Dorothy Eden (28 page)

Was it really because of his stringent financial circumstances, a thing that hadn’t bothered him too much as a bachelor, but seriously did as a husband and a home provider? Or was it because his older brother, Andrew, to whom he was deeply attached, was at present exploring in the wilds of Alaska and couldn’t be at the wedding?

Or was it anything to do with Lola? Lola, the tall sunburnt Australian with the zany humor and the sun-bleached hair. Not the dark-haired soft-voiced English girl with whom he had had fun in London, but one of his own kind, reckless, high-spirited, not too overburdened with morals.

While still in England Abby had flatly refused to believe that Luke might really not have wanted her to come. As soon as they were together all would be well. She had only to remember Luke’s blue eyes, so full of love, the hungry way he had held her and his promises that there would never be anyone else.

She had been twenty-four that spring, and life seemed to be flying by. To wait another year was crazy, when all that happiness was there to be taken. So she had refused to listen to her mother who had said that surely it was Luke’s duty to come for his bride. She insisted that Luke needed his money for their home, and that it shouldn’t be spent on unnecessary travelling. The practical thing was for her to go out to him.

So she had gone, without a doubt in her mind, and waiting on that rather dismal pier in Sydney’s harbor eight weeks ago had been the hard-eyed stranger.

But he had married her. And that night he had buried his face in her hair and muttered, “Try to understand, Abby. Try to understand.”

But what she had to understand, she hadn’t the faintest idea, for after that they had been simply a man and a woman, and perhaps it was the pain and the ecstasy of her first loving that she had to understand.

All she knew was that it bound her to Luke forever…

The long day ended with the sun setting behind the monastery on the hill. The sky went shining pink, the cross over the monastery a slim pencilled black. The row of cypresses turned the scene sharply Italianate. There was a vague melancholy about this view from the big picture window in the living-room. Abby was more than ever conscious of it this evening, and longed for darkness so that she could draw the curtains.

She even turned with relief to the river to listen to the commonplace twang of Jock’s gramophone. This new country kept making her feel disorientated. It was a mixture of too many things, old and new. It was going to take her a long time, even with Luke’s help, to settle down.

But as darkness grew she became more cheerful. Luke would be home any moment now. She had prepared a small elaborate meal. She took a quick shower and changed into the white dress. Then she tried Lola’s lipstick and found it an intriguing color with the dress. She tasted the slight rather pleasant flavor as she pressed her lips together. If Deirdre were to get into trouble about the gift to which she had obviously helped herself, Abby would have to defend her. But the color looked well against her clear skin. She brushed her short dark hair and smoothed her eyebrows. Her heart beat a little faster. Would Luke notice the lipstick? Or her? Would it make him emerge from his preoccupation, almost his obsession, about his work?

Once she had been his obsession. She would be again.

The determination made her light-hearted. When she heard Luke’s car she ran to open the front door.

“Hi, darling! You’re home early.”

Luke got out of the car, a tall man with powerful shoulders and a slim wiry body. Abby’s heart gave its familiar leap of pleasure at the sight of him.

But a moment later it sank, as he went round to open the other door and Lola’s long sinuous form emerged from the car. It was Lola who answered Abby’s greeting.

“Hi there. Can I come in for a drink? Just five minutes. Then I’ve got to dash.”

Luke said belatedly, “Hullo, darling.” He came to kiss her on the cheek. “Had a nice day?”

Abby thought of the long slow hours now safely past.

“A lazy one. I did nothing except cook for you and the kookaburras.”

“I thought you hated the kookies,” said Lola.

“I think they’re cute. They’re even learning not to laugh at me.”

She slid her hand into Luke’s as they went indoors. His fingers closed round hers. But the next moment he was saying, “What will you drink, Lola? Your usual?”

“Thanks, Luke. Say, that crazy man does play his records a bit persistently down there. Doesn’t it drive you mad, Abby?”

Nothing drives me mad in Australia. I love everything, Abby wanted to say. Even you hanging around here. As I suppose you’ve been doing for weeks and months before I came…

But Lola was decorative in her casual deadpan way. Her eyelashes were curled, her eyes heavily made up. Her skin was a smooth golden brown. The straight skirt and top showed her flat elegant body. Like Deirdre, she was exaggeratedly thin, but she had learned to use her thinness to advantage. She was half exotic, half the outdoor type that was necessarily Australian. A fascinating mixture.

“I sometimes wish he’d play another tune,” she said lightly.

“The platypus and the kangaroo. Do you know, that’s exactly Mary and Milton.” Lola gave her deep husky laugh. “Mary can look just as meek and silly as a duck, and Milton’s a bad-tempered old roo, always wanting to jump at somebody. Always craning his neck to look out of the window. Have you noticed, Abby?”

“Sometimes,” said Abby. And not only Milton, she wanted to add. Your mother, too, with her flat brown face and crinkled gray hair. She comes quietly, and she’s always smiling. You never know what’s she thinking. Or any of them for that matter, except perhaps Milton who was probably always thinking angrily and resentfully of his crippled body.

“Why wasn’t Deirdre at school today?” she asked.

“It was a holiday. Has she been bothering you again?”

Because Deirdre was so unlikeable and defenceless, Abby said, “Not bothering me. She looked lonely.”

“She won’t play with the other kids. She isn’t popular. She’s a bad mixer, poor little wretch. Not like me.” Lola laughed again and looked at Luke. “She needs her father,” she said, and suddenly she wasn’t laughing. Her eyes remained on Luke. They had an odd significance.

Luke was busy pouring a drink. He didn’t look up as he said, “When is he coming home?”

“Goodness knows. I haven’t heard from him for ages. He’s no letter writer. Well, neither am I, for that matter.”

Her face was deadpan again. She shrugged.

“You might as well know, Abby, I haven’t seen my old man for a long time. Deirdre doesn’t even remember him. I keep up the fiction that he’s coming home one day, but I don’t even know that I want him now, you know. I get along. Better than poor Mary with Milton underfoot, anyway.”

Abby didn’t want to pursue the subject. By asking too many questions she might have discovered that Lola didn’t have a husband at all. And somehow that was a discovery she would much rather not make. She preferred to subscribe to Lola’s fiction.

But I love only you-oo
… I
love only you…
floated through the window from the dark river. Luke clinked ice in a glass. He handed a drink to Abby and smiled at her. His eyes had their contained impersonal look. The words of the song hadn’t entered his consciousness, or he wouldn’t have continued to look like that, as if she also were merely a visitor for drinks.

Lola swallowed hers and sprang up.

“I must fly. I’ve got a date. I’ve got to change and see my child gets her supper.”

Fly in, fly out. No wonder Deirdre was lonely.

“Did you buy Deirdre her new dress?” Abby asked pointedly.

“Oh my God! I promised her that, didn’t I? But I’ve had such a day, you wouldn’t believe.” To give her her due, Lola looked upset. “I’ll tell her I’ll pick her up early from school tomorrow and take her to choose it herself. That’s if I can possibly make it. It depends on the mood the boss is in.” Lola sighed exaggeratedly. “Sometime I wonder how I keep sane. Abby, you don’t know how lucky you are, just one uncomplicated man to take care of—or to take care of you. I have mother at me, Milton at me, Deirdre at me, the boss at me, a salary to earn, an old man somewhere who doesn’t give a damn. Honestly, I’m torn in about eight pieces.”

“If you’re ever in a jam I could meet Deirdre from school for you,” Abby heard herself saying.

“Oh, no! Abby, you are an angel. Isn’t she, Luke? Would you really be nice to my little horror?”

“I haven’t that much to do,” said Abby guardedly.

“It wouldn’t be often,” said Lola. “But sometimes I’m in a fizz. And I can’t let her cross that main road alone. The traffic’s appalling. Really, Luke, it’s the nicest thing you could have done, marrying Abby.”

She came to kiss Abby on the cheek. She smelt strongly of a heavy expensive perfume.

“Must go. Good-bye, sweetie. ’Bye, Luke. Thanks for the lift. See you in the morning?”

“Eight thirty,” said Luke. “Not a moment later.”

“God! Isn’t Abby lucky, being able to sleep?”

She had gone. The house was suddenly very quiet. Luke looked at Abby.

“Another drink, darling?”

The first one had gone rather effectively to her head. It must have been stronger than usual.

“Yes, please,” said Abby. She resented Lola bitterly, she was even a little afraid of her, but now she had gone there was too much silence. She must get back her gaiety. She waited all day for the evenings. If they were to become failures, too, what was to happen?

“Luke, is Lola’s husband really in San Francisco?”

“So she says. Or thinks.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“No. I’ve told you before that I haven’t.”

“I know. I didn’t mean quite that.” Abby sipped her new drink, and felt pleasantly vague. “I suppose I mean have you met anyone who might have been Deirdre’s father?”

Luke looked at her levelly.

“Your guess would be as good as mine, darling. I don’t know Lola that well. I’ve only met the family since I bought this piece of land.”

This was what he said. But he specifically said ‘the family’, not Lola. She couldn’t cross-examine him. She must be more subtle.

“Does Lola have a lot of men friends?” she said lightly.

“She’s out a good deal, yes. She’s a lively person. I expect that household is rather suffocating.”

“But she leaves her child in it.”

“I know. It’s a difficult situation. By the way, that was nice of you to say you’d help with the kid.”

Abby sighed.

“I detest that child, but I can’t help feeling desperately sorry for her. I don’t know how long I can put up with her haunting this place, but—oh, let’s forget her. Is Lola to be the only person to kiss me tonight?”

Luke grinned and came towards her.

“Fair enough.”

His hands were pressing through the thin material of her dress. She closed her eyes, not wanting the shock of seeing that his had not softened—once, at the beginning, she had opened hers to see him bending over her with a speculative coldness, as if his thoughts were far from the urgency of his body—so now always she let his lips and his body tell her that he loved her.

I love only you…
The thin bleating voice from the river died away, and Luke sprang back from her.

“Where did you get that lipstick?”

“Why—” He was rubbing his lips violently. “Don’t you like it?”

“I asked you where you got it?”

It had a distinctive flavor. She had noticed that when she had put it on. Now Luke recognized it. He recognized it as Lola’s, of course.

“Deirdre gave it to me,” she said flatly.

Abruptly he handed her his handkerchief.

“Take it off. Every trace.”

“But, Luke! Why on earth—”

“I don’t like it, that’s why. And I don’t like you accepting presents from that child. You might know she took it, anyway. Do you want to encourage a child to pinch from her mother?”

Abby was almost in tears.

“But Deirdre would have been so hurt. And I liked the color. I intended to tell Lola.”

Luke took the handkerchief back from her, and tilting her head up scrubbed at her lips himself.

“I don’t want you to get too mixed up with that kid. It’s one thing to do a good turn by meeting her from school, it’s another to encourage her to hang around here all day, and take things from her.”

“I don’t suppose it’ll happen very often,” Abby said coldly.

“And now where’s the lipstick itself?”

“On my dressing-table, of course.”

She watched Luke go to the bedroom. When he came back he went to the kitchen and opening the door of the rubbish shute threw the small gold object down.

It was only then that he began to look less tense and upset.

“There,” he said. “Now I’ll taste you. You, yourself.”

But his kiss on her pale lips was perfunctory. He was now only making a gesture…

W
HEN HER MOTHER CAME
in Deirdre, bending over the stupid, old jigsaw puzzle that Uncle Milton had told her to do, made herself not look up. She looked beneath her lashes to the level of her mother’s hands, and saw that they held nothing.

So she had forgotten the dress. You might have known she would. With tense fingers Deirdre silently broke a piece of the jigsaw in two. Then she did another, and another. When Uncle Milton discovered this, as he undoubtedly would, he would punish her. He was actually the only person she was afraid of, but this fact she would never allow him to discover. It would please him too much. Because he didn’t like her any more than she did him. She was too active for him. He sat in his chair hating to see her thin, quick body moving wherever it pleased. Once he had been so irritated he had almost got up to pursue her. But he had heard Mary coming and had sunk back.

Of course he hadn’t nearly got up because he couldn’t. But it seemed as if his rage had lifted him. Mummy said you had to be sorry for him, but you couldn’t be sorry for someone you didn’t like. Mummy didn’t like him much either, nor Gran. And Mary was scared of him. So it was nice when he went to hospital.

“Well,” said Lola. “Everyone here. Cosy.” She saw Deirdre and exclaimed,