Dorothy Eden (52 page)

Watching the children tumbling on the lawn Brigit thought the garden had never looked more delightful. The peaches were ripening along the high brick wall, the roses had made a wonderful show and were going to linger late into the autumn, the heavy scent of carnations filled the warm air. Soon there would be another baby to sleep under the umbrella of the weeping elm. She would tell Fergus tonight. He would be pleased. She knew he would. He would say, ‘Long live the Gaye dynasty!’ and then hold her in his arms and she would try not to fall asleep the whole night long, because it would be so delicious curled up in Fergus’s arms listening to the owls, and watching the friendly moon.

The thought made her so happy that she even smiled with complete affection at Uncle Saunders who was making no secret of his boredom at a day in the country, and obviously itched to get back to town to his mysterious lists of figures and his stock-market reports. She even ignored Guy’s too frequent trips into the house from which he emerged slightly flushed, and smelling a little more each time of whisky.

Guy was drinking too much and his eyes had an evasive look. He didn’t talk to her about anything that mattered, but Guy always had been secretive. He had used to hide his toys so no one else could play with them. Since her marriage to Fergus, Brigit had been able to look on Guy’s idiosyncrasies as slightly comic, and not to be interpreted as major diseases, as she had once thought them. A good wife, Fergus had said easily, was all the boy needed.

Brigit wondered if it was her six years away from the house in Montpelier Square that made her relatives seem to her a little more queer each time she saw them. Aunt Annabel, for instance, had lately become wrapped up in a society dedicated to the welfare of animals and was filling the house with cats. She was beginning to look rather like an untidy Persian herself, Brigit thought, with her mass of coarse smoke-grey hair that defied pins, her peculiarly coloured pale-green eyes, and her habit of wearing a somewhat draggled fur cape draped crookedly over her shoulders. Once she had been a beauty. What had Uncle Saunders, with his immense preoccupation with money, done to her to make her this dowdy vague obsessed person, old before her time?

‘Brigit dear,’ she was saying now, ‘you really work too hard. Fergus should get you more help.’

‘We can’t really afford it,’ Brigit answered cheerfully.

‘Then you must ask Saunders for money. Goodness knows he has plenty. Though really he has been behaving in the oddest way lately. He hides the housekeeping money. Each week I have to look for it.’

‘Hides it!’

‘It’s just his idea of a little joke. One has to be amused, of course. It’s only fair. And besides he does show ingenuity. One week he will choose an easy place, and the next it will be so difficult that Mrs Hatchett and I have to spend the entire morning searching.’

‘And what happens if you can’t find it?’ Brigit asked, fascinated.

‘That’s the game, of course. Then I forfeit it.’

‘You mean he doesn’t give it to you that week?’

‘No, I have to make do,’ Aunt Annabel said serenely. ‘Saunders said we had to cut down expenses and this is his way of doing it. He always liked little jokes, you know.’

Brigit looked at the grey head and high red forehead of Uncle Saunders behind
The Times.
She remembered when she was a child that Uncle Saunders had had odd skittish occasions that she had found obscurely frightening, but she had thought that he must long ago have outgrown them.

‘Don’t you find it awfully irritating?’

‘Actually I do,’ Aunt Annabel confided, in a whisper, giving a quick nervous glance towards her husband. ‘But I have to pretend I enjoy it as much as he does, otherwise I doubt if he’d give me any money at all. And really, I find it awfully hard as it is to run that big house with only Mrs Hatchett and Lorna.’ She clasped her hands in her lap. ‘It’s just his peculiar sense of humour. I remember one night on our honeymoon there was a frog in the bed. He swore he knew nothing about it, but he must have, of course.’

‘Aunt Annabel! That wasn’t a joke!’

‘Well, no. I sometimes wondered if it was meant to be something more subtle.’ Again her eyes flicked towards her husband. ‘It’s a pity we never had children. I think he always blamed me.’

But coldness, or whatever cruel suggestion Uncle Saunders had been making, had nothing to do with not having children, Brigit thought, suddenly filled with pity for the aunt who had given her a home and mothered her in a detached ineffectual way. She had always been too preoccupied with her committees and social occasions to bother much about two orphaned children. But perhaps she had been seeking her way of escape, too. Of recent years she had given up her social life because Uncle Saunders, with his growing miserliness, had said it cost too much, and now her refuge was animals. One didn’t need to wear model gowns to impress a stray cat, she said mildly.

She really looked much sweeter as an untidy old cat, Brigit decided, than as a wealthy philanthropist opening a hospital.

Guy broke into her thoughts.

‘What did Fergus give you for your birthday?’ he asked. Guy was good-looking in a thin rather boneless way. He had the black Templar brows, prominent cheek-bones, and a beautiful sensuous mouth. His chin was perhaps a little indefinite, and there was something in his eyes, an evasiveness, a coldness, that disturbed Brigit. Because she was older than he and had always mothered him, Brigit felt a deep bond between herself and her brother. But sometimes she felt that she didn’t know him at all. This fact disturbed her and made her feel curiously guilty, as if she had failed him in some way. If she had not failed him he would surely have been less secretive.

‘Fergus hasn’t give me anything yet,’ she said lightly, in answer to Guy’s question. ‘After all, I haven’t seen him today. He’ll be here soon.’ All her happiness, forgotten for a moment in her vague uneasiness about Guy, came flooding back. She laughed at herself for her girlish silliness. Why should she be so excited because Fergus, whom she had seen only yesterday, would shortly climb out of his shabby red sports car at the gate, and come striding in to join the party. Was it natural to be so much in love with one’s husband after six years of marriage?

Natural or not, Brigit told herself, it was the most utterly lovely thing in the world. She wanted to hold for ever this sunny day with the flowers blooming and the children’s voices and the shadow like a shawl under the weeping elm where the new baby would sleep, and the sense of delicious anticipation that filled her. Soon Fergus would be here…

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t give you a larger present, my dear,’ Uncle Saunders boomed from behind
The Times.

‘But, Uncle, you gave me a hundred pounds. That’s a tremendous present.’ It was, too, to her. She was going to put it in the bank for the new baby.

‘Only a trifle,’ said Uncle Saunders. ‘But money’s difficult now. I have to be careful. Your aunt knows that.’

Aunt Annabel gave a deep purring chuckle.

‘So ingenious, dear. In the coffee pot this morning. It was the Sèvres set. We might never have found it, but Mrs Hatchett was careless enough to break the pot we normally use, and we had to use the Sevres. And there was the housekeeping money. Such a joke!’

Uncle Saunders scowled, as if he were disappointed, then reluctantly gave his great bark of laughter because he always laughed at his own jokes. Would he truly have taken back the money and made Aunt Annabel scrape through the week on almost nothing? Brigit had a fantastic vision of him sitting up late at night in a dark room in the basement with a bag of sovereigns, a sprawling Nero counting and gloating. Was he perhaps a little mad?

Aunt Annabel had forgotten the subject of money, and was back on her present obsession, her cats.

‘No one really likes them except me,’ she confided, ‘so I have to give them extra affection. I’ve taken the furniture out of the studio so they can use it to scamper about as much as they please. We have a committee meeting once a month.’

‘You and the cats?’ Brigit said bewilderedly.

‘No, dear, the society members and I. We report all the animals we have helped to save during the month, and really you’d be surprised.’

Brigit had an absurd vision of alley cats crouching primly over Moody and Sankey hymn books, and longed for Fergus with whom to share the joke. Fortunately Nicky, tugging at her skirt, saved her from laughing outright at Aunt Annabel’s amiable nonsense.

‘Mummy, when will daddy be home?’

‘Soon, darling.’

‘Mummy, will you like his present better than mine and Sarah’s?’

Nicky’s and Sarah’s gift, carefully chosen in the village with the assistance of Mrs Smythe, had been a gilt brooch set with tiny blue stones in the shape of forget-me-nots. Brigit was wearing it now.

‘I shouldn’t think so, darling. It would have to be very beautiful if I did.’

‘You’re still crazy about Fergus, aren’t you?’ came Guy’s drawling voice. ‘What are you going to do if he falls in love with another woman?’

‘Give him his freedom, I expect,’ Brigit answered light-heartedly. She was completely unable to take his question seriously.

‘Mummy, mummy!’ Nicky shouted. ‘Here’s daddy now!’

‘Daddy coming!’ echoed baby Sarah, making her slow sure progress on her fat legs towards the gate.

The other children, six of them of varying ages, followed, and when the dusty red car drew up and Fergus leaped out, he was surrounded with children. So that at first Brigit thought he was unaccompanied.

It was only when he had cleared the children, like lapping waves about him, away, that Brigit saw the small dark girl standing beside him.

She was a complete stranger.

Fergus took her hand and brought her towards Brigit. She came meekly, like a child.

‘My birthday present for you, darling,’ he said gaily. ‘This is Prissie.’

H
ER NAME WAS PRISCILLA HAWKE
. It was not until later that Brigit saw that she was much more than a child. Her hair, which was dark and straight, she wore cut short, with a brief fringe that shortened the height of her forehead, and balanced her face. It was a small face, quite colourless, and slightly hollow-cheeked. The dark brows over the wide eager eyes were slanted slightly, giving the girl an elfin look. Her figure was elfin, too. She looked like a twelve-year-old until one perceived the maturity in her face. That only leapt out at odd moments, rather disturbingly. Most of the time Prissie was smiling in that eager-little-girl manner that Fergus clearly found enchanting.

‘She’s an air hostess turned mother’s help,’ Fergus explained. ‘She wants a job with a pleasant family, so I’ve brought her down to see you.’

Fergus, towering over the girl, was obviously very pleased with himself. Brigit’s first qualm of distrust (was it distrust?) vanished, and she smiled welcomingly at Prissie.

‘But how sweet of you to want to come to us. Are you sure you want to be a mother’s help after flying? I thought being an air hostess was such a glamorous job.’

Prissie wrinkled her miniature nose. ‘Not so glamorous, if you get air-sick when it’s bumpy. I thought I’d get over that, but I haven’t. And really what I love most is children. Which are yours, Mrs Gaye?’

Brigit called to Nicky.

‘Come here, darling. Bring Sarah.’ As Nicky came, dragging the unwilling Sarah who had decided to swing on the gate, Prissie went down on her knees to them. ‘These two? These little blonds? But how adorable!’ She ruffled their heads and smiled engagingly at them. Sarah, plump and placid, gave her a wide friendly smile in return. Nicky, shyer and more wary, drew back a little, staring.

‘Say hullo to Prissie, Nick,’ said Fergus. ‘She may be looking after you from now on.’

‘I know millions of stories,’ said Prissie. ‘Simply millions.’

Nicky stared, considering.

Brigit thought to herself that she was the same as her small son—considering. Who was this dark-haired dark-eyed girl who had been presented like a whirlwind to them? Why had Fergus decided to bring her here without one word to her first? And anyway could they afford her—nice as it would be to have a pleasant person in the house, with Fergus away so much and a new baby coming.

Fergus didn’t know yet about the baby… So it wasn’t that that had made him decide Brigit needed help.

‘I’ll take over the children right away, Mrs Gaye,’ the girl was saying. ‘You have your husband just home.’ Her hands were drawing the children away. She was giving that wide irresistible smile.

‘But you!’ Brigit protested. ‘You’ve just arrived. You’ll want to wash and see your room.’

Which was Prissie’s room? Why had she suddenly said so surely that there was actually a room for her?

Fergus’s arm was round her waist. ‘Prissie will be all right. She’s used to finding her way about. I haven’t spoken to your family, nor you.’ His eyes rested on her. He bent his head to kiss her and his lips lingered. ‘Happy birthday, my darling.’

There were too many people watching, Brigit thought. But she didn’t care. Fergus was her husband and she had been waiting all day for him. She returned his kiss warmly, then turned to take him over to Aunt Annabel and Uncle Saunders.

Aunt Annabel promptly said, ‘Who’s that child you brought, Fergus? Is she one of the neighbour’s children?’

Brigit looked towards the dark-haired girl who already had the children in an absorbed group about her.

‘She’s not a child, Aunt Annabel. She’s what you said I needed, a mother’s help. Fergus has given me a surprise.’

Uncle Saunders’s head was turned and he was watching Prissie with interest. When he turned back his pale eyes had the protuberant sly suggestive look that attractive young women always aroused in him.

‘Can you afford this, Fergus? Servants cost the devil of a lot these days.’

‘Yes, darling, I’ve just been telling Aunt Annabel we couldn’t afford any more help,’ said Brigit.

‘Brigit is alone too much,’ Fergus answered. ‘I’ve meant to do this for a long time. If Brigit likes Prissie, certainly we can afford it. But if she’d rather,’ his mischievous smile flashed out, ‘she can have some diamond ear-rings.’