No Love Lost (15 page)

‘You'd better find out about the marriage now.'

‘Good lord, yes.'

I couldn't resist it. ‘Lucky I waited,' I observed.

He pulled me close to him and kissed me squarely on the mouth.

‘I had my eye on you all the time.'

‘What?'

‘I found out where you were when I got back. Then I had to get a job and I had to make good at it. Last week I thought the time had come, and I set about breaking things to you gently. I began by letting it be known in Southersham that the prodigal had returned. I knew someone would pass it on.'

I sat up at that.

‘Do you mean to say that you were conceited enough to expect me to approach you?'

He pulled me back again and chuckled.

‘Hang it,' he said, ‘I got a telegram.'

Rhoda stopped the fight by appearing in the doorway, the morning papers in her hand.

‘See here.' Her voice was packed with admiration. ‘Look at that Miss Francia doing her washing. Doesn't she look lovely? All over a whole page!'

I suppose the most frightening thing in the world is the moment when one realizes that courage isn't going to be enough. One plods along cheerfully, convinced that one hasn't got a breaking point, and then, quite suddenly and at the most unlikely moment one sees it, not yet quite on top of one but not so far ahead.

That was why I crossed the road before old Mrs Wycherley caught sight of me. I had nothing against her, poor old darling. She was kindness personified, and the canon's sister, but I knew that in less than five minutes I should be seeing her sad eyes peering out of her unpowdered face, should be feeling her gloved hand on my arm, and, out of a warm cloud of cologne and mouthwash, should hear her soft voice saying: ‘How
are
we today, my dear? Forgive me, but you look so
young
' And I felt I couldn't stand it.

Mrs Wycherley always said that. At first I had assumed that she was worrying because I didn't start a baby, but just lately it had dawned upon me that she was only guessing, with the rest of the insatiably inquisitive town of Tinworth, and was inquiring if I
could
be happily married. So far I had always been brightly reassuring but this morning, the moment I saw her black drapery bearing down upon me, I turned and fled across the glistening surface of Tortham Road, panic-stricken. It alarmed me all the more because I had not dreamed that I could ever be that sort of person. Until then I should have said that I was a young woman who didn't hold with panic. I hurried down the Tortham Road, giddy with the shock of the discovery.

Every provincial town of any size in southern England has its own Tortham Road under some name or other. It is the good road, the residential street leading off the main shopping centre where, in their heyday some eighty years ago, Victorian merchants built their little mansions. These still squat there, portly and inconvenient, each boldly individual in style to the point of mock-Gothic turrets or pagoda-topped conservatories, and each muffled like a sleeping beauty in thickets of laurel and rhododendron. Now, of course, they are nearly all nursing homes, or
converted flats, or schools. Our school, the one of which my husband was Headmaster, was at the far end of Tortham Road and our estate marked the end of the town and the beginning of the fields. The main house, dominating the four others put up to form dormitories for the boys, really was a mansion. It had been modernized, but the broad Georgian façade, glowing in rose brick at the far end of wide lawns, had been built by a retiring Tinworth banker at the time of the great merger, and it still bore his name.

Buchanan House was a first-class private preparatory school, and little boys came there as boarders from all over the country to be made ready for Tortham College, which could hold its own with – well, if not quite with Eton, at least with most of the others.

Tinworth was delighted with Buchanan House. As a market town with a side line in the manufacture of agricultural implements, it did not set out to be particularly intellectual itself, but it liked its school and liked it all the more because there was nothing state-aided about it. Parents paid and paid highly, and their money went out into the town's trade. Ratepayers, startled by the demands of the County Council for the new education account, felt that was as it should be.

As headmasters go, Victor was young. He was in his late thirties and was thought to be brilliant. Indeed, if all I'd been told was true, Tinworth was prepared to credit him with the brain of an Einstein and the knowledge of an encyclopedia, but that did not prevent it from speculating with uncanny insight about his private life. I was beginning to realize that after my six months of marriage to him.

I was walking very fast, almost running, the shopping basket I carried for show swinging on my arm and my straw hat flapping. I was forgetting my dignity and trying to forget everything else, including the atmosphere I had come out to escape, not to mention my latest irritation, which was the news that Andy Durtham, of all people, was going to take a locum job here in Tinworth for Dr Browning while the old man went on holiday.

Dorothy's letter, mentioning this somewhat startling news amid a host of other gossip from St Jude's, where she was still a
Sister, was in my pocket. It had only arrived that morning, but as usual there was no telling when she had written it. Dorothy wrote letters as some people knit woollies, now and again when the mood took her. It was sometimes possible by carefully noting the changes of ink in the closely scribbled pages, to discover if any particular item was some months old or comparatively recent, and I was just wondering if I could pull the untidy bundle out and examine it again there and then in the street when I saw Maureen Jackson thumping down the sidewalk towards me.

Miss Jackson was the Headmaster's secretary and, I suppose, about five years older than I was. The notion that the Head's wife was always older than the Head's secretary had made our relationship, I thought, vaguely awkward at first, but she appeared to have decided to ‘settle all that' in her cheerfully efficient way by treating me always with bluff kindliness, as if I was not quite right in the head or a foreigner. So far I had not attempted to enlighten her, because she was Tinworth personified and I was trying very hard to get the hang of Tinworth.

Miss Jackson was the daughter of the town's best auctioneer and estate agent, quite a powerful person in that community, and her relatives seemed to spread into every conceivable branch of the town's affairs. Her grandfather had been Mayor seven times. Her uncle was the owner of the great ironmongers and agricultural engineers in the High Street. Her mother was an Urban District Councillor, and at least two of her brothers were Justices of the Peace.

She came thumping towards me, big, bony, and not uncomely, with a pink-and-white face and clear cold-blue eyes which were somehow typical of Tinworth in their bland self-satisfied intelligence. She was known as the ‘thundering English rose' by the junior masters, whom she used to treat with offhand tolerance. I understood her work was excellent, and she certainly took Victor's acid rebukes with amiable forbearance.

‘Morning!' she shouted at me when we were within hailing distance. ‘The vac is heaven, isn't it? Or don't you like it?'

Her last question brought her level with me and she did the thing all Tinworth seemed to do, pausing and looking into one's
eyes and investing ordinary trivial questions with direct inquiry. As usual it put me slightly at a disadvantage. To say outright that I'd temporarily forgotten that the day before yesterday all the boys and most of the masters had gone home for the summer holidays, and that yesterday the majority of the domestic staff had dispersed also, would be about as silly as mentioning that one had forgotten a recent earthquake or an invasion in arms. On the other hand, if one said that as far as one's own life was concerned it appeared to make no difference at all, I knew a shadow of suppressed excitement would float over that bovine countenance of peaches and cream and she would want to know why. To do it justice, Tinworth never minded asking.

‘It's very pleasant,' I said, adding idiotically, ‘Are you going to the school?'

‘Of course I am. The letters still come, don't they? I should have thought you'd have known that.' There was no impudence in the last observation. It was just another inquiry, a sharp inquisitive inquiry if I'd really forgotten I'd once held down a high-powered secretarial job at St Jude's Hospital myself. Her blue-eyed stare was filled with pure curiosity. I said nothing at all so she had to go on. ‘I expect the Headmaster's out of his room by now, isn't he?'

‘He was there when I came out,' I told her, adding drily, ‘with Mr Rorke.'

‘Oh.'

I don't know quite how people bridle, but if it means that an expression both disapproving and self-righteous, if admittedly justified, comes over their faces, Maureen bridled.

‘I'd better hurry along. Good-bye, Mrs Lane.'

The thud of her feet was still in my ears, and I had only just had time to remember that at least she had not asked me outright where we were going for our summer holiday, when I saw my next hurdle. Bickky Seckker was advancing demurely down the path towards me, his gold spectacles glinting in the morning sun.

Mr P. F. Seckker was senior classics master at Buchanan House, and the fact that he'd been just that for more years than anyone would like to mention probably accounted for much of the school's reputation. His nickname, a reference to his initials,
which were the same as those on a favourite brand of shortcake, indicated his standing with successive generations of boys. Very few masters achieve such an innocent soubriquet.

When I first met him I had assumed he was a very ordinary elderly bachelor, a little old-maidish and perhaps the least bit seedy, but as the months went on I had revised my opinion and was fast coming to think he was the kindest soul I had ever met in my life. He smiled at me, hesitated, made sure that I really did want to stop (which I didn't, of course, but I would have died rather than hurt his feelings), and came out with the one most unfortunate remark which from my point of view he could have made.

‘I don't know when you're off for your vacation, Mrs Lane, but my sister and I will be at home here at Tinworth all the holidays and my sister – I mean we – would be delighted if you'd drop in to see us just whenever you feel like it.' He was a little shy, as he always was with what he was apt to describe quite suddenly as ‘a very, very pretty woman', and he twinkled and glowed at me as if he were twenty-four and not I. ‘Nothing formal, you know,' he chattered on. ‘We are too old, and like most other people too poor, for formal entertaining, but my sister was talking to you on Speech Day and she thought that, well, you never know, you might care sometime for a cup of tea in our wailed garden.'

He paused abruptly and to my horror I realized that my face was growing scarlet.

‘I – I'd love that,' I said. ‘I would like it better than anything. I'm not sure – quite – when we're going away.'

‘Naturally.' Now that I had betrayed embarrassment, any shyness of his own was thrust aside and he took social command with all the charm and ease of his kind. ‘Of course. Well, you must come when you can. We shall be delighted. I love this warm weather. It suits Tinworth. Some people think it's an ugly town, but I don't. We've got history here, you know. The site of the Roman camp at Mildford is perfectly fascinating. I shall show it to you one day. Much better than half the things one travelled all through France to find.' And then, abruptly, as if he were a gauche old person surprised into speech, ‘That blue
gown of yours makes your dark eyes darker and puts quite a blue light into that black hair of yours. There, isn't that forward of me?'

The old-fashioned word made me laugh, as I think he knew it would.

‘No,' I protested. ‘It's charming of you. I feel better and younger already.'

‘That would be impossible,' he assured me gravely. ‘Until I show you the Roman camp, then.' He raised his polished cherry-wood stick in salute, since he was hatless, and strolled on, leaving me shaken to find that even old Miss Seckker, who was considerably his senior and certainly half blind, should have noticed that I might need a little human comfort in the sanctuary of her garden. Yet I was glad I had met him and was grateful for his compliment.

It was at that precise moment as I turned away that I saw Andy. He was speeding down the road towards me in a well-worn open sports car. We looked straight at each other for an instant as he passed and then I heard the shriek of brakes and the revving of the engine as he swung round in the wide road. In the last few hours I suppose I had envisaged meeting him again in half a hundred possible places. For some reason I had assumed that it would be at some very crowded social gathering, the Agricultural Show perhaps, or one of the eternal sherry parties Tinworth likes so much. I'd even prepared an opening gambit: ‘Oh yes, of course I know Dr Durtham. We met at St Jude's. How nice to see you again, Andy.'

To find him pulling up beside me in this vast and now apparently empty street called for an entirely different approach and I was so amazed and so pleased to see him that I couldn't think of anything at all suitable.

‘Hullo, animal,' I said.

‘Hullo yourself,' he said briefly. ‘Get in.'

They say it is impossible to forget anyone you've ever been truly in love with, but it is astounding how easy it is to put out of one's mind the things about them which one loved. One of the things I had succeeded in forgetting about Andy Durtham was his force. He was a big, rakish, intensely masculine person,
dark as I am and not ill-looking in a tough untidy way, but his chief characteristic, and I suppose charm, was vital energy. It was a bit overwhelming and there had been a period when I had found it alarming. It seemed to radiate from him almost noisily, as if he were an engine ticking over. He was young, of course, only just qualified.