Winds of Enchantment (18 page)

By the last of those ten days, Pat was dry of all emotion.

A month later, when she landed in England, she at once went to Torquay in preference to the vast unfriendliness of London. At the station she called a taxi and told the driver to make for the Weldon Bridge Hotel. It was the only hotel in Torquay whose name she remembered, and it couldn’t be so bad if Steve had lived there for a year.

The next stop was to find Steve. He owned the cottage and she had to buy it back. He was also her only friend in the whole of England. The hotel manager could tell her nothing; Mr. Holman had simply checked out. Neither was she any luckier with the firm of architects in which he had been a partner. Stephen Holman had left the business fifteen months ago.

Pat was reluctant to get in touch with Celia Mellors, and outside the village she knew practically no one. But the thought of the cottage pulled; it was home. She had once been happy there, and might again find a shadow of her former happiness.

The weather was fickle and she was always cold. A fire was lit in her sitting-room at the hotel and she sent out for magazines and crouched over the blaze with them. It was a picture in one of the journals that sent her wild with hope.

It was a serial illustration—and Steve’s name was at the bottom of it!

Quickly she got out notepaper and an envelope, and she wrote to Steve care of the editor of the magazine.

A week passed and her spirits drooped. Her letter could not have been forwarded. She walked steep roads and stood up the cliff top, a desperate hollowness in her chest. It is a frightful thing to be sad and alone.

By the middle of the following week Pat had decided to brave London and if that, too, proved a failure, she would try Hereford where her mother’s people lived. She was actually shaking out her clothes ready for packing, when Steve was announced.

“Show him up here!” she cried gladly.

He came into the little sitting-room, tall and smiling, disreputable in stained slacks and a green shirt—it might have been the old green shirt he used to wear at weekends so long ago. His brown hair was rough and curly, and too long.

She laughed with sudden exuberance. “You look so Bohemian,” she said. “Oh, I’m so glad to see you, Steve!”

“I’m glad to see you,” he answered quie
tl
y. “Feeling fit?”

“Quite fit,” she answered briefly.

An awkward brimming moment came between, then she was smiling again. “Have some lunch up here with me, Steve, and tell me what you’re doing.”

His whole manner was changed. He was as she remembered him in his twenties, carefree, lazy, traces of boyish merriment in the nut-brown eyes. “I didn’t find your letter till this morning,” he said. “The office sent it on last week in a bunch of stuff to be illustrated. I kicked myself when I happened on it.”

“And came straight to Torquay as you were?”

He glanced down at his clothes. “I do look pretty awful, don’t I? And you so neatly tailored. It’s good to see you, Pat—more than just good. How long are you staying here?”

“I don’t know.” She started to twist her wedding ring, then remembered that she had removed it on the boat and put it away in the little heart-shaped box with the square-cut topaz. “Until I can move into the cottage, I suppose. I—want to buy it back, Steve.”

Lunch arrived and it wasn’t until the waiter had gone and they were seated that Steve spoke again. He looked at her across the table. “I used to hope for this, and then I gave up hope. We’ve such a lot to talk about that I’m not sure where to begin.”

She took a roll and broke it, eyes averted. “Some things are best left unsaid. Just go on being what you appear at the moment.”

“What’s that?” he smiled.

“Grubby, and bohemian, and nice. Where do you live, Steve?”

“Along the coast, at Balcombe; the other side of Torquay from Caystor. I share a house with a cartoonist. You’ll like him, Pat. His cartoons are the funniest you ever saw—his name’s Tim Sterry.” He hesitated. “Pat, are you serious about living at Caystor again?”

She nodded.

He ate for a minute. “Is it wise? The cottage is so isolated.”

“I can’t go on living here. A hotel is too—impersonal.”

“I quite agree.” He leaned forward. “Come to Balcombe, where I could fix you up with some friends of mine. Do come, Pat.”

After the barren weeks it felt good to have someone bothering over her, fussing in case she were lonely.

“I could try it,” she said.

“Come with me this afternoon.”

She hesitated. “Steve, did you come here by car?”

He nodded. “It’s outside.”

“Take me to the cottage, Steve. Just to look.”

“It’s all dismantled, Pat,” he hedged. “Stark, weeds in the garden. Wait a while.”

Pat nipped at her lip, and because she wasn’t quite up to seeing the cottage with blank windows and an unkempt garden, she agreed to drive out to the moor, where they had tea at one of the sunken villages. At Dartmoor they rested and listened to the cool songs of the waters, and Pat smiled a
little
to herself. This was England. A pale blue sky, the stream babbling over the boulders, the sweet undulating grass, a black tor erupting on the horizon.

Suddenly Steve took her hand, the left one, and glanced at it
.
What was he seeing? she thought wildly. The white mark against the tan where a ring had rested? But he didn’t remark on that band of white.

“I’m sure the Mertons will be glad to have you,” he said. He gripped her hand and then released it. “I’ll telephone you tomorrow, Pat, to tell you what they say about having you lodge with them.”

“Thanks, Steve.”

Back at the hotel, Pat went up to her bedroom with much on her mind, most of it pleasant. She had been apprehensive of meeting Steve, afraid he would ask awkward questions, but he had been his old understanding self, and she was very grateful.

Being near Steve, she decided, was going to help dispel the pain and emptiness of not being near Nick. Nick, who had come to the boat, filled her cabin with fruit and flowers, and coolly kissed her on the cheek before going ashore again. They had drawn up the gangplank and she had stood at the ship’s rail, waving goodbye to her heart.

The Mertons were middle-aged, in the nicest way imaginable. They both worked in Torquay, and except at weekends, breakfast was the only meal the Mertons cooked for Pat. For the rest of the day she looked after herself, and when it got towards six she prepared vegetables and slipped them over the gas.

The large, well-tended garden supplied the two struggling artists next door with vegetables.

“What do you feel about art?” asked Tim Sterry, a talented cynic.

“Art is creative, and gives lots of pleasure,” she replied. She drew up her knees and hugged them, seated on a boulder, her back to the sea and below, on the sand, Tim at work on a woodcut, a pastime to which he was addicted when nothing else offered.

“Damn,” he said suddenly, as the tiny chisel slipped. “It might be anyone now. I’ve chipped the tilt from your nose.” He got up and spun the square of wood into the surf.

“You might have given me a look at it,” she said lazily.

“You that curious about yourself?” He shot her a discerning look. “Steve warned me I wasn’t to discuss Africa with you. Why is the place taboo?”

She sat quiet a minute, listening to the whirr of grasshoppers, then, “Things happened there.” Funny, but she could talk more easily with Tim than with Steve.

“Things would happen in a place like that.” He quizzed her in the growing dusk. “The tropical tan is leaving you, Pat. Right now you look windblown, and the soft evening light is on your features and you look very young.”

“Steve’s talking about painting me,” she said. “Should I let him?”

“Sure. He’ll never see what I can see.”

“And what’s that?” Her heartbeats had quickened.

“That you left someone behind in Africa—someone you care a great deal about.”

"You’re a bit of a warlock, Tim.” She tried to speak lightly.

“Steve did a bit of talking about Africa when he first came to share quarters with me. He mentioned a man named Farland—he seemed mighty impressed with him.”

“Nick—has that effect on people.” Her arms were gripping her knees, knees that had gone fluid. “Nick was my father’s best friend in Africa. He’s a rubber planter.”

“Teak-brown and tenacious, eh?” She knew Tim was smiling, though the dusk had deepened to hide his face. “I should be the one to paint you, Pat. I know you better than Steve ever will.”

She jumped to her feet, and stood a moment poised, gazing out across the dark sea. The months had passed, but the memory of Nick was as potent as ever. She would never forget him
.
.. not a line, not a feature, not a word he had ever said to her. Love for Nick had her heart in a firm and painful grip.

“I’ll race you,” she said to Tim, and they sprinted up the cliff side to the road.

Fine afternoons were invariably spent with Steve. They bathed in the sea or took out the boat. Sometimes they drove into Torquay to the cinema.

He had started his painting of her, and Tim criticized with a cynical glint in his eye. “You’re making her too ethereal,” he gibed. “She’s a woman, Steve, not a fey and charming girl.”

“Go away,” Steve grunted. ‘Your opinion of women is a bit too earthy.”

‘You’re a dreamer, Steve,” Tim scoffed. “Too many men are. Funny, isn’t it, when everyone believes it’s the other way around and that women are the romantics. They’re the realists. Pat is a realist, you know.”

He turned from the canvas to look at Pat. A misty ray of light caught her across the cheekbones. “That canvas is daubed with sentiment,” he hooted. “Wipe emotion right out of your mind, my lad, and take a good look at our Pat. What do you see? Not a sprite but a healthy young creature on a chunk of rock, suggesting elegant limbs through black linen slacks and a shortsleeved sweater. Go closer. The face is da
i
ntily boned but not childish. Nor are the eyes so innocent as you apparen
tl
y like to think. They hold secrets—and you are painting blind, Steve.”

Pat was relieved when Tim cleared off. She knew he
had a lot of respect and liking for Steve, and a belief in his work, and he thought she might hurt him. She would try not to.

One evening they took a walk to the shore, where they stood braced, hair whipping back, cheeks stinging. Earlier Pat had dug three long rows of potatoes and now she felt healthily spent, and did not protest when Steve tucked an arm about her waist and drew her head against his shoulder.

She was scarcely aware of his hold, till it tightened a little and he spoke.

“These months have been good, for both of us, haven’t they, Pat?”

“You were always easy to be happy with,” she replied.

“You say that a little sadly.” He stood silent a moment. “I ran out on you that time in Africa, and I’ve never stopped kicking myself. It was—a bad mistake.”

“You didn’t care for Kanos.” She had spoken the name at last, after all this time, though it shot pain through her heart. “I didn’t blame you, Steve. This is your land. This is where you belong.”

“
You, too, Pat. Don’t you feel that?”

“Perhaps.”

August ended with heavy intermittent rain. The trees were full and heavy, leaves rusted and the grass grew coarse and lost its spring. Pat went about her gard
ening
in rubber boots.

Rubber!

As she pulled them on, her fingers slipped over the black shiny surface and she thought of the raw milky sheets and the bronze bodies of the natives
handlin
g them. Her nostrils twitched suddenly for the scents of palm oil and spice, and she went quickly outside and pulled beans, and sniffed the damp
Eng
lish air, t
ellin
g herself there was nothing finer in the whole wide world. Soon—soon she would grow to believe it.

Steve finished his painting of her, but thanks to Tim’s scathing remarks he was not satisfied with it. He admitted now that it was just another picture of a girl
on a rock.

“Yes, you’ve gone and portrayed her as a kid, Tim said again. “Pat, turn your face to the window. There, Steve. If you can’t see it now, you never will. The slight pull at the mouth, the depression at the nostrils—and the eyes. You
must
see it in the eyes.”

“See what?” Steve demanded shor
tl
y.

“Pain—discovery—yearning. You went wrong m choosing Pat for your first model. The child has blinded you to the woman.”

“Mind your own damned business,” Steve said angrily. “You’re a bit too free with your opinions.”

Tim shrugged. “Show me the artist who doesn’t resent criticism. Well, as I said before, it’s a pretty picture...”

Steve covered the canvas and stood it against the wall. When Tim had removed himself to his own workroom, the
stern
look fell away and he smiled. “Tim’s a cynic, but he knows what he’s talking about
.
My first and last venture in oils.”

“You’ll try again later,” said Pat, still quivering from Tim’s merciless honesty. “I like it. You won
’
t destroy it?”

“No, I won’t do that.”

These days Pat thought increasingly about the cottage at Caystor. Summer was fading and winter with the Mertons did not appeal to her. She thought of log fires in the big grate at the cottage, flames curling cosily, and muffins on a plate. The wind howling round the cobbled walls, and the sea roaring below.

She told Steve she wanted to go there. “Just for a while,” she added. After a short silence she said uncertainly: “I seem to feel that Caystor will—help me.” This was her first allusion to hidden pain, and she saw Steve compress his lips.