Sunshine Yellow (10 page)

Roland Ardmore climbed up from the inn on perhaps a couple of fine mornings every week to work on Penny’s portrait. Stephen sat in a chair while he worked, and Penny sat in the window-seat, with the sea behind her and the flying clouds, and wore a soft green dress that made her look more than ever like a dryad—or so Ardmore assured her, when she made her first appearance in it.

“You wore green when we were married, Penny,” Stephen reminded her, after Ardmore had made his observation. “It wasn’t a very lucky colour for you!”

Ardmore sent him one of his searching looks, and then glanced at Penny. The sunlight was pouring over her and her yellow hair, and he smiled at her.

“Green isn’t really an unlucky colour,” he told her.
“If you were Irish you’d probably believe that it is, because the fairies are supposed to resent human creatures wearing it. But since you wore it at your wedding you obviously are not Irish.”

Penny didn’t tell him that she had worn green at her wedding because the suit and coat were a present to her from Aunt Heloise, and she couldn’t really afford a new outfit at that time.
If she had been a normal bride—a bride who could choose!—she would have worn white.

“In any case, you’re not unhappy, are you?” he asked, as if he were deliberately probing. “I’ll grant you it was most unfortunate you should have that accident right at the beginning of your honeymoon, but your husband’s health is improving.” Once again he glanced at Stephen, who was looking dark and elegant in one of his beautifully cut suits, and whose dark glasses no longer drew attention to the fact that his cheeks were hollow, because the hollows had filled out.

It was only the restless tapping of his hands on the arms of his chair—that and his occasional bursts of temper, and moods of irritable impatience—that gave away the truth that he was not happy.

That he was very unhappy, as Veronica had pointed out to Penny.

Although sometimes in the evenings, when the wind howled round the cottage, and they were snug in their beamed sitting-room, Stephen did not behave like a bitterly unhappy man.

“Come and sit here, Penny,” he would say—or rather, command—and she would sit beside him and let him hold her hand and play with the delicate tips of her fingers, while the walls of the cottage shuddered and shook, and the waves thundered on the beach below them. Sometimes she would play gramophone records at his request, and sometimes she would turn up the lamp and read to him, but the evening nearly always ended with those few minutes of quiet, and the strength of his hand holding hers.

“Such little soft fingers,” he would say, and sometimes he carried them up to his face and held them there almost absentmindedly. Sometimes he made her kneel down before him so that he could let his fingers rove in her hair, but he never made any attempt to draw her into his arms, as he had done the night before Veronica drove back into his life.

They never talked of Veronica, but she was always an unspoken thought between them, or so Penny believed. She believed, also, that Veronica was the reason why Stephen invariably grew a little strange before he actually said good night and let Waters guide him upstairs to bed. Why he always said good night so curtly and briefly.

If he had been married to Veronica there would have been no curt good night of that sort!

Christmas came, and it was one of the strangest Christmases in Penny’s life. Waters, who looked after them so very admirably that Penny never had anything at all to do in the house—although she sometimes wished she had, for the days might not then have seemed as long as they frequently did—provided them with all the usual trimmings in the way of seasonable fare, and Penny herself dressed a small Christmas tree which she brought in from the garden. She placed it in a
corner
of the main living-room, and the bright tinsel streamers and coloured glass balls looked surprisingly gay and attractive by contrast with the heavy oak beams.

She also decked all the pictures with holly, and hung a bunch of mistletoe beside the swinging ship’s lantern in the hall. When Waters saw it for the first time his gaunt face registered approval, and then he glanced at Penny and his eyes grew soft and pitiful.

“If the master’s to know about that you’ll have to tell him where it is,” he said.

But, although her colour deepened, Penny shook her head.

“I don’t think I’ll do that,” she replied quickly. “It—it’s just because it’s Christmas!”

On Christmas Eve Stephen put a hand into his pocket and produced a jeweller’s case, which he tossed almost carelessly into Penny’s lap as she sat beside him.

“I had no real idea what you’d like for a present,” he said, “and I decided to play for safety and make it jewellery. Most women seem to like it, and you’re feminine enough in all conscience.”

Penny sat with the case in her lap, feeling suddenly so acutely shy that it was almost an agony. Her fingers itched to touch the red morocco and explore the neat gold clasp, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do so. It was only when Stephen spoke impatiently—so impatiently that it astounded her, when only
a
second or so before he had been as casual as if he was bestowing on her some neglected weed from the garden—that she apologized swiftly and opened the case.

“What are you waiting for?” Stephen demanded. “Don’t you like trinkets? Or do you like to be consulted,” with ponderous dryness, “before you start collecting suitable items for your jewel-box?”

“Of course not,” she answered, and by this time she had the case open, and was staring with delighted eyes at the string of milky pearls that lay on a bed of velvet. The clasp alone, she realized, with its solitary sapphire surrounded by diamond points, must have put the price of the necklace up considerably; and when it was gradually borne in on her that these were
real pearls
...
Real pearls
! … And for her!

“Oh, Stephen!” she said, and found that she could
say nothing more.

The note in her voice was enough. Stephen relaxed.

“Put them on,” he said—or rather commanded. “Or give them to me, and let me put them on for you.”

She knelt in front of him on the rug—so often, nowadays, she felt like the beggarmaid kneeling at the feet of King Cophetua—and he fumbled with the clasp, and then secured it about her slender neck as she bent her head. His fingers were warm and vital as they brushed against her skin, and such a wild thrill shot through her that she remained silent.

“You like it?” her husband asked, quietly, while his breath stirred the gold floss of her hair. “You really like it?”

“I think it’s absolutely beautiful. But it must have cost a lot of money.”

“Never mind how much it cost,” he said disagreeably.
“A wife receiving her first Christmas present from her husband shouldn’t be thinking about cost.”

“I—I wasn’t” She was suddenly aghast. “It was simply that
.
.
.
”

“Oh, forget it!” It was plain that he was no longer in a mood for present giving. He sat back in his chair and thrust out a hand to turn on the portable wireless set that stood on a table at his elbow. “Let’s drown the noise of those confounded carollers in the porch outside!” Penny had been thinking the voices of the carollers—a little band that had trudged all the way from the village to entertain them—so beautiful that it was one reason why she had been so easily overcome just then; and on top of them Stephen’s present made her feel as if she wanted to dissolve into tears. As if she wanted suddenly to drown in tears.

“I never could bear carol-singers,” Stephen said harshly, his mouth grim and mutinous.

Penny clambered up from her knees and looked at him, appalled.

“But I—I love them!”

“You,” he said, almost scornfully, and turned his face away from her, “you’re nothing but a child still. And half of that collection of hopefuls out there are children as well. You’d better take a handful of silver and dole it out amongst them, and they’ll depart.” When Penny returned from distributing the silver and thanking the singers for their efforts, Stephen seemed to have withdrawn into such a state of moody aloofness that she couldn’t think of anything to say to penetrate his reserve. There was one thing she badly wanted to say, and she got it out at last, while she knelt to add another log to the crackling, hissing blaze of logs in the grate.

“I haven’t got anything for you, Stephen. I—I didn’t know what to get you.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, as if he were merely bored. “You haven’t got anything for me
...
?”

“A Christmas present!”

“Oh!” He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s all right. I’m not interested in Christmas presents for myself.”

“But I wanted to get you something
...
” Her voice was almost a wail. The truth was that he kept her so short of money she simply hadn’t enough to expend on anything worth while. It had probably never occurred to him, since she was housed and fed and generally well looked after, that she needed money for clothes, and the small things a woman depends on if she is to maintain her appearance, such as hair-does and cosmetics and things like that. Her Aunt Heloise had made her a tiny allowance that was so very tiny she had never found it possible to save any of it, and ever since she married Stephen she had been hard put to it to buy herself the small necessaries. And now that Christmas was here, to her bitter regret, she couldn’t even buy him a present.

Unless she asked him for the wherewithal! And she hadn’t been able to find the courage to do that.

“I said forget Christmas presents,” Stephen said harshly. “Shove those pearls away somewhere where they’ll be safe, and wear them when you want to. But you needn’t regard them as a present from me. You’ve a right to those things now that you’re my wife.” Penny felt as if the tears in her heart rose up and congregated in her throat. In the hall the grandfather clock chimed the hour of ten, and Stephen made one of his impatient movements.

“Let’s go to bed,” he said. “By this time tomorrow night Christmas will be nearly over, and I shall be glad of that!”

Penny found her voice again.

“Have you never enjoyed Christmas?”

“Oh, yes. When you’re heart-whole and fancy-free, Christmas is a wonderful time! Why, only last
year...”

“What did you do last year?”

“Veronica and I went to some grand Christmas Eve ball, and then on Christmas Day, if you’ll remember, I had lunch at Grangewood. In the evening we
went out again
—
”

“To a party?”

“Yes; it was quite a party!” He spoke reminiscently. “Quite a party!”

“And you enjoyed it?”

“Every minute of it,” he assured her, almost solemnly. Then he rang the bell for Waters. “Let’s go to bed,” he repeated. And at the foot of the stairs he turned to wish her mockingly:

“A happy Christmas, Penny!”

On New Year’s day he developed a chill which kept him in bed for several days, and Penny sat beside
his
bed and read to
him
and strove hard to prevent him feeling bored.

He was not a good patient, and he resented the incarceration in his room. He was not yet able to perform his toilet without aid, but the mere act of dressing and going downstairs to the sitting-room was a diversion. And he liked sitting with Penny in the evenings, feeling the warmth of the fire on his face, and not always appreciating the tiny sacrifice she made when she refused to put on the light because he couldn’t see it. And if she couldn’t do anything else to help him, she could at least share the dimness of the quiet room, with the leaping flames which at least he could feel, and the sense of snugness while the sea thundered unceasingly without.

For, fine weather or foul, the sea was always beating itself against the granite cliffs, striving sometimes frantically, and at other times with a monotonous leisureliness, to make some impression on the unyielding wall.

Penny sometimes thought that, however long she lived, and whatever happened to her, she would never forget the Cornish cliffs, and the Cornish seas.

She would never forget the stormy nights, and the bright, ice-clear days of January and early February, when the first primroses appeared in sheltered lanes, and the hart’s-tongue ferns hung green and dripping above them. When the sea started to croon instead of to roar, and the sky was blue for hours at a stretch.

By the end of February the days were growing warmer, and by the middle of March Stephen and Penny could sit out of doors for the better part of a morning. Stephen recovered completely from his attack of influenza very early in the year, and grew steadily browner, and more fit-looking. When he removed his dark glasses the scars above his eyes were scarcely noticeable.

Roland Ardmore finished painting Penny’s portrait, and Stephen bought it. Penny had no idea what he paid for it, for Stephen could still sign his own cheques when Waters presented his cheque book, but Ardmore was plainly very satisfied.

The picture hung in the sitting-room at the cottage, until one day it disappeared and reappeared in Stephen’s bedroom. It was standing on the floor and had its face to the wall.

“
I’
d like to keep it there,” Stephen said, for no sound reason that Penny could think of.

They neither of them discussed the day when he was due to see Robert Bolton again. That was still weeks away, and in the meantime Ardmore said good-bye to them.

“I’m going to London,” he said, and I shall probably stay there for a while. Perhaps one day we’ll meet again—” he said this to Penny, when he said his final good-bye to her outside the cottage. “I don’t
s
uppose your husband will want to renew the lease of this cottage, but we may meet ... at any rate, I hope so!”

“In London, perhaps,” Penny answered, wondering why he looked at her so hard. His eyes were every bit as blue as Stephen’s, but they were a much lighter blue
...
and they could see her and the wistfulness that grew more noticeable every day in her eyes.

“Why in the world did you marry him, Penny?” he demanded suddenly, as if the words were
torn
from his throat. “He may be badly incapacitated, but he doesn’t appreciate you, and your life is just
...
well, it’s no life at all!”

And then he walked away from her, and when she went inside the cottage Stephen was standing before his chair with his dark glasses in his hand, and the burning directness of his blue gaze gave her quite a shock.

“Poor Penny!” he said dryly, mockingly. “You’re going to miss him, aren’t you?”

“You mean Mr. Ardmore?” she returned, in an even voice.

“Who else? You’ve enjoyed sitting for him, and he enjoyed painting you. And now he’s gone away!”

She picked up the morning paper and started to
read the headlines to him. Impatiently he told her he wasn’t interested in the world’s news.

“I’m not interested in anything. I don’t care about anything any more. I don’t think I feel anything
...
!” Penny stood watching him as he collided with various articles of furniture while he made in a kind of frenzy for the door.