Past All Forgetting (24 page)

As she had once wished to be able to hate Fleur, she now wished she could dislike Earn San, but it was impossible. She would have to be careful—so very careful— she told herself, not to give any of her secret thoughts away and dull the glow of Kim San's obvious happiness. Fortunately, she seemed to have no suspicion of the truth as she made the coffee and served it in the drawing room, which had now been additionally furnished with an ancient sofa of uncertain springs.

Kim San apologised for the bareness of the surroundings.

'It is well Ri-an did not warn me before I came of what it would be like,' she said with a pretty grimace. 'I think I would have stayed away until our apartment was finished. You have not seen our apartment, Jan-na may I call you? It will be very nice, I think, when the furniture arrives next week.'

Janna tried desperately to think of an excuse not to look over the apartment, but nothing would spring to mind, and Kim San was already leading the way, delighted to have a guest to show over her future domain.

She was forced to admit that the conversion of the loft and stables seemed to have been a great success. The main living area had been given a blocked parquet floor, and most of one wall had been removed to make way for a huge picture window, giving an uninterrupted view over the dale. The worst moment came when she had to mount the wrought iron spiral staircase to the former loft to see the bedroom and bathroom which had been fitted almost miraculously into the available space. There was a private agony to be endured in looking into the larger of the two rooms, and knowing that was where Rian would sleep with Kim San.

'You look very pale, Jan-na,' Kim San gave her a searching look. 'Are you well?'

'Yes.' Janna loosened the top button of her shirt. 'It— it seems a little stuffy in here, that's all. I wasn't expecting any heating to be on.'

Kim San was all concern immediately, and led her out into the fresh air. Janna could only be glad that Rian had not accompanied them, otherwise she was afraid she would have been bound to give herself away.

When they went back into the house, Fleur was in the drawing room practising 'Away in a Manger'.

'She sings so well,' Janna commented, glad to find a topic that had no personal connotations for herself.

'Yes,' Kim San acknowledged. 'Though it is too early to know if the voice will grow and develop or whether it is the talent of a child. In some ways, I hope that it is so.'

'You don't want her to be a singer?'

Kim shrugged. 'I want her to be happy,' she said quietly. 'Perhaps I think too much of my own experience. All I wanted to do was sing. I wished for nothing else.'

'But you don't feel like that now?' Janna asked.

Kim San shook her head. 'Now I wish to make a home for my child and my man. Years ago I could have done so, but I would not. I wished him to follow my career, and when he refused I quarrelled with him, and sent him away. I had the chance of fame—to appear on concert platforms all over the world. It seemed a great chance. Then I found I was to have his child, and I was angry. I demanded that he return to me and do as I wanted, and again he would not. He said I must come to him.'

'And so eventually you did,' Janna said, trying to smile.

'Yes,' Kim San agreed. 'But how many wasted years there have been between, and even now we are not together as I would wish. We have both changed, I know this, but perhaps we are wiser now, and I know we must take this chance to build our lives together.'

'Don't you hanker for your career, even now?'

Kim San shook her head. 'No,' she said calmly. 'I have another one now.'

She accompanied Janna to the front door, and shook hands smilingly, saying that she was looking forward to seeing her at the Nativity play. She obviously had no idea that Janna would be leaving the school, and was prepared to continue the friendship. If circumstances had only been different, Janna thought she would have liked to have had Kim San as a friend. But as things were, it was quite impossible.

She walked away down the drive, and paused as she readied the gates. Somewhere behind her she heard the purr of an engine, and saw the long sleek shape of Rian's par following her. She stood aside to let it pass, but he pulled up beside her.

'Get in,' he said shortly. 'I'll drive you back to town, or home, or wherever you're going.'

'No,' she burst out. 'I—I'd rather walk.'

'Don't lie,' he sent her a sardonic look. 'What you're really saying is that you don't want to drive with me.'

'If you know that, I don't know why you persist,' she said in a low voice.

'Frankly, neither do I,' he said coldly. 'I must have an inbuilt streak of masochism. Anyway, I'm not prepared to argue with you. Get in, Janna, before I mate you.'

She hesitated. They were out of sight of the house, but if she ran, she knew he would come after her, and there would only be some kind of undignified scuffle. Setting her jaw, she walked round the car and climbed in silently.

He let in the clutch and moved off. She sat, her shoulders slightly hunched, as far away from him as she could get, a fact that wasn't lost on him, judging by the satirical smile that played around his lips.

'Relax,' he advised. 'You won't have to put up with my company for very long.'

'You don't make things very easy for me.'

Have we ever made things easy for each other?' he asked coldly.

'No.' She moistened her lips. 'And I can't say I wasn't warned. When you wanted me with you, you told me what it would be like.'

He sent her a swift glance. 'How did you know about that?'

'My mother told me. She gave me your letter—only seven years late.' She tried a laugh, but it was a failure.

'And seven years too late,' he said almost conversationally. 'Don't worry about it, Janna. Pack it away among your souvenirs. I'm sure you must have some—I certainly have. Would you like to see one of them?'

He applied the brakes and brought the car smoothly to rest at the side of the road. He reached into an inner pocket and produced a small package loosely wrapped in tissue paper which he tossed into her lap. 'Remember this?'

Wonderingly, she unwrapped the flimsy paper covering and caught her breath. She was looking at a small white artificial rose, the sort of pretty ornament that a young girl might use to fasten in her hair at a party—a special party, anyway.

'It's a little crushed and faded,' Rian went on in the same almost casual manner. 'But then it's travelled a long way and been in some strange places.'

'I realised I'd lost it—that night,' she whispered. 'But I had no idea what had happened to it.'

'Well, now you do know,' he said abruptly. 'Have you nothing to say?'

'What can I say?' She shook her head helplessly, her eyes blinded by a rush of sudden tears. 'It makes no difference. How can it?' She drew a long, uneven breath. 'My God, you can be cruel!'

'That's rich coming from you.' He set the car in motion again, and Janna began to re-wrap the flower. He looked at her sharply.

'What are you doing?

'Giving it back,' she said almost inaudibly.

'That's hardly appropriate under the circumstances,' he said with immense dryness. 'Keep it, sweet witch, or throw it away as you wish.'

'Don't you care?' she asked childishly.

'What has caring to do with it? As you reminded me so graphically the other day. I have no right to care. It was a salutory reminder, and I'm trying hard to live up to it. Hence the clearing out of old memories?

She slipped the little bundle into her handbag with shaking fingers, hardly able to think coherently any more. The irony of the situation was almost more than she could bear. Only a few days before she had found that Rian had loved her all those years ago, loved her enough to want to marry her and take her with him in spite of pressures from his family. No wonder he had seemed bitter. Her lack of response to his letter must have convinced him that she was just playing some silly, childish game with him, pretending to love. His quarrel with his uncle and subsequent breach with his family must have seemed a totally futile action.

Yet in spite of this he had kept her rose, carried it with him as a reminder of her. And now at this moment, when they should have been closest, all the shadows fled and the ghosts laid, they had never been further apart. Kim San and Fleur were not ghosts. They were reality, and they deserved their chance for happiness. But for Rim San's insistence on her career, they would probably have been married years before, Janna told herself sombrely. In some ways she wished they had been, so that she would have at least been spared this heartache she was now suffering.

But he belonged to Kim San, just as surely as if the legal cermony had already been performed, she thought, and she had to crush down this bitter-sweet longing to feel his arms about her just once more.

As the car reached the bridge, she roused herself. 'Will you drop me here, please. I—I still have some messages.

'As you please,' he said coolly.

She waited on the bridge until the car had disappeared, and then walked to the parapet and stood looking down into the lazily swirling water. The rose drifted down, the petals fluttering in the icy wind. Then the current took it and it vanished under the bridge. Janna did not go to the other side to see if it reappeared. As she walked away, she felt that she had just let all the wildness and eagerness of her youth slip through her fingers for ever.

As the evening of the school concert and the Nativity play drew nearer, Janna felt herself growing increasingly nervous. She told herself that she had no logical reason for this. The rehearsals were going well, and Fleur's confidence was increasing daily. Janna was even able to ignore the sullen behaviour of Lucy Watson and her immediate circle.

She almost felt sorry for Lucy. She was a spoiled child, and she had obviously been convinced that Janna would be forced to change her mind about giving her the part when she learned what was being said.

Lucy now found her consolation in making the odd spiteful remark, which Fleur managed to appear never to hear, or at least to understand.

Inevitably, a rumour had got out that she was leaving, and several of the children showed an embarrassing disposition to hang around her, sighing mournfully. Janna was glad to have the Christmas preparations to take their minds off her imminent departure.

She had to pretend too that she did not know that money was being collected both by the children and the staff to buy her a leaving present.

Once as she sat at the back of the hall listening to a group of older juniors practising carols, she felt a lump come into her throat at the realisation that next Christmas she might be many miles away. She promised herself she would take the memory of this last week of term with its songs and parties and laughter and traditions with her, no matter how far she might travel. She smiled at herself rather sadly, thinking it was her disturbed emotions that were responsible for that piece of sentimentality.

If she was sensible, she would take nothing with her from Carrisford—neither memories, nor regrets, nor frustrated yearnings.

She lived each day as it came, trying to look neither forward nor back. She had spent too much of her life in retrospection, she told herself. If she started again now, she might find herself overwhelmed by might-have-beens.

The play and concert were due to be performed for the parents in the evening, and there was always a run-through in the afternoon, rather like a full dress rehearsal, watched by the infants department, an appreciative and uncritical audience who normally had a soothing effect on the frayed nerves of the young actors and performers.

The play was always the climax of the concert, followed only by a lusty mass rendering of 'O Come, all ye faithful' by everyone present.

The children were dressing for the play in a large classroom just near the hall. All the costumes had been taken home during the week and washed and pressed, and were now laid out carefully over desks while the wearers submitted gingerly to having a modicum of make-up applied. Janna was just finishing an artistic beard for one of the Wise Men, when she felt a tug at her sleeve. She glanced down and saw Fleur, very solemn and wide-eyed in vest and flowered knickers.

'You'd better get dressed,' she advised. There isn't very much time.'

'Come and look, Mees, please.' There was no gainsaying the urgent, note in Fleur's voice, so with a slight sigh Janna abandoned a rather indignant shepherd who was waiting to have sixty years added to his age with the aid of a few greasepaint wrinkles, and went to see what was causing Fleur's concern.

The reason was not far to seek. The pale blue costume to be worn by the Virgin Mary was hung neatly across a chair, its pristine splendour destroyed for ever by the great smear of paint and glue which had appeared on the front. Janna's lips parted in a gasp of dismay as she saw it. The little robe was utterly ruined. The glue that had been used was a brand which the children were always particularly careful not to get on their clothes because it was known not to wash out. The paint was just an added refinement.

Biting her lip, she picked the dress up and studied it to see if there was possibly enough material left undamaged to salvage for a makeshift costume, but there wasn't.

She was angry, but she had to mask her anger. She gave Fleur an encouraging smile. 'Well, you'll just have to wear that nice dress you had on earlier for now, and we'll think of something else for tonight. The infants won't mind.'

Fleur, little more than an infant herself in the school hierarchy, gave a solemn nod, but it was evident that tears were not too far away.

Janna did not bother to look at Lucy Watson. She knew there would be both guilt and triumph on her face, and she knew too that there was not a shred of proof. It could have been an accident, if the dress had not been folded carefully so that the smear was concealed until the wearer picked it up to put it on. 

She could not accuse Lucy, but she did accuse herself of having underestimated the child's malice, although she suspected that the idea had been planted in her mind by someone older.