You Took My Heart (7 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Joan
stiffened under this salute, her only emotion at the touch of his lips being one of immense and outraged surprise. Really Garth was acting in the most extraordinary fashion lately! He didn’t seem to have the smallest shred of decency or consideration left in him. It was diabolically clever of him to have planned this visit, knowing perfectly well that she would be unable to show her displeasure at the trick in front of his parents. For, of course, they were unaware of Vera Petrovna’s existence; they must be. Always, Joan recalled with a pang, they had treated herself and Garth as though they were tacitly engaged. It was all going to be most frightfully awkward. Even now, Mrs. Perros was beaming at her romantically, saying, “It’s so good to have you both at home together, children! You’ll be able to amuse each other nicely. It really was lucky Garth was able to get this particular weekend off.”

“Not so much luck as good management!” murmured Garth, with a mischievous glance for Joan. The look she flashed back at him ought to have told him most eloquently what she thought of him, but he merely took her arm affectionately, his mother taking her other arm, and in this amiable fashion the three of them walked to the car.

“You’re a bit thinner, my dear, but it suits you.” Mrs. Perros was saying. “I’m glad they haven’t quite worked you to death at the hospital.” Her eyes were admiring for the slick blue hat, the glowing, vivid little face, the trim well-cut suit. “You look
charming
, most charming,” she said with an affectionate squeeze for Joan’s arm.

Joan gave her a grateful smile. “It’s sweet of you to say so, Auntie Miggs. I love being thinner—and I love hospital. But most of all at the moment I love being here—with you,” she added hastily, avoiding Garth’s glance.

They were getting into the car now. Garth at the wheel and Joan jumping hastily into the back with Mrs. Perros.

“Now, you sit with Garth, dear,” Mrs. Perros said with a coy little smile which was meant to convey a special understanding of the relationship of the two young people.

But Joan stayed where she was. “It’s
you
I want to talk to,” she persisted. “I see Garth all the time.”

“Liar!” said Garth calmly from the front. “You haven’t looked at me or spoken to me for exactly three weeks.”

Mrs. Perros raised shocked eyebrows.

“But hospital is like that,” Joan found herself explaining hurriedly, her color rising. “There is so much to do always, and so much
not
to do—I mean—it’s against the rules for me to talk to Garth on the wards.”

Her eyes were snapping as she spoke, two pools of stormy blue under their thick, dark lashes. If Garth were going to bait her like this in front of his parents at every opportunity it would be intolerable. The sooner she could have a private word with him, the better!

The opportunity came almost at once—after the short drive through the village street, the swift climbing of the curving driveway and the bustle of arrival at the old white house with its covering of
jasmine
and windblown yellow roses.

It was Garth who carried her suitcase up to her room for her, and suddenly with the door of the chintzy guest room shut behind him (most deliberately and indiscreetly shut in the face of a maid who was fussing about with towels and hot water can) he faced Joan seriously. There was no twinkle now in his grey eyes and his mouth wore an odd twisted look of pain, so that her anger faltered a little in her heart and a bleak feeling of defencelessness came over her.
“Why did you do this, Garth?” she was asking, so much more gently than she had meant to ask.

“Because I had to see you somehow, Joanna,” he explained humbly. “I haven’t got the courage to go on the way things are. I want to tell you everything—things, perhaps I ought to have told you long ago and” he hesitated—“one thing I have never quite had the right to tell you until now. That’s why I fixed this meeting of ours; away from hospital, at home. I knew everything would be different here—in this atmosphere, I mean. We couldn’t possibly go on quarrelling here, Joanna, where we’ve always been so happy, so—so right together.” His voice altered a little. “You’ll give me the chance sometime over the weekend of a talk with you, won’t you?”

She didn’t promise anything. She was very young, very puzzled standing there before him, taking her hat off, rumpling her brown-gold hair with a childish gesture. She said, “And your mother and father, Garth, do they know about—about Vera?”

He shook his head. “Nobody knows except you,” he told her.

She gave a small, bewildered sigh and turned away from him. “I don’t understand, Garth,” she whispered. “I
can’t
understand. All this seems so unlike you.”

“Of course you don’t understand,” he put in quickly, “but you’re going to. I’m going to
make
you.”

She said stonily, “I’ve got to dress now. Will you leave me?”

He went out slowly, the droop of his big, tweed-clad shoulders, his air of dejection tugging at Joan’s heart. She did not instantly begin her preparations for the evening when he was gone. Drifting idly to the window she set it open, letting the cool, sweet frosty air blow in on her heated forehead. There was a scent of burning leaves from somewhere, a garden bonfire of the last of summer’s gaudy rags. There was a pleasant smell of upturned earth and the faint, delicate perfume of the half-wild little yellow roses which covered the house.

Leaning out a little between the softly stirring chintz curtains Joan saw the sloping garden with its trim green lawn and twisted monkey-puzzle tree. Chrysanthemums fluffed their proud heads in gold and bronze, redeeming the shabbiness of the finished summer borders. And beyond the massed shining of the laurel bushes arose the red brick wall which marked the boundary between the adjoining grounds. The rectory was the other side of the wall, its comfortable chimneys sending forth the smoke of the stranger’s fires. A young man it was who now had the living, a young man with a wife and babies. In the old nursery which she had used for a study Joan saw the lights snap on. Then a nursemaid in a white cap drew curtains sharply together, shutting her out.

Tomorrow, Joan promised herself, she would make the acquaintance of her father’s successor and his family. It wouldn’t be easy going back to the house which for as long as she could remember had been home, but it would be polite to call—and in a way it would be exciting and there were still her trunks and various bits of treasured furniture stored in the loft over the garage. Perhaps they would want her to have these removed now, though the new rector had written to her kindly enough before taking over the place, bidding her make what convenience of it she needed. Maybe by this time he, would be regretting his generosity. She had left rather a lot behind. And if the rectory folk did want her to take away her “junk” she wondered a little bleakly where she could put it instead, and suddenly she shivered with a queer, almost physical sense of homelessness—that sinking, frightened feeling which a lost child knows!

It was with a pang of relief she turned to the cosy room behind her, seeing the maid come in now with fresh hot water and fat, cosy towels. There was a leaping fire in the grate, a fire of sweet-smelling apple wood, and when she was alone again she sat by it as long as she dared in a comfortable dressing gown, brushing her silken tangle of hair, thinking of Garth—trying not to think of him, telling herself that he had by ruining her holiday done just one more thing to steel her heart against him.

She was calm and self-possessed in the end, running down to dinner in her pretty velvet frock. It was red-brown with gold lights in it—like her own soft curling hair—and her neck and her arms were bare; a clinging frock, thin as fine silk against her slender limbs, her rounded childish breasts.

To the elderly doctor taking off scarf and coat in the hall below, weary after a day of tiring visits, she, was a fair picture indeed. He held out his arms to her and there was a catch of real emotion in his voice saying, “Joan, my child, welcome home!”

She ran to him laughing a little brokenly. He was very dear to her, this father of Garth’s, and the sight of him brought back so vividly those other days of her own father—the days before life had gone all queer and hurting and difficult to understand, when Dipley had been home indeed and she was “Garth’s girl” with all the security of his love about her.

After that there was the long pleasant evening; dinner at the great old-fashioned walnut table with its covering of snowy damask, its creamy candles in tall, branching Sheffield candlesticks. There were crisp homemade dinner rolls and curls of delicious butter, hot soup in leaf-thin bowls, roast ducklings with peas and extravagant
soufflé
potatoes, a cranberry sweet, chilled and tangy, blackberries smothered in rich yellow cream and a savoury of mushrooms picked that morning in the wet sheep fields behind the house. After the weeks of plain hospital fare Joan ate with youthful zest and enjoyment.

She was gay now, with a wild, intoxicated gaiety she could not understand, joking with old Dr. Perros, sending Mrs. Perros into fits of laughter over the escapades of Gemma, the stiff and awe-inspiring proprieties of Miss Don; she told of the new probationer who had been sent cruelly by her fellows to bath in Miss Don’s own sacred bathroom and who had been ejected shivering by that irate lady in dire disgrace and an inadequate towel. She told of the old lady in Dale who would keep pork pies wrapped up in her stockings of all things, until her bedside locker became entirely too unsavoury and had to be fumigat
ed. She made the dull routine of
the hospital sound like the maddest, merriest thing under the sun—and all the time she was conscious of Garth’s grey eyes glowing for her, watching her, Garth with that “special” look on his face she had always found it so difficult to resist.

And suddenly she wasn’t so angry with him any more, all the hard knot of bitterness in her heart dissolving, the strange, soft mood of happiness enfolding her. Only she couldn’t look directly at Garth it seemed, nor bring herself to speak to him.

After dinner they sat in the cosy drawing room with its drawn velvet curtains and leaping fire. There were candles here too and Mrs. Perros, gracious and white-haired bringing out her knitting; going presently to the open grand piano to play for them, Chopin and Mozart and the sweet, thin airs of Purcell that she loved.

Joan sitting on the furry hearthrug then with her shoulder against Dr. Perros’ chair grew serious. And presently her eyes fell on the treasured oil painting of the house—Garth, at the age of five, in a frilly silk collar and velvet suit. The childish face so exactly
Ivan
looking down at her that her mood chilled and her heart grew heavy.

She was oddly silent after that and when Mrs. Perros and the doctor presently spoke of going upstairs—so plainly going to their rooms early in order to leave the young people together—she jumped up in alarm and said she too was tired, and would like to go to bed. She was clinging to Mrs. Perros’ plump arm like an anchor getting out of the room, seeing Garth holding the door for them, the strangest expression of hurt and bewilderment on his tanned face.

Though what
he
had got to be hurt about, she told herself with some asperity, she did not know!

In the sanctuary of her beautifully warm bedroom she lingered over her nightly ritual, creaming her face, brushing her brown-gold silken curls, toying idly with the small pink finger nails that would never these days come
quite
right because of their toil on Dale floor. In her dressing gown she went to the window, opening it again, letting in the icy flood of frost crisp air. In the absolute hush of that country night the stars twinkled and snapped in a vault of cloudless sky; branches cracked here and there in the motionless trees; leaves, loosened by the frost, went fluttering to the hard ground with a small, ghostly sound; and away over the marshes the wild geese “honked” as they flew south over the salty estuary.

And tomorrow, Joan thought, with a shiver as she turned at last to the warmth and comfort of her luxurious bed ... tomorrow Garth would talk to her. They would walk out there on the marshes and she would be helpless no longer to evade and elude this thing she had got to hear ... Garth talking about Vera ... Garth, her own, cruel, incomprehensible Garth talking about his wife!

* * * *

And that in the end was exactly how it happened, just as she had known it would. It was a bright, sunny morning, almost hot again after the night of white frost. Hatless in her casual tweed coat, her slim ankles tucked into comfortable scarlet socks, her feet encased in “sensible” country shoes, Joan set off with Garth at her side ... They would walk over to the estuary before lunch. He had proposed the expedition at breakfast and with a lost feeling she had agreed to it. Tomorrow they might ride, he said, when she had had time to retrieve her riding clothes from the lumber room at the rectory, but today was so perfect for walking. Striding through the village he was awkwardly silent, a tall, stern young man in a rough tweed jacket, bright polo jersey and whipcords, his hands dug deep in his pockets.

At first it was an interrupted walk, Joan stopping to greet her old friends one by one—the butcher, the grocer, the old verger who came hobbling out of his cottage to speak to her, his face lighted with pleasure. She had a happy word for all of them.

Then the village was left behind and they came to the rough cart track that led away from the high road, a track used by the farm carts that labored down to the sea to gather seaweed and drift. There were low hedges of bramble and dog-rose here, great scarlet pips of rose shining among the bronze and purple leaves. The air had a salty tang and the sun was warm.

Garth took out an empty pipe and sucked at it unhappily for a moment. “It’s going to be hard, talking to you, Joanna,” he said quietly and the glance he gave her was a very appealing one.

She looked up at him steadily, brave now that the moment was actually upon her. And all at once she felt, sorry for him. It hadn’t occurred to her until this moment that Garth had been suffering these past few weeks perhaps as much as she had. In the clear, wintry sunshine she could see the fine lines etched about his eyes, the furrow marking his frowning forehead. He looked tired—nervously tired, in spite of his healthy tan. At the corner of his mouth a muscle twitched.

She said impulsively, “I’m sorry, Garth, if I make it hard for you—to talk to me; I mean. It never used to be hard for us to say things—did it? I know I’ve been horrid to you lately. But what else could I be? It’s been so—so peculiar; all this about Vera Petrovna!”

“Did you guess,” he asked in a muffled tone, “that Ivan is my son?”

“I didn’t have to guess,” she told him. “I overheard Vera Petrovna telling you—the day of Ivan’s operation. I was stuck in the bathroom adjoining his room and couldn’t get out—couldn’t help hearing.”

He gave her a shocked and startled look. “You poor kid!” he murmured. “Having it crash down on you like that. I didn’t know. Why didn’t you come to me about it—talk to me—question me?”

“Oh, I couldn’t, Garth!” Her voice was wild with pain. “I just didn’t understand you any more. I don’t now. All this seems so extraordinary somehow, so utterly unlike you, so—so cheap!”

He winced at that. “Well, you’d better have the whole story before you condemn me altogether,” he commented drily.

She stumbled a little in her misery in that rutty, sandy lane, and he put a quick hand to her elbow. She didn’t move away from him and while he talked his fingers were warm on her arm.

“You were only a baby, Joanna, a baby in the schoolgirl frocks when I first met Vera Petrovna eight years ago,” he began.

“I
was fourteen,” Joan put
in, adding in her heart, and even then old enough to be in love with you, Garth, darling, old enough to be quite crazily in love, writing about you in my diary, weeping when you forgot to write ...

Garth’s voice went on: “She was staying at that boarding house near the medical school, the place in Gower Street where I lived when I first went up to London. There was a bunch of us there, all students, and we had a kind of silly, childish competition among us for the favors of the Russian ballet dancing girl. We all thought she was marvellous—oh, glamorous and all that sort of rot. We used to go to the theatre night after night and hang round the stage door and vie with one another for the privilege of riding home with her in a taxi, or taking her out to a half-crown supper somewhere in Soho. We thought we were men of the world running around town with a real live actress.” He gave Joan a hollow sort of look. “It
does
sound cheap, doesn’t it?” he said.

“Go on,” she commanded, her eyes fixed on the straight bright line of the sea shining now beyond the sandy hummocks of the marshes.

Garth took his hand from her elbow. With his stick he switched at the ragged heads of sorrel beside the path.

“I’m not excusing myself,” he said fiercely, “but I was young, and for a time I was genuinely in love with Vera. She was very sweet, very feminine. She still is. Whoever was
cheap
in this story it wasn’t Vera.”

“I’m sorry I used that word. Forget it,” Joan put in shortly, the color coming into her pale, tense little face. This business of listening to Garth explaining himself was proving even harder than she
h
ad thought it would be. She was breathless keeping pace with him along the level lane—as though she were pushing her way up the steepest hills.

“So you were in love with Vera,” she prompted, “and Vera was in love with you.”

“No,” Garth said quietly.
“Vera was never
i
n love with me, never pretended to be. But for the whole of one autumn I was mad about her. And then she got into difficulties over her passport—”

He gave Joan a despairing look. “Damn it, I’m no good at atmosphere, local color and all that sort of thing,” he explained impatiently, “but you see we all had meals together at this boarding house place—at one long, friendly table. We used to read our letters in public and even discuss them.
Vera told us the morning she got the letter from the Home Office. She was crying a little. They’d told her she had to get out of the country in forty-eight hours. She hadn’t even a Nansen passport like most Russian refugees, but only some kind of identity papers which meant she ought to have stayed in France. How she got over here at all I can’t imagine. But she did, and it was her ambition to remain and to get on to the legitimate stage. Actually, at the time she got this Home Office warning to quit there was a prospect of her being taken on by a repertory company. She was dreadfully upset at the thought of losing that chance.

“One of the fellows at the table said right out of the air, ‘If you married an Englishman, Vera, you could stay put. You’d have a British passport then and no one could annoy you any more.’

“I was altogether stunned by this idea—sitting there not saying a word, just looking at Vera and wondering if I could induce her to marry me so that I could give her the protection she needed—give her a country. You see, she’d been kicking about the world ever since the Russian Revolution. She’d been through untold hardships and tragedies. Her people were White Russians, of course, Czarists. Very aristocratic and all that. Her father was murdered by the revolutionists. Her mother died (of starvation, I imagine) in Cannes a few years later when she had finished selling the jewels they were living on. Vera just succeeded in not dying of starvation because she could dance. She joined a
corps-de-ballet
. Probably that’s how she got into England in the first place—with them. Then she was silly enough to throw up her job with them and try the straight stage. She hadn’t realized that as an alien without a passport she had no right to remain in England. But, of course, the Home Office tracked her down pretty quickly—and there it was.”

“And you married her to appease the Home Office?”

“Well, it had that effect, I suppose, if no other. She was terribly grateful to me and terribly honest—told me she didn’t love me in the least, but like a fool I imagined that wouldn’t matter. I thought I could make her happy—be happy myself. We tried it for a few ghastly weeks. It was a hopeless failure—oh, a wretched business altogether. I was a jealous, impossible, ill-tempered young ass, I suppose. I could not bear her being on the stage. The feeling that she didn’t love me drove me wild. She went on being honest, you see—never pretended anything for a moment. We began to quarrel violently. We were in debt. I only had my allowance from Dad in those days. It wasn’t very much. We left the boarding house and went to live in a couple of ramshackle rooms in Camden Town. Then Vera got her job with the rep. company. They were to tour for a year. That somehow finished us. We were just about through anyhow, I imagine, and I wasn’t the least bit in love with her any more. The whole sordid muddle had cleared my romantic mind with a vengeance.”

They had come to the sea now, the path widening out suddenly losing itself in the sandy tufts of coarse grass and heaped mounds of seaweed. The tide was out, leaving the flat shore smooth and wet and shining. Pink-toed gulls padded solemnly to and fro from one gleaming pool to another in their endless search for food. To the right the river bubbled and foamed in its shallow channel, emptying itself into the great wastes of sand.

With an aimless kind of feeling Garth and Joan walked on a little way until their shoes began to sink into the wet sand, then they turned aside and sat themselves on one of the tussocks of coarse sea grass which bordered the shore.

“And that was the end?” Joan asked at last, breaking the troubled silence which had persisted since Garth’s last words.

“In a way—yes,” he admitted. “I wasn’t too worried about Vera. She had ten pounds a week from her rep. job. Far more than I had. I thought vaguely she would write. She didn’t. I found that a relief and began to work hard trying to pull up on all the time I had wasted. I was badly ploughed in an exam. That shook me. I worked all that long vac. at home—remember? You were marvellous to me. Just as though you knew I was in need of some sort of special consolation. I’ll never forget you that summer, Joanna—” His voice broke. “You seemed to have grown up suddenly.”

“I think I had,” she put in quietly.

They sat silent again a while, then Garth went on. There wasn’t much more to tell. When he at last began to look for Vera with an unhappy sense of his duty towards her he was told by her theatrical agency that she had gone abroad. They did not know where. But she had left London ... disappeared completely. Garth drifted on month after month wondering what to do over his queer matrimonial tangle. Vera would come back some time. Vera would write.

“In the meantime there was you, Joanna,” he said. “Every time I saw you I realized more and more how much I liked you. You were so—so right somehow, always fitting in with my moods, being so companionable. You were seventeen I think when I had to admit to myself my liking for you was something much more vital. I went through hell. You were so lovely, so adorable in your first grown-up frocks. I had lost feeling when I was away from you, and when I was with you I felt marvellous—complete, somehow. I can’t explain, only that you seemed to be a part of me, a part I couldn
’
t live without. It has been like that a long while now.”

In the soft sand Joan sat, her fingers playing convulsively with the coarse stems of withered sea-pinks and sedge. Under their level brows her eyes were dark with pain. She did not dare now to look at Garth—did not dare to speak. Blankly, unsee
in
gly she watched the bright line of the distant sea, the sudden rising of the gulls as a man with a shrimping net appeared far off on the flat sands.

She heard Garth sigh. He said, “I didn
’
t know what to do about it. I couldn’t tell you. I thought I would find Vera somehow and get her to agree to our unsatisfactory marriage being dissolved. I knew she would be as glad as myself to be clear of it. But I didn’t know how to set about searching for her. Then I qualified and I was hard up for some years. I knew I couldn’t afford divorce proceedings even if I found Vera, and that they would hurt my professional reputation most unfairly. I told myself I would have to establish myself first before I risked the publicity of divorce. I did establish myself. Sooner than I thought possible, but still I was poor and still Vera was lost and still—even if she hadn
’
t been—there was that damnable social stigma to be considered if I allowed Vera to divorce me. I dreaded hurting my mother and father too. I dreaded what you would think. I hoped on wildly that somehow things might come right. I even thought Vera might be dead—that that was the only thing which would account for her extraordinary disappearance.

“Then your father died, Joanna, and I wrote you to come to St. Angela’s. It was wonderful and awful at the same time having you near, taking you out, seeing you that evening at the Berkeley in your loveliness with the flowers on your shoulder—my flowers. I went home that night determined to trace Vera. I rang up a private detective agency the very next day. They were busy searching for her when she walked into St. Angela’s quite calmly with Ivan—my son Ivan whom I had never heard of until that moment.

“The rest you know, Joanna. Or not quite the rest. Vera had kept out of the way in that extraordinary fashion all those years because of Ivan. She loves him terribly, you see, in fact he is her entire world and she feared if we met again I might have some claim on him. She wants divorce as much as I do, but she dreaded having, perhaps, to share Ivan’s time with me. She wants him entirely and wholly. So,” his voice faltered a little, “I’ve told her she can have it that way. And now she is quite happy about it and the divorce can go through as quickly as we can arrange it.” He paused.