Flowers in the Rain & Other Stories (3 page)

They worked on, companionably, and all became as clear as light. So preoccupied was William, so involved, that he did not hear the car coming up the road and stopping at the gate, and the first inkling that he had of his mother’s return was the sound of the front door opening and her voice calling to him.

“William!”

She was back already. He looked at his watch and was astonished to see that it was nearly five o’clock. The hours had flown past like moments.

He sprang to his feet. “That’s my mother.”

Mr. Wray smiled. “So I guessed.”

“We’d better go down. And, Mr. Wray, don’t say anything.”

“I won’t.”

“And thank you so much for helping me. I can’t thank you enough.”

He went from the room and hung over the landing banister. Mother and sister stood below him in the hall, their faces turned up towards him. His mother carried an enormous bunch of daffodils, wrapped in pale-blue tissue paper, and Miranda clutched a new and particularly hideous doll.

“Did you have a good time?” he asked.

“Lovely. William, there’s a car outside with a dog in it.”

“It’s Mr. Wray’s. He’s here.” He turned as Mr. Wray emerged from the bedroom, closing the door behind him, and came to stand beside William. “You know,” William went on. “He’s bought the Manor House.”

His mother’s smile became a little fixed, as she gazed in some astonishment at the tall stranger who had so unexpectedly appeared. William hastily filled in the ensuing silence with explanations. “We met this afternoon, and he came home with me to give me a hand with … well, with something…”

“Oh…” With a visible effort, she collected herself. “Mr. Wray … but how very kind…”

“Not at all, it’s been a pleasure,” he told her in his deep voice, and went down the stairs to meet her. “After all, we’re going to be neighbours.”

His hand was outstretched. “Yes. Yes, of course.” Confused still, she juggled the daffodils into her left arm and took the proffered hand.

“And this must be Miranda?”

“Arnold bought me a new doll,” Miranda told him. “She’s called Priscilla.”

“But…” William’s mother had still not quite got the hang of the situation. “… how did you meet William?”

Before Mr. Wray had time to answer this, William began to explain. “I forgot about not going through the garden, and Mr. Wray was there. We ate his picnic lunch together.”

“What happened to the shepherd’s pie?”

“I forgot that too.”

For some reason, this broke the ice, and suddenly they were all smiling.

“Well, have you had tea?” his mother asked. “No? Neither have we, and I’m longing for a cup. Come into the sitting-room, Mr. Wray, and I’ll go and put the kettle on.”

“But I’ll do it,” said William, running down the stairs. “I’ll get the tea.”

*   *   *

In the kitchen, he laid a tray, found some biscuits in a tin, filled the kettle. Waiting for this to boil, he went, with some satisfaction, over the events of the day. The problem of the doll’s house was now solved, he knew what he had to do, and he would finish it in good time for Miranda’s birthday. And Mr. Wray was coming to live at the Manor House, and he was not the walking adding machine that he had feared, but the nicest person William had met in years. As well, he was willing to bet, they would be allowed to walk through the garden, just as they had done in Miss Pritchett’s day, and perhaps, when the autumn came and the leaves turned gold, to pick the fruit in the old orchard.

And so, with one thing and another, he felt better about life than he had for a long time. The kettle boiled and he filled the teapot and set it on the tray and carried it through to the sitting-room. From the playroom came the sound of the television, which Miranda was watching, and from the sitting-room a pleasant murmur of voices.

“When will you move in?”

“As soon as possible.”

“You’ll have a lot to do.”

“There’s a lot of time. All the time in the world.”

He pushed the door open with his foot. The room was filled with evening sunlight and there was something in the air, so tangible it almost could be touched. Companionship, maybe. Ease. But excitement, too.

All the time in the world.

They stood by the fireplace, half turned towards the newly kindled flames, but he could see his mother’s face reflected in the mirror that hung over the mantel-piece. Suddenly she laughed, though at what he could not guess, and tossed back her lovely red hair, and there was that look about her … the old glowing look that he had not seen since his father died.

His imagination bolted ahead, like a runaway horse, only to be reined firmly in and brought to a halt. It wasn’t any good making plans. Things had to happen at their own speed, in their own time.

“Tea’s ready,” he told them and set down the tray. As he straightened up he caught sight of the daffodils, lying on the window-seat where his mother had tossed them down. The tissue paper was crushed and the delicate petals beginning to wilt, and William thought of Arnold, and had it in his heart to be very sorry for him.

E
NDINGS AND
B
EGINNINGS

Tom said, without much hope, “You could come with me.”

Elaine gave a derisory laugh, which sounded like a snort from her pretty nose. “Darling, can you see my freezing in a castle in Northumberland?”

“Not really,” he admitted with honesty.

“Besides, I haven’t been invited.”

“That wouldn’t matter. Aunt Mabel would love a new face around the place. Particularly one as attractive as yours.”

Elaine tried hard not to look pleased. She adored compliments and soaked them up as blotting paper absorbs ink. “Flattery will get you nowhere,” she told him. “And I’m cross. You were meant to be coming down to the Stainforths with me this weekend. What am I going to tell them?”

“Tell them the truth. That I’ve got to go north for my Aunt Mabel’s seventy-fifth birthday ball.”

“But
why
do you have to go?”

He explained again, patiently. “Because somebody’s got to put in an appearance, and my parents are in Majorca, and my sister’s living in Hong Kong with her husband. I’ve already told you that three times.”

“I still don’t see why you have to leave me in the lurch like this. I don’t like being left in the lurch.” She gave him one of her most persuasive smiles. “I’m not used to it.”

“I wouldn’t leave you in the lurch,” he swore to her, “for anyone in the world but Aunt Mabel. But she’s a very special old girl, and she doesn’t have any children of her own, and she was always so marvelous to us when we were young. And she must have had to go to a lot of effort to organize any sort of a shindig. I think it’s very plucky of her. It would be churlish if I made no sort of effort to turn up. Besides,” he finished in truth, “I want to be there.” He said again, “You could come with me.”

“I shouldn’t know anybody.”

“You would, after you’d been there for five minutes.”

“Anyway, I hate being cold.”

He stopped trying to persuade her. It was always fun taking Elaine to places and introducing her around to his awe-struck acquaintances, because she was so sensational to look at that Tom’s own self-esteem took a welcome boost. On the other hand, if she was not having a good time, she would make no effort to hide the fact. Staying with Aunt Mabel was always a bit dicey. One’s well-being and comfort depended heavily on the state of the weather, and if the coming weekend turned chilly or damp, then Elaine, hothouse London flower that she was, might turn out to be the worst possible companion.

They had dined together in their favorite restaurant, just around the corner from Elaine’s little flat in the King’s Road. Now Tom reached across the table, around the coffee-cups, and put his hand over hers.

“All right,” he said. “You don’t have to come. I’ll ring you when I get back and tell you all about it. And you’ll just have to say I’m sorry to the Stainforths. Say I’ll take a rain-check on that invitation.”

*   *   *

The next day was Friday. Tom, who had already squared things with his boss, left the office at lunchtime and drove north, up the Motorway. It was April and showery weather, but the roads were clear and he was able to allow his thoughts a free rein. Inevitably, they chose to chew over the problem of Elaine.

He had known her now for three months, and despite the fact that she frequently exasperated him, she was nevertheless the most engaging person he had met in years. Her very unpredictability he found delightfully stimulating, and she never failed to make him laugh. Because of this, he had taken her home once or twice for long weekends, not anticipating that his mother would find Elaine just as attractive as he did. “She’s perfectly charming,” she kept saying, but she was a model mother and managed, with obvious effort, not to say more. Tom, however, knew very well what she was thinking. He was, after all, nearly thirty. It was time that he settled down, got himself married, provided his mother with the grandchildren that she craved. But did he want to marry Elaine? It was a dilemma that had been tearing him for some time. Perhaps getting away from it—and her—for a little while would be the best thing that could happen. He could view the problem at a distance, as though he were studying some complicated painting; get the details of their relationship into a true proportion. The best way to start doing this was to stop thinking about her, so he put visions of Elaine firmly out of his mind and concentrated instead on the weekend that lay ahead.

*   *   *

Northumberland. Kinton. Aunt Mabel’s party. Who would be there? Tom was the sole representative of his particular family, but what about all the other cousins? All Ned’s young relations, who had formed the larger part of that gang of children who had run wild at Kinton when they were young. He ran a mental finger down an imaginary list. Roger was a soldier. Anne married and with a family. Young Ned was in Australia. Kitty …

Putting on speed to pull out into the fast lane and pass a thundering lorry, Tom found himself smiling. Kitty. By some confusion of generations, Kitty was Ned’s great-niece. Kitty had been the rebel, the one who led the way. Kitty who fell out of the tree-house. Kitty who organized the skating party the night the lake was frozen. Kitty who slept out on the battlements because one of the others had dared her, and because she thought that she might see a ghost.

The rest of them, over the years, had, more or less, conformed. Taken typing courses and become secretaries. Been articled to chartered accountants or lawyers and finally qualified. Joined the services. Kitty had conformed to nothing. In desperation her parents had sent her to a French family in Paris as an au-pair girl, but after Madame had found her in the passionate embrace of Monsieur, she was given—unfairly, everybody agreed—the sack.

“Come home,” her frantic mother had cabled her, but Kitty hadn’t. She had hitched a lift to the south of France, where she met up with a most unsuitable—everybody agreed again—man.

He was called Terence, a wild Irishman from County Cork, and he ran a yacht-charter service out of Saint-Tropez. For a bit Kitty chartered yachts with him, and then brought him back to England to meet her parents. The opposition to him had been so deadly and so absolute that the inevitable happened and Kitty married him.

“But why?” Tom asked his mother when he heard this incredible news. “He’s a gruesome chap. He’ll make a rotten husband. Why did she marry him?”

“I’ve no idea,” said his mother. “You know Kitty better than I do.”

“She was the sort of person,” Tom told her, “that you could lead with a carrot, but you could never push with a goad.”

“What a pity her parents never found that out,” said his mother.

Once, on the way back to London after a weekend in Sussex, he had gone to see Kitty and her husband; they had a boat on the Hamble River and Kitty was pregnant. The boat, and Kitty, were both in such a state of shambles, that Tom, without having meant to, asked Kitty and her husband out for dinner. It was a disastrous evening. Terence had got drunk; Kitty had talked nonstop, as though she had been wound up; and Tom had said scarcely anything at all. He had simply listened, paid the bill, helped Kitty get Terence back on board, and flat on his back on his bunk. Then he had left her, got into his car, and driven back to London. Later he heard that the baby was a boy. He did not see her again. He did not see either of them. Mainly he did not want to become involved.

Once, when he was a young man, Mabel told Tom that he should marry Kitty. He had bucked from the very idea, partly because she was like a sister to him, and partly because he was embarrassed, at nineteen, even to be talking about such things as lasting love and matrimony.

“Why do you say that?” he had asked Mabel, nonplussed as to why she had boxed him into this uncomfortable corner.

“You’re the only person she’s ever taken any notice of. If you told her to do something, or not to do it, then she’d behave herself. Of course those parents of hers have never known how to deal with her. There’s a lot going for Kitty, if only they’d let her do her own thing.”

“She’s so bouncy, she’d wear me out,” Tom had said. He was just going to Cambridge and bouncy sixteen-year-olds had no place in his plans. He was into the older woman, the skinnier and sexier, the better.

“She won’t always be bouncy,” Aunt Mabel pointed out. “One day she’ll be beautiful.”

“I’ll wait for that.”

*   *   *

The road unrolled like a great grey ribbon behind him. He was through Newcastle and now deep into Northumberland. He left the Motorway and headed into the country, through hilly moorland and small stone villages, and down steep avenues of beech. By now it was late afternoon. The sun was setting in a blaze of pink, casting rosy shadows on the undersides of large, wet-looking clouds, and tinting the blue bits of sky that showed between them to an extraordinary, translucent aquamarine.

He came at last to Kinton, rounded the squat, square-towered church, and the main street of the village stretched before him. It was an unremarkable street. Two rows of small houses, little shops, a pub. It could have been anywhere. Except that, at the far end of this street, a cobbled ramp climbed a grassy slope and passed beneath the arch of a magnificent gatehouse. Beyond the gatehouse was a high-walled courtyard as big as a rugger pitch, and on the far side of this stood the castle. Four stories high, square and turreted with the pepper-pot towers; romantic, unexpected, incongruous.