Kissing Kin (4 page)

Phoebe arrived in London on a cold clear night with a raid on. Oliver had dined with them in St. James’s Square, in the little upstairs sitting-room, and went off to meet the boat-train looking like a schoolboy, Virginia said compassionately when he had gone, all lit up inside, and God knows they deserved it, the both of them, and it was high time.

“Are all Dinah’s brothers as good-looking as that?” asked
Camilla, on whom Oliver’s brilliant dark eyes and ready smile under the clipped moustache had made a definite impression. “And are they all so—gay?”

“Wait till you see my Archie,” said Virginia smugly, and then laughed at herself. “Well, he’s not a bit like Oliver, so far as that goes, I just happen to like him best. As a matter of fact, they’re all quite different. Edward is large and pompous, and so is John, rather. Gerald—he’s the youngest—is a little more like Oliver, I suppose, but he wants kicking most of the time if you ask me. Instead of being just naturally lighthearted, Gerald is downright irresponsible. A real troublemaker. Gerald would never love the same woman for fifteen years, through thick and thin, the way Oliver has, either!”

Phoebe too was looking rather lit-up inside when she arrived at the house with Oliver later that evening, after a windy crossing from Boulogne. They had stopped somewhere along the way for supper, in order to keep the first hour of reunion to themselves, and their happiness was a piteous thing to see, it was so shameless and real and so—
young
, Camilla thought, trying not to stare. As though neither of them had ever been in love before. And that was so in a way, because for Phoebe it was her first love back again, her only love, and for him it was an almost hopeless dream come true.

The All-clear bugles were sounding in the street outside as they entered the blacked-out parlour, with its drawn curtains and the single lamp on the table and the coal fire—Camilla hoped that was an omen for them. Phoebe kissed her, smelling of Paris just as she had always done, and Camilla thought how like a girl she looked still, for all the blue shadows round her eyes, and how serene. She took off her hat and her hair was bound round her head in a wide smooth band, still a warm brown except for a soft greying streak on the left side. She was just enough made-up, and when she removed her gloves her hands showed carefully tended, though the nails were short and unpolished.

Every move that Oliver made as he took her coat and shifted
a chair for her an inch nearer the fire, every glance of his smiling eyes was like a caress. Whenever Phoebe looked at him or spoke to him or said his name she shone with a quiet joy. Camilla had never seen, or at least had never noticed before, how love could set a nimbus around two people that was positively visible to the naked eye. They didn’t hold hands or use endearments, they were beyond that. It was superfluous in the completeness of their comprehension of each other. He sat down near her, watching her face, she kept glancing towards him as she talked to Virginia, as though to make sure he was still there, and she always found his attentive, amused gaze waiting. Camilla, silent and observant on a hassock at the corner of the hearth, felt a stab of envy like pain. For the first time in her life she saw love as something desirable, something one could not oneself bear to be without for ever—and she felt bleak and forlorn and left out in the cold because there was nothing like it in her own experience, nor any prospect of it that she could see.

She rose obediently when Virginia said it was bedtime, and they left Phoebe and Oliver there together by the fire—and Camilla’s feet ached and she was chilled and miserable and—yes,
lonely
—unbearably, childishly, tearfully lonely, and not for Calvert—climbing the stairs to her little room on the top floor which had once been slept in by an under-housemaid. She got into bed and lay there wide-eyed in the dark, thinking of the warm, firelit room below and Phoebe in Oliver’s arms—till hot tears of weariness and nebulous longing rolled down her cheeks into the pillow. Lost in this strange new misery, she never suspected that Virginia in a similar bare little cell across the passage was sobbing into her own pillow because there was no hope of seeing Archie before Christmas and maybe not even then.

Phoebe and Oliver were married at a Registrar’s Office a few days later, and neither Bracken nor Archie could get to London for the wedding, and nobody came up from the country because Cousin Sally had caught a slight cold. Phoebe
had no trousseau and there was to be no honeymoon journey: they simply went home together to the little Westminster flat after the ceremony. Camilla had seen elaborate church
weddings
in Richmond, had been a bridesmaid once, and the whole business had seemed to her rather remote and tiresome and not altogether in good taste, and she had even been heard to remark that if her time ever came she would elope. But as they watched Phoebe and Oliver drive away together in a broken-down taxicab, each incandescent with wordless contentment, she said to Virginia with a catch in her breath, “Why didn’t somebody tell me it was like that to get married?”

“It isn’t always,” said Virginia, and put her hand through Camilla’s elbow and gave it an understanding squeeze. “I was lucky too. And pray God that you will be. But I remember the day Rosalind Norton-Leigh got married—” Camilla distinctly felt her shiver, and looked round in surprise.

“To the German prince?”

Virginia nodded, and her small, heart-shaped face looked set and drawn.

“That was barbarous,” she said.

“Barbarous—how?”

“She was afraid of Conrad. And he was a brute.”

“Then why on earth—”

“She had to. It was a long time ago. Things were different then. There didn’t seem to be any way out of it. Girls used to be so helpless—”

Camilla’s chin lifted.

“I
couldn’t
marry a man I didn’t love,” she said fastidiously, out of her new knowledge. “I just
wouldn’t.
Nobody can
make
you marry somebody.”

Virginia gave her a long, speculative look. She was a
self-contained
child, Virginia was thinking ruefully. One had learned very little about her in the weeks since she had come to live in St. James’s Square. She worked hard and willingly, she was steady under the raids if a little tense, but that would doubtless pass. Looking back, it seemed to Virginia that the
only man Camilla had ever mentioned was her brother. Twins were queer, of course. It might be that her devotion to Calvert had so far cheated her out of the usual boy and girl attachments. She had an almost aggressive virginity of outline, with her undeveloped figure and her pure, sharp profile. But her mouth was wide and tender and there was a reddish cast to her thick chestnut hair—the capacity to feel was there, Virginia thought, dormant still, perhaps, but surely not for long now. Her fingers tightened on the small sharp bones of Camilla’s elbow.

“Are you by any chance in love with somebody yourself?” she asked lightly.

“Me?” Camilla’s eyes, rather dazed with her own
preoccupation
, but utterly honest, met hers. “Heavens, no! Who would I be in love with?”

“Whom,” Virginia corrected gently. “I just wondered. Shall we walk home, there’s plenty of time.”

Camilla fell into step with her.

“Did you ever feel like that?” she asked after a moment. “The way Phoebe looked just now, I mean.”

“I never had to go through what they have endured,”
Virginia
admitted. “Archie and I were free to do as we pleased from the beginning, and there wasn’t even a war. But when he comes home on leave nowadays I expect I look pretty hazy myself, even at my advanced age.”

“It lasts, then,” Camilla said thoughtfully.

“Sometimes it does.”

“I wonder,” said Camilla, and her feet dragged a little, “if anything like that will ever happen to me.”

“Darling—why shouldn’t it?”

“I’m not pretty like you—nor clever like Phoebe. Calvert is the only man I’ve ever really known very well, or ever
cared
to know, I reckon. Father was always busy, and I don’t seem to remember him very well, and I never thought much of Uncle Miles. Of course, Bracken is wonderful, but—you couldn’t
marry
Bracken.”

“Dinah did.”

“Oh, well, Dinah’s different, he would never have looked twice at anybody like me,” Camilla said vaguely, stating a simple, self-evident fact.

“Doesn’t do to be too humble, you know,” Virginia advised sympathetically.

“It makes one humble,” said Camilla. “To see a man like Oliver—and no doubt your Archie too—to see them
belong
to somebody that way, believing in that one person out of all the world, and the
responsibility
of being that person and living up to it—I should be afraid to try, I think.”

“There’s no reason for that,” said Virginia briskly. “You could make some man happy with one hand tied behind you. I can’t imagine what the Richmond boys have been thinking of.”

“Oh, in Richmond there was always Calvert.”

“But Calvert’s only a brother, goose. He’ll get married himself some day, and then where will you be?”

“Yes—I suppose he will.”

“Lonesome?” asked Virginia kindly, and Camilla nodded with a tightness in her throat.

Growing pains, Virginia thought with compassion. Poor lamb, I’ve forgotten how it feels to be as young as Camilla. I never
was
as young as Camilla, I started having beaux when I was sixteen. She’ll fall in love with some soldier before long, I suppose, and then God help us all, it will take her very badly when it comes. Well, she won’t be the only one. Not Gerald, though, blast him. Gerald wouldn’t do. Besides, he belongs to Fabrice, if she bothers to hang on to him. Camilla wouldn’t stand a chance against Fabrice, any more than Jenny did. I must look round for somebody suitable for Camilla. There’s young Lord Binley, but he’s lost an arm. Or if only they hadn’t killed Bertie Pakenham— She wants someone kind, like Archie. I want every girl to have someone like Archie, don’t I! There’s Adrian Carteret. He’s still whole, and now that the Needham girl has got herself engaged to that colonel, Adrian must be rather at a loose end. I must try to get him down to Farthingale for Christmas….

B
UT
C
HRISTMAS WAS
still a month away when the
indestructible
Virginia slipped on the stairs leading to the scullery and was picked up with a broken ankle. For the next few days she lay with her leg in a cast, fuming, in the little cell at the top of the house which had served for three years as her bedroom, and Camilla carried trays and chamber-pots and tried to fill in round the edges of the large hole left in the hospital routine by Virginia’s absence from below stairs. Then Phoebe moved in and took charge there, persuading Virginia that she would be less trouble if she went home to Farthingale until she could get round on two feet again. Phoebe added that in view of the fact that Farthingale was under-staffed already it might be a good idea if Camilla accompanied Virginia and stayed there to wait on her while Virginia was more or less helpless, putting in any spare time she might have in helping Winifred at the Hall.

Camilla’s disappointment at this tame interruption of her war-time career in London was mitigated by her eagerness to see Virginia’s Gloucestershire home, around which so many family legends grew. The house called Farthingale had been built by a remote ancestor and through a chain of romantic
circumstances which included Virginia’s marriage to Archie was now once more inhabited by descendants of the original line. It lay in a fold of the Cotswold Hills not far from the Hall, where the wounded soldiers were in possession—so that Farthingale had become the rallying-place for leaves, illnesses, and whatever leisure the war had left to anyone on either side of the family.

It was to Farthingale that Bracken repaired now and then on his brief visits to England from the Front, to catch up on his sleep and his writing of articles which could be sent to the New York paper by boat without having to pass the cable censor. To Farthingale the children of Edward and Winifred and of Clare and Mortimer Flood went for their holidays, as well as Virginia’s and Archie’s four. And at Farthingale one would find the fabulous Cousin Sally, who had been born a Sprague in Williamsburg and was Phoebe’s aunt, and who had taken refuge in England in 1914 after living in France for more than thirty years in what was believed by the puzzled younger generation at home to be sin. For all her zeal to be of immediate use in the war, and to accustom her tense young nerves to the sound of enemy aircraft over London, Camilla could not help looking forward to Farthingale and Cousin Sally.

They got Virginia a pair of crutches, on which she at once nearly fell over backwards, giving herself a terrible fright, and with motherly concern and already a touch of professional steadiness Camilla escorted her to Paddington Station, helped her into the train, and settled her as comfortably as possible with rugs and cushions. By a miracle the two other occupants of their compartment got out at Oxford, so they had it to themselves when by another miracle nobody else got in, and as the train moved out of the station Virginia said, “Now, about Cousin Sally,” and Camilla was instantly all attention.

“You mustn’t look like that,” Virginia complained. “You’ll make all of them awfully self-conscious and uncomfortable.”

“All of whom?”

“Well—everybody. Cousin Sally, Sosthène, and even Fabrice, I suppose,” Virginia explained rather vaguely.

“Is she—m-married again?”

“You would ask that!” Virginia murmured.

“
Well
, I do think this family gets more like a circus every day!” Camilla burst out. “Calvert has no idea what he’s missing! Skeletons in every closet, and ghosts in the attic!”

“Nothing of the kind!” said Virginia rather sharply. “And please say cupboard in England or you’ll be misunderstood.”

“Won’t you go right back to the beginning about Cousin Sally?” Camilla entreated.

“Nobody can remember that far back, unless it’s Cousin Sally herself,” said Virginia. “She’s
got
to be seventy, but you’d never know it to look at her—almost makes you believe in those tales about glands and things the Viennese surgeons can do to keep one young. She’s had three husbands, all of them much older than she was—at the time she married them, I mean—and all extremely wealthy, and they all died one after the other and left her all their worldly goods. Somewhere along the way, I’m not quite sure when, she had a child—a daughter named Clémence, who in time grew up, got married, and had a daughter of her own named Fabrice.”

‘Who is now at Farthingale too?”

“Yes, Clémence died and Sally has brought up her
grand-daughter
, who is your cousin, don’t forget!”

“How old is Fabrice?”

“Eighteen.”

“Nice?”

“She is what I believe in Sally’s day was called a minx,” said Virginia, and lit a cigarette. “She makes eyes at all the men and most of them love it.”

“She can’t have Calvert,” said Camilla jealously at once. “You mentioned somebody else.”

“Sosthène.”

“Well, who is she?”

“A lamb,” said Virginia warmly. “He’s got a dicky heart
and can’t fight—never even did his military service as a boy because of delicate health.”

“Well, how does he come into it?” Camilla prodded, as Virginia seemed to have come to a full stop.

“It’s hard to say,” said Virginia slowly. “We none of us can quite make up our minds about that, and we’ve stopped trying.”

“Where did you find him?”

“He came with them out of Belgium when they escaped.”

“Attached to Fabrice?”

“No. Attached to Sally.”

“
At
her
age?
How old is he?’

“About forty, I should think.”

“You—don’t mean they’re—” Camilla for once was speechless.

“No. Who knows?” Virginia was leaning back, dreaming through the smoke of her cigarette. “He’s devoted to her, in the most heartrending way. They seem to read each other’s thoughts, they seem to converse without speaking, their hands seem to touch across the room. I suppose it’s the French in him,” said Virginia dreamily. “And what they’ve been through together.”

“You don’t suppose—he could be her son?” Camilla
suggested
. “Secretly, you know.”

“No.” Virginia shook her head. “That’s one thing I’m sure he isn’t. Bracken says mother says Sally doesn’t deserve it. When they were girls Sally was known to be utterly heartless and vain and a flirt. Either she has changed since then—or she’s got Sosthène fooled.”

“And you
like
him?”

“We all love him,” said Virginia simply. “You’ll see.”

“Fabrice too?”

“Not Fabrice, no. She doesn’t get anywhere with him. He is immune.” Virginia put out her cigarette. “She’s turning the Hall upside down, though, with her taking ways,” she added,
and her tone hardened. “
I
say she oughtn’t to be allowed to work there, but they’re so short of help they have to take anybody who offers. She shirks all the dirty little jobs a VAD is supposed to do and flirts with the men and puts them against one another for fun and generally stirs up trouble, and we’ll be lucky if we come out of it short of some beastly scandal. I specially resent it because she’s messed up Jenny Keane’s life without any conscience at all.”

“Messed it up, how?”

“Jenny was engaged to Archie’s youngest brother Gerald. They had grown up together—Jenny is the Duke of
Apethorpe’
s daughter and lives at Overcreech House up Moreton way—and while Gerald’s not much of a match, being a younger son, and Jenny is the Duke’s only child, it’s been understood for years that Jenny and Gerald sort of belonged to each other. Then Gerald took one look at our Fabrice and went right out of his mind and asked Jenny to release him—broke it off, mind you, without consulting anybody—and I don’t think Fabrice wants him now that she’s got him—not for keeps, anyway, and no more than she wants half a dozen others.
She
means to make a good match, you can count on that! Jenny’s been perfectly splendid, and tried to pretend she doesn’t mind and didn’t really want to marry Gerald, but we all know better and the poor kid is killing herself over at the Hall, doing all the kind of beastly work Fabrice ought to and won’t. Archie keeps wanting to thrash Gerald, but it’s Fabrice who ought to be scalped, she only took him away from Jenny to prove she could do it—and everybody is a bit crazy, anyway, in war-time, I don’t suppose you can blame anybody, really, no matter what happens. Gerald is in France and the thing is temporarily more or less at a standstill just now. Fabrice doesn’t bother much about letter-writing, I fancy!”

“He might get over it out there and come back to Jenny,” Camilla suggested.

“He might. If only we could get rid of Fabrice while he is away! Get her married off to someone else, or something.
You’ll like Jenny, she’s our sort. Dinah’s sort. And the Duke is a dear.”

“Shall I see him?”

“Who, the Duke? Bound to, he’s always around.
Overcreech
is lonesome for him, with Jenny at the Hall, and he’s got most of it shut up and lives in one wing all by himself with a couple of ancient servants. Her mother is dead.”

Virginia leaned her head back and closed her eyes, tired with talking and the nagging pain in her ankle. Camilla sat looking out the window, her sharp young profile flooded with the pale clear light of the Cotswold country, green and gold in the late afternoon sunshine. It didn’t by any means always rain in England, she had discovered, and even though the unheated compartment was frigid with autumn chill, the land was just as green as they said it was. Little grey farms flashed past her eyes, and low stone walls and lovely rolling fields and sudden wooded hillsides—the sky curved above them, deep blue with hardly a cloud. And somewhere men were dying….

Her quick, keen-cutting mind jeered at the commonplace reflection, which she told herself was bound to occur to anyone with an ounce of imagination, beholding the remote peace of Gloucestershire. Growing up with Calvert kept one from sentimentalism, like another boy. And all these involutions of other people’s love affairs were Greek to her, so that she approached them sceptically, warily, with curiosity rather than sympathy, and no wish to become involved in them herself. She had known young men in Richmond, of course, who admired her coltish beauty and were a little staggered by her forthright manner and uncompromising way of looking at things. Southern girls were not like that, as a rule. Southern girls made some effort to please. The young men decided charitably that Camilla’s odd ways came of being twin to a boy, and were a little afraid of her.

And Camilla, wrapped up in Calvert and wanting no other company if his were available, had never felt the lack of the romantic interludes other girls of her age had experienced, and
she had never yet seen any man to compare with her brother. Now Virginia’s words left an uneasiness. Suppose Calvert met someone irresistible, like Fabrice. Suppose Calvert fell in love, enough in love to go out of his mind like Gerald, and forget his old loyalties and convictions. She, a sister, certainly had never meant to interfere with Calvert’s marrying when the time came. But he must marry someone good enough for him, that was all. And who would be the judge of that—Calvert or his sister? With people like this Fabrice about, and France must be full of them, how would a mere sister count?

“The next stop is us,” said Virginia, gathering herself together, and Camilla roused to lend a hand.

It was tea-time when the motor wheezed its way up the drive in front of Farthingale—it was in need of repairs, and war-time petrol was not what it was used to—and the day was grey and chilly, but Camilla cried, “Oh, how beautiful!” like the right-minded person she was. Virginia recalled with a pang her own first sight of the old stone house with its rows of narrow mullioned windows and its sharp gables, and the smooth lawn sloping to the brim of a clear stream too wide for jumping, the further bank overhung with chestnut trees. No war then, thought Virginia nostalgically, and everyone was young and gay and there was no necessity for patience and fortitude and all those bleaker virtues life had thrust upon one recently. Lovely days, when first she herself had come to Farthingale; lovely days since then too, living here with Archie and the babies. When would such days come again, she wondered, or had one had all the best of it now for a long time to come, and would the babies, growing up, ever know the pure, unclouded happiness in which her own first youth had passed—not so long ago….

“Who’s that?” Camilla was asking, at sight of a strolling figure in a tweed knickerbocker suit and cap, which had paused near the front steps to await their arrival.

It was Sosthène, walking Cousin Sally’s Peke and being
patient while it did its duty at the edge of the herbaceous border. Bracken had presented the golden brown Mimi to Cousin Sally to replace another Mimi who had been left behind in France and might never be seen again and was endlessly lamented.

Sosthène stood still at the edge of the gravel sweep as the motor drew up, and when Virginia waved he lifted his left hand in a slow, gracious gesture of reply, and then, unhurried, at his ease, his white, even teeth showing in his smile, he advanced to open the car door for them.

“Anyone looking less like an invalid I never saw,” he greeted Virginia with affection. “Was it a tedious journey?”

“We’re chilled to the bone, that’s all,” said Virginia. “This is Cousin Camilla from Richmond.”

“How do you do?” said Camilla gravely, wondering what she was to call him, as she stepped down into the drive beside him and offered a slim paw in a dark glove.

Sosthène bent and kissed it, glove and all, which was the first time any such thing had ever happened to her, and she was still looking astonished when he straightened and met her eyes. His were dark brown, with rather sleepy curving lids, and they were smiling too. Mimi, suddenly aware of strangers, dashed up to them and began to bark shrilly, dancing round their feet.

“Another charming cousin from America,” said Sosthène above the racket. “Sallee is so pleased that you have come and has made me understand exactly how you are related to her.
Tais-toi,
Mimi
—
que
tu
est
folle
—
silence!
And now, Virginia, does one carry you into the house or do you want a stretcher?”