Dorothy Eden (4 page)

The sound made him turn his head. He saw her standing in the doorway, and he swung round sharply, his blue eyes, Paul’s familiar blue eyes full of astonishment. Then he spoke. “And who the devil are you?” he said.

I
T WAS THE DIM
wavering light, of course. That, and because he hadn’t expected her to arrive that night. In a moment Julia had recovered from the shock of his words and had run forward.

“Paul, it’s me! Don’t you recognise me? But of course you do. Come and look at me under the light. Have I changed so much?”

She was chattering, as she had chattered with Davey in the car. Excitement and uneasiness made her twitter like a disturbed starling. Suddenly she realised she still had on Davey’s coat, a heavy camelhair duffel coat with a hood over her head. No wonder Paul didn’t recognise her when she was practically obliterated with woolly material. She pushed back the hood and began to laugh merrily. Because in none of her imagined versions of their meeting had there ever been one where Paul didn’t recognise her.

Paul picked up his stick and came painfully towards her. Now she was staring at him, thinking that it was the pain of his ankle that made his face look different. Or the shadows made by the flickering candlelight. No, of course not, it was that new nose which seemed to have very slightly altered the shape of his mouth, making it pulled up at the corners instead of firm and easy laughing mouth that she didn’t remember. But his blue eyes and his fresh rather florid colouring were the same, also the neat clipped golden moustache that had always seemed something of an affectation in a simple person like Paul.

“Why, you’re a pretty thing,” he said, as if her looks were quite unexpected.

She was conscious of the faintest surprise. Hadn’t he always thought she was pretty? “Have I changed?” she asked.

For answer he dropped his stick and put his arms round her hard. She was agreeably conscious of the bright ardent look in his eyes, then of his mouth, still disturbingly unfamiliar, on hers. His kiss was very complete and accomplished. The thought flashed through her head that the Paul she had known had not learnt how to kiss like that. What had been happening during those three silent years? Then she thought fleetingly of her own flirtations, and surrendered herself to the feel of his lips.

“Why wouldn’t you marry me in Wellington?” he demanded.

“But, Paul!” She drew back. “It was too soon. I wanted to see you first. I had to get to know you again.”

“Scared, eh?”

“No, of course not. But I only knew you for a few days, and after three years—”

He kissed her again, in that warm expert way, and once more she was conscious of delight, with that faint undercurrent of uneasiness.

He seemed uncannily to sense her uneasiness, for he said,

“You don’t like my face!”

“But, darling, it’s no different.”

“Yes, it is. Look!”

He picked up a candle and held it dramatically a few inches from his face.

“See!” he said. “Scars here.” He ran his fingers down the faint lines on either side of his nose. “My nose is a different shape. Better, perhaps. I even think I may be more handsome. But not the Paul you remember?”

The last was a question to which he awaited her reply with apparent anxiety.

“No-o,” she said slowly. “Not quite. It’s not your nose. It’s your mouth, I think. Your expression.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Oh, Paul, of course I do.”

He smiled, with that indefinable difference that both pleased and disturbed her.

“That’s a tremendous relief. I’d been a bit morbid about the whole thing, I can tell you.” Then for the first he seemed to realise her unorthodox arrival. “But why didn’t you stay in Timaru as I told you to?”

“Then you did write that letter?”

“Now who else did you think would have written it?”

Again uneasiness stirred in her.

“I don’t know. But it wasn’t a bit like you. So cold. As if you didn’t want me.”

“Want you! Don’t be a little idiot. But we had quite a night here last night, and then I got this infernal twisted ankle. And all the light’s had gone. Perhaps I was a bit curt in that note. I didn’t realise it. I’m sorry. But you can see that at present this is no place to bring a girl.”

For the first time she looked round the dimly lit room. It was obviously a library, but the books on the shelves looked as if they had not been taken down or dusted for a very long time. There was the cleared place in the centre of the room where Paul had been sitting, a round table, a chair and a faded rug on the floor, but for the rest the piles of newspapers and old magazines, like sand dunes in the wind, were gradually encroaching over the whole of the floor. It looked like a room that had been shut up for a long time. Probably that was what had happened, and now Paul was planning to bring it back into use.

He was watching her. “You’re looking at the dust,” he said. “You can see how much I need a wife.” He gave his unfamiliar smile and lightly ran his hand down her body over the curve of her hips.

Instinctively she drew back. “Don’t do that,” she said.

His eyebrows went up teasingly. She coloured and said ineptly, “You wouldn’t have, once.”

“Ah, but we weren’t about to be married once. And you’ve grown so utterly beautiful.”

There was a low whistling in the hall, then several thumps. Someone began to sing softly,
“Do not trust him, gentle maiden
…”

Paul seized his stick and limped to the door. “Davey! What the hell are you doing? What’s all that stuff?”

“It’s the luggage.”

“Julia’s?”

Julia went to the door. “Paul, it’s my trousseau.”

Paul looked at the small mountain of bags in the hall.

“Why, you little plutocrat.”

“I didn’t buy it. Uncle Jonathan did. It was his wedding present to me.”

Then again she was thinking of the immaculate perfection of her wedding dress. Her gaze wandered to the shadowed ceiling. She was almost certain that spider webs hung there. This great sprawling house was full of dust and shadows. She felt as if she were in a dream that was half delicious, half nightmare.

“Now do you see why I wanted you to wait in Timaru?” Paul muttered. “Coming to this old place like a princess. Wait here while I go and wake my mother.”

He picked up a candle and limped to the stairs. His shadow preceded him up the wall, flickering and shapeless. It seemed to dance in Julia’s brain, like a monstrous moth, and suddenly all her confidence left her. Paul was disturbed by her arrival. For all the smile in his familiar blue eyes she had been aware of the speculation behind it. Something was wrong. She had walked on to the stage without her cue.

She sat on one of the smart labelled bags and put her head in her hands.

“I wish I hadn’t come,” she whispered involuntarily.

“The trouble with you,” came Davey Macauley’s dry voice, “is that you’re hungry.”

Julia looked up sharply. She had forgotten he was there.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was like this?”

“You insisted on coming to see for yourself.”

“But it will be all right,” she said, almost in a panic.

“In this life,” he said in his offhand way, “being too sensitive isn’t amusing. Would you like bacon and eggs?”

His prosaic voice made the fluttering in her head cease.

“Oh, Davey, that would be wonderful.”

He disappeared down a dark passage. Before Julia could ponder on the improbability of the shepherd cooking her a meal there was a quick patter of footsteps overhead, and a little plump woman in a flying negligée came down the stairs.

“Julia! My dear child! My dear, dear child! You naughty little creature, taking us by surprise like this.”

Julia, getting to her feet, was enveloped in a soft perfumed mass of satin and plump flesh. The lilting voice enveloped her, too.

“We wanted to have everything beautiful for you. That was why Paul so hoped you would spend your honeymoon in the North Island. I was going to work like a beaver while you were away getting this ghastly old house tidied up. But never mind, probably you would like to choose your own furnishings, anyway. So perhaps it’s all for the best. Do you find it terribly shocking, arriving by candlelight?”

Julia had a queer feeling that this woman, Paul’s mother, so extremely feminine, carrying with her an aura of expensive hotels and sophisticated parties, so unexpectedly in this old dark house, was also trying to hide uneasiness.

“My arrival is the last straw,” she said.

“Don’t be silly, my dear. Paul is delighted you have come. He says you’re astonishingly pretty. Let me look.”

Again a candle was raised, this time the flickering flame glowing in Julia’s tired eyes and dazzling her.

“My dear,” she heard the voice of the little plump woman saying with sudden solicitude, “you look cold!”

That was what was wrong, of course. She was cold and hungry. She had thrown off Davey’s duffel coat so that Paul would recognise her, and now suddenly she badly wanted it back on. She was not out in the wind, but she could hear it against the walls and it made her shiver again. This, she thought, was exactly the kind of house where anonymous notes would be pushed under doors, notes saying
You are deliberately running into danger.
If she had on Davey’s duffel coat she could stop shivering.

“Julia, this, as you will have gathered, is my mother,” she heard Paul saying belatedly, as he limped towards them.

“You must call me Kate,” said the woman affectionately. “I
do
hope you will like me, dear. Such a tragedy, when one has a horrid mother-in-law.”

Her mouth, thin at the corners, blossomed into fullness in the centre, like a bursting poppy bud, her eyes were small and bright and sharp. She had a large quantity of blonde hair that rippled in innumerable curls. She was an entirely unexpected person. It would not be impossible to imagine her slipping, as a dramatic touch, an anonymous letter under a door.

The thought drifted in and out of Julia’s head. She smiled and murmured, “I’m so glad to meet you. You must think I’m crazy bringing all this luggage, but Uncle Jonathan—”

“My dear, it’s enchanting. We’ll be able to have the sweetest wedding. I adore weddings. I was going to be devastated if Paul had persuaded you to marry him in a registry office. He was just so impatient. But of course one doesn’t blame him, after all this time. He’s been through such a lot, poor darling.”

“Mother!” said Paul deprecatingly, “Julia has already looked at my face. She likes it—a little, I think.”

His eyes were on her. She tried to read them. But it was too dark. All she could think of was his hand on her, familiarly. She wished that that hadn’t happened, not because she objected so much to it but because it perplexed her. Had she known Paul so little in England? Or had he changed so much? If she had kept Davey’s shapeless duffel coat on he wouldn’t have had that impulse to touch her.

“Food’s ready,” came Davey’s voice from the kitchen.

“What, haven’t you had a meal?” Kate asked.

“But I told Davey to take you to dinner,” Paul said.

“We didn’t want to waste time,” Julia told them. “It was my fault.”

“But you must be
expiring!”
Kate cried. “You go and eat while I get your room ready. Then you’ll want to go straight to bed.”

The food was set on the end of a large table in the kitchen. There was a pleasant smell of frying bacon and woodsmoke. Mercurially Julia felt her spirits rising. She noticed that Davey, the extraordinary fellow, had laid a clean cloth and set the cutlery with some care. This room, an old-fashioned farmhouse kitchen with a high smoke-blackened ceiling and enormous coal range, had a lived-in appearance, and was not so derelict as the rest of the house.

“Lily, our maid, has been away for a week,” she heard Kate explaining. “We’d only just got her, and then her mother was ill in Timaru—or so Lily said, so I had to let her go. But she’ll be back tomorrow, and we can really get organised. Isn’t Davey a treasure?”

“I thought he was a shepherd,” Julia murmured, her eyes on Davey’s back as he bent silently over the stove.

“Oh, he’s one of the family, too. Actually, he’s a dark horse. He’s writing a book. Paul and he became friends in the North Island, and as he was looking for a job in the country, Paul brought him back. Paul, should you be standing so much on that ankle? When was it last bathed?”

“Mrs. Robinson did it this evening. She’ll do it again in the morning. It’s all right. Don’t fuss, Mother.”

“I’m not fussing, darling. I’m just running along to get Julia’s room ready. Then perhaps Davey will carry up the bags.”

Julia watched for the flash of contempt in Davey’s eyes. But Paul intercepted her glance, and gave her a warm secret look that demanded recognition. She smiled back, for one thing at least was eased in her mind. He had not handed her carelessly to his shepherd to look after, he had known that Davey Macauley was a man of superiority and intelligence. That much was explained. For the rest—was she more than a little excited at the thought of his mouth on hers again?

But after the meal Julia was too sleepy to be kissed. She brushed Paul’s lips with hers, then stumbled up the stairs after Kate’s little bustling figure. She was almost too sleepy to notice that the room into which Kate led her, was crowded with furniture, so that there was scarcely room for the enormous four-poster bed in the centre. There was everything imaginable, carved chests, tasselled footstools, large dark paintings, a chandelier that tinkled softly in the draught that came from the ill-fitting windows, tarnished mirrors, a wardrobe that could easily house several people. A light film of dust lay on everything.

“You see,” said Kate apologetically, running her finger over the dressing-table and frowning fastidiously, “how unprepared we were for you. The dust! I’m overcome with shame. But the bed, I know, is comfortable. This, of course, will be Paul’s and your room, so now you will be able to plan it yourself. It has a beautiful view of the mountains.” She perched on the edge of the bed, her short legs dangling. “I do hope we shall be friends, Julia dear. It’s doubly important to me since Paul is my only son. You’ve no idea how desperately he counted on his last operation being a success so that he could send for you. He said you were much too sensitive to be tied to a badly scarred man.” She sighed deeply. “But now everything is all right. In a few days we’ll have the house cleaned up. I can see you’re wondering why it’s in this dreadful state. I’ve only just come here, you know. Paul had been away at the war and then he was in hospital. He hasn’t been here long, either. Before that there was only Granny who is much too old to notice anything, and a dreadful old couple called Bates whom we had to get rid of at once. The place had gone to rack and ruin.”