Sunshine Yellow (9 page)

CHAPTER X

Before N
ovember was out Mrs. Wilmott and Veronica spent a week at the local inn, and it was while they were staying there that Penny met Roland Ardmore for the second time.

She and Stephen had accepted an invitation to have dinner with her aunt and cousin, and they were sitting round the fire in the main lounge and sipping their coffee when he walked in. It was a wild night outside
—
very
diff
erent from the sunny morning when Penny
had met him on the beach—and he was wearing a duffle coat, and his golden hair was wet with rain and sea spray, but she recognized him at once. It was quite obvious that he also recognized her at once, for he came straight towards her, holding out his hand.

“Ah, Mrs. Blair!” he exclaimed, “I’ve been hoping I would see you again. I’ve been hoping you’ll let me paint that portrait.”

Stephen’s dark head went up at once, and behind his dark glasses his blue eyes registered alertness.

“Who is this, Penny?” he asked sharply. “Some friend of yours I have yet to meet?”

Penny made the introduction she couldn’t possibly avoid in a tone of constraint, wishing it wasn’t necessary to do so while Veronica was looking on with undisguised interest in her thickly-lashed eyes.
An attractive man was always a challenge to her, and she found herself looking up at him and regarding him between her lashes with ill-concealed speculation and quite a tinge of admiration.

“H’m, h’m!” she said, when Penny had somewhat stiltedly made them all known to one another. “So my little cousin goes roving on the beach sometimes, does she? All by herself! And runs into celebrated artists who want to paint her portrait!”

“I’m afraid I’m not very celebrated, Miss Wilmott,” Ardmore returned, looking down at her keenly. “Or not as celebrated as I hope to be one day!”

“But I know your name,” Veronica told him. “I’ve seen some of your work. It’s excellent!”

“Thank you.” He bowed, his bright blue eyes glinting, although they also reflected some of the admiration that flickered like a surprised flame in hers. “You are too kind,” he added, with the utmost dryness, “and I can’t tell you how flattered I feel!”

Stephen said with even greater sharpness than before:

“Why didn’t you tell me Mr. Ardmore wanted to paint your portrait, Penny?”

Penny explained awkwardly.

“Perhaps because I didn’t take him seriously. I can’t imagine why anyone should want to paint my portrait.”

“Then you can’t look at yourself very often in the mirror,” Ardmore said swiftly, sinking into a chair beside her and accepting a drink somewhat grudgingly offered by Stephen. “You have the type of face almost any artist would like to paint, and it isn’t merely your colouring—which is unusual, of course, with those brown eyes—but your bone formation and expression. The latter might be a bit difficult to reproduce
faithfully, but I could do it. If your husband would allow me.”

“Where do you suggest my wife should sit for you?” Stephen asked, his tone still
very
uncompromising.

“At the cottage, since that would provide a suitable background,” Ardmore replied. “Or I have a studio
which I rent a mile or so along the coast
—
”

“If you paint Penny at all you’ll paint her at the cottage,” Stephen said, his lips compressed and grim.

His landlord cast a curious glance at him, and then agreed suavely enough.

“Splendid!” he exclaimed. “Then I take it you have no objections?”

“Not if I can buy the finished effort. I shan’t be able to see it, but I should want it.”

“Since I live by the sale of my pictures I couldn’t agree more readily. And who knows
...
you may see it one day!”

Stephen’s lips grew so thin and tightly clamped together that his whole expression struck Penny as almost unbearably bleak.

Veronica, who had been trying to look mildly interested while the conversation was taking place, tossed back her lovely cloud of hair from her shoulders and glanced along the length of her cigarette—complete with ornamental holder—at the artist.

“I wonder whether your prices are very high, Mr. Ardmore?” she murmured tentatively. “I should like to be painted myself one day!”

He studied her once more very deliberately, but without the flickering of admiration.

“I’m always glad of a model,” he told her carelessly. “Any time you like to offer yourself.”

It was not quite the reply she had expected, and her scarlet upper lip curved a little resentfully. She lowered her sweeping black lashes and turned with a show of solicitousness to Stephen.

“Would you like to go now, Stephen? You’re looking rather exhausted, and it worries me. You’re not really up to gatherings of this sort,” with a disapproving glance at Ardmore, “and I think I’ll have to take it upon myself and order you home to bed! Penny may be a good nurse, but she wouldn’t be human if she didn’t have occasional lapses.”

“Penny doesn’t have many lapses,” Stephen said, his taut mouth relaxing a little.

“Well
...
” She slipped a hand inside his arm and more or less urged him to his feet. “You mustn’t forget that she
is
human! And young! We’ve always thought of Penny as awfully young for her years!”

She guided him out into the inclemency of the night with the utmost care and cautiousness; and because he would be driven nowadays by no one but Waters she put him into his own car, and his servant appeared from the landlord’s quarters at the inn. Penny joined her husband on the back seat of the car, and Veronica closed the door on them.

But not before she had urged Waters several times to drive carefully over the headland, and almost entreated Penny to see that Stephen went straight to bed when they got home.

“It’s been a wonderful evening, but I’m afraid it’s been rather too much for Stephen,” she shouted above the roar of the wind, and the restless moaning of the sea. “Take care of him, Penny! Take care of him!” she begged.

As the car slid away from the lighted front of the inn Penny sat back on the seat beside a silent Stephen and wondered how he would feel if he could see Veronica—as she could see her—standing a little forlornly in the doorway of The Three Smugglers. She was hugging her coat around her, and her black hair was streaming on the wind. Her face was white and anxious.

Just how genuine was Veronica’s anxiety for Stephen, Penny asked herself?

The next day, when Veronica and her mother paid their final visit to the cottage before returning to Grangewood, Penny learned something about her cousin’s anxiety.

The two girls were alone in her bedroom for a short while before tea, and Veronica was engaged in her favourite occupation of making up her face. She was doing it carefully, peering at herself in the mirror, as if it was highly important that her lipstick should be neither too lightly nor too heavily applied, or her mascara smudged. As if, in fact, there was a man in the cottage who could see her and admire her
...
when there was only Stephen, who could not see!

Penny stood watching her, feeling awkward for some reason
...
awkward because Veronica was so silent. She had been silent all the afternoon, and there was something about her silence that lay like a warning pressure against Penny’s heart. A strange taut feeling of apprehension.

When Veronica put away her various make-up aids and snapped the clasp of her handbag the younger girl knew that something was coming. For nearly a week she had watched Veronica and Stephen together, and although Stephen gave away nothing at all, Veronica was sickeningly transparent to the wife who was not a wife.

She had said that she had never been in love with Stephen, but she was in love with him now. Whether it was purely and simply pity that had awakened love,
P
enny could only guess
...
and the feminine heart was such a strange thing, it could be worked upon by pity. The torrent of tears she had shed when she saw him without his dark glasse
s
had been absolutely genuine.

On the other hand—and there was a nagging doubt deep down in Penny’s heart—it might well be that she was regretting haying thrown away a husband who could have provided her with everything she needed. And when to that regret was added the momentous discovery that she could have loved him after
all...!

Aunt Heloise had hinted at financial strain and unpaid bills. The bills for Veronica’s trousseau had not yet all been met, apparently
...
and there were other commitments.

Penny tensed as her cousin turned and smiled at her in an almost gentle manner.

“Poor Penny! I did you no good service when I broke off my engagement and left Stephen in such a state of bitterness that he asked the first young woman he knew reasonably well to marry him, did I? And you must surely have realized that it was because he felt so bitter, and for no other reason, that he proposed to you?”

Penny said nothing, but her legs felt so weak suddenly that she sat down rather abruptly on the side of her own bed.

“I’m not blaming you
...
” Veronica didn’t sound as if she was blaming her, but she did sound as if she had a purpose in mentioning such a delicate subject within a brief half-hour or so of taking her departure from the lonely cottage where Penny would have plenty of time in the weeks ahead to dwell upon her words. “I never did feel in the least annoyed with you for catching Stephen on the re
bound but
having seen him again
...
Having
made the rather
appalling discovery that I ought never to
have let
him go—and I mean that!” extending a hand
almos
t appealingly to
Penny
—
“and being absolutely c
ertain
that I’ve ruined
Stephen’s life, I want to ask one thing of you before I go back to Grangewood.”

“And what is that?”
Penny asked,
feeling as if the entire inside of her mouth had
gone
dry as bones, so
that she found it difficult to articulate.

Veronica made another gesture with her hands. “Oh, Penny, if I thought you w
e
re living in some sort of a fool’s paradise I honestly wouldn’t say this, but I know you’re not! You’re too sensible! You didn’t even try and pretend when I a
sked you
why you were sleeping in a room with a sing
l
e bed! You
know
that it’s all so obvious
...
such a
hollow
pretence!” She gestured round the simple room, inside which Stephen had never once set foot. “You’re the old Penny, and Stephen’s the old Stephen
...
except that he’s bitterly unhappy! He has every cause to be. Through me he lost his eyesight, and through you
...
”

“Yes?” Penny barely breathed.

“Through you he has lost all hope of happiness—some sort of compensation—in the future. But if you’re very deeply attached to him—and I believe you always
were!
—try and see his side of the picture more clearly
than
you can see your own. Tell yourself that he needn’t lose everything—
everything
!
—if you can find it in your heart to be generous and let him go. Such marriages as yours are the easiest things in the world to annul
...
”

Aunt Heloise called from the bottom of the stairs: “Darling, I don’t think we ought to stay to tea.
It looks like being another wild night, and we ought to get back.”

“Coming, Mother!” Veronica called.

“Tell Penny we’ll make an effort and come down again in a few weeks.”

“I’ll probably come down by rail,” Veronica said to Penny. “They’ll always put me up at The Three Smugglers.” She slipped into her coat, and tied a silk head-square under her white chin.
“
However much you may pretend, Penny, you’re going to find it fiendishly dull here with Stephen!”

And then she was running lightly down the narrow stairs to join an agitated Mrs. Wilmott, who was nervous at the thought of driving across the exposed cliff with a storm sweeping in from the sea.

CHAPTER XI

After t
hat Penny lived in constant dread of receiving a telephone message from Veronica to say that she was on her way to Cornwall.

But the autumn passed, winter set in in deadly earnest on that exposed bit of coast, and Veronica did not turn up unexpectedly at The Three Smugglers. The landlord kept Trevose Cottage supplied with dinner wines and the bottles of brandy and whisky that provided Stephen with an occasional liqueur with his coffee, and his final nightcap before he went to bed
...
which no doubt helped him to sleep. Especially since he took to rating Waters if the nightcap was not strong enough!

Penny often wondered whether he did sleep, however, or whether he lay awake throughout most of the long nights. His room was not far away from hers, and sometimes she heard him tossing restlessly while the tide lapped at the foot of the clif
f
s upon which they were perched, and otherwise—except on blustery nights—there was complete silence.