Kissing Kin (22 page)

“Camilla told me something about how you feel,” Calvert was saying, not looking at her. “I can understand how that is, of course, but I’m hoping I can change it for you. I’m hoping I can teach you to trust me enough to let me try to make it up to you for what you’ve been through. I want to take you home with me, Jenny, and make you forget the war and all that went with it. You’ve done your bit, anyway, at the hospital. As soon as I’m sure I won’t be a nuisance to you with this leg, I want to start taking care of you. We’ll go to Williamsburg, where Aunt Sue is, and you can have a good rest and eat Southern cooking and everybody will adore you. It’s a pretty town, with white houses behind white picket fences, and the voices
of the darkies are happy in the streets. They make the best servants in the world, loyal and funny and affectionate. You’d like Williamsburg better than Richmond, I think, we spend a lot of time there, though Mother won’t give up the house in Richmond. We haven’t got much money on our side of the family, but we don’t seem to need much, somehow. You’ll be all right with us.” His eyes came up, honest and a little shy about the awkward subject of money. “You won’t starve, anyway,” he said earnestly, “and if I find I can write books like my cousin Phoebe, we might do pretty well. Anyway, I want to try. Will you come, Jenny?”

“Oh, Calvert, you make it sound very nice, but—” Tears stood in her eyes. The obstinate memory of another voice beat against Calvert’s drawling words: My father kept the livery stable and feed store—my father taught me how to do things, I don’t have to send for the plumber and the carpenter—you’d be the wife of a common garage mechanic in greasy overalls…

“But what, Jenny? We could always come back to England for a visit when you get homesick. Dinah always comes back. Bracken’s got more money in a minute than I have in a year, of course, but I can still afford steamship tickets for two now and then, I’m not asking you to emigrate.”

“I know, darling, I know, it isn’t that, but—”

“What is it, then? Are you afraid? You’re safe to love me, honey, I’m yours for keeps, you know. Jenny, you’re crying! Do you still love him?”

“Gerald? No, of course not!”

“I’ll make it all up to you,” he pleaded. “Just give me a chance. I’ll take care of you, Jenny. I’ll give the rest of my life to it. There’s nothing else I want to do, but make you happy, and never see you cry again. I love you so, Jenny—”

And that other voice in her wilful memory, offering nothing, promising nothing: When I go back I expect to build that garage and operate it—it would be years before I could give you a better house—you couldn’t live like that…. And her own voice, desperate and broken: I could get a job—I could
learn to make my own clothes—I wouldn’t be a nuisance…. And Calvert’s Virginia drawl:—white houses behind white picket fences—the best servants in the world—I’ll take care of you—I’ll make you happy—I love you so….

Had Raymond ever spoken of love, or happiness, or care, like that? But it was Raymond she wanted still. And inside of a week she would see him again. She wasn’t engaged to him. He had asked for no pledge from her, nor given any assurance of his own. She had no right to take refuge behind him from any new proposal of marriage, for he had made none himself. She was bound to him only by her own stubborn devotion, not by any act of his, and he would doubtless point out his renouncement of her if confronted with a rival claim. He stood back, aloof, enigmatic, mysterious, a stranger in all his ways, making no concessions and no appeals and no demands. Her heart was in his strong, fine hands, but hers were empty, he had given nothing in return. She felt newly bereft and humiliated and bewildered, to realize that she had no plausible reason now for refusing Calvert, I am in love with somebody else, she could say. And then— Are you going to marry him? Calvert would have the right to ask. I don’t know, was all she could answer. Why don’t you know? He won’t ask me—he won’t have me. Then why bother about him—I’m here—I’ll take care of you—I love you so—why bother about him, Jenny, who is he? And if she told him it was Raymond who stood between them, what would Calvert say? What did men do who loved each other and wanted the same woman? What would Raymond do if he saw that Calvert— The mere idea brought a sort of panic. He was sure to see. Or Calvert in all innocence would tell him. What would
Raymond
do then?

“I suppose it’s much too soon,” Calvert was saying on the sofa. “Camilla warned me not to rush you.”

“D-does Camilla know how you feel—about me?”

“Oh, yes—Raymond does too. He said so far as he knew there was no one to stand in my way with you. Is there?”

Jenny rose and walked to the window and stood there
looking
out blindly. Her hands and knees were shaking. Calvert had been and done it.

“Please say something, Jenny,” suggested a patient voice from the sofa.

“It’s because I don’t know what to say. It does seem a bit soon, doesn’t it, we haven’t known each other very long.”

“I’ll wait, then. I’ll ask you again. But I think as a rule people know right away, don’t you? I did. Of course there’s my leg. Everything depends on it.”

“It’s got nothing to do with your leg,” she said firmly, returning to the sofa. “You took me by surprise. The British are awfully slow, hadn’t you noticed that?”

He sat up, and caught one of her hands in both his, and kissed it.

“I’ll be good,” he promised. “I’ll try not to worry you. But it’s such fun to be in love, Jenny.”

“Is it?” she said, looking down at him ruefully.

“Try,” he said. “Promise me to try.”

That too stuck in her throat, for she dreaded to encourage him even a little. He was very attractive, with his hair rumpled from the pillows, his fine-drawn boyish face upturned to her, his grey eyes confident and dancing. He would be easy to love. Life with him would be gay and comfortable and perhaps lavish. There was nothing easy about Raymond, dark and inarticulate and unimpulsive. Nothing but to let him go. Jenny’s chin lifted.

“For me, it’s got to come without trying,” she said gently.

The day before Raymond arrived at Farthingale Camilla got her feet wet on a walk in the garden with Sosthène and Mimi and began to sneeze again and some anxiety was felt. She was not allowed to go to the station in the car which would meet Raymond’s train, and a telephone call to the Hall met with a firm reply from Winifred. Jenny’s afternoon off was tomorrow. Today she could not be spared. Raymond would have to find his welcome on the mat at Farthingale and
not at the train. At Camilla’s croaking insistence Jenny was brought to the telephone.

“Honey, you’ve got to help us out over here,” Camilla told her hoarsely. “I’m laid up again with a temperature and Calvert is tied to the sofa and it’s going to be very dull for Raymond if you don’t rally round.”

“I’ve only got tomorrow afternoon,” said Jenny, and her heart began to beat.

“Well, let’s think of something,” Camilla entreated. “I
suppose
you couldn’t get a car and run him over to Gloucester or Cheltenham or somewhere, just for a treat?”

“No petrol for a jaunt like that, I’m afraid. If he can ride a bicycle I could take him to Overcreech and give him tea there, but that’s not very exciting, is it.”

“That would do nicely,” Camilla assured her. “Just to break the monotony here, you know. You could show him over the house, and your father liked him at Christmas time, didn’t he?”

“Father is in London, unfortunately. But he left the
housekeeper
and a couple of maids at Overcreech. I’ll ring up and warn them that we’re coming, shall I?”

“Unless it rains,” said Camilla. “I do think it would be too bad for Raymond to be stuck here the whole of his leave with two complete crocks like us.”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Jenny. “Lend him a bicycle and send him over here about two o’clock tomorrow and we’ll go on to Overcreech. He can see the pictures and the garden and they’ll give us some sort of tea—”

“And then you could both come back here for dinner. I’ll come downstairs tomorrow night if it kills me.”

“I’d have to get back to the Hall before dark on a bike.”

“Stay the night here. I can always lend you things.”

“Well—I’ll ask.”

“Ask for Sunday too, while you’re about it.”

“I can try.”

Jenny hung up the telephone, marvelling at the
resourcefulness
of Providence. It was hard on Camilla to have got a
relapse, but it gave her, Jenny, an afternoon with Raymond—perhaps a chance to block any nonsense on his part about Calvert. And to have Overcreech all to themselves might make all the difference—a chance to talk to each other without eyes and ears all round them, a chance to behave for a little while like people in love in normal times. Tea in the panelled parlour, with the sun streaming in through the windows, and the door shut on the war. Jenny’s heart was beating fast. He was well now. He could put both arms around her….

Raymond, confronted with the well-meant plans for his entertainment, protested that he would be perfectly happy at Farthingale with them all day, and was reminded that nobody ever missed an opportunity to see Overcreech House, famous for its picture gallery and its gardens. He subsided meekly, feeling that somebody somewhere was not giving him an even break on this thing. An afternoon alone with Jenny, even with a couple of bicycles between them, was full of risks he had no desire to encounter.

She was waiting when he arrived at the Hall the following day. She gave him her hand and her smile, and led the way to the stables where her bicycle lived, and they set out along a deep lane towards Overcreech. When they stopped to rest, sitting on the grass beside the road, he told about the training he had had, and they discussed what was ahead of him—gazetted Flying Officer now, he wore a single gold stripe, and if he passed in his technical subjects would be eligible for the CFS at Upavon and advanced fighter training. By the time July was out he would have won the right to fly a
single-seater
Camel over the lines in France. The German ace von Richthofen had been recently killed, his red plane crashing behind the British lines after a general dogfight. “The b-
so-and-so
claimed eighty of our planes, so we bury him with full military honours,” said Raymond in disgust.

Jenny watched and waited with a growing hopelessness for any sign from him of their former intimacy. He was cool, impersonal, respectful, and withdrawn, as though she was the
Queen—or a duke’s daughter. Gradually the light went out of her face, and she became passive and polite like a disappointed child. It was gone. The thing they had had together was swept away by this passion of his for flying, his single-minded absorption in the job ahead of him. He had left love behind. He had no need of it now that he was well. She had ceased to matter to him. It might as well be Gerald all over again. And because she cared so much more this time, it was going to be much worse. Later, when she had time to face it, it would be. In the meantime, a cup of tea would help.

Jenny rose from the grass, very much on her dignity, a thing he had never seen before. She had not interrupted him, but she had quietly closed a door on the subject of German aces and their boastful records, as compared to the less publicized anonymous exploits of the RFC fighter pilots.

“If we don’t get on our way,” she said, sounding to him a little more clipped and British than he was accustomed to, “the hot scones they promised me will be spoilt.” And she was off before him down the lane.

Raymond followed, looking dark and closed in. He knew very well what he had done, he had seen it happening while he talked, and had deliberately pressed home the point of his blade, as he had braced himself to do. He had hurt her, enduring a double anguish while he did so. But when it was over, and he had gone to France, Calvert would still be here, and Calvert was the sort of person for Jenny to marry. She would be safe with Calvert, and this crazy interlude with himself would finally be forgotten. Not by him. No one would ever fill Jenny’s place with him. But he would probably not have long to get used to living without her anyway, and he would be pretty busy. It was unlikely that he would ever have to see her married to somebody else. To come right down to it, he would just as soon be let off that. And if the worst happened to him, the less she had to remember of the love between them the better for her.

Following Jenny’s bicycle through the tall wrought-iron
gates of Overcreech House, he looked up to find the ornate façade before him. That it was in the best Jacobean style would have conveyed nothing to him. He only knew that it was more impressive than Farthingale and more home-like than the Georgian vastness of the Hall.

It was a gem of a house, as Jenny well knew, and her pride of it was not entirely dimmed by the fact that it was no longer going to be as much fun to show it to Raymond as she had always thought it would be. Tea was laid in the panelled parlour, where tall vases of pale blue delphinium stood. The housekeeper had provided lavishly, but Jenny found it difficult to appreciate the delicacies the good woman had contrived. Raymond ate a bit of everything politely, and drank two cups of tea, and discussed the news from France, which was not good. After a month’s lull another violent German thrust had been launched on the Marne front. Soissons was gone—and Neuilly—and it was hotting up round Montdidier again. He took some time to explain his own preference for the small fighter plane as against the bombing jobs—in a Camel, he said, you could go right down to the level of the housetops and machine-gun German troops jammed between the walls to great effect, while it took tons of bombs to damage a city to any extent, besides killing a lot of non-combatants, which was a waste of effort. It was troops you wanted to kill. They were the people who shot at you, weren’t they? Well, then.

So that was the way the door was shut on the war, Jenny thought angrily as the afternoon slid by and away from her for ever, with no word of love from him, no advantage
whatever
taken of their first opportunity to be quite alone together without being overheard. And remembering how she had promised herself the feel of both his arms around her, to warm and uphold and sustain her in the time to come, her cheeks reddened and her mouth tightened, and she listened numbly, making few remarks of her own, and he fought off a growing compassion. Her day was ruined, he knew. Better that than her life.