Return to Tremarth (2 page)

She gasped as she stared up at him. From the moment that her eyes alighted on him perched on a high stool at the bar strange things had been happening to her. She felt as if her memory was being tugged at. Few people can remember clearly the faces they encountered when they were five years old, but this one must have created for itself a niche somewhere in the deep recesses of her unplumbed retentive consciousness. She would have been exaggerating outrageously if she said that she recognised him. But memory was already beginning to stir a little, like a sleeper awaking from a prolonged state of trance, and she knew why those sardonically marked black eyebrows, and those disturbing grey eyes, had puzzled her. They had intrigued her against her will. And now she knew the reason why.

“But it can’t possibly be true,” she protested, still staring up at him. “You were so many years older — ”

“I was fifteen,” he told her, “and you, as I have just reminded you, were five.”

“You were away at school. But you came to Tremarth to stay with your uncle.”

“And you were staying with your Great-Aunt Jane.”

“My aunt didn’t like you. She discouraged your visits.”

“Because her house had once belonged to my family, and she disliked to think of herself as a usurper. That was precisely what she was, however. And she was not even a Cornish-woman!”

“You’re Richard Tremarth!”

“I am.” And he bowed slightly and mockingly from the waist. “One of your earliest admirers! Have I your permission to sit down and talk to you?”

Charlotte could think of no reason why she should be discourteous enough to refuse him this permission. True, the memories — such very, very faint and faded memories — he aroused had a kind of backwash of

unpleasantness. She had disliked being carried on his shoulders round the orchard at Tremarth, and the childish perspicacity that had enabled her to sense that her Great-Aunt Jane was almost hostile towards him had no doubt shaped her own attitude of badly veiled dislike and mistrust. He was the local doctor’s nephew, and he visited Cornwall two or three times a year. His people were rich — his parents, that is — but it appeared that they were always abroad. Young Richard didn’t seem to mind in the slightest. In fact, to Charlotte he was a slightly unnatural boy already approaching manhood, who cared for very little except sailing and Tremarth.

She recollected now that he had seemed passionately devoted to Tremarth. He had taken photographs of it with his expensive German camera and carried them back to school with him in one of his opulent pigskin suitcases, and he had spent hours on the terrace trying to paint the south wall that overlooked the sea. But he was no artist, and his efforts had made her laugh — a little cruelly, as she realised now. She had had beech-brown curls and elfin dark eyes, and although she had had a wholesome fear of her impressive elderly aunt she had had no fear at all of the doctor’s dark, intense nephew. Quite the contrary, in fact. She had provoked him with the shamelessness of a far older specimen of her sex, and although she accepted sweets from him, and allowed him to take her out in his boat, she never thanked him for these favours.

She had told him on one occasion that she hated him. And now that she recalled it, she was not entirely surprised. He had been so extraordinarily possessive about Tremarth, saying that her aunt had no right to live in it. and one day he would buy it back. He would force her to part with it because it was the cradle of the Tremarth family, and he was more proud of being a Tremarth than he was of being English. She simply hadn’t understood why he had seemed to despise the English. He had insisted that he was Cornish.

And one day he intended to settle down in Cornwall. It was his background... his heritage.

“Well, well,” she exclaimed, as she watched him take a seat at her table and study her over the top of it. “Life is strange, isn’t it? I never expected a bit of my past to creep up on me when I returned to Cornwall.”

Richard, who was six feet two in his socks and as lean and lithe as a greyhound, smiled.

“I’m flattered to be described as a bit of your past.”

“You know what I mean_” She felt annoyed again.

“I’d honestly forgotten you. But then that isn’t really surprising, is it? I was only a baby. And to me you were neither fish nor flesh, if you follow my meaning. You were not another child I could play with, and you were not really a man. You were something in between, and you puzzled me.”

“If you’d had brothers and sisters I would not have puzzled you at all.” “No; but I hadn’t any brothers or sisters. I was — and still am — an only child.”

“I was an only child, too,” he told her. She studied him with rather more interest. He was astonishingly good-looking, really, in a dark and saturnine way. His eyes were quite extraordinary, and they fascinated her. She wanted to look away, but his eyes would not allow this, and they stared at one another, the colour stealing slowly into her deliciously creamy cheeks as she recognised that his whole expression was mocking her. She knew enough about men to realise that he found her attractive, but the curve of his mouth was hard and cynical. He had a square jaw that jutted ominously, and she wondered what it would be like to thwart him.

And then she found herself blushing furiously because it was such an extraordinary thing to think only a few minutes after making the discovery that she had known him in the past.

If he noticed the blush, his expression did not alter. He merely began to press her for information.

“So you haven’t been back to Cornwall for some time?”

“Not since I was five.” A dimple played for a moment at one comer of her mouth, and then vanished. “My great-aunt’s health deteriorated soon after that, and I never saw her again. She left Tremarth to my father, but he

also is dead.”

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

Charlotte found it necessary to lower her eyelashes. She shrugged.

“Like your father he travelled abroad a good deal,” she told him, “and in fact he died abroad. He was an archaeologist.”

“And your mother?”

“I’m sorry to say that they parted. But she’s dead, too, now.”

She thought that his expression grew slightly sombre, and his grey eyes harder between the short thick fringes of his very black eyelashes.

“So we’re both orphans,” he remarked. “But I’ve been an orphan for many years — and I’m used to it.”

“Your uncle?” she enquired politely. “I remember he was Aunt Jane’s doctor.”

“Dead, too, but one of my pleasant memories. I was fond of him.”

“I’m sorry,” she murmured automatically.

The landlord had brought a tray of coffee to their table, and had thoughtfully added another cup, but Richard Tremarth refused to be tempted when Charlotte poised the coffee-pot near the rim of his cup.

“Thank you,” he said absent-mindedly, “but I loathe coffee.”

He was frowning as he lighted yet another cigarette.

“You smoke too much,” she remarked, without passing to reflect that it was no concern of hers.

Tremarth shrugged.

“We all have one particular vice, and mine is not smoking.” She watched as the smoke crept upwards in a column and surrounded his sleek dark head. “I heard that Miss Woodford had died, and I came down here to take a nostalgic look at the house. You may remember that I once expressed the determination to possess it myself one of these days.”

“Yes,” she replied, “I do remember that.” “We all have dreams, but some of them are not very practical. However — ” He glanced at her swiftly and then away. “Any objection to my having a look over the house since you’re

here, and I’m here, too?”

“None whatsoever,” she assured him.

“I take it you’re not planning to live there yourself?”

“I really don’t know...She sounded surprised. “It’s too soon to make up my mind. To be honest, I’m not yet accustomed to the idea that I own the house.”

“And the contents?” He shot the question at her. “Your aunt left you everything, of course?” “Everything except an income to maintain the place. She died very badly off, I’m afraid.” She was amazed by the appearance of

relief in his face.

“Then you can’t even contemplate living there yourself?”

“I’ve told you I’ve no idea what I’m going to do with it--”

“But a young woman of your age! Alone — in a house like that!” Relief gave place to an alert hardness that widened her eyes and aroused in her the beginnings of real resentment. “I mean, you’re not even married. Or are you?” Suspicion edged his voice and narrowed his eyes while, to her astonishment, his fist on the table clenched itself until the knuckles showed up white and gleaming in the rays that were streaming from the ship’s lantern overhead. “You’re not just calling yourself Miss Woodford and living apart from a husband, or anything of that sort?”

“Well, really! ” she gasped.

“Are you?” he persisted, his mouth like a steel trap.

“Certainly not!” She couldn’t remember feeling so indignant for a long time. “For one thing I don’t believe in married couples living apart, and for another I’m not even — engaged!”

“Good!” He relaxed so completely that she could almost have deceived herself that she had imagined that alteration in his expression. She saw his even, well-cared-for white teeth again as he smiled across the table at her, and between his thick eyelashes his grey eyes actually softened. “Then there’s no one to tell you what you must or must not do? You are your own mistress?”

“I hope so.”

“And you probably have a job of some sort?” “I run a typewriting bureau with a friend. She’s carrying on without me at the moment.” He looked as satisfied as if she had supplied him with a very useful piece of information.

He rose from the table unexpectedly.

“You must forgive me if I say good-night to you now,” he said. “Whenever I pay a short visit to Cornwall I like to make the most of it. The tide’s out and the moon will be up in another ten minutes or so” — he consulted his watch — “and I want to take a walk. Discovering the old familiar places is one of my favourite occupations when I’m down here at Tremarth.”

She looked up at him in some surprise. Even by the light of a Cornish moon, discovering old familiar places might be a trifle difficult at that late hour of the day.

“Good hunting,” she replied carelessly, as she poured herself another cup of coffee and realised even as she did so that it would probably keep her awake when she took herself upstairs to her room. “I hope you’ve got cat’s eyes. Or perhaps you normally take your exercise when other people are thinking of going to bed?”

He looked down at her unsmilingly.

“If you’re visiting the house to-morrow, may I go with you? I don’t want to be a nuisance, but I would like to look over it again.”

“Of course,” she answered immediately. “As a matter of fact, I’m leaving here to-morrow morning after breakfast, and shall be staying at Tremarth after that. At any rate, for a while —”

He looked down at her intently.

“Thank you,” he said, “I have my own car. I’ll simply follow you up to the house as soon as I see you leave.”

She was about to call after him that she was sorry she couldn’t offer him lunch because there were no stores, as yet, at Tremarth, but he swept out of the bar with a few quick strides, and she was left with the impression of someone who was a complete and — she suspected — rather ruthless stranger, and a memory that didn’t actually link up with that stranger.

The Richard Tremarth she had known when she was a child had found her a nuisance, but had gone out of his way to please her. This man was not as pliable and she could not imagine him going out of his way to please anyone. He was very much a self-contained unit who conveyed to her the strong impression that he was not visiting that part of the world because of nostalgia, but because he had some sort of an axe to grind.

She said good-night to the landlord and made her way up to her room in the quaint centuries-old inn. Her bed was turned down, and the room itself looked very inviting, but after switching on the light for a moment she switched it off again and went across to the window. Below it lay the cobbled village street, a small opening opposite at the end of which she could see the sea.

Richard Tremarth had been quite right about the moment when the moon would rise, for it was already lifting itself above the rooftops and shedding a light across the placidly heaving sea. From where she stood at her window she could see a semi-circle of glistening white beach, and some dark cliffs looming above it. She could also see a tall figure striding out across the sand, making for the line of cliffs and looking very purposeful, and not in the least as if his sole purpose was to enjoy himself.

A faint frown drew her slim eyebrows together. Since they were such old friends, why hadn’t he asked her to accompany him? After all, as he had reminded her, he had once given her piggy-back rides round the orchard at Tremarth.

Try as she would, she couldn’t imagine him giving her anything but a few formal minutes of his time after this lapse of so many years.

CHAPTER II

SHE was enjoying the sunshine on the terrace when he drove up in his car the following day. It was a silver-grey Italian car, and one that was built for speed. When Tremarth alighted from it, also wearing a rather pale shade of grey, there seemed to the watching eyes of Charlotte something lean and almost greyhound-like about him.

He ascended the worn steps of the terrace in a single bound, and stood beside her in the sunshine. He smiled at her in the faintly onesided way that he had smiled at her the evening before.

“I saw you leave,” he said. “I hope you didn’t feel as if I was trailing you.”

She glanced up at him in some surprise.

“Good gracious, no...why should I?” She didn’t know why but with his eyes regarding her somewhat critically — or so she thought

— she felt nervous and a trifle awkward. For no reason at all, she had dressed herself with particular care, and the morning itself was not any fairer than she was, with her warm creamy skin that went with her red-gold hair overlaid with just the faintest tinge of pink.