Down an English Lane (6 page)

‘I’m not bothered about that,’ said Maisie crossly. ‘Why should I care about Audrey and Brian Milner?’

‘All right, all right, love. I just wondered, that’s all,’ replied Lily. ‘I see Bruce Tremaine had a young lady with him an’ all tonight. Of course, he’s several years older than you girls, isn’t he? I always thought when he was knocking around with the three of you, before he joined the RAF, that he should find a girl of his own age. I know he only thought of you as children though…’ Maisie was not answering and Lily looked more closely at her. She was staring
fixedly ahead as they walked down the High Street, her lips pressed closely together.

‘Oh… Maisie,’ said Lily, suddenly realising what might be the problem. ‘You’re not upset about…? It isn’t Bruce, is it?’ The fact that her daughter didn’t answer made Lily realise that that was, indeed, the case. ‘Oh, lovey… I never realised you felt like that. But…he’s years older than you.’ She took hold of her daughter’s arm. ‘He’s too old for you, darling. Besides…’

Maisie snatched her arm away. ‘Leave me alone,’ she cried. ‘You don’t understand; nobody does…’

She set off running down the street, her long pink dress billowing around her legs, not stopping until she reached the draper’s shop. She let herself in with her own key and fled upstairs to her attic bedroom. When Lily arrived home she was lying on her bed, sobbing as though her heart would break.

‘Oh dear, that poor girl; poor Maisie,’ said Patience, shaking her head. ‘I guessed what was the matter with her. I don’t think she was tired… Well, she might have been, I suppose, but that wasn’t all it was.’

She and Luke were enjoying a late-night cup of tea before retiring. The boys had gone to bed as soon as they came home, and Audrey had arrived back soon afterwards looking happy and starry-eyed. She, too, had gone straight to bed and,
tactfully, her parents had not asked her any questions.

Luke regarded his wife quizzically. ‘What do you mean, dear? I noticed that Audrey and Brian Milner appeared to be getting rather friendly tonight, and I expect he’s brought her home, judging by her pink cheeks. You don’t mean… Maisie isn’t feeling jealous, is she? Did she “fancy” Brian, as they put it?’

Patience laughed. ‘No, no…not Brian. You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, Luke. I’m surprised; you’re normally such a perceptive soul. No… I’ve known for ages that Maisie has had what you might call a “thing” about Bruce Tremaine.’

‘Oh dear! Are you sure?’

‘Pretty sure. I know they wrote to one another whilst he was away; and I’ve noticed that certain look in her eyes whenever she mentions him. And she does seem to mention him rather a lot.’

‘She’s only young though,’ said Luke. ‘And so is Audrey, of course. They’re only fifteen. And Bruce must be – what? – almost twenty-one now, isn’t he?’

‘Yes; he’ll be twenty-one in November. Rebecca was telling me that they were planning to have a party for him. But she didn’t mention anything about him having a lady friend when I spoke to her a couple of weeks ago. Perhaps the young woman was as much of a surprise to Archie and Rebecca as she is to the rest of us.’

‘Maybe she is.’ Luke nodded. ‘I spoke to them
briefly at the interval, Bruce and Christine, I mean, and I thought she seemed a nice sort of girl. She’s very pretty, and he’s obviously very taken with her.’

‘Well, she would be on her best behaviour, talking to the rector, wouldn’t she?’ smiled Patience. ‘I’ve only had a brief word with them both myself… but I sensed a sort of calculating gleam in that young woman’s eyes. She wants him, Luke, I could see that, and she’ll be determined to hang on to him.’

Luke chuckled. ‘I know you are intuitive, my dear, but don’t you think you’re being a tiny bit imaginative? And jumping the gun as well. It might just be a casual friendship.’

‘I don’t think so; not as far as she is concerned at any rate. I’ve always thought that Bruce is a very innocent sort of lad. He had a sheltered boyhood, stuck away in that boarding school. I don’t suppose he’s ever had a girlfriend before.’

‘You don’t know that. He’s been in the RAF for a couple of years now, so he’s sure to have had a few corners rubbed off him. Don’t worry about him. He’s a sensible lad, and I’m sure he can take care of himself. And I know you’re concerned about Maisie, but she’ll have her heart broken many more times before she’s through. She’s only fifteen; she’ll get over it.’

‘I hope so,’ replied Patience, deciding it would be best to say no more to her husband at the moment. It was true that Maisie was young in years, but
circumstances had forced her to grow up quickly and she often showed the maturity of a much older person. Patience had seen the pain tonight in the girl’s eyes and she knew that she was hurting very badly.

‘That girl’s in love with you,’ said Christine, when Bruce’s parents, somewhat reluctantly, had gone to bed, leaving them alone in the sitting room.

‘Which girl?’ asked Bruce, with an air of innocence that was not assumed. ‘I don’t know who you mean, darling.’

‘Oh, come off it, Bruce, of course you do!’ Christine sounded impatient and she pulled away from his encircling arm. ‘That girl who sang the song; the one with the soulful brown eyes. She’s crazy about you; I can tell that she is.’

‘What? Maisie Jackson…’

‘Yes, Maisie; that’s the one. I remember that was what you called her.’

‘Don’t be silly, darling; of course she’s not,’ laughed Bruce. ‘Maisie? She’s only a kid; she’s only fifteen. Honestly, Christine, how could you possibly think…?’

‘Because it’s true. I’m a woman, aren’t I, and I know. Feminine intuition, my darling. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed the way she looks at you?’

‘No, I can’t say that I have,’ replied Bruce thoughtfully. ‘We’ve been friends for a long time; I told you so…’ He chuckled. ‘Actually, I don’t think
she liked me very much at first. She was very wary of me; she was of all boys. Apparently she’d had a bad experience with an awful stepbrother – I don’t know all the details because it was never really talked about – and I know her mother was married to a brute of a man when she first came to live up here. Maisie had had a rough time…’

‘She seems to have recovered well enough now,’ remarked Christine. ‘What happened to her brute of a stepfather? I take it he’s not still around?’

‘He was in prison the last I heard. He was doing a stretch for burglary and for beating up his wife. He came up here and had a go at Lily when she was living here, in Tremaine House. As far as I know he’s still in gaol; it’s the best place for him.’

‘Oh, I see…’ Christine suddenly went very quiet. ‘Poor Maisie…’ she muttered, but Bruce was not altogether sure that her utterance was sincere. ‘So you befriended her, did you, the little evacuee girl…and her pal? Audrey, isn’t it, the girl from the Rectory?’

‘Yes… Maisie and Audrey.’ Bruce smiled reminiscently. ‘But a lot of water has flowed under the bridge, as they say, since those days.’

‘And you’re interested in rather older girls now, aren’t you, darling?’ Christine looked up at him teasingly in the enticing way she had, her lovely silver-grey eyes alight with amusement and desire. And, as always, he was powerless to resist. He bent to kiss her lips and she reached for him hungrily, her
mouth opening beneath his, her hands cradling his head to draw him closer to her.

He drew away from her after a few moments. ‘Steady on, darling. I don’t think we should; not here, with my parents upstairs.’

‘Where then, Bruce?’ Christine demanded. ‘Your mother has seen to it that we have separate rooms.’

‘Well, of course she has! What else did you expect? You surely didn’t imagine that she would…?’

‘No, no, I suppose not.’ She shook her head irritably. ‘No, of course I didn’t. It would be highly improper, wouldn’t it? No, I guessed when you invited me to come and meet your parents that we would have to behave impeccably.’ She shrugged away from him then, reaching for her shoulder bag and taking out a slim red packet of Du Maurier cigarettes. She lit one with her silver lighter and handed the packet to Bruce.

‘Thanks, I will. You’ve got me into all sorts of bad habits,’ he remarked, leaning towards her while she touched the flame to his cigarette.

‘You are ridiculous, darling,’ she chided. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t smoke until you joined the RAF. What about that public school of yours? Don’t tell me you didn’t have a crafty drag or two in the dorm? I’ve heard all sorts of tales about what those public school toffs get up to.’

‘Wildly exaggerated, I’m sure.’ Bruce drew deeply and blew out an expert smoke ring. ‘See how
good I’m becoming… No, there was very little extreme behaviour at my school, believe it or not. And we were kept well away from any girls.’

‘It wasn’t just girls that I was thinking of,’ said Christine slyly. ‘I was thinking more of the boys…’

‘Then you’re barking up the wrong tree,’ said Bruce vehemently. ‘There was nothing of that kind, I can assure you.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ she said.

She smiled contentedly as she puffed away on her cigarette, looking around the Tremaine’s elegant sitting room. ‘I must say it’s a lovely place your parents have here, Bruce. I’m very impressed…’

Her eyes took in the deep pile floral carpet, the floor length green velvet curtains which matched exactly the green background colour of the carpet, and the large three-piece suite; two enormous armchairs and the huge sofa on which they were sitting, dark green with chair back covers of cream linen edged with crochet work. A Dresden shepherd and shepherdess stood at either end of the mahogany mantelpiece, with a golden clock under a glass dome in the centre. There was no fire in the hearth as it was summertime, and the grate held a tasteful arrangement of leaves and fir cones. The house was gently heated throughout, when required, by a central heating boiler which Archie Tremaine had had installed just before the start of the war; one of the few houses in the area that could boast of such a commodity.

‘Your father owns a lot of the land around here as well, does he?’ Christine went on. ‘The outlying farms, they belong to him, do they?’

‘Only the Nixons’ farm now,’ replied Bruce. ‘There were a couple of others, but my father sold them to the tenants. Walter Nixon might well have bought his farm as well, but he was killed during the war. It’s still run as a family concern though. Ada, Walter’s widow, is very competent, and she has her son, Ted, to help her as well as young Doris. That’s the girl who was in the concert – she’s a friend of Maisie and Audrey – the one who did the poem about Matilda. She’s quite a scream, is Doris.’

‘Yes, I’m sure she is,’ said Christine, with an eloquent lift of her eyebrows. ‘How many more little girlfriends are you going to trot out of the woodwork, darling?’

‘That’s the last one, I promise,’ laughed Bruce easily. ‘But to get back to the Nixons that I was telling you about…’ As if I am really the slightest bit interested, thought Christine, trying not to look too bored.

‘The eldest son, Joe, has just been demobbed – I caught a glimpse of him there tonight – so no doubt he will go back to working on the farm. They’ve had a land girl helping out, but the girls will all be going back home before long, I dare say, as the male farmhands return. They’ve done a marvellous job, though.’

‘I’m sure…’ replied Christine, on an exhalation
of cigarette smoke. There were three land girls still billetted at Tremaine House, and she had been surprised to see how Bruce’s mother treated them, almost as though they were members of the family.

‘My father would like to sell the Nixons’ farm as well, to the family of course. They’ve been invaluable tenants, and I know he’ll be willing to help Ada financially if she would like to own it.’

‘But there is still a good bit of land apart from that, isn’t there?’ asked Christine, in a casual tone, not wanting to appear too inquisitive.

‘Yes, quite a fair acreage…’

‘How does it work, Bruce? I know you have two older sisters…’ Both were married and living a good distance from North Yorkshire, he had told her. ‘But as the only son of the squire, it would all come to you, wouldn’t it?’

Bruce burst out laughing. ‘Good gracious, darling! We don’t belong to the nobility.’