Authors: Mary Whistler
Perhaps, she thought, while her eyes grew dark, it would be better if Veronica did come.
CHAPTER XII
Veronica, h
owever, stayed
away.
Aunt Heloise wrote a bare fortnight before the date when Stephen had an appointment to see Sir Robert. She wrote to say that she had personally seen to it that Old Timbers was ready for their occupation, and she took it for granted that, after the visit to the great eye-man—and whatever his verdict!—they would be making Old Timbers their permanent home.
“
The garden is full of crocuses,”
she wrote gushingly,
“and I have filled the house with bowls of hyacinths, which I brought along myself. I have been through every room and every corner of the house has been aired, and is ready for you at any hour of the day or night. Of course, when you do arrive, I shall wish to be there, so please notify me of your plans as soon as you can, and I will make my own arrangements accordingly.”
There was a postscript added, and it ran:
“
I h
ave found you an excellent cook and a parlourmaid, and a woman to help with the rough work.”
“Waters will enjoy that,” Stephen remarked dryly. “He likes to run an entire place himself.”
“But surely Old Timbers is rather large, isn’t it?” Penny said diffidently. “Waters would find it too much of a task to run it
himself
.”
And although she was to be the mistress of the house she couldn’t imagine what there would be for her in a house that had been intended for Veronica.
“Yes, it is rather large,” Stephen admitted. “We were expecting to do a lot of entertaining, and we
wanted something large.”
Penny felt as if she herself was dwindling until her
proportions were utterly insignificant.
“We shall feel rather lost in it,” she heard herself say nervously, “after this tiny cottage.”
“If we go there,” he returned unexpectedly. “Do
you want to go there?”
“I
...
It doesn’t matter to me.”
She thought that he smiled rather cruelly.
“But it does matter to you ... or it should! Your aunt has devoted a whole paragraph to the reasons which she considers good enough in themselves for you—a young married woman who must begin to make friends, as she puts it!—to take up your residence at Old Timbers. Presumably the main reason is that you should live surrounded by well-meaning friends!
She spoke quickly.
“If you don’t want to go and live at Old Timbers ..
.
if you would prefer to go on living here
...
!”
“No!” he said sharply, and at once. “I should loathe to go on living here! I detest it here!”
For Penny there were several poignant moments when she said good-bye to the endless crooning voice of the sea, and to white-walled Trevose Cottage, that had sheltered her throughout the whole of a wild winter. She had come closer to happiness at odd times during her stay in the cottage than ever before in her life, and she felt that she owed it something. At least one lingering look over her shoulder when they drove away, and a half-formed wish that one day, one day, perhaps, she would see it again.
But Stephen sat stiff and withdrawn beside her in the back of the car, and he never even turned his head towards the sound of the sea. The green-clad cliff was left behind, the smell of the wild thyme and coarse grass and clean winds, and they turned inland towards the commencement of another stage in a strange married life.
Aunt Heloise had begged them to break their journey at Grangewood, at least for one night. But instead they spent a night in London, and arrived at Old Timbers in time for tea the following day.
Penny had not quite recovered from the extraordinary experience of sharing a luxurious hotel suite with Stephen, and being a mere useless looker-on while Waters did everything for him, when they arrived at Old Timbers. To her acute relief Aunt Heloise had found it impossible to be there to greet them, but the cook and the house-parlourmaid were already installed.
Old Timbers was an exceptionally mellow old house that sought to hide its Tudor chimneys in a grove of Lombardy poplars not far from the river. It had diamond-paned windows and a beautiful black and white facade, and the front door reminded Penny of the door of a church. Inside, Aunt Heloise had filled every available container with golden tassels of mimosa and impressive sheaves of white lilac, and she must have incurred quite a bill at the florist’s in her efforts to give her niece and nephew by marriage a flowery welcome. A welcome that would, perhaps, take their minds off the tragedy of Stephen’s homecoming, for although he couldn’t see the flowers he could certainly smell them.
He crinkled his nose in the long drawing-room
where the afternoon light lingered like a caress and asked Penny sharply to open the windows.
“I can’t bear the smell of mimosa,” he said, and she wondered whether it had some special significance for him
...
whether, perhaps, Veronica was very fond of mimosa, and he had once bought her large quantities of it.
And this house, after all, was to have been Veronica’s home. She had chosen so much of the soft furnishings, and so many of the elegant pieces of furniture, that to the man who knew about it this moment of coming back to the knowledge that she would never live in it after all must be a moment of pure bitterness, and in a sense a refinement of the torture he had had to live with for months.
There was a bright fire burning on the hearth, and Waters went straight out to the kitchen to interview the as yet untried domestics, and assert his authority at the outset on the other side of the green baize door that shut off the kitchen quarters. It was he who brought in the tea, and Penny tried hard to make Stephen relax in one of the room’s most comfortable chairs. But Stephen wanted neither to rest nor to drink tea and eat buttered crumpets—which he enjoyed, when his mood permitted him. And Penny glanced anxiously at Waters.
The manservant barely inclined his head, as if to reassure her, and then went out and returned with a tray bearing whisky and a syphon of soda. He poured his master a reasonably strong drink, and Stephen muttered appreciatively. Then he lay back in his chair and closed his eyes behind the dark glasses.
Penny sipped her China tea in the silence of a room that struck her as almost suffocatingly oppressive. She longed for the roar of the sea outside, and the simplicity of Trevose Cottage. Here, her hand shook a little as she handled the fragile china—selected, she felt certain, by Veronica—and blinked at the brilliance of the glittering silver tea-tray, and brand-new spirit kettle.
A little later she went upstairs to the room to which her own personal luggage had been carried, and wished still more that she was back at Trevose. It was plainly the main bedroom of the house, beautiful and light and airy, with satin draperies and quilted satin headboards to the pair of deliciously comfortable-looking beds. And it was after staring at the two beds that she made the discovery that not only her own luggage had been carried to the room, but Stephen’s.
One of the new maids must have done it, and it was almost certainly she who had unpacked for Penny and laid out her prettiest nightdress on her bed, while the bed in which Stephen was apparently expected to sleep had his blue silk pyjamas lying on the pillow.
Penny whirled round and looked at the dressing-table. Stephen’s brushes were there, side by side with her own. And when she looked at the door his dressing-gown hung on a hook, and was swinging slightly in a light current of air.
Stephen’s voice spoke from the doorway to the bathroom. She had no idea how he had found his way there, but he was standing and looking very slim and straight in his dark suit, with his immaculate linen showing up the tan he had acquired in Cornwall, and the rosy light from one of the bedside lamps shining across his black hair.
“I’m afraid there’s some slight confusion,” he said stiffly. “I believe they’ve brought my things here to your room, although I told Waters quite specifically to make certain there wasn’t any muddle.”
Penny stood very still in the middle of the pale rose carpet—that Veronica must have chosen—and the only thing that struck her about her husband’s voice was that he was angry. He was coldly, implacably angry.
She took a deep breath, and swallowed something in her throat at the same time.
“This is a large room,” she said. “I imagine it’s the principal bedroom? I don’t suppose Waters was responsible for bringing your things here.”
“Then it must have been that idiotic girl! ... the new one.”
“I don’t think she’s idiotic. She just—I don’t suppose she thought
...
”
“You mean she thought along too conventional lines, and decided that husbands and wives always sleep together?” His voice had a rasp in it. “Seventy
-
five out of every hundred probably do, but we’re amongst the twenty-five who don’t. And because some slow-thinking girl makes a decision, that isn’t going to let Waters off.” He shouted for him loudly and furiously. “Come here, Waters, and clear all my stuff out of Mrs. Blair’s room!”
Waters appeared, looking faintly perturbed, but the sympathy in his eyes was for Penny. She had often wondered what he thought of the unusual relationship that existed between herself and her husband, but Waters was not the type to betray himself by so much as a flickering eyelash at inappropriate moments, and even now it was impossible to be absolutely certain what he was
thinking
. His voice was very gentle, however, as he addressed his mistress. “I’m very sorry, madam. That girl, Janet, is new
to private service, and, I suppose my instructions weren’t specific enough.”
He started to gather up the handsome pigskin suitcases.
“
I
made them specific!” Stephen said in an icily displeased tone.
“I’m aware of that, sir.”
“Then another time do the job yourself if you can’t trust underlings!”
“I will, sir,” Waters promised evenly.
As he made for the door with the cases Penny stopped him.
“Where is Mr. Blair going to sleep, Waters?”
“There’s a kind of dressing-room next door, on the other side of the bathroom. I’ll sleep there,” Stephen instructed.
“But you can’t! I mean, if it’s only a small room...”
“I don’t require a large room.”
“I don’t either.” She spoke with unusual firmness. “If anyone’s going to move out of here, Waters, it had better be me. I’d much prefer a little room of my own, and Mr. Blair’s things can stay here
...
”
“They’ll do nothing of the kind,” Stephen said between his teeth. “As I remember this room, it’s more like a stage-set than a bedroom, and I refuse to sleep in it.”
Penny recoiled. It wasn’t so much his words, but the biting emphasis he gave to them, and the feminine instinct deep inside her that warned her when she was treading on thin ice with Stephen.
This bedroom she was to occupy was the room he had once planned to share with Veronica, and that was all there was to it! Naturally he couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping in it alone!
“Very well,” she said, in a voice so quiet that even
Waters paused to glance at her. “It doesn’t matter to me where I sleep, and if you’d rather I made this my room then I’ll do so.”
Waters departed discreetly, and Penny spoke more bluntly.
“I asked you just now whether this was the principal bedroom in the house,” she said to her husband. “By that I meant, is it the one Veronica meant to occupy?” There was a pause before he answered.
“If it has very deep built-in wardrobes, and the walls and paintwork, as well as the hangings, are all a sort of creamy-pink—I
think
Veronica called it ‘dawn glow’!—then it is.”
“And the bathroom is black and pink, and you were to have the dressing-room on the far side?”
“Yes.”
“Then why don’t we choose two entirely different rooms for ourselves?” she suggested. ‘Then this could be a kind of guest suite.”
He moved nearer to her—she was a bare yard away, and the sound of her voice told him where she was—and suddenly his voice was anxious.
“Penny, please don’t misunderstand...!”
“There’s nothing to misunderstand,” she said coldly, clearly. “It’s all too easy to understand!” She darted to the door of the bathroom that connected with the dressing-room and called after Waters. “Waters, you’ve left your master’s dressing-gown and his slippers behind. We’ll sleep in these two rooms tonight, but tomorrow we’ll probab
l
y be
making
a change!”
But the next day Aunt Heloise and Veronica arrived in good time for lunch, and Penny realized that she had no alternative but to ask them to stay. In order, however, that Veronica should have no reasonable excuse that could take her inside the Pink Room,
Penny removed all her own things from the room immediately after she received the news over the telephone that they were arriving, and when the blue car drove up, the lovely kidney-shaped dressing-table that stood in a petticoat of pale rose velvet, and had a lovely Florentine mirror standing on it, was denuded of her lonely schoolgirl brushes and hand-mirror, and her solitary flagon of perfume, and she was established in a little room over the porch, that had no door connecting with any other room.
Aunt Heloise was all welcoming smiles and affectionate kisses, but Veronica seemed a little aloof. Penny was not surprised, since she was visiting at a house where she had expected to be mistress.
Waters served an excellent lunch, and afterwards Penny poured out coffee in the drawing-room. Veronica picked up one of the pieces of porcelain and sighed as she traced its delicate shape with her fingers.
“Do you remember, Stephen,” she said, softly, “that I wanted Sevres, and you insisted on Minton? You had your way, and I must admit the Minton is very, very lovely!”
Stephen said nothing, and she went and sat beside him in the lap of a huge Chesterfield.
“How are the eyes?” she asked. “When do you see Robert Bolton?”
“The appointment has been put off for another month,” he told her. “But I’m not hopeful, so it doesn’t matter.”
Her fingers fluttered above his sleeve, and then came to rest lightly on the back of his hand.
“You should be hopeful,” she said, with meaning. “And I firmly believe you will see again!”
“Dr. Veronica!” he said, with dry sarcasm.
Her breath seemed to catch.
“You can call it intuition, if you like,” she said, “but I
know
you will see again!”