Emily (5 page)

CHAPTER NINE

    I WAS determined the dinner party would be a success. For the next three days I cooked, polished and panicked, determined Rory should be proud of me. On the afternoon of the day they were coming, I was well ahead; the house gleamed like a telly ad., all the food was done. The only thing we needed was lots of flowers. There were none in the garden, but I’d noticed some gorgeous roses in a garden down the road. I set off, still in my nightie - flimsy and black. I’d been so busy I hadn’t even bothered to get dressed.

    It was a warm day for the time of year, the wet grass felt delicious beneath my bare feet. I ran past ancient fruit trees and overgrown shrubberies, and started to pick great armfuls of roses.

    I was just bending over, tearing off one huge red rose with my teeth, when I heard a furious voice behind me. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

    I jumped out of my skin and spun round, aghast, the rose in my teeth like Carmen. A man towered over me. He must have been in his early thirties, he had dark red hair curling over his collar, a battered, freckled, high-complexioned face, a square jaw, a broken nose, and angry hazel eyes. His face was seamed with tiredness, his mouth set in an ugly line - but it was still a powerful, compelling, unforgettable face.

    ‘Don’t you realize this is private property?’

    Then I twigged. This must be Finn Maclean. I stared at him, fascinated. It was not often one came face to face with a legend.

    ‘Didn’t you know you were trespassing?’

    ‘Yes, I did. I’m terribly sorry, but no one’s ever picked any flowers here before. It seems such a waste to leave them. I didn’t know you’d turn up.’

    ‘Evidently,’ he said, taking in my extreme state of undress. ‘Who are you, anyway?’ he asked.

    ‘Emily,’ I muttered. ‘Emily Balniel.’

    For a second there was a flicker of emotion other than anger in his face. Was it pity or contempt?

    ‘I’d have thought Rory was rich enough to afford his own roses. I suppose you’ve picked up all his habits of doing and taking exactly what you like?’

    ‘No, I haven’t, and you can keep your rotten roses,’ I said, and threw the whole lot at his feet.

CHAPTER TEN

    ALTHOUGH I was seething with rage, I didn’t mention the incident to Rory when I got back; he was in too bad a temper. I started tidying the drawing-room.

    ‘I wish you wouldn’t hum nervously when you do things,’ he said. ‘Stop fiddling with those leaves, too, they look awful enough as it is.’

    ‘You only notice them because Marina’s coming.’

    I went into the kitchen and slammed the door. First Finn, now Rory. I thought I was going to cry, but it would only make my eyes red, so I took a large swig of cooking wine instead. Then I suddenly realized I hadn’t put out any napkins, and had to rush upstairs, pull them out of the laundry basket and iron them on the carpet.

    Maddeningly, Marina and Hamish arrived twenty minutes early, so I had no time to tart myself up. I wondered if Marina did it deliberately. She looked staggering in a slinky, backless blue dress which matched her eyes. But even I was unprepared for Hamish. He must have been close on sixty, with nudging eyes, an avid grin and yellow teeth. But he’d got himself up like an out-of-date raver: thinning grey locks clustering over his forehead and down his back, sideboards laddering his wrinkled cheeks, a white chamois leather smock, lots of beads and jeans several sizes too small for him. He looked like an awful old goat. Rory, who looked devastating in a grey satin shirt, couldn’t stop laughing.

    ‘Marina, darling, what have you done to him?’ he said in an undertone. ‘He looks like an octogenarian ton-up boy.’

    ‘I’ve made an old man very hippy,’ said Marina, and
gi
ggled.

    ‘Don’t you like his smock? A touch of white is so flattering close to the face when you reach a certain age.’

    They were convulsed with mirth. I think I would have been shocked by their malice if Hamish hadn’t been so awful, leoherous and pleased with himself.

    We all drank a great deal before dinner.

    ‘I’m thinking of growing a beard,’ Hamish said.

    ‘I don’t like beards on boys or girls,’ said Marina. ‘Are you still taking singing lessons?’ Rory asked Marina.

    ‘I drive over to Edinburgh once a fortnight. It’s a long way, but worth it. I usually stay the night. It gives Hamish a break.’

    ‘To get up to mischief,’ said Hamish, giving me a wink that nearly dislocated his eyelid.

    No one really noticed the dinner, not even when one of my false eyelashes fell in the soup. Marina ate nothing; Hamish was obviously frightened his trousers were going to split. Rory never ate much, anyway. I cleared the plates and served each course; I might have been a waitress. Walter Scott was having a field day finishing up in the kitchen.

    There were strange undercurrents. I felt as though I was watching a suspense story on television where I’d missed the beginning and couldn’t quite work out what was going on. Hamish rubbed his skinny leg against mine. Any moment he’d get a fork stuck into it.

    After dinner Marina turned on the gramophone. She and Hamish danced. Hamish looked absurd, flailing about like a scarecrow in a gale. Marina moved like a maenad, her red hair flying, her face transformed by the soft light.

    Rory sat watching her, his face expressionless. He had been drinking heavily all evening.

    Finally she flopped down beside him on the sofa.

    ‘Did you ever finish that water-colour of the harbour?’

    He nodded. ‘It’s in the studio.’

    ‘May I come and see it?’

    They went next door.

    Hamish looked dreadful now, grey and exhausted. He went off to the loo and I wandered into the studio to see the painting they were talking about.

    Suddenly, I froze with horror. They hadn’t bothered to turn on the studio light, and were standing near the window in the moonlight.

    Marina stood there vibrating, a foot away from Rory; her face glowed like a pale flame. She was all fire and ice.

    ‘Why did you marry her?’ Her voice dropped an octave.

    ‘Oh come on,’ Rory said, ‘let’s say I wasn’t wanted any more.’

    ‘To punish me, to put me on the rack. You can’t believe I married Hamish for anything but his money, but she’s something entirely different.’

    She turned on her heel and was coming towards me; it was as though I was frozen in some terrible nightmare. ‘Marina, wait,’ I heard Rory say.

    ‘Oh go to hell,’ she said, but the longing and ache in her voice were quite unmistakable.

    She didn’t see me as she came into the drawing-room. ‘Hamish, I want to go home,’ she snapped.

    Her face was turned away from him, only I could see it was wet with tears. Rory didn’t even bother to come out and say goodbye to them. I went back into the studio, my legs would hardly hold me up.

    Rory turned round, the lustre of his black eyes startling against the pallor of his face.

    ‘Rory,’ I said, ‘I think we ought to have things out.’

    ‘I’ve nothing to have out, nothing.’

    I realized he’d reached that pitch of drunkenness about to explode into violence, but I didn’t care.

    ‘What’s going on between you and Marina? Why was she hanging around when we arrived? It was she who sent the wreath, wasn’t it? And her whom you rang up the first night of our honeymoon? I want to know what it’s all about.’

    ‘Nothing, nothing. We were brought up together, that’s all. Anyway,’ he snarled, ‘you asked her to dinner. Now get out of my way.’ He pushed me aside. ‘I’m going to sleep in the spare room, and don’t come crawling into my bed in the middle of the night.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

    I DIDN’T sleep at all. I lay trembling with panic, clutching Walter Scott’s solid body, my mind reeling from possibility to possibility. At dawn I tried to be rational. Rory and Marina had probably been childhood sweethearts, and he’d been piqued when she married Hamish. After all, it was me he’d married.

    Next morning I came down, washed up, and tried to be brave about my hangover.

    What would please Rory most? I decided to clean out his studio.

    He came down at midday. He looked terrible. He must have been hangover down to his toes, but, glass in hand, he was making a nice recovery. I was standing on a ladder dusting a shelf.

    ‘Hello, darling,’ I said, brightly.

    ‘What are you doing?’

    ‘Dusting.’

    ‘Again? Women think they can cure everything with a bucket of water and a scrubbing brush.’

    ‘Please don’t let’s quarrel. I’m sorry for the things I said. I didn’t mean them. I couldn’t bear another night like last night.’

    ‘You can always leave,’ he said brutally.

    ‘I don’t want to leave. I love you.’

    His face softened. ‘Do you now? Well come down off that stupid ladder then,’ and, catching my ankles, he ran his hands slowly up my legs.

    ‘I’ll just dust this last folder,’ I said, steadying myself on the shelf.

    Put that down,’ said Rory, his voice suddenly icy. Startled, I swayed on my high ladder.

    ‘I said put it down.’

    Purely out of nerves, I let the folder slip from my hands and crash to the floor. Hastily I scrambled down and knelt to pick it up.

    Rory reached it at the same time as me, his hand on my arm like a vice.

    ‘Ow,’ I yelped.

    ‘Leave it,’ he snarled, but it was too late.

    Spilling out of the folder were the most beautiful drawings. The naked model smiling that secret, come-hither smile was unmistakably Marina.

    We looked at the paintings scattered round our feet. Marina in her lush beauty mocked me a hundred times over.

    ‘Well?’ I said.

    ‘It’s your fault. I told you not to touch that file.’

    ‘They’re very good, very life-like indeed,’ I said slowly, trying to keep my voice from trembling. ‘I’m sure you didn’t paint these from imagination.’

    ‘Of course I didn’t. I wanted to do some nudes last summer, and there are only a limited number of people on the island who’ll take their clothes off. You can hardly see Buster or Hamish stripping down to the buff and sitting around for hours on end. Anyway, as I’ve said before, it’s damn all to do with you what I did before I was married.’

    ‘Or what you do after you’re married,’ I said bitterly. Rory drained his drink and poured himself another one.

    ‘Rory,’ I said slowly, ‘this is important. Do you love me at all?’

    Rory looked bored. ‘Depends how you define love.’ How could I explain that he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, that my tongue suddenly got stuck in my throat when I saw the set of his shoulders, that I spent all day wanting him.

    ‘Oh Rory,’ I said, appalled. ‘Can’t you try and be a bit more loving?’

    ‘Why?’ he said, logically.

    ‘Why did you marry me then?’

    He looked at me reflectively, ‘I’m beginning to wonder.’

    I gave a gasp. God, he could be vicious.

    ‘What shall we do about it, then?’ I said.

    ‘Do?’ he exploded. ‘Do let me work, that’s enough for me.’

    ‘But not enough for me,’ I screamed, and brushed blindly past him.

    ‘Where are you going?’ he said.

    ‘Out.’

    ‘Well, for God’s sake come back in a less destructive mood.’

    And so our marriage began to deteriorate. It wasn’t helped by the rain which started to fall the next day, and continued for weeks. Rory passed the time in painting, I in sulking, then in trying to win Rory round, then in sulking again.

    I suppose I was pretty disagreeable myself, I complained steadily about the weather and how bored I was. At first I made an attempt to stop myself, then I didn’t try to stop myself, then I found I couldn’t. Emily - the fishwife.

    That crack about being lousy in bed had gone home too. I wrote off to London for a sexy black cut-out nightie, and a book on how to undress in front of your husband. It showed you how to swing your bra round like a football rattle, and slide your pants off in one go.

    I tried it on Rory one evening, but he merely raisedhis eyebrows and asked me if I’d been at the gin. As the weeks passed, he didn’t lay a finger on me. I was desperately unhappy and cried a great deal when he wasn’t around. I kept telling myself that when he’d assembled enough canvases for the exhibition we’d be like a couple of love birds, but I didn’t really believe it.

    I spent most of my time corrupting Walter Scott. Rory was a great believer that dogs should be treated like dogs and kept outside. I kept bringing him in and feeding him in between meals and cuddling him - I needed a few allies.

    Gradually Walter invaded the house. He started off sleeping in the kitchen, then moved to the foot of the stairs, then to the landing outside our bedroom. At dawn he would steal in and try to climb on our bed. Invariably Rory, who was a light sleeper, would wake up and throw him out.

    ‘Walter Scott suffers from being an only dog,’ he was fond of saying.

    ‘Blood is thicker than Walter,’ I said.

    ‘Nothing is thicker than Walter,’ said Rory.

CHAPTER TWELVE

    IN November, later than expected, Coco and Buster came back.

    Buster brought his new private plane, which he landed perilously on the sward outside the castle, terrifying the life out of the islanders and the local sheep, and nearly depositing himself, three labradors, gun cases, rod boxes and several hundred tons of pigskin luggage, in the sea.

    ‘Pity,’ said Rory. ‘Never mind, there’ll be plenty of other opportunities. In the old days he used to come up by train from Euston and take the dogs to lamp-posts as the train waited interminably at Crewe.’

    Coco arrived in rip-roaring form and swept Rory and me into a round of gaiety, meeting people on the island and the mainland. It was a frightful strain trying to keep up the appearance that I was blissfully happy.

    A few days later, Marina and Hamish asked us back to dinner. I was amazed and irritated to discover she was a very good cook, and had decorated Hamish’s huge, stark house with a wild elegance I could never achieve in a million years of poring over
House and Garden.

    The drawing-room had grey silk walls and flame-red curtains, and I felt sure, had been chosen to compliment Marina’s colouring.

    ‘Oh it’s lovely,’ I said wistfully, ‘you ought to go into interior decorating.’

    ‘Emily’s an inferior decorator,’ said Rory.

    In my attempt to make our bedroom more feminine, I’d started painting it but had got bored in the middle. The colour, too, was disastrous. It looked all right on the chart but once on the wall turned out an appalling E-K directory pink.

    I felt very overdressed that evening, too. Trying to compete with Marina, I’d put on a see-through blouse and a long skirt. Marina of course was wearing jeans.

    There was another couple to dinner - Deidre and Calen Macdonald. She was a commanding, big-boned woman with a ringing voice. He had a handsome, dissipated face, roving grey eyes, and had obviously married her for her money. He turned out to be a shootingfriend of Buster’s and made an absolute dead set at me.

    ‘I can’t claim to be a gentleman, but I’ve always preferred blondes,’ he said cornering me on the sofa as soon as we were introduced, ‘and you really are gorgeous.’

    The intensity with which he gazed at my see-through blouse threw me off balance - I folded my arms firmly to cover up what I could. 4 ‘Er - do you do anything for a living,’ I said, casting around for something to say.

    ‘Good god, no. I realized very early on that I was quite incapable of supporting myself, so I married old Deidre instead; she’s a pretty full time job, but I do get the odd afternoon off while she’s sitting on committees. How about you?’

    ‘I’ve only been married seven weeks,’ I said firmly.

    ‘So disillusion hasn’t set in yet. Pretty tricky customer Rory, I admire you if you can handle him. He runs rings round poor Buster. Is he still drinking too much?’

    ‘Hardly at all,’ I said, out of the corner of my eye watching Rory go to Marina’s sidetable, and help himself to a second very large glass of whisky.

    ‘Very loyal and proper,’ said Calen. ‘I must say you really are extremely attractive, I wish you’d stop sitting with your arms folded like a rugger player so I could appreciate you properly. Promise me that if you ever decide to be unfaithful to Rory, I can have first refusal.’

    I tried to look disapproving, but after Rory’s indifference of the past few weeks, it was such heaven to be chatted up. I was sure Marina had invited Calen on purpose. But although he flirted outrageously with me all evening, I felt terribly depressed that Rory wasn’t betraying a spark of jealousy.

    ‘So nice for you to find someone of your own mental age to play with, Emily,’ was all he said afterwards.

    As the weeks passed, we often encountered Marina and Hamish at parties. Marina and Rory so studiously avoided each other that I wondered if they were meeting on the sly.

    Occasionally I saw her loathsome brother, Finn Maclean, driving round the island, obviously far too preoccupied with building his beastly hospital to waste time on parties.

    In December, Coco slipped down some steps at the castle after a boozy evening and sprained her ankle. Next day she rang up, saying she was bored, would I come over and see her. On my way I drove into Penlorren to find her some nice escapist novel from the bookshop.

    Having parked my car in the main street, I started browsing through some romances. Oh dear, the lovely things that happened to those heroines. Why didn’t Rory feel like that about me?

    Finally, I heard a cough behind me. The owner wanting to shut up shop.

    Hastily I bought the book and wandered dreamily into the main street, through the mist and rain. A man was standing by my car. There was something heroic about the way he stood, the massive breadth of the shoulders, the hair curling over the collar of his battered sheepskin coat like Michelangelo’s David.

    Instinctively, I unhitched the long lock of hair from behind my ear and let it fall seductively over my eyes. Then I realized the man was Finn Maclean, and he was blazingly angry.

    ‘Is this your car?’

    ‘Yes, at least, it’s Rory’s.’

    ‘Can’t you read?’

    He seized my arm and swung me round to face a
notice
on a garage door. It said,
Doctor’s car, please leave free.

‘Oh,’
I said. ‘Well, in London, people often put notices like that on their garage doors even if they’re not doctors, just to keep people away.’

    ‘This is not London,’ he snapped, and in terms of the most blistering invective, proceeded to tell me exactly what he thought of Londoners who came to live in the country, and me in particular, and didn’t I realize that people could be dying because people like me parked their cars in places like this. Finally I got fed up.

    ‘It strikes me,’ I said, ‘that while you’ve been rabbiting on and on and on about my criminal irresponsibi
^l
ity, at least twenty more people could have died. Admittedly, a few of them may have been Chinese. In fact, if all the people who died while people like you were blowing their cool all over the islands were laid end to end…’

    ‘Don’t be fatuous,’ snapped Finn. ‘There’s obviously no point in trying to get anything through to you. You’d better move your car.’

    Of course, the beastly thing wouldn’t start. Eventually I remembered to let out the clutch, and it shot forward in a series of agonizing jerks.

    ‘Louse, swine, monster,’ I muttered to myself, as I drove to the castle. No wonder Rory and he can’t stand each other.