This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (25 page)

Mirella did not see Aida Desta Ras Mangasha Seyoum again because the table was empty and Adam’s shrill whistle pierced the air. Marlo pulled her hat from her head and ran down to the beach. By the time Mirella reached Adam, the speedboat was a good distance from the shore. All Mirella could see of the two women was a white hat waving in the air, and a red-hooded figure standing in the boat, her gaze fixed upon Africa.

17

“I
think I’m suffering from culture shock.”

Brindley began to laugh. “That’s very amusing, because that’s what I say to myself half dozen times a day in New York.”

“What do you do about it, Brinn?”

“Much what I expect you will do about it. Sit back and enjoy it, and not pretend I’m going to join the natives, because I know I am not. I’m too British to be anything else.”

Deena took his point. “And I’m too American to be anything else, is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes. The best you can hope for is to be an Anglophile with a British husband and bilingual children, meaning they will speak English-English and American-English.”

“And tolerate the subtle English put-down like the one you’ve just delivered? I’ve learned these past four days to recognize it as a work of art. But for the rest of my life?”

“I would hope so. I shall, after all, have to suffer the ‘poor-little-England’ put-down for the rest of mine.”

“Oh dear, do we have a problem, Brindley?”

“I have no problem, Deena. Do you?”

Deena came back with greater precision. “I didn’t ask if you had a problem, Brinn. I asked if
we
, you and I together, have a problem.”

“I stand corrected. No, I don’t believe
we
do. What’s this all about, Deena?”

“Whether you still love me, want to marry me.”

Brindley began to protest, and she looked away from the lake with the majestic white swans gliding on the mirror surface of the water, and into Brindley’s eyes. That was difficult, because Deena was enchanted by Lyttleton Park, the Ribblesdale house in the green English countryside. Its nine hundred acres of parkland that Capability Brown had addressed his genius to held working farms, idyllic gardens, and a forty-two-room Tudor manor house. On a sultry summer day the estate made a less than ideal site for a confrontation. It was, therefore, with a heavy heart that Deena confronted Brindley with that question.

She placed a hand gently over his mouth. “No, please, Brindley, don’t say anything. Just hear me out.”

He looked at Deena, so pretty. His golden girl, as he christened her in bed. And here, at Lyttleton Park, he found her even prettier, more vital, more sensuous if possible than in New York. He applauded the way she slipped into the pattern of English country life and, without even trying, brought new energy to his family home, and laughter and a freshness he savored.

In his ancestral home she appeared softer, more at ease with life. Yet still she exuded for him that feisty sexuality he had been seduced by. He was so proud of her, so proud that she would soon be his wife, the mother of his children, and one day the mistress of Lyttleton Park … and she would be his mate for eternity in their secret sexual debauchery. It puzzled him that she could even suggest that he might not love her, not want to marry her.

He reached out and tucked a golden curl under the white chiffon scarf she had tied in a wide band around her head and into a soft floppy bow just off center of her face, in order to keep her long hair pulled back. She looked so romantic with her white handkerchief-linen dress rippling in the soft warm breeze, and the straw garden hat held in her hand with its wide brim and peach satin band and streamers. He took her by the arm and silently walked with her to a three-hundred-year-old elm tree and spread his colored blazer on the grass for them to sit upon.

After some minutes of silence, Deena said, “Brindley, my
dearest love, please be patient and hear me out. In all, since we became lovers we have spent less than a week together. We fell in love under the influence of two enormously charismatic people and their inspiring love affair. We calculatingly used each other to gather up our courage to go forward and change our lives, wanting to fulfill ourselves in an emotional relationship as strong and binding as Mirella and Adam’s.

“You saw my life in New York, you met my mother and father, and saw very clearly what my background is. Now I have experienced your family and your background. We are no longer under the influence of someone else’s romance. We are out here on our own. I think it’s important for us to face squarely how we feel about each other now, not when you asked me to marry you in New York. Don’t get me wrong. I am not discounting how we felt for each other then. I am just saying that in the four days I have been with you, your family, and friends at Lyttleton Park, I scarcely have seen you between the village fetes, and the cricket field, and the lawn tennis, and the luncheons, and the dinner parties, and the ball — not to mention your mother’s greenhouses, and her walled garden, and her fruit gardens and orchards, and vegetable gardens, and her glorious flower gardens, and tea parties on the lawn … and our separate bedrooms.

“I have met the vicar, your old cricket chums, all those Binkies and Bonkies, and Henrys and Jeremys and Percys, the fast bowlers and wicket-keepers and batsmen of your life. I’ve picked up their private language of cherries and prunes and boxes, which have nothing to do with fruit and everything to do with balls and cricket.

“I have made sandwiches unacceptable in your musty-smelling clubhouse because I made them too thick. That is, with more than a smidge of butter or cucumber, fish paste, or one of the other pastes that tint the bread and disguise themselves as sandwich filler. I have been on the receiving end of embarrassed silences and blank gazes and abrupt changes of subject when I’ve missed the point with your chums or their wives or girlfriends.

“I have sat on the edge of conversations with the Babses and the Carolines, and the Dianas, the Tamsins and the Camillas. I’ve been dazzled by the English beauty who has never heard of a nose job, has encountered cosmetics but has no need to use them, whose hair is rarely combed but stays clean and
shines as if by moonbeam. I’ve seen skins and complexions that carry that English-beauty lifelong guarantee that ignores wrinkles.

“They’re terribly nice girls, with classy voices and feet shoved into green wellies, or riding boots, and bespoke brogues and Charles Jourdan dancing pumps. Lovely girls with cracked fingernails, who can ride, hunt, shoot, fish, and still outshine any woman at a grand ball. Those cool-looking girls with their quiescent smoldering sexuality — in old age, when they get to be seventy, will they still be gaily answering to schmucky nicknames like Piggy and Froggie and Bunty, Poo or Koo, Poppet and Midge?

“And I have been aware of your mother’s confusion about me. We have had a freaky dialogue going with each other: ‘Oh, please, Miss Weaver, you simply cannot go on calling me Mrs. Ribblesdale. Do call me Lady Margaret, and I will call you Deena, if you don’t mind.’

“ ‘Oh, Brindley, Miss Weaver is our first American guest in Lyttleton Park, in my lifetime at any rate. I think she must have the State Bedroom, next to mine. Don’t you agree, dear?’

“ ‘Is Deena a friend of Fiona’s. No. Oh. You will get on well with Fiona, my dear. Fiona and Brindley have been friends all their lives. She once flew over North America. I believe she even went hunting in Virginia once with her father when she was a little girl. Is that the near coast or the far one, Deena?’

“I seem to have communicated with your mother entirely through what I was ‘just in time for’: the first of the new potatoes, the runner beans, her garden roses, her delphiniums, the Bagshots’ ball, the Tetbury fete, the Sherston flower festival, the Oaksey bazaar.

“Or it has been what I have just missed: Royal Ascot for the racing, Badminton for the horse trials, Wimbledon for the tennis, Henley for the rowing. Or it’s been the strawberries, the spring greens, the baby carrots, the first of the lettuce, the spring opening of the gardens to the public, the wild daffodils, narcissi, bluebells, and forty thousand tulips.

“Then, of course, if I were to stay on a while, there were wonderful things just about to happen: the glorious Twelfth — that’s the twelfth of August and the opening of the grouse season — the pheasant shoots, the deer stalking in Scotland and
the salmon fishing. Couldn’t I hang on for the raspberries — they were coming on but not ready — her tomatoes and her rhubarb, her artichokes and her prize-winning dahlias, the field of Oriental poppies? And wasn’t it a pity I had not been in time for the rhododendrons, four acres of them.

“Not once in the four days has your mother spoken directly to me, on a personal level, nor asked me one question about myself, myself and her son. And why should she, since neither her son nor I have appeared together as anything but casual good friends? We haven’t had sex, made love, had a personal conversation, since we arrived in England. With every mile of the road from Heathrow Airport you became more reserved, more remote. And from the moment you changed into your cricket whites and took up your stance among your family and friends, if it hadn’t been for the occasional time when our eyes met, I might have forgotten that you said you loved me once.

“Brindley, in New York when you said you loved me I suddenly knew I was in love with you too. Now, together, here at Lyttleton Park, I appreciate you and our differences even more than I did in the States. I have fallen far more deeply in love with you than I did before, something I never expected and our families never, I suspect, wanted to happen. If it’s not the same with you, I want to leave today, this very afternoon.”

“ ‘Creams,’ not cricket ‘whites.’ Some of the locals prefer to call cricketers’ trousers ‘creams,’ darling. And that’s the color they are, really,” said Brindley, fending off her outburst. He smiled, stood up and pulled Deena to her feet, and holding her hands in his, continued. “I am by nature a very conservative man. I function by habit and tradition. No woman has ever aroused my sexual passion as you do. You have made my heart laugh, you’ve lit up my life. I never gave myself to a woman as I gave myself to you that night in Massachusetts. Between our meetings I did nothing but think about you, and about bringing you home here to be mine, and about sharing Lyttleton Park with you one day. I’ve been a fool. Once I had you here, I reverted to type, took it for granted that you understood. It hardly occurred to me to talk to you about it. Every day I saw you slipping into place and enjoying Lyttleton I fell more deeply in love with you. It’s too late for you to leave: I couldn’t bear the loss.”

Then Brindley pulled Deena roughly to him and kissed her passionately. They hugged each other and he untied the scarf from around her hair and wiped the tears from her eyes and cheeks, delighted when she explained they were tears of joy and relief that he loved her and would never let her go.

“We’ll go right now to my mother and tell her we want to marry as soon as possible. Then we’ll deal with your parents.”

“What about the cricket match this afternoon?”

“Quite right. Priorities. We’ll tell her after the game.”

It was gray and pouring with rain. Lady Margaret and Deena got caught in it at the fete. Rain stopped play, so the cricketers were disappointed, disgruntled with the weather. Not Deena. One more tombola, one more prize-giving award for the most succulent marrow, the biggest onion, the weightiest tomato, the best flower arrangement, the most perfect English rose; one more visit to the beer tent, or innings at cricket, would have tried her nerves to breaking point.

Yes, Deena’s very un-British nerves were fraying and would continue to do so until Brindley and she confronted their parents with their intention to marry. She watched the cricketers in their “creams” walking dejectedly off the pitch, as she and Lady Margaret drove past in Lady Margaret’s Vintage Bristol. In the pouring rain several old men with passive faces gave the players a round of applause from canvas folding chairs.

“Mrs. Houghton’s chocolate cakes were gone before anyone else’s. They always are. Cook’s pork pies and scones, I never did see them. She will be pleased they were such a success. I did manage to get some ginger cake for tea,” said Lady Margaret as she swung the car around a sharp bend and through the open gates of Lyttleton Park.

“And I managed to grab one of Mary Jane Jones’s French apple tarts,” said Deena, hardly believing the enthusiasm of her own words.

“Oh, that was clever, dear, her tarts are excellent. I never seem to get there in time to buy one.”

There was one sharp blast on a horn and, in a flash of ruby-red, Brindley passed them on the drive in his open MG, a 1954 TF, and sped up the avenue of lopsidedly pruned lime trees that led to the house.

“Oh my, Brindley is driving in a temper. The cricket is finally rained off, I expect. He was looking to score his first fifty of the season, you know. A game so completely at the mercy of the weather makes him very frustrated, and I sometimes wish he would occupy his time here more fruitfully. It is a little silly. Well, we’ll make him a lovely cup of tea and that will cheer him up. Oh, by the way, Deena, we’ll dress for dinner this evening, I’ve invited guests.”

They had tea in the sitting room. A room of beige and peach and aquamarine roses on cream-colored glazed chintz, overstuffed chairs, and soft sofas and Queen Anne furniture. The tea table was set in an oriel window, one of the four in the house, that overlooked the rose garden. The room was damp and chilly, and a wind had come up and was beating the rain against the huge leaded window, crisscrossed with stone mullions. Brindley lit a fire and turned on lamps. He walked around nervously looking at the Augustus John paintings, the Singer Sargent of his great-grandmother, picked up a book, a magazine, several of the dozen family photographs in silver frames, but nothing could hold his attention.

Lady Margaret whispered to Deena as she poured the tea from a Victorian silver service, “He has something quite serious on his mind, I can tell, because he behaves just as his father did when he had something to say and didn’t know how to say it.”

Then she raised her voice and said, “Brindley, my dear, do say what you have to say, and come and have a cup of tea.”

“Mother, Deena and I are going to get married.”

It was Deena, not Lady Margaret, who fumbled with her cup and saucer; Deena whose color faded from her face. The clicking of a grandfather clock sounded to her like a time bomb, so quiet was the room. Lady Margaret took Deena’s cup, which was swimming in a saucer of spilled tea, from her hands and placed it on the silver tray and put a fresh cup on the table before her future daughter-in-law.