Sunshine Yellow (2 page)

Aunt Heloise decided that Veronica would have to be taken away somewhere where she could live down her broken engagement, and forget all the unpleasantness of it as quickly as possible. It apparently didn’t matter to Aunt Heloise that she had spent a small fortune on a suitable trousseau for her only daughter, and that now it was all packed up in suit cases that certainly wouldn’t travel to Italy as the property of Mrs. Stephen Blair.

But it occurred to Mrs. Wilmott that the cases could travel, and Miss Veronica Wilmott could delight the eyes of fellow guests in some of the rather less expensive hotels on the Continent. If she were very careful and chose the right type of inexpensive hotel it was just possible—in fact, more than possible!—that someone who could help her to forget Stephen Blair and his comfortable private income (although it was Mrs. Wilmott who was not going to find it easy to forget Stephen’s private income) might be met while they were on some sort of excursion, or even in the hotel itself. If only it were the season of winter sports a few weeks in Switzerland might do the trick; but, unfortunately it was not the season of winter sports—it was April, and blossom-time, and it would have to be the South of France! Or somewhere down in the heel of Italy, where there were golden beaches.

Penny drove Veronica—wearing one of her trousseau outfits, and looking pale and bewildered because she had been so close to the verge of making a serious mistake and possibly wrecking the whole of her life, although also extremely interesting—and her aunt to the airport, and saw them safely aboard the Paris flight, after promising to look after everything while they were away.

She was watching the aircraft soar into the sky—thinking of it touching down in the exciting capital she had not so far seen, but which she hoped very much she would see one day—when someone touched her
on the arm, and she looked round to see that it was Stephen who was standing beside her.
He was gazing at the same aircraft that was carrying Veronica away from him, and his expression was entirely unreadable.

“Stephen!” Penny exclaimed.

He didn’t attempt to meet her eyes until the aircraft was out of sight, and then when he did so they told her nothing.

“Oh, Stephen,” she said, feeling desperately sorry for him, and quite certain of the reason why he was there. “You came too late. You just missed it.”

“Missed what?”

“The Paris plane
...
with Veronica on board.”

His face seemed to her to be very hard and set, and there was an almost contemptuous curl to the
corner
s of his lips.

“I had no idea Veronica was even contemplating boarding a plane,” he remarked.

“You hadn’t?” Penny exclaimed, and studied him unbelievingly.

He looked down into her wide brown eyes that were as limpid as pools, the bright-tipped eyelashes curving away from them rather like reeds bending backwards from a pair of mountain tarns, and smiled.

“I’ve just been saying good-bye to an old friend of mine who is off to the Middle East, as a matter of fact.”

“And you knew nothing at all about Veronica
...
?”

“Nothing at all!”

She looked down at her gloved hands, and then up again at the silver speck that was fast disappearing into the blue. She sighed audibly.

“I’m glad of that,” she said. “I wouldn’t have wanted
you to be disappointed. Not on top of
—
”

“My major disappointment?” His voice was dry, but his smile was suddenly kind. “I take it that your cousin was accompanied by Mrs. Wilmott, who so nearly became my mother-in-law? And, if that is so, why did they leave you behind?”

“They’re not at all sure when they’re coming back,” Penny replied, avoiding his eyes. “And I have to look after the house in their absence.”

“I must confess you strike me as absurdly young for a caretaker,” Stephen Blair told her, crinkling up his thick black eyelashes to look at her with his vivid eyes. Slim as a reed beside him, neatly dressed in a tailored suit, but with her soft, extraordinarily light hair uncovered and blowing freely in the strong breeze that cut across the tarmac, she had an almost childishly naive air about her. Certainly she did not look as old as twenty-four.

“I hope there’s someone else in the house to keep you company?”

“Oh, yes, the cook. And a couple of dogs.”

As one of them was a poodle Stephen himself had bestowed on his
fiancée
during the early days of their engagement she thought it as well to say nothing more about the latter.

Stephen glanced at his watch.

“I’ll have to be off,” he said. Then he hesitated. “Do you ever go up to town? If you do, would you care to have dinner with me one night?”

She stared at him, as if she could hardly believe her ears.

“D-dinner with you?”

“Yes.” The gentleness touched his smile again, the colour in her cheeks was so natural and revealing. “After all, we know one another fairly well by this time, and your aunt wouldn’t have any objections
...
or I shouldn’t think she would,” with quite studied dryness. “And you seem to be rather alone.”

“I’d love to have dinner with you, Stephen,” she got out in a little rush.

He turned away. The smile had faded from his face, and his manner was once more brisk.

“All right. I’ll telephone you some time tomorrow and fix a date. Of course I’ll drive you home afterwards. As a matter of fact, it might be a good plan if we had dinner at some country inn, not far from Grangewood. That would save you travelling up to town.”

“But I have the car,” she said quickly, “and my aunt’s permission to use it whenever I want to do so.” He glanced at her so bleakly that she felt rebuffed. Of course, she thought afterwards, he would not want to take her to any of his favourite London haunts where the image of Veronica would rise up between them and render the evening intolerable from his point of view.

As she had accepted his invitation—and probably he was regretting his impulsiveness already, since he looked so bleak—he would almost certainly take her to somewhere that was entirely new to them both, where Veronica would not sit at the table and torment
him
with memories of a truly memorable evening.

He telephoned the following morning, somewhat to her surprise—for she had been quite prepared for him to forget his impulse of kindliness, and count upon her forgetting it, also—and arranged to call for her at eight o’clock.

She spent the rest of the day frantically trying to make up her mind which of the limited number of suitable dresses in her wardrobe would recompense him in some small degree for taking her out to dinner.
And in the end she decided that a cloudy black chiffon which she had bought herself, and which had not been handed down to her by Veronica, would be ideal for the occasion—since there was no point in attempting to compete with her cousin, and he would probably hardly notice her in any case. And with it she wore a bright flamingo-pink stole, with some sequins attached, which her Aunt Heloise had given her for a birthday present.

When Stephen arrived she was waiting nervously in the hall. After taking the dogs for a walk she had had a leisurely bath, and then taken an even longer time over her dressing, although she was not at all satisfied with the result when Stephen’s long black car came creeping up the drive. She had touched the lobes of her ears and the insides of her wrists with perfume, and she had had one dreadful moment when she remembered that the bottle had once graced Veronica’s dressing-table, and had only been handed over to her because it was nearly empty.

What if Stephen should be upset when a faint wave of it was carried to his nostrils, and it called up visions of Veronica...?

But Stephen didn’t look as if he were in the mood to be either upset or moved to appreciation when she opened the front door to him. His face might have been carved out of lightly tanned rock, it was so devoid of expression, and his blue eyes were hard and impenetrable.

“Ready?” he said, although it was very obvious she was ready and waiting, and he handed her into the car and slipped back into the driving seat. Then they were moving, with that effortless movement she so appreciated—although it was very infrequently she had been permitted a drive in the fashionable doctor’s car—away down the drive, with a young moon climbing into the sky above them, and a soft spring wind stirring the branches of the still partly bare trees on either hand.

The road wound like a ribbon between darkling woods and meadows when they emerged from the drive gates, and Stephen turned left and announced that he had booked a table at the Crown, in Hardingbridge, and he thought they would make it in time for a not-too-late evening meal.

Hardingbridge was nearly twenty miles away, but at the rate the car travelled they had arrived at the Crown, and were being shown to their table, before Penny had properly recovered from having her breath partially taken away when the speedometer touched eighty.

Stephen could certainly drive, and she was quite certain there were moments when they were actually travelling at a hundred miles an hour. Yet when they arrived at the Crown he looked cool and bored as if they had only just started out.

Penny never afterwards clearly remembered how they got through the early part of that evening. She had had very few men friends in her life, and she had never been out to dine
—a deux
—with anyone who looked like Stephen. He was wearing a dinner jacket that was so beautifully tailored that she could hardly take her eyes off it, and tucked in at the end of one of his sleeves was an unorthodox crimson silk handkerchief. Whenever she found her eyes attracted by the brilliance of the handkerchief she also took note of his hands, slender and perfectly shaped ... the hands of a born surgeon.

She refused an aperitif, but he insisted that she sip a light wine with the meal. The dining-room of the ancient hostelry was no longer as crowded as it had been earlier in the evening, and skilfully arranged lighting drew attention to the heavy oak beams and the panelling. At each end of the room a log fire blazed on a truly baronial hearth, and the atmosphere was warm and pleasant with the scent of good food and
after dinner
cigars.

Penny said how much she loved old houses, and almost instantly she would have bitten out her tongue if she could. For the house where Veronica and Stephen were to have lived—to which they would have returned after their honeymoon in Italy—was quite a gem of an old house, which Stephen had bought and had restored and furnished at great cost. Penny had never seen it, but she knew it was somewhere quite close to the River Thames, within easy reach of London, and it was called Old Timbers.

As she glanced uneasily at Stephen she wondered what he was going to do with it, and whether he would decide to live in it alone. And then she saw him smile at her a little strangely, as if he was not unaware of her confusion, and forgave her for reminding him so poignantly of all that he had lost.

“Tell me about yourself, Penny,” he invited. “Just what do you propose to do with your life? Or haven’t you any particular plans? You’re young, so it doesn’t really matter.”

“I’m twenty-four,” she reminded him.

“True.” His voice was sober, a trifle mocking.
“A
great age, but as I told you before you don’t look it. Therefore you can take your time over making up your mind what you would most like to do with all the years that stretch ahead.”

Penny’s brown eyes widened a trifle, as if she was making an effort to look down the vista of the years, but was not particularly hopeful of seeing anything about which she could grow enthusiastic.

“I expect I shall go on living with Aunt Heloise,” she said, quietly. “She has been very good to me all my life, and I feel I owe her something.”

“So far as my powers of observation have gleaned information for me, and I have very little doubt that they can be relied upon, you have made yourself very useful to your Aunt Heloise, so I wouldn’t get too accustomed to the idea that you owe her all that much,” he cautioned, refilling his own wine glass, although hers was still practically untouched. “Fair’s fair, my dear Penny, and you have your own life to live. You mustn’t be a doormat all your days.”

“I’m not a doormat,” she protested swiftly, disturbed because his eyes were so very blue, and they seemed full of mockery tonight. “I was an orphan when my aunt took me to live with her, and naturally I’m grateful for all that she’s done for me.”

“I’m sure you are,” he murmured. The mockery leapt and danced in his eyes, and then turned to irony. “And Veronica, your lovely cousin
...
?
Was she always very good to you? Or were you the humble little cousin, worshipping at her shrine, to whom she condescended sometimes?” He glanced at the simplicity of her black dress. “The odd frock occasionally, the bottle of perfume?”

So he had recognized the perfume!

She turned faintly pink, wishing she had stuck to toilet water.

“Veronica was often very generous, too,” she said quietly and truthfully.

He glanced distastefully at a dish of trout when it was presented, although he encouraged Penny to work up an appetite.

“You’re too thin,” he said critically, his blue glance running once more over her black slender shape, but without even a flickering of admiration. “Too thin and too large-eyed.” Then he smiled at her gently. “But your hair is like sunshine
... I’ll grant you that!”

He lighted a cigarette, and then crushed it out in an ash-tray. She realized that he was not behaving normally, and although nearly a fortnight had elapsed since the breaking off of his engagement he was still seething with bitterness, and repressing a kind of deathly misery. Her heart twisted with pity for him, and she wondered whether Veronica quite realized what she had done.

How badly she had used this man!

“So you haven’t any ambition, and you’re not planning to get married,” he remarked, leaning a little towards her across the table. “Well, I think that’s very sensible of you, because you’re the type of girl who might get hurt. You’re young and ingenuous, and you’re also loyal
...
loyal to your aunt and your cousin, which is commendable if nothing else.” The bitterness in his voice made her wince. “Loyalty doesn’t get you very far, and centering all your hopes on one person is bad. Although I’ve never really liked your aunt—she’s a stupid woman, who brought up her daughter in such a stupid fashion that she never acquired a set of values, and has no capacity at all for sustained affection—I’d rather you stayed with her all your life than become involved with a man who would one day open your eyes too wide for you, and rob you of that unawakened look.”

Penny stared at her plate. How did he know she was unawakened? How could he be sure of that?