Fantails (24 page)

She saw them off, then established herself on the sofa in the library with the latest
Vogue,
Ranee and Rajah lying at her feet. Studying photographs of models from the big dressmaking houses, she thought what fun it was that Sherry was a rich man. When they were married, although coupons would allow her no more clothes than anybody else, those she had could be the best—models that would keep their shape and wear for years without dating. For a little while she compared the creations of Digby Morton, Molyneux, and Victor Stiebel, and bought herself a large imaginary wardrobe—glamorous evening gowns, shoes for all occasions, afternoon frocks that in a country life she would seldom if ever wear, a suit in bird’s-eye tweed with velvet collar, a tweed frock with short matching jacket, two or three fur coats. Then, smiling to herself, she laid the magazine beside her, reflecting that she would be no less happy if Sherry earned his living as a gardener or gamekeeper and they were going to set up together in a three-roomed cottage. If marrying him were going to mean that she could never again afford anything but the cheapest, ugliest clothes, go without a single luxury, do all her own housework and get up earlier, still on Monday mornings to struggle with a heavy washing, she would still face the prospect joyously because it would be shared with Sherry.

When first they had become engaged she had imagined herself deep in love with him. She knew now that in those early days she had been no more than wandering on the fringes of love, infatuated and beglamoured. But since then, with every hour they spent together she had learnt to love him more, and with a depth and tenderness that would outlive that first infatuation, lovely and perishable as a child’s soap bubble ... Clasping her hands behind her head, she closed her eyes, seeing again the expression in Sherry’s eyes last night as after one of many good-night kisses he had held her from him, looking at her searchingly, and said, “Darling, I’m only just beginning to realise how much I love you!” Until that moment she had not realised that although he had called her all manner of tender and endearing names, said that he adored her, and made love to her with tenderness and ardour, he had never uttered those three magic words:
I love you.

She was going home the day after to-morrow. Sherry would stay for a few days at the Painted Anchor, then return to Crail to work with his agent until two days or so before their wedding. She was going to be married in her mother’s wedding-gown, of heavy ivory satin. The waist had been a trifle low for present fashions, but a local dressmaker was altering it cleverly, thanks to its deep hem. The lace train had been her great-grandmother’s, and she would wear a veil of filmy, billowing tulle. Andrew had sent silk for slips and nightdresses and nylons and a peach-satin dressing-gown ...
Darling
Andrew! He would come to Crail to spend the last part of his leave with them when they got back from their honeymoon ... They were going to be married quietly at noon, then have a small luncheon party in a private room at the Painted Anchor. Sherry had insisted on this, “For if you have a ‘do’ of any sort at Fantails you and Alison will be worn to shadows preparing for it, and she’ll have all the drudgery of clearing up after we’ve gone!” That night they would spend in London, and would go next day by train to Edinburgh, where Sherry’s car would be waiting. Then by leisurely stages they would explore the highlands.

Ranee and Rajah scrambled suddenly to their feet and plunged for the door, where they stood listening, heads cocked, having heard the returning car several minutes before Logie caught the sound. The agent was with him; they spent half an hour closeted together in the office until Mary summoned them autocratically to join Logie for a cup of coffee. “You’ll work all the better for a drop of something hot inside you—this is a real nippy morning!” Afterwards, all three went out to inspect the hen-runs that were being made in a field conveniently close to the house. Logie was going to boil the mash in a boiler already installed in an outbuilding behind the kitchen, that had once been a wash-house. “And I’ve ordered dustbins for your corn. They’re a convenient size, and mouse-proof,” the agent said. He stayed to lunch with them.

Early in the afternoon Logie and Sherry motored to the poultry farm, ordered a pen of twenty-five Light Sussex pullets, two cocks, and twenty-five cross-bred pullets—Light Sussex crossed with Brown Leghorn—to be delivered early in November. On the way they dropped in on friends for tea, and arrived back at Crail soon after six. On the refectory table in the hall lay a telephone message from Vee, written in Mary’s neat, old-fashioned hand, saying that she was staying for dinner and a rubber of bridge with the friend who had taken her to York, and might be back late. The afternoon post lay near it. There were several letters for Vee and Sherry and for Logie a small flat package. She thought it probably contained patterns of tweed for which she had written a few days ago to Russell of Insch, where Sherry always got his tweeds. Logie took it and went upstairs, calling down to Sherry, who was standing in the hall absorbed in the contents of a letter, that as she was a little tired she would have a bath and change now.

“Tired, are you? I’m sorry, darling. Like me to send you up a glass of sherry?”

“No, thanks. I’m not really tired, just pleasantly lazy.”

She tossed her bag and gloves and the package on a chair, took off her shoes, and was going to undress when the package caught her eye. She loved tweeds and these particular patterns were for a winter coat to be made up by Vee’s London tailor. She would look at them at once. But the contents of the envelope were disappointing. Instead of squares of tweed, out fell a bundle of newspaper cuttings. Logie concluded that they were yet another advertising effort on the part of some enterprising press-cutting agency. Since the announcement of her engagement several of these had sent her the particulars of their services. She laid the cuttings down without a second glance, so carelessly that they slid to the floor from the table on which she had put them, too near the edge. She would have left them for the moment where they had fallen, when a photograph caught her eye, the likeness blurred by printer’s ink but recognisable: a photograph of Sherry. Logie picked it up, then stared astonished at the words beneath it:
“Jilted on Wedding Eve.”
Her first thought was that Sherry’s photograph had been used in mistake for someone else’s and that some friend, seeing it, had sent it to amuse them. She began to read the paragraph beneath; then with shaking hands snatched up the other cuttings and one by one unfolded them and skimmed their contents.

Headlines stared up at her in horrifying capitals:
“Bride Changes Mind on Eve of Wedding," “Broken Society Romance,” “Well-Known Polo Player Loses Bride to Millionaire,” “Bride-To-Be Weds Other Man at Registry Office," “Mayfair Sensation: Ex-Deb’s New Romance.”
There were more photographs of Sherry—in uniform, in polo kit, at Ascot, at a fashionable wedding. There were photographs of Zara in all manner of clothes and poses. There were two photographs of Sherry and Zara taken together, one taken at a fashionable restaurant where they were dining, the other as they entered the foyer of a cinema for a film premiere. Every paper told the same story in essentials, with unimportant additions and embroideries: how after “a whirlwind romance” and brief engagement the Honourable Zara Brayton, only daughter of Lord Alderbeck, had been going to marry Major A. K. MacAirlie of the Red Hussars, at St. Margaret’s, Westminster. Eight hundred guests had been bidden to the wedding. Twelve bridesmaids, each celebrated for her beauty, had been invited to attend the bride in gold brocade. Then, the day before the wedding, the bride had gone out by herself from the hotel where she was staying with her father, saying that she was going for a final fitting of some of her trousseau garments. She had failed to keep a luncheon engagement and another appointment early in the afternoon. In consequence of this, search had been made in her room, and letters were found addressed to her father and fiancé, true to the tradition of elopement. These stated that by the time they were received the writer would have been married at Caxton Hall by special licence to Mr. Solomon Hinterzhagen, whom the press described variously as “the well-known financier,” “the South African diamond king,” and “the South African millionaire.” All the papers with the exception of two Sunday ones were dated June 28th: the day Sherry had first come to Market Blyburgh.

Logie felt physically sick. She dropped on a low chair and sat there for a few minutes, hands clasped to her breast, rocking to and fro as though the movement might soothe her anguish. Gradually the first numbness of the shock wore off. She drew a long, slow, shivering breath, looking vaguely at her locked fingers and thinking in an odd, detached way, “I suppose this is what people mean when they talk about wringing one’s hands.” Then suddenly, as though a dam had burst, a tide of raging anger took possession of her. She sprang up, paused unsteadily a moment, then pulled herself together and ran down to the library.

Sherry was there, sprawled in a deep chair, reading
The Times.
He looked up, startled by her impetuous entry. “Hullo, darling—anything wrong?”

“Everything!” Logie cried, and flung the cuttings at him. They fluttered to the floor gently, scattering here and there, instead of falling with dramatic finality at his feet, as she had intended. She cried “How dare you do this thing to me!” and to her fury burst into tearless sobbing. Sherry sprang up and took one stride towards her, but she held him off. “Don’t touch me! Don’t come near me!”

Though without seeing them he knew well enough what they must be, he snatched up one of the cuttings, glanced at it, crushed it savagely in his clenched hand. Half to himself he said, “Oh
God!
If I had only dared to take the risk of telling you! Logie, if you’d known this all along, would you have minded terribly?”

“Would I have
minded!
What girl wouldn’t mind getting engaged to a man whom she supposed to be in love with her, when he had only asked her—what’s the expression?— ‘on the rebound,’ to save his face, to show his friends there were as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it!”

“You know it wasn’t that. You know I love you—”

“Love me! You have a funny way of showing it! If you had really loved me you’d have told me. You’d have trusted me. That’s what I can’t forgive. If you had only told me in the first place I might have understood or asked for time to learn to understand. But you’ve made such a fool of me before your friends—before Zara! I see now why Elizabeth came to warn you Zara was at Harrawick, why Vee was so amazed that you had asked the Hinterzhagens here. I understand all sorts of things that puzzled me. Gossip I overheard by accident—those people at the Country Club who thought we were on our honeymoon—oh, endless little odds and ends that fit together to make the whole picture like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle!”

“Now listen, Logie—” he was trying to speak quietly.

“I’m not going to listen to a single word you say.”

“But you must, in fairness, hear my side of it—”

“I’m not in the least interested in your side of it. I’ve finished with you! Finished, do you hear?”

Anger got the better of him. “I won’t believe you’re going to be such a little fool as to do just as Zara hoped you would when she sent you those cuttings on the chance I hadn’t told you!”

“I’m certainly not going to be such a fool as to make a wretched marriage simply to annoy Zara!” Her agony was mounting to a torturing climax, blinding her, crazing her, goading her to hurt as she was being hurt, “I must admit that I deserve all this. I’m every bit as bad as you! I’ve never loved you! It was entirely because you’re rich, because there was so much you could give me, that I said I’d marry you. Well, we’ve both been fooled, and serve us right!”

He seized her shoulders. “That’s a lie!”

“It’s not. It’s true!” She wriggled in a brief convulsive movement from his grasp and dived for the door. Sherry plunged after her, skidded on a sliding rug, nearly fell, recovered his balance and ran after her. But the momentary check had given her a start. He reached her door a split second after she had slammed it in his face and locked it.

He said, trying to control his anger and despair, “Logie, open that door. You’ve got to let me talk to you—to tell you why—”

Silence.

“Logie, darling, I
beg
you—for heaven’s sake at least give me a chance!”

Still silence behind the locked door, but below he heard the opening of the baize door between the back premises and the front of the house. Mary, probably, coming through to lay the table for dinner. He couldn’t stand this any longer. Logie could keep it up for hours, and probably would. He must get a ladder and be dammed to what the servants made of it. There was one in the tool-shed by the garden gate, and he was pretty certain it was long enough. He rushed downstairs, across the hall, and out, nearly knocking over Mary, who was carrying a tray of glasses, in his headlong progress, and paying no heed to her startled exclamation, “Is there anything the matter, Mr. Sherry?”

Logie, hearing him go downstairs, thought he was going to get some tool with which to force the door. Then when she heard him run beneath her window she knew he must have gone to get a ladder. Now was her opportunity to escape—it was bound to take him quite five minutes, possibly ten, to bring a ladder from the garden, unless luck was against her and there was one in the outhouses by the back-door. She’d risk it. There was no need to change her clothes; the tweed suit she was wearing was ideal for travelling, and she would wear her camel-hair coat and take a pair of woollen gloves, for it would probably be cold during the night. Luckily she had plenty of money, having cashed a cheque yesterday. No time to pack—Elsie would have to pack her things and send them after her. Not that she would care if she should never set eyes on any of them again. She gave one last look round the room where she had been so happy, then unlocked the door and opened it cautiously, wondering if Sherry’s departure had been a ruse and he had come in quietly by a side door, crept upstairs, and was now waiting for her to come out. But there was no sign nor sound of him. Downstairs there was a clink of silver in the dining-room, where Mary was laying the table for two people who would never eat another meal together. A lump rose in her throat. Swallowing, she crept softly down the wide staircase. One step creaked loudly and she paused in panic, afraid that Mary must have heard and would come out, but nothing happened. On tiptoe she crept across the hall, then along a passage behind the library to a side door seldom used. Outside, gravel crunched beneath her feet; quickly she sought the silence of the grass beyond it, and began to run with muffled footfalls towards an outhouse that adjoined the coal-cellar, where she knew the maids kept their bicycles. With them was one belonging to Vee, who had bought it dining the war with the idea of eking out her scanty petrol allowance, but had scarcely used it.