The House Above the River (4 page)

Giles laughed to himself. He was thinking like an old hen housewife, and that was not a familiar role with him, confirmed bachelor though he might be. He took his glass of sherry from Henry's outstretched hand and they both moved towards the window, where Phillipa and Tony were standing, smiling at him.

“We certainly didn't expect this sort of reward for trespassing,” he said, heartily, turning again to look at his host. “It's extremely good of you.”

“It's a pleasure,” replied Henry, quietly, and with no sign of enthusiasm. “We are very isolated here. We have few visitors, and hardly ever fellow-countrymen.”

Seeing the expectant look on the three faces before him, he added, “My father came to live in this place after the First World War. He was the only male survivor of his family at the end of it. I was brought up here, but educated in England.”

“Then you were over there for the second war, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes. We both were. My father got out in the winter of ' 39. He had no illusions about France. But the people here resented it. They thought he ought to have stayed, though what good that would have done.… German officers were billeted in this house. Everything went to pieces. It has never recovered. It still feels contaminated.”

“Uncle George helped much more by going, Mother always says,” added Susan, heartily. “Working in Intelligence, and helping to get people away from this coast. So did you, the last two years.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Giles looked at his watch again.

“We really ought to be going,” he said. “We've been ashore more than two hours. And the fog was pretty thick in the river.”

“It will have lifted by now,” said Henry. “But I mustn't keep you if you are anxious about your yacht.” His indifference was pointed by his adding, “Susan will show you the shortest path down to the river.”

They wondered how he knew about the fog, if he did know. There was no view from the windows of the dark room. It ran the whole width of the house. The window in front looked out on the drive, which was surrounded by bushes. There was another big window at the back, and this showed a dank lawn of long grass, upon which the sun shone through the trees in a bright circle at one corner, while the rest lay in shade. Leafy branches, hanging low across the upper part of the window, blotted out the sky.

“How did you know the fog has gone?” Phillipa asked, impulsively.

Henry stared at her, not in resentment, but in slow surprise.

“Because that's the sort of weather it is,” he said. “And will be until the wind goes back into the west.”

“You mean we may be stuck here another day?” Giles asked. The indignant dismay in his voice made them all smile.

“Unless you feel confident of getting out to sea in the fog. There probably isn't any ten miles out.”

“We want to go on round the coast. Lézardrieux, Isle Bréhat, eventually St. Malo.”

“In that case, I expect you'll have to put up with Penguerrec. Or Tréguier, of course. You'll be able to go up the river this evening.”

Giles resented his host's air of authority, but the chap must know what he was talking about. He lived here, and used the water. Giles always made it a rule to respect local knowledge of the sea and its ways. He did so now.

“Well, thanks a lot,” he said. “Perhaps you'll come aboard some time, if we're staying. And Miss Brockley, of course.”

“Susan might like to come up to Tréguier with us this afternoon,” Phillipa suggested.

“Would you?” Giles's voice sounded quite eager.

The girl's face lit up with a radiant smile. But before she could answer, the door behind them opened, and a woman stood on the threshold.

Giles stared at her. The room span mistily about him, then cleared. It was the face he had seen at the window; the face he had hoped never to look at again. He watched her proud neck stiffen as she lifted her head to stare back at him. The high cheek bones, the long brown eyes, the black wings of hair, swept back in a fashionably careless manner now, he noticed; the wide curving mouth, the perfect skin; all, across the length of the low, dark room, exactly as he remembered them, Miriam, whom he had last seen eight years ago, taking leave of him with her usual ardent passion. Whose cool little note, two days later, told him that their impending marriage could not now take place. Miriam, whose lips were parting in her familiar smile of heart-piercing sweetness, whose eyes were lighting with a totally unexpected, unaccountable welcome.

He stepped back behind Phillipa, with a quick, total revulsion from this encounter.

“Ah,” said Henry, in a bleak voice. “My wife—Mrs. Marshall, Mr. Marshall, Mr. Armitage.”

The conversation was general, mainly explanatory. Very slowly Giles's embarrassment faded, though his utter bewilderment and protesting incredulity remained. Miriam, of all people. The lost love turning up in the last place on earth he would have looked at, if he had been trying to find her. Peeping at him from a window of this seedy make-believe château above the river. How long had she been here? Henry Davenport was not the name that had wrecked his happiness. Or was it? He was amused to find that he really did not remember. Perhaps she had never told him. Her exit from his life, like her re-entry, had been characteristically dramatic. He was delighted to find it so utterly painless, and was both surprised and elated by his own mild cynicism.

Meanwhile the others chattered together, a lively set of variations on the theme of the persisting fog, and what it had meant to them all in terms of altered plans.

“Not that my wife and I were much put out by it,” Henry said, glancing across at her, where she sat with Phillipa on a wide window seat. “We were in Paris and the car met our train at the station. My chauffeur is a Breton born and bred. He could find his way about the country roads in any weather.”

“Did you have a good time in Paris?” Giles asked, feeling it was time he joined in the conversation.

Henry did not answer. But Miriam turned her head to look at him, and said, in a slow grave voice, suggesting hidden depths of sorrow, “Henry does not go to Paris for fun. He goes for treatment of his slipped disc.”

There was an awkward pause. Henry, ignoring his wife's explanation, filled up his guests' glasses. Giles moved closer to Susan, who was sitting a little way from the others, only taking part in the conversation when someone spoke directly to her. She smiled up at him and then glanced out of the window.

“It's clearing,” she said.

“How d'you know? There was no mist up here, earlier.”

“By the clouds.”

He followed her gaze and nodded.

“How right you are. The wind has gone round, too.”

Henry was filling Tony's glass.

“Slipped disc?” the latter said, cheerfully. “Beastly condition! I'm sure I've got one myself. My back gives me hell at the start of every season.”

“That's just stiffness,” said his wife. “Hauling on ropes, and lifting weights which you never do at home.”

“How does it affect you?” Tony went on, addressing Henry. “You seem pretty active. You'd need to be, living on the side of a precipice like this.”

Henry smiled: a reluctant smile, Giles saw, of politeness, not amusement. He was about to answer, when Miriam said, in her slow, tense way, “Sitting at his desk, mainly. It's so important. Whatever happens, he must be able to work in comfort. He is a writer.”

“Oh, I see,” muttered Tony, with an Englishman's instinctive recoil from the arts. “Very inconvenient. Does it affect typing, as well?”

“I actually write in long hand,” said Henry, quietly. “I am not good at typing. At present I am very lucky to have Susan here. She has been typing for me.”

“Are you an expert?” Giles asked her.

“I've had some training,” she answered, laughing, “but that isn't quite the same thing.”

“I'm sure it is in your case.”

They went on talking about her work, and Giles discovered something of her life in England. She still lived at home, in a country town, mainly looking after two rather elderly parents. They had kindly lent her to Henry for the summer, because they were themselves going on a long-planned cruise to the West Indies.

“It was lucky for me that Henry wanted me to be here,” she said.

“Wouldn't you have liked the cruise?”

“Oh, yes. But they couldn't afford to take me as well. Obviously.”

Obviously, Giles thought, they were a selfish pair. He was indignant to learn that they kept the girl at home, where she couldn't do more than casual jobs for pocket money, instead of letting her get on and earn enough to take herself abroad.

“I'm glad I came,” she said, lowering her voice, and looking significantly at Miriam and back at Giles. “She isn't a bit well. And Francine doesn't understand her. Thinks it is just affectation. It isn't. I know it isn't.”

Just affectation. Giles nodded. He found himself wishing the moment was suitable for telling Susan about himself and Miriam. And then he heard the latter's voice again, saying to Phillipa, “I wish he would go to England, and see a specialist. This Paris man is supposed to be first-rate, but the French never give me the same confidence. Do you know what I mean?”

“I have never been ill in France,” said Phillipa.

“Lucky you. Henry has the most fantastic things to take, all according to an elaborate plan. I think most of it is mumbo-jumbo.”

“Not entirely,” said Henry. He had been showing Tony some old maps of the Brittany coast-line, which he had taken from a high shelf on the other side of the library, but he had evidently heard his wife's remark.

“Not entirely,” he repeated, coming back towards the group near the window. “These new drugs, cortisone, and so on, are very up to date and they need careful handling. One is given them for a limited period at a time. The point is, they work. Temporarily, at all events.”

“Francine agrees with me that it's probably all bunkum. If your disc has slipped they ought to put it back. She always says so.”

“Francine is an ignorant old woman, and as superstitious as they come.”

“She adores you, and she's bitterly disappointed you won't drink her own filthy concoctions.”

The tone of these exchanges was light, suitably flippant, but there was an edge to both their voices that silenced all the others.

Giles made a show of looking at his watch.

“I'm afraid we really must make tracks, now,” he said, heartily. “There are several jobs we have to do on board before we leave this part of the river.”

Phillipa jumped up, a trifle too readily, gathering together her shopping bag and the milk can.

“I must get going on my lunch,” she said. “I've got the most marvellous food in here. Oysters, fillet steak, peaches.”

“Come on,” said Tony. “I can't wait.”

They thanked their hosts and moved towards the door.

“See you this afternoon,” said Giles to Susan. “We shall go up river to Tréguier on the tide about six. But come along earlier for tea. O.K?”

The girl hesitated, looking round for Miriam. But the latter was at the door, moving through it with Phillipa.

“I'll expect you,” Giles urged.

“I'll come if I can,” she answered. He left her standing near the window, smiling at him, the sun bright on her hair.

Giles strode rapidly ahead down the path through the woods. Behind him Tony and Phillipa were delayed by Henry, who insisted, after all, upon coming with them to the landing-stage, and who kept stopping to point out some tree or shrub worthy of notice.

Giles was impatient to get back to the seclusion of his boat. His thoughts, if not his feelings, were in turmoil. He wanted only to find some simple job to do on deck, where he could allow the peace of his surroundings to sort out and subdue the disturbance.

He was aghast, therefore, when he came round a corner of the path through the trees, to see Miriam, standing at the junction of yet another track with the main way down the hill.

“I had to speak to you, Giles,” she said, breathlessly, and stood looking at him, one hand up to her neck, in a gesture he remembered only too clearly.

He felt nothing but a cold anger.

“I'm sorry we burst upon you as we did,” he answered, very quietly. “Naturally, if I'd known, it would have been the last thing I'd have done.”

“You haven't forgiven me—even now?”

He said, impatiently, “Really, Miriam, need we talk like a third-rate magazine? There isn't the slightest need for anything of the sort. You had a perfect right to alter your mind. Only of course it wasn't on Davenport's account. I have forgotten whose, but I'm sure his name wasn't Henry.”

“You are cruel,” she said, and two large tears rose in her big dark eyes. “I made a terrible mistake about George. It was George Banks. Perhaps you didn't know him. I wrote to tell you it was a mistake.”

“I never had any letter.”

She reddened slightly, and her eyes fell before his accusing face.

“I meant to write,” she said, in a low voice.

He laughed.

“You were always a prize liar. But we needn't go into that, either. We needn't rake up any of the past. It was finished eight years ago.”

“Are you married, Giles?”

He shook his head, beginning to walk on again. His anger had died, but he longed to finish this unprofitable conversation. He went on, but he could hear Miriam, on the narrow path behind him, following in his footsteps. When he reached the landing-stage he paused, waiting for the others. Miriam stood still, watching him.

Without meaning to, he went on where they had left off.

“Never mind about me,” he said. “The point is you married this chap, Davenport, and you have a fine house, and—and—”

“And I have nothing to complain of?” said Miriam. “Is that what you mean?”