in that hand. What does that mean?”

“It must mean you’re getting better.”

“I sure hope it does.”

“Hi, Jenny, don’t let him do that!” said Bracken, brushing past them with Fabrice in his arms. And a moment later Clare swept by with the Duke and cried, “Don’t let him use that
arm!” as she went. Jenny faltered in her step and looked up at him, realizing that she knew very little about his wound.

“We’d better stop,” she said, and felt his clasp tighten masterfully around her.

“Whose arm is it?” he wanted to know, and then, wiping out the dark obstinacy on his face, came the transfiguring smile so few people ever saw. Jenny caught it for the first time at a distance of only a few inches and it knocked the breath right out of her, leaving her limp and pliant in his hold, obedient to every shift and turn of his big body, without the will to resist him even for his own good. He was having such fun. Anything that could make him look like that couldn’t hurt him.
Anything
that made him look so—so
young.
“I’ll need this the day after tomorrow,” he was saying. “They can’t take this away from me, even with chloroform.” His eyes went possessively over her hair, so near he could almost feel its softness against his
cheek, over her upturned face in a deliberate glance like a caress, with a pause on her lips like a kiss. “You’ve got the cutest chin,” he said. “I bet you can be stubborn as hell.”

“Well, so can you,” she said without embarrassment.

“Yep—that’s two of us,” he agreed at once. “Two stubborn people, I guess.”

“Stubborn or not, when this record ends you’re through dancing for to-night. And it’s ending now.”

She returned with him to the gramophone and helped him slip his arm back into the sling, and he wound the machine with his left hand while she turned over the record. He knew now how wrong he had been. While they were still dancing, there had been a prickling in the wound, a growing smart, a flash of pain, and now he felt a slow spreading warmth. As he set the needle he was wondering desperately how he could get away without Jenny’s catching on, get out of the room, get off somewhere alone and not spoil the party….

There was a shout from the doorway, and Gerald stood there—captain in the Royal Horse Artillery, tall, dark,
laughing
, very naughty and very brazen about it. Fabrice flung
herself at him with a joyful scream, the rest gathered round to greet him, and Raymond realized with relief that Bracken had arrived to help look after Jenny.

“Let’s all go have something to eat,” said Bracken, and moved them towards the dining-room, collecting the Duke with a lifted eyebrow on the way.

As they passed the staircase in the hall Raymond fell a little behind, then stepped quickly aside and mounted to Bracken’s bedroom. Closing the door carefully behind him, he made for the bathroom. The wound had opened and was bleeding hard.

After a decent interval in the dining-room Bracken began to wonder about Raymond. Then he began to worry. And finally Jenny agreed with him that he had better go upstairs and find him.

Raymond was sitting on the edge of the bathtub dripping scarlet splotches on to the white porcelain. He had undone his tunic in an effort to get it off which had been too much for him alone. The right side of it and the shirt beneath it was dark with blood. He looked up defensively as Bracken appeared in the bathroom doorway.

“Please don’t say anything about this downstairs. Could you get me back to the hospital without anyone knowing?”

“I wouldn’t dare to try,” Bracken replied promptly. “You’ve got to have that seen to at once, but it’s too much for me. Stay where you are and
don’t
move
.”

From the top of the stairs he could see Jenny hovering in the hall. He beckoned to her and she came running up.

“He’s bleeding,” said Bracken. “In my bathroom. Can we get a doctor to come over from the Hall?”

“Let’s have a look,” said Jenny competently. “Which room are you in?”

“The green one.”

Jenny had a look—just one—and said, “Send Phoebe and Virginia up here, quick. Then ring up the Hall and ask Dr. Butler to come at once—say I asked you to—say it’s an
emergency—a bleeding wound which may go into shock before we can get it stopped. Ask him to bring whatever he needs, there’s nothing here, and to bring me a nursing dress, I’ll take night duty. And ask him to hurry.”

Bracken vanished without comment, and Raymond raised his head slowly to look up at her. He was drawn with pain and his colour was already bad.

“I’m sorry about this,” he said rather thickly. “I’m sorry to take you away from the party—”

“Nonsense, we’re used to this sort of thing, we’ll fix you up. Stay right where you are while I get the bed ready. Can you stick it a few minutes more?”

He nodded, and she went into the other room and began to strip back the bed. Phoebe arrived breathless from running upstairs, followed by Virginia, limping, and they rushed off again to bring rubber mats and mackintosh sheets from the nursery cupboard, towels and hot-water bottles. By the time Bracken returned from the telephone the bed was ready and he helped Jenny to get Raymond out of his clothes and into a pair of his own pyjamas. Dr. Butler was not in at the Hall, but was believed to be dining at the rectory. They were trying to find him.

Raymond collapsed gratefully against the pillows and lay with his eyes closed, looking rather done for. Jenny rolled a towel and wadded it under his armpit, pressing the arm against it, but the blood kept coming. His shoulder-cap bandage was soaked bright red, and Phoebe said, “It looks like the
subclavian
artery to me. Put your finger on it.” Without hesitation Jenny made pressure on a spot above the collar-bone, and they watched anxiously. It was hard to tell at once if the flow was slowing up. For all Phoebe’s experience in front-line hospitals, it was somehow Jenny who was in charge here, and Raymond was aware in a growing mistiness that she had fastened a towel over the front of her dance-frock which was already blotched and stained. It was Jenny’s small hands which were red with his blood, it was Jenny who had pinned herself to his side to
maintain the pressure on the first rib. He opened his eyes wider and looked up into her face, brightly lit by the lamp Phoebe was holding above them.

“Please don’t bother,” he said foggily. And then, when she turned her head to smile at him, “You’ll spoil your dress—”

“Hold tight,” said Jenny. “The doctor’s coming.”

They kept the linen wad pressed under his arm, they kept the bed warm with hot-water bottles, Jenny kept her fingers hard against his collar-bone. Their faces were white and strained, and Raymond’s had got quite grey, and a creeping cold was gaining on him, but the bleeding had finally stopped.

He wavered in and out of consciousness, and always when he opened his eyes Jenny was there, her soft hair falling forward along her jaw, her bloodstained hands firm and quiet on him, her chin sticking out. Stubborn, he thought, but could not get the word past his teeth. Too stubborn to let me die, I guess….

But the mists closed in again, and he never knew when the doctor came, and never felt the morphine injection. The lamp was still burning when he roused again to find a clean new bandage in place and the covers smooth above him. He had no strength to stir, but there was a movement beside the bed, quick fingers were laid on his pulse, and he caught the smell of good cigar smoke. The doctor, he thought, gratefully. He got here, then. Where’s Jenny? She was not within the range of his half-open eyes, so he tried to turn his head a little to look for her.

“That’s right,” said the doctor. “Coming round nicely now. Better get some nourishment into him soon.”

With a great effort Raymond raised his eyelids a little further, but his head weighed too much to move.

“Well, you did give us a fright,” said Jenny on the other side of him. “I suppose now you’d like breakfast?”

He tried to smile, he tried to see her—but his eyes closed again in spite of him—he heard something a long way off about chicken broth—and the next thing he knew he was swallowing it.

“There,” said Jenny. “That’s the stuff, isn’t it. Have some more.”

He swallowed again. It wasn’t hot enough to burn his tongue, but hot enough to comfort. It took Jenny to serve broth at the right temperature. He could see her now—holding the bowl and spoon for him—wearing her blue VAD dress and white apron with her hair hidden under the coif.

“Hullo,” he whispered.

“Hullo, darling,” said Jenny.

He remembered that he had heard her call Bracken darling, and even the Frenchman. It was a way Jenny had. It didn’t mean anything.

More broth went down. He dozed again, with that lovely stuff inside him, and the day passed in a haze, punctuated by a visit from Sir Quentin, who humphed at him and hurt him a good deal and said A fine thing, and now they would have to wait a few days.

When he had slept off Sir Quentin he found Virginia sitting beside the bed knitting, and supposed that Jenny had gone back to her regular duties at the Hall. That being the case, it didn’t seem advisable or tactful to ask Virginia about her, so he ate docilely what was given him and drifted off again.

It might have been hours later when he opened his eyes on lamplight, and there was Jenny. This time his head turned towards her on the pillow.

“I thought you’d gone,” he murmured.

“I’m on night duty,” she said. She had been reading a book by the shaded light, and her coif and apron were spotlessly fresh. She laid down the book and took his temperature and pulse and wrote them down while he watched silently. Then she went to a little spirit stove which had been installed on a table against the wall and heated some broth and brought it to him. He stirred as though to raise himself and she said quickly, “Lie perfectly still, I’ll feed it to you.”