Theirs Was The Kingdom (95 page)

“And you, Mr. Coles? What are you studying for?”

“How to live on my father’s money,” he said, promptly, “and I’m sure I shall be very good at it. But don’t keep calling me ‘Mr. Coles.’ I’m ‘Clint’ to my friends, and you’ll join them, won’t you?”

“I should like to,” she said, laughing, “so I’m Joanna, number five on the Swann muster-roll. Helen is the next girl down. Hugo comes in between. Are there a lot of you?”

“Four,” he said. “Rowley, me, and two girls, Melie and Nell, who likes to be called ‘Eleanor.’ The girls are nineteen and seventeen. Rowley is years older than any of us. Sometimes I think of him as being of the Governor’s generation. Well, here we are. You’ll like Mamma. She’s fun, and the girls aren’t so bad when you can stop them talking about clothes. They’ll enjoy meeting you, I can guarantee that.”

She stopped him as they passed through the stable yard arch. “Just a moment… before I do meet them…
Why
, exactly? I mean, how does it come about that you know so much about us. Your folks don’t think of us as… well… notorious, do they?”

“Good Lord, no! Just liberated. That’s an accepted fact about here, it seems. ‘Papa Swann lets his sons and daughters do as they please, instead of how it pleases him.’ At least, that’s how I’ve heard it!” He was serious for a moment. “That’s rare,” he added, “rare enough to make other girls jealous.”

2

He could hardly have taken more trouble had he been treating a patient with a severed artery. Every movement of his hands was controlled and deliberate, and his expression did not vary at all from one of grave concern, so that she had the impression of being someone of tremendous consequence. Visiting royalty, perhaps. Or someone world-famous, like Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale.

She soon realised it was useless to flirt with him in the accepted manner and abandoned her ailing Elizabeth Barrett Browning pose within minutes of Joanna and Clinton leaving them alone. Instead she lay back and relaxed, watching him roll bandages on to her lacerated palms and bring to the task the neatness and precision of an old maid at her embroidery frame. And yet, in another way, he was very masculine, more so than anyone she had ever known, save her father. He had a trick of proclaiming, without a word of self-praise, that he knew precisely what he was about; although, in a way, this made him slightly forbidding, and his eyes were as kind and gentle as a girl’s. He had, she noticed, beautifully kept hands, the kind of hands she imagined a concert pianist might have, but his features, beetling and rather craggy, suggested austerity, even severity, as though, in some way, he was at war with himself, and having as much as he could do to subdue a livelier, more reckless Rowland Coles. It even occurred to her that he was monkish, and possibly shy of women, as when he asked her gravely if she had any other injuries apart from her stinging palms, now blissfully soothed by the ointment he had applied. She said, doubtfully, “I’ve bruised my knee, I think. The left one. It isn’t bleeding but it feels very sore and stiff.”

It was fun watching him work that one out, his professional concern at odds with his notions of propriety, but then Mrs. Mallow, the lodge-keeper’s wife, came bustling in and he said, gravely, “Would you like me to examine it, Miss Swann? I daresay it was badly jarred, and will stiffen up before you can get to your own doctor. Be so good as to wait, Mrs. Mallow.”

She nearly giggled at that, telling herself that the prospect of displaying her knees to him pleased her, for she had always been proud of her slender, shapely legs, the prettiest legs in the family according to her mother, who took a lively interest in such things. Carefully she lifted her muddied skirt, revealing a grey stocking shredded at the kneecap. The flesh below was tender and already an area of blue-black bruising was visible.

He said, “Er… roll down your stocking, Miss Swann,” and stared hard at an atrocious watercolour hanging above her head while she slipped her garter and quietly disposed of it, placing it in her pocket. He said, impersonally, “I’ll use arnica. I have some here,” and probed in the box, while the plump Mrs. Mallow stood watching, holding herself as straight as a sentinel. He applied the arnica and gave Mrs. Mallow the stocking, telling her to burn it. “One of the girls will have a change of clothes for you,” he said. “Then, after luncheon and a rest, Clint or I will run you home in the dogcart. Take it quietly for a day or two. Luckily that bruise has come out, and I don’t think you’ll have trouble with it. Leave the bandages on the hands when you go to bed tonight. Your own doctor will apply fresh, no doubt.”

The prospect of passing out of his orbit and submitting to the gruff ministrations of old Doctor Birtles was depressing. She said, quickly, “I’m not obliged to go to another doctor, am I? I mean, since you were the first one to treat me, couldn’t you keep the case until I’m healed up?” And at that he smiled and said, “Your injuries aren’t that serious, Miss Swann. They might have been but fortunately they aren’t.”

He went through into the scullery then to wash his hands and she thought, irritably, “He must be made of stone! He’s the first young man to see my pretty legs above the ankles, but he might just as well have been looking at a couple of dumb-bells!” And it occurred to her to pretend to have a relapse, so that he would lift her and carry her up to the house, but common sense told her he was not that gullible and she would have to think of something more original. But before she could apply her mind to it the dogcart arrived, driven by Mallow, and Rowley offered his arm on which she leaned half her weight as they crossed the little garden to the drive.

He was very slow, it seemed, at taking hints, for when she staggered all he did was to brace her with his forearm, instead of taking the opportunity to encircle her waist, and she thought, glumly, “He acts just as if he were married but I’m sure he isn’t. Maybe that’s the way of young doctors. They’re afraid of getting compromised by women patients…” But then, like administering a slap in her face, he made a direct reference to Joanna, saying, anxiously, “I do hope that idiot Clinton looks after your sister properly. He’s good-hearted but a regular clown, and I got the impression she was very shy. Would you say she was shy, Miss Swann?”

It was at once a rebuke and a confession. For years now, she and Joanna had worked as a team, perfecting the technique of passing young men between them like shuttlecocks. And a very stimulating game it had proved, ever since Helen had put her hair up and Joanna, then eighteen, had given her the benefit of all her experience, so that Helen had started out with an enormous advantage over all the other junior belles, extracting the maximum fun and excitement from romance without once getting into a serious scrape, or having her name erased from a local Mamma’s invitation list. Together, in their shared bedroom when the house was asleep, they had pooled their experiences night after night, giggling and descanting over this beau and that, but always with a sense of holding on to the initiative. They generally regarded their admirers as puppies, good for a romp, and a little spoiling maybe, but aware, at any given moment, they could be called to heel. In all this time they had never once fallen out over a beau, and there had never been an occasion when she felt a pang of jealousy for Joanna. She felt one now, however, and it baffled her, for something was telling her that this beetle-browed, craggy, gentle, rather prim young man was aware of Joanna in a way that he certainly wasn’t aware of her, even though he had touched her bare knees, a privilege, she would have thought, that would have reduced most young men to a state of servitude.

She said, sulkily, “Joanna can look after herself, Mr. Coles. None better, believe me!” But having said it, she regretted giving herself away, and would have fallen back on the time-honoured technique of praising her sister had they not arrived in the stable yard at that moment, to be engulfed by the entire Coles family, all talking at once, all regarding the accident as the highlight of the week.

She was right about Rowley, however. On seeing Joanna standing between his sisters Amelia and Eleanor, he forgot her entirely, and it was left to the brash Clinton to hand her down and introduce her to his parents and sisters.

Coles père, she decided at once, was a pet and looked as if he had been the model for Cruickshank’s Mr. Pickwick. Mrs. Coles was a red-faced, excitable little woman, who at once began to fuss over her as if she had recently undergone a major operation. Then Eleanor, the younger of the two girls, screamed that she had a change of clothes ready, and mother and daughters dragged her into a sewing room adjoining a large room where a table was set for luncheon. Everybody continued to talk at once, and she wished that Rowley would reappear and tell everyone she was suffering from nothing more than a few scratches and a bruise. But it was Clinton who presented himself, announcing that luncheon was served, and when she went out into the long, low-ceilinged room, gleaming with silver, she caught a glimpse of Rowley through the open door of the conservatory. He was standing beside Joanna who was pretending to admire the fuchsias. His expression reminded Helen of a cud-chewing cow in the pasture adjoining the Tryst paddocks.

3

That was the way of it. Somehow, no one could say how exactly, they all got off to a wrong start, and there were many times during the next six months when Helen Swann, and Joanna too for that matter, wished they could rewind time and set it going again at the moment they began their breakneck descent of Spout Hill.

When they were adolescents, and given to childish games, they had often taken part in a game known as “The Jolly Miller,” in which everybody formed a ring around the player chosen as miller and circled him, chanting:

There was a jolly miller
And he lived by himself
As the mill went round
He made his wealth;
As the mill went round he filled his bag,
As the wheel went round he made his GRAB!

At which point the miller would select his favourite for a wife and kiss her before the circling would begin all over again.

The memory of this silly kissing game coloured Helen’s reflections on the developing situation between herself, Joanna, and the two Coles boys. They had each, as it were, made their grab, but the circle had stopped moving too soon or too late, with the result that all four—to Helen’s mind at all events—had grabbed the wrong partner.

The spill at the foot of Spout Hill, and the luncheon party at Addington Manor that followed it, began an association that would have been very rewarding in happier circumstances. The Coles family were excessively jolly and hospitable, and she got along very well with Papa Coles (whom she could never disassociate from Mr. Pickwick), his excitable wife Letty, their rather homely daughters, Amelia and Eleanor, and, above all, with the livelier of the two boys, Clinton, who squired her here, there, and everywhere throughout that winter and the subsequent spring. This was well enough, and had it not been for an unforgettable moment in her life—opening her eyes in the lodge parlour and looking up into the face of Rowland Coles—she would have made the most of it and enjoyed a protracted flirtation with Clinton, as well as the company of his sisters, both of whom, it seemed, had fallen madly in love with her brother Hugo.

But moments like that, she discovered, could not be erased like a squiggle from a nursery slate. This one would return to her, unbidden, every time she saw Rowland’s spare, upright figure, pacing the Tryst terrace, or the gravelled paths of Addington Manor, beside an impassive, untroubled Joanna. Whereas Rowland’s total indifference to her, as anything more than an appendage to Joanna, had the effect of undermining all the confidence in herself assembled during the years when she had regarded herself (along with Joanna) as one of the most sought-after belles in Kent. The cuts on her palms and the bruise on her knee healed in a matter of days. The injury to her self-esteem festered, promising to sour her existence.

This might not have happened, of course, had she been able to bring herself to admitting the facts to Joanna, or even to herself, but she was unable to do this, falling back on a general prickliness that was uncharacteristic of her, so that her temper would flare over trivialities. Anyone less preoccupied than Joanna, or more discerning than Clinton Coles, would have noticed something was amiss when the three of them, accompanied by Rowland whenever he could spare time from his studies, dashed about the countryside to meets, soirees, a ball or two, and when the better weather came round, picnics into the countryside adjoining Tryst, or the home of the boys five miles nearer London.

They were not always a foursome. Sometimes a whole group of the country-house set would join them at a gymkhana or a birthday party at one or other of the towns or villages about here. Then, if Rowland were present, Helen would try to capture his attention by a display of excessively high spirits, or an exhibition of reckless flirting with any young man who gave her encouragement, but it was to no avail. Rowland, it seemed, had eyes for no one but the strangely subdued Joanna, mooning after her everywhere she went, hanging on her lightest words, blundering forward to open doors or set chairs for her, so that sometimes Helen’s resentment was half-submerged in amazement that nothing final emerged from this spectacular display of courtship. Joanna dropped no hint that Rowland Coles was on the point of proposing or had, perhaps, already proposed and been refused in the certainty that he would go on doing it until Joanna judged he had been kept dangling long enough.

Now that Helen was eighteen the two sisters no longer shared a room so that their cosy, after-dark confidences were not so readily available. Nonetheless, she did manage to make it clear to Joanna that she, of all people, would be extremely interested to learn what, if anything, was moving in this direction and was indignant when Joanna hedged and seemed disinclined to confide in anyone. Helen could only assume from this that there was really nothing to tell, and asked herself (for possibly the hundredth time since that crash outside the Manor gates) whether her obsession with Rowland Coles was rooted in pique at his indifference, or in some deeper emotion, deep enough to scare her a little. For while it was agreeable to fancy oneself in love with a beau who was only awaiting a suitable opportunity to declare himself, it was humiliating to love someone who looked past you at your elder sister every time you crossed his path.