Flowers in the Rain & Other Stories (31 page)

“Just Daphne Fenton.”

“What does she want?”

Mrs. Fairburn shut the oven door and straightened up. Her face was pink, but perhaps that was just the heat. “She’s asked us all for a drink this evening.”

“What’s the celebration?”

“No celebration. Fergus is home for the weekend, and Daphne’s asked a few people in for a drink. She particularly wants you to come.”

Jenny said, “I don’t want to come.”

“Oh, darling, you must.”

“You can say I’m doing something else.”

Her mother came over to Jenny’s side. “Look, I know you were hurt, and I know how much you loved Fergus, but it’s over. He’s marrying Rose next month. At some point you’ve got to let everybody see that you’ve accepted this.”

“I think I will once they’re married. But they’re not yet, and I don’t like Rose.”

They gazed hopelessly at each other, then they heard Mr. Fairburn’s car coming up the road, turning into the gate.

“There’s your father. He’ll be starving.” Mrs. Fairburn gave Jenny’s hand a loving pat. “I must make the gravy.”

After lunch, with the dishes washed and the kitchen tidy, they dispersed on their various ploys. Mr. Fairburn changed into his gardening clothes (in which no self-respecting gardener would be seen dead) and went out to sweep leaves; Mrs. Fairburn disappeared to work on the new sitting-room curtains which she had been trying to finish for a month; Jenny decided to go fishing. She collected her rod and her fishing bag, pulled on her father’s old shooting jacket and the rubber boots, and firmly told the dogs that this time they couldn’t come.

“Is it all right if I borrow your car?” she asked her mother. “I’m going up to the loch to see if I can catch anything.”

“Catch at least three trout. Then we can have them for supper.”

As Jenny came to the loch, she saw the stillness of the brown water, scarcely touched now by the breeze. “Too still for fish,” Fergus would have said. “We’ll need to whistle for the wind.”

About a mile down the loch, a grassy track led off the road and down towards the water. Jenny took this, letting the small, battered car bump and bounce its way over tussocks of turf and heather. She parked a few feet from the shore, collected her rod and the bag, and made her way down to where the little rowing boat was pulled up on a sickle of shingle.

But she didn’t get into it at once. Instead, she sat on the bank, and listened to the silence, which was not a silence at all but a stirring and murmuring of tiny sounds. The buzz of a bee, the distant baa-ing of sheep, the sigh of a breeze, the whisper of water against pebbles.

“We’ll need to whistle for the wind.”

*   *   *

Fergus … What could you do about a man who had been part of your life since you were a little girl? A boy in patched jeans, collecting shells on the beach. A young man in a worn kilt, walking the hill. A grown man, immensely sophisticated and attractive, with a smooth dark head and eyes as blue as the loch on a summer day. What could you do about someone with whom you had quarrelled and laughed, who had always been your friend and your rival and finally turned out to be—she knew—the only man she could ever love?

He was six years older than Jenny, which made him now twenty-six, and the son of her parents’ friends, the Fentons, who farmed Inverbruie, two miles down the road.

“He’s like a brother,” people used to say to Jenny who was an only child. But she knew that it had never been like that. For what brother would spend patient hours teaching a small girl how to fish? What brother would dance with a gangling teenager at parties, when the room was filled with older, more charming and prettier girls?

And when Jenny, sent to boarding-school in Kent, hated being away from Scotland so much that every letter home begged to be allowed to return, it was Fergus who eventually persuaded her parents that Jenny would do just as well, and be a thousand times happier, at the local Creagan High School.

“One day,” she had promised herself, “I shall marry him. He will fall in love with me and I shall marry him, and I’ll move down the road to Inverbruie and be the young farmer’s wife.”

But this happy prospect was slightly dimmed by Fergus deciding that he did not want to follow his father into farming, but would go to Edinburgh to learn how to be a chartered accountant.

So what. Jenny’s private schemes for the two of them did a quick change of direction. “One day he will fall in love with me and I shall marry him, and go with him to live in Edinburgh and we’ll have a little house in Ann Street and go to symphony concerts together.”

The thought of living in Edinburgh was, truth be told, fairly daunting. Jenny hated towns but perhaps Edinburgh wouldn’t be too bad. They could come home for weekends.

But Fergus did not stay in Edinburgh. After he qualified, he was offered a transfer to the main office of his firm, and moved to London. London? For the first time Jenny knew a nudge of doubt. London. Could she bear to go so far away from her beloved hills and loch?

“Why don’t you go to London?” her mother asked when Jenny finally left school. “You could go to college there. Perhaps share a little flat!”

“I couldn’t bear it. It would be worse than Kent.”

“Edinburgh, then? You ought to get away from home for a bit.”

*   *   *

So Jenny went to Edinburgh and learned shorthand and typing, studied French and went to art galleries, and when she became homesick, climbed Arthur’s Seat and pretended she was on the top of Ben Creagan. By Easter, she had finished the course and been duly presented with a Certificate, and it was time to go home. Fergus would probably be home for Easter as well and she wondered if he would notice a change in her.

He would probably look at her, like people did in books, as though seeing her for the first time, and perhaps then he would recognize what Jenny had known for years. That they were made for each other. And at last all those elusive day-dreams would come true. It would, of course, mean living in London, but by now Jenny knew that living anywhere without Fergus was no fun at all.

As her train drew into Creagan, she hung out of the window and saw her mother waiting for her, which was odd, because usually it was her father who met her.

“Darling!” They hugged and kissed, and there was the business of getting cases off the train and making their way out into the yard where the car waited. It was now nearly dark, street lights were on, and the air smelt of hills and peat.

They came through the little town and turned on to the side road which led to home. They passed Inverbruie.

“Is Fergus back?”

“Yes. He’s home.” Jenny hugged herself. “He’s—he’s brought a friend with him.”

Jenny turned her head and looked at her mother’s neat profile. “A friend?”

“Yes. A girl called Rose. You may have seen her on television. She’s an actress.” A friend. A girl. An actress? “He met her a couple of months ago.”

“H—have you met her?”

“No, but we’ve all been invited to a party there tomorrow night.”

“But—but—” There didn’t seem to be any words for the shock and the desolation which she felt. Mrs. Fairburn stopped the car and turned to Jenny. “This is why I came to meet you at the station. I knew you’d be upset. I wanted to talk it over.”

“I just—I just don’t want him to bring anyone here to Creagan.” Even to herself this sounded pathetically juvenile.

“Jenny, you don’t own Fergus. He has a perfect right to make new friends. He’s a grown man with his own life to live. Just as you have a life to make for yourself. You can’t spend it looking over your shoulder and mourning for childhood fancies.”

The worst bit was not that she actually said this, but that she had been so perceptive in the first place.

“I—I really do love him.”

“I know. It’s agony. First love is always agony. But you’ll have to grit your teeth and see it through. And don’t let anybody see how much you mind.” They sat in silence for a bit. Then, “All right?” her mother asked, and Jenny nodded. Mrs. Fairburn started the car up again, and they moved on.

“Do you think he’ll marry her?”

“I’ve no idea. But from what Daphne Fenton tells me, it sounds perfectly possible. She says he’s bought himself a flat in Wandsworth and Rose is making his loose covers.”

“Do you think that’s a bad sign?”

“Not bad, exactly. But indicative.”

Jenny fell silent. But as they turned into the gates of the Manse, she stirred herself. “Perhaps I shall like her.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Fairburn. “Perhaps you will.”

*   *   *

And she did try to like Rose. But it was difficult, because, without realizing it, she had seen Rose on television, in a hospital drama, where Rose had played a nurse. Even then Jenny had thought that she was a bore, with her heart-shaped face struggling with a variety of emotions, and unbearable distress being conveyed by a slight tremor in her well-bred voice.

In real life, Rose was pretty enough.

Her hair was silky black, loose and curly around her shoulders, and she wore a low-waisted dress with unexpected bits of beading and glitter stitched to its loose folds.

“Fergus has told me so much about you,” she said to Jenny when they were introduced at Inverbruie. “He says you were practically brought up together. Is your father a farmer too?”

“No, he’s the bank manager in Creagan.”

“And you’ve always lived here?”

“Born and bred. I even went to school here. I was in Edinburgh for the winter, but it’s heaven to be back.”

“Don’t you get—er—rather bored in such a desolate spot?”

“No.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come to London. Nowhere else on earth to live, I always say to Fergy. Come to London and we’ll keep an eye on you—” She reached out and closed her fingers around Fergus’ arm. Fergus was at that moment engaged, happily, in conversation with somebody else, but she drew him physically away from this person and back to herself. “Darling, I was just saying, Jenny must come to London.”

Fergus and Jenny looked into each other’s eyes: Jenny smiled and found to her surprise that it was remarkably easy.

Fergus said, “Jenny doesn’t like city life.”

Jenny shrugged. “It’s a matter of taste.”

“But you can’t stay here always.” Rose sounded incredulous.

“I will for the summer.” She had not, in fact, thought about it, but now discovered, in an instant, that her decision was made. “I’ll get a holiday job in Creagan, I expect.” She decided to change the subject. “My mother was telling me about the flat in Wandsworth.”

“Yes…” Fergus began, but that was as far as he got because Rose took over.

“It’s heavenly. Not very big, but full of sunshine. Just a few little touches and it will be quite perfect.”

“Has it got a garden?” Jenny asked.

“No. But there’s a window-box or two. I thought we could plant geraniums. Real scarlet ones. Then we can pretend we’re in Majorca or Greece. Can’t we, darling?”

“Whatever you say,” said Fergus.

Scarlet geraniums. Dear heaven, thought Jenny, he really is in love with her. And suddenly she couldn’t bear to stand there any longer, watching them. She made her excuses and turned away. She did not speak to either Rose or Fergus for the rest of the evening.

*   *   *

But she could not escape Fergus, because he sought her out the very next day, spring-cleaning the summer-house.

“Jenny.”

She was actually shaking dust out of a rush mat when he appeared, unexpectedly, around the side of the summer-house, and for an instant she was startled into immobility.

“What do you want?” she managed at last.

“I’ve come to see you.”

“How nice. Where’s Rose?”

“She’s at home. She’s washing her hair.”

“It looked perfectly clean to me.”

“Jenny, are you going to listen to me?”

She sighed noisily and looked resigned. “It depends on what you’ve got to say.”

“I just want you to understand. To understand the way things are. I want you not to be angry. I want to feel that we can still at least talk to each other. And be friends.”

“Well, we’re talking, aren’t we?”

“And friends?”

“Oh, friends. Always friends. Friends whatever we do to each other.”

“And what have I done?”

She glared at him accusingly, and then threw down the rush mat.

“All right, so you don’t like Rose. You might as well admit it,” he said.

“I don’t feel about Rose one way or the other. I don’t know Rose.”

“Then isn’t it a little unfair—on both Rose and myself—to make a snap judgement?”

“I just don’t feel I have anything in common with her.”

“That’s just because she told you that you ought to get away from Creagan.”

“And what possible business is it of hers?”

Now his temper was rising to match her own. She saw his jaw muscles tighten, a familiar sign, and she was pleased because she had made him angry. It somehow eased the hurt inside her.

“Jenny, you stay here for the rest of your life, and you’ll end up a country bumpkin in a seated tweed skirt with nothing to talk about except dogs and fishing.”

She turned on him. “You know something? I’d rather be that than a third-rate actress with a mouth like a button.”

He laughed, but he was laughing at Jenny and not with her. He said unforgivably, “I do believe you’re jealous. You always could be quite impossible!”

“And you, perhaps, could always be a fool, but I never realized it until now.”

Fergus turned on his heel and walked away, across the lawn. Jenny watched his progress, her temper dying as swiftly as it had blown up. Words spoken in heat and haste were all very well, but they could never be taken back. Nothing could ever be the same again.

*   *   *

Jenny found a job in Creagan, working in a shop which sold Shetland pullovers and pebble-jewellery to tourists. Around July, she was told by her mother that Fergus and Rose were engaged, and were to be married in September in London where Rose’s parents lived. Just a quiet wedding, with a few of their close London friends. But meantime, they had returned to Inverbruie and there was to be another little party and Jenny could not find the courage to go. After they were married, she told herself again, it would be different. She would become dynamic; go abroad perhaps; get a job in the French Alps as a chalet girl, or be a cook on a yacht. However, she was growing cold and there were trout to be caught for supper. She stood up, clambered down the heathery bank, untied the painter, pushed the boat out into the water and began to row.