The House Above the River (7 page)

“You're imagining things,” he said.

“I'm not. Do you think I haven't watched them together? Do you think I haven't seen the deadly change in Henry? Perhaps he is mad, because he suffers so much pain, and because his writing is so unsuccessful. But I know I am in danger. Terrible danger. You must help me Giles! If you ever loved me, and I know you did,
you must help me now
!”

To stop her flow of words, her high-pitched, sickening, false self-dramatisation, he put his hands on her shoulders to shake the mounting hysteria out of her.

Over her head he saw Susan, standing framed in the doorway of the room.

Henry appeared at dinner that evening, in a more forthcoming mood, apparently, than on the day before. He apologised for avoiding his guests earlier in the day, explaining that when he started work he found it difficult to break off. Giles agreed with him. His own work was largely creative, and though he knew very little of the processes of art, he was reasonably well-informed and well-read. The new conversation at the meal reached a far more interesting level than that in the library had done. Only Susan and Miriam took no active part in it. The former was rather too obviously avoiding any contact with Giles. The latter was equally obviously put out by losing her place at the centre of notice.

“You are very silent, Susan,” she said, presently, cutting across the general talk. “Your walk doesn't seem to have done you good. I hope you have not caught a chill.”

“I enjoyed the walk,” answered Susan, without enthusiasm, “and I never catch chills.”

“I'm sure I shall,” replied Miriam, “if we go on having arctic conditions, in August.”

“It seems to us marvellously warm in the house,” said Phillipa, hoping to check a further list of complaints. “You should try a wet day on the yacht.”

“God forbid!” Miriam exclaimed, too loudly.

“I certainly should,” Giles broke in. “I've had too many passengers on board in my time, hating every minute of it, and wishing they hadn't imagined they were born seamen.”

Miriam had attained her object. She had broken Henry's short ascendancy, and she had turned all the attention to herself. Both Phillipa and Susan, watching their host, saw the quick flash of anger in his pale eyes. Afterwards he sank again into apathy. The meal continued, with desultory conversation among the women. None of the men said much.

When they had finished breakfast the next day, Giles proposed to his crew that they should visit Tréguier that morning, have lunch there, see the cathedral, do their shopping, and stay away from the house until the afternoon.

Tony and Phillipa understood his predicament. He wanted to avoid Miriam, and he had somehow fallen foul of Susan.

“Because she thinks he's been knocked all of a heap again by Miriam's fatal charms,” Phillipa told her husband, when Giles had left them. “Obvious situation. Silly misunderstanding. Giles will probably let the whole thing slide. I wonder what there really was between them? I mean, what parted them?”

“Between Susan and Giles?”

“No, darling. Don't be so dim. Between Miriam and Giles. We shall never know. He'll never tell us, and she would only tell lies.”

“You don't have a very exalted idea of our hostess.”

“I think she's a prize-winning bitch.”

“Possibly. She's a damned attractive woman.”

“Tony! You can't mean that!”

“Oh, yes, I can.”

Phillipa went off to her room to get ready for the day's outing. There was a bus, Giles had said, from outside the post office in Penguerrec. They must leave in ten minutes if they wanted to catch it.

In the Marshalls' bedroom, Francine and one of the maids were making the bed. They finished it quickly and the girl went away, but the old woman moved to the door and shut it.

“I would like to speak to Madame,” she said, gravely.

“Oh, yes? I have to catch a bus. I am late already,” answered Phillipa, in her rather halting French.

“Madame understands what I say?”

“Yes, yes.”

Phillipa put the finishing touches to her make-up, and began going through the contents of her handbag.

“I will not keep Madame a moment,” said Francine. “Only to say that Monsieur Armitage upsets Madame Davenport. That makes Monsieur Henri very unhappy.”

Phillipa was suddenly furious. What right had this woman to say such things? To criticise Giles, of all people.

“Monsieur Armitage had no idea he would meet Madame Davenport here,” she said, indignantly. Her instinct had been to say nothing, but Francine was impressive. She was not someone to be ignored. And Giles had told them she had been with Henry since his childhood.

“I wonder,” said Francine, calmly, “if that can be true.”

Phillipa snatched up her bag and made for the door, but Francine's solid figure stood there, blocking her path. As she came up to her the old woman put her hand into the large pocket of her apron and pulled out a folded leather photograph frame. She opened it and turned it towards Phillipa.

“Madame keeps this in her room,” she said.

Phillipa pushed it away.

“Then put it back there!” she protested. There was much more she wanted to add, but her French was not equal to it.

“Let me pass,” she said, fiercely, instead.

Francine made way for her. She watched her hurry away down the passage. Then she looked again at the photograph in her hand. A younger Giles, a younger Miriam, faced one another from the two sides of the case. Francine closed it and put it back in her pocket.

“What a pity,” she said to herself, “that they did not marry.”

The visit to Tréguier gave the party from
Shuna
much-needed relief. In spite of the gale, now beginning to blow out, they enjoyed it in the holiday spirit befitting a cruise abroad. Giles was disappointed that their meal had to be eaten inside the hotel, instead of under a gaily-striped umbrella among the magnificent hydrangeas. But the food was as good as ever, and it was largely on account of the food, he explained, that he brought his boat to France so often. They went back to Penguerrec on the bus feeling refreshed and happy.

Susan was in the hall when they got back. In his present confident mood Giles decided on the spot to settle their difference.

“Haven't you been out today?” he called to her as she turned, after greeting them, to go upstairs.

“No. Miriam needed me.”

“But you're free now, aren't you?”

“I think she's asleep. She had a very bad night.”

“Then you need some air, and I need some exercise after sitting in that bus, and eating a colossal meal. Get your things on and come down to the river to see if
Shuna
is all right.”

“Why wouldn't she be?”

“Don't argue, girl. Skipper's orders.”

She gave him a brief smile, and began to rummage in the big cupboard in the hall.

“Bother,” she said, flapping through the coats that hung there. “My mac must be upstairs.”

“Borrow. There are hundreds available.”

“I don't think Miriam would mind if I wore hers. She won't be going out.”

She pulled on gumboots and the mackintosh and joined him at the door.

They walked away from the house in silence, taking the main path into the woods. Giles had made up his mind. He would end the nonsense, here and now.

“Eight years ago,” he said, looking straight ahead down the path, “I was engaged to Miriam. She wrote to me a fortnight before the wedding to say it was off. I couldn't believe it, at first. I knew she liked making scenes, but they had always ended happily. They never lasted long. This time there was no scene. She refused to see me.”

“Oh, no!”

“What d'you mean, oh, no? That she didn't behave like that? Or that you don't believe any of it?”

“Neither. Miriam told me this morning that you had been engaged, but
you
broke it off, and had been sorry ever since.”

Giles swore fiercely.

“You believed her?”

“I didn't know what to believe. She … you …”

“You are thinking of yesterday. When you came into the room. Do you know what I was about to do?”

Susan reddened.

“I was not going to kiss her, you little clot; I was going to shake the hysteria out of her, if I shook her head off.”

Susan exploded into laughter: Giles joined in, and for some seconds neither could speak.

“Seriously, though,” said Giles, at last, with an effort, “I swear it happened as I've said; eight years ago, I mean. It amazes me now to think I didn't see the snags at that time. They stick out a mile. I suppose she really isn't quite normal.”

“Poor thing,” said Susan, also recovering her gravity. “She seems to exist by making herself miserable.”

She paused, and then asked shyly, “Did you really not know she lived here?”

“Certainly not. Why do you think I might have known?”

“Henry thinks you did. He thinks Miriam asked you to come.”

“Good God! Did he tell you so?”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

He wondered if he were seeing too much. Miriam had hinted at a close relationship between this girl and her cousin. All the more reason for discarding such a suggestion.

“He is wrong,” he exploded. “You are all wrong. Milling about these caves of suspicion and suggestion and beastliness! I swear she was the last person I expected, or wanted, to see. I wish I'd gone into Lézardrieux, instead of this place. I would have, if the wind hadn't been just right for coming here.”

“Poor Giles,” she said, not teasing him, but with full adult understanding.

“Susan!”

He took her hand and held it, and they walked on together, not speaking until they came out of the. trees and saw the river below them, and
Shuna
, swinging up and down on a heavy swell, but lying safe to her anchor, with the ebb rushing past her.

“She doesn't give a damn,” said Giles, proudly, and Susan, with an unreasonable pang of jealousy, knew there would always be two women in his life, and one was
Shuna
.

He dropped Susan's hand and went forward to the top of the stage, looking up and down the river.

“The dinghy seems to be bumping your launch a bit,” he said. “I'll slip down and fix it.”

“Do you want any help?”

“Probably not. But come down if you like. The ladder's as slippery as hell, and stinks of river mud and fish, but not to worry.”

He went down rapidly to the lowest stage, while Susan followed, moving rather clumsily in her rubber boots, because they tended to slip on the iron rungs. Giles did not wait to help her. He seemed to take it for granted she could look after herself.

“Does Henry go out much in the launch?” he asked, as Susan joined him.

“When the weather is good, yes. We've been for several trips since I've been here. He likes fishing, which I find rather boring. But there's plenty of excitement otherwise.”

“How?”

“He knows all the little channels between the rocks. He was brought up here, apart from school.”

“I know.” Giles thought of his own scared entry down the main channel, and laughed. “That's why he wasn't much impressed by our coming in in the fog. He could do it himself, blindfold, I suppose?”

“I expect so,” Susan agreed, and added, “I don't like the launch much, anyhow. I'd rather sail.”

“Do you sail?”

“No. But I want to.”

“You'd better come round to Lézardrieux with us, when we do manage to get off.”

“I'd love to,” she said, eagerly. But as they turned from the boats to go back up the stage, she said sadly, “I expect Miriam would find some excuse to stop me, though.”

“To hell with Miriam!”

“It never works out like that. She brings the hell to you.”

“How right you are.”

On the way up the hill, Giles stopped, pointing to a narrower track on the left.

“This was where Miriam waylaid me,” he said. “Is it a short cut?”

“Yes, in a way,” Susan answered.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it is actually shorter, but it brings you out at a door in the old stable wall, and unless you have the key, you have to walk right round the wall to the front of the house.”

“I see. There is only one key?”

“I don't know that. But I haven't got one.”

“Let's go up it, anyway. I like exploring.”

“Actually, it's Miriam's favourite path in the woods. There is a clearing with a seat and a view. The seat is a sort of war memorial, to the local resistance movement. The Germans had officers billeted in the château. They disappeared from time to time, I believe. And then local people were taken and shot.”

“Even in Penguerrec?”

“Everywhere, wasn't it?”

They turned into the path and walked up, in single file, Susan leading.

The clearing, as a beauty spot, Giles found disappointing. It was much overgrown with rank grass; the view, through a gap in the trees, of the distant village of Pen Paluch was restricted. Moreover, the seat was not well placed to enjoy it, for it raced down, instead of across, the clearing. He also noticed that the seat was slightly tilted, for one of the flat iron rings, like feet, that stuck out from its base at either side, was raised from the ground. He pointed all this out to Susan, as they stood at the edge of the grass, looking about them.

“I never noticed that,” she said. “I think I've been here only once. Henry showed it to me soon after I came. He told me it was a favourite haunt of Miriam's. She never talks about things like that, herself.”

“Far too ordinary,” said Giles.

She looked at him, puzzled and sad.

“You almost hate her now, don't you?”

“No,” he answered, turning his face away from her. “No. Myself. For wasting so many years on a sentimental memory. For not letting myself grow out of it. Till now.”