Sunshine Yellow (15 page)

“I’m not misunderstanding,” he assured her. “I’ve merely had my eyes opened very wide ... in a purely figurative manner of speaking, of course!” He lit another cigarette rather jerkily. “And now I think I’ll go to bed, and we’ll resume this conversation when I’m back here again at Old Timbers. Do you mind ringing the bell for Waters?”

His voice sounded strained and hard, and she felt utterly at a loss. She also felt slightly appalled.

“Stephen, you’re not angry with me?” she pleaded, laying a hand on his arm. “Oh, Stephen, if I’ve said something I oughtn’t to have said ... if you can’t forgive Veronica...?”

“I forgave her long ago,” he replied with the utmost calmness. Then he stood up. “Please ring for Waters.” Almost timidly she pressed the bell.

When Waters came Stephen addressed him with a kind of deadly flatness.

“Get me upstairs to bed, Waters. Let’s hope I’ll be able to get myself to bed in a few weeks from now!”

P
enny accompanied him to the nursing home the following day, and she found that Veronica had been before her and filled his room with flowers. But Veronica herself was nowhere to be seen. She had, however, left one of her famous notes, which Penny read aloud to her husband.

Darling, here’s wishing you a wonderful future, and I’ll be in to see you every day when the operation is over. You know that
I
shall be
thinking of you all the time.

It was signed, simply,
Veronica.

“You’d better disappear now,” Stephen said, making no comment whatsoever when she had finished reading the note. “They like patients to get promptly into bed, and I can’t undress while you’re here. But you can come back and see me when I’m settled if you like.” If she liked! She gazed at him with burning eyes—she felt as if the tears in her heart were pressing against the backs of her eyes, and might overflow at any moment if she wasn’t careful. She also felt bereft of words.

“I’ll come back,” she said quietly, and slipped out at the door.

When she returned Stephen was lying back comfortably against his pillows, and a very pretty nurse was taking his temperature as a matter of routine. She looked round smilingly at Penny when she entered.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Blair,” she said. “Your husband may be wearing bandages when you see him next, but when he walks out of this room he’ll do so without any assistance from you or anyone else!”

“Most heartening, Nurse,” Stephen remarked dryly. “Very good for the morale!”

Then he held out his hand to Penny, and she drew close to the bed. She put her fingers into his, and he gripped them strongly.

“You’ll be all right?” he asked quietly. “Waters will drive you home.”

“Yes.”

“And although they’re not wheeling me off to the theatre until the afternoon, don’t come in the morning. Too much emotion isn’t good for the patient,” with even greater dryness.

“I—
I’ll
telephone if you’d like me to do so,” Penny said. And then she added almost eagerly: “I’ll telephone tonight?”

But he shook his head.

“No, don’t telephone. And wait for news tomorrow. Don’t keep on ringing up here ... it will be tiresome for you.”

“Oh, Stephen!” she said, and then her voice broke on a sob. “Oh, Stephen!” she whispered.

He pulled her down to him.

“Give me a quick kiss, and then go,” he said.

She obeyed, her lips coming to rest on his with a feather’s touch. He felt very quiet and still to her. Unresponsive.

“
Good-bye, Stephen,” she barely breathed, and then fled from the room.

The following afternoon she hadn’t the strength to lift the telephone receiver and call the nursing home. Her knees felt as if they would give way under her every time she rose from a chair.

Stephen had told her not to telephone, but at last, when no message came through from the nursing home, she rang for Waters and asked him to put through a call for her. He was on his way to the instrument when the bell shrilled loudly, and Penny felt as if every bone in her body turned to water. She managed to rise from her chair and stood clinging on to the arm while Waters—almost as white as she was, and with taut lines in his face—lifted the receiver and spoke into it.

Penny watched him and she thought that he was growing paler. It was a bad line, and he had to repeat himself several times. Penny began to feel that she couldn’t endure it much longer.

“What is it, Waters?” she whispered, when he turned to her at last. It might have been her imagination, but colour was seeping back into his face. “Is it—bad news?”

“Good news, madam.” Waters spoke very distinctly. “The operation was a success, and Mr. Blair is very comfortable.”

The room spun round Penny. Waters put down the telephone receiver and made a quick clutch at her. She heard him exclaiming in concern.

“I’ll get you a nip of brandy! You can do with it.” He put her gently into a chair. “Isn’t it wonderful, madam. It’s—good news!”

CHAPTER XVI

Every d
ay during the next week Penny visited the nursing home, and more often than not Veronica was there ahead of her.

Stephen’s room was full of expensive hot-house flowers which were Veronica’s daily offering, and although Penny took him flowers too, they were from the garden of Old Timbers, and could not compete with the splendid blooms for which Veronica paid far more than Mrs. Wilmott could afford. In addition she took him baskets of fruit and magazines, which, since he could not read them himself, were an excellent excuse for prolonging her visits; and more than once when Penny followed the nurse into the room a little diffidently her cousin was seated beside the bed and reading aloud in an attractively husky voice.

Usually she put the magazine down and made way for Penny at once, but Penny could never be certain that Stephen welcomed the interruption. On the contrary, she frequently received the impression that he was not entirely delighted when the pretty nurse announced:

“And here’s another visitor, Mr. Blair. Your wife this time!”

Veronica always looked so beautiful that Penny felt her heart ache when she saw her sitting there in such close proximity to Stephen’s piled up pillows. She had so little interest in her own appearance that she didn’t even wear her new clothes, and her expensive new range of cosmetics remained undisturbed on her dressing-table.

But the pretty nurse had a very attractive smile for her, and in her eyes there was something kindly and encouraging. Veronica always forced a smile when she was announced, and she hardly ever took her departure before Penny.

Stephen, who had recovered his spirits remarkably since his operation, would greet Penny as if she were a younger sister, or a young female acquaintance for whom he had developed an affection. Certainly no one would have guessed that she was his wife.

“I hope you let Waters drive you,” he said, more than once. “I don’t trust you behind the wheel of a car, Penny. Those brown eyes of yours may not actually look short-sighted, but I’m sure they are.”

“The blind leading the blind!” Veronica declared, with a soft little laugh. “Or that’s what it’s been like for the past six months. In the future,” laying her hand over Stephen’s, “it will be different, won’t it?”

“In future—that is to say, when I get these confounded bandages off my eyes, and get out of here—I hope it won’t be necessary for anyone to lead me,” Stephen replied.

“The future is going to be wonderful,” Veronica said, still more softly—and to Penny there was a whole undercurrent of meaning in her voice as she turned her head and looked at Stephen, whose handsome mouth and chin gave away nothing below the bandages.

More than once Penny actually felt in the way. She did so on the day Veronica started to discuss convalescence, and the length of time Stephen should take to convalesce.

“You’ll have to go right away somewhere and get brown and fit in the sun,” she said. “Mummy and I are thinking of renting a villa in the South of France for the season, and you could come to us. I’d take such care of you, Stephen,” her voice a seductive caress. “Penny could have a rest—which she deserves!—and I’d devote myself to you. I’m just aching for
a chance to make it all up to you, Stephen, for
—
”
Her voice broke. “You know what I mean!”

Stephen was silent.

Veronica’s voice came muffled.

“I’ll never forgive myself for what I did to you! Never!”

“Never’s a long time,” Stephen said, with a little smile.

“But I mean it, Stephen! I
—
” Her fingers groped
appealingly for his. “You have forgiven me, haven’t you?”

“If I haven’t,” Stephen replied, with the same little smile, “I’ll have to do so, since you’re going to devote yourself to me!”

Penny
made an excuse to leave them alone together, and the excuse was that Stephen’s afternoon tea was late in arriving.

Another afternoon, when she managed to have a few words alone with Stephen, Veronica waited for her outside the door of his room.

“There isn’t any point in putting up a pretence any longer,” Veronica said bluntly. “You must see the way things are going, Penny
...
and although I don’t want to hurt you, I did warn you months ago that I must have Stephen back! And it’s so obvious that you’re just my little Cousin Penny to him that you can’t accuse me of robbing you of a husband.”

“I’m not,” Penny said quietly, remembering Roland Ardmore’s words about putting up a fight. But she couldn’t put up a fight for something that was not hers, and never would be hers.

“In any case, I’m not breaking up a marriage, am I?” looking probingly at Penny. “You know what I
mean? You and Stephen
—
”

“Yes, I know what you mean,” Penny said hastily.

“Then will you do this for me?” Veronica requested. “I happen to know—as a matter of fact, he told me this afternoon—that Stephen is having his bandages off tomorrow, and I want to be the first person he sees when they come off. So will you do the decent thing and stay at home tomorrow? Don’t visit him at all!”

Penny stared at her for a moment incredulously. Surely if Stephen were having his bandages off he would have told her, too? Then she recollected his complacent little smile when Veronica promised so fulsomely to devote herself to him.

Of course ... if the bandages were coming off, then Veronica
would
be the first person he would want to see! She mustn’t risk getting in the way herself.

The next day was such a long day for Penny that she wondered whether she would ever live through it. Waters followed her restless movements with concern as she found things to do in the house that were quite unnecessary, and it was quite obvious that he didn’t understand why she hadn’t paid her usual visit to the nursing home.

Tentatively, he asked her once:

“The master is quite all right, madam? He’s going on nicely?”

“Oh, yes, Waters, he’s going on nicely.”

But in Penny’s heart nothing was quite all right. It felt frozen, blighted, as if all the warmth in it had dried up, and never again would it beat quickly at the sound of a masculine footstep, or a masculine cough ... an impatient voice outside the door calling “Penny!” She realized that she would have devoted the whole of her life to Stephen, asking for nothing more than that impatient voice, that occasional repentant squeeze of the fingers or light, caressing pat on the head, if such a state of affairs could have continued. If it had
had
to continue for Stephen!

But now that he was expecting to see again she wouldn’t have even the pat on the head or the squeeze of the fingers.

She swallowed. She wondered what she was going to do with the future
...
how she was going to bear it when the final break came.

That night Veronica telephoned, and when Penny asked her breathlessly whether Stephen had had his bandages removed she replied coldly, “No.”

She went on:

“I don’t know what happened, but there was evidently a change of plan, and they didn’t come off. Stephen, however, was furious because you didn’t put in your usual appearance, and he vented his ill humour on me. I never knew he had such a beastly temper before, and I don’t know how you put up with him for six months in such a God-forsaken place as Cornwall! You must have an angelic temperament, or something
...
”

Penny’s heart had once more started to beat so quickly that it made her voice tremble.

“But why didn’t they remove the bandages? Is Stephen all right?” she asked anxiously.

“Perfectly all right, as far as I could make out,” her cousin replied. “Except for his filthy temper! I promised I’d ring you and give you his message. You’re to be at the nursing home without
fail
tomorrow! And that means without fail!”

“W-what time?” Penny asked.

“The usual time, I suppose.”

“And are you going to be there, too?”