Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs (34 page)

‘Of course we aren’t! You’ve got to believe me! Sebastian’s a brute and a pig and I hate him! He’s not happy with the girl who’s dancing Belle Rose and he thinks I’d be better. So he’ll say anything to get me to come back to London.’

‘It seems a peculiar way to go about it. Are you telling me that there’s nothing between you and that man?’

‘Absolutely nothing! Since I left London he’s had two other girlfriends.’

‘So there was something? Not that I’ve any right to mind. What you did before we met is your own affair, of course. But I don’t like being made a fool of in front of the entire county.’

‘I really am most dreadfully sorry and I never loved him the least bit even when we were … going out together.’

Rafe’s expression grew stormy despite his stretched lips. ‘He
doesn’t look to me the kind of man who’d be content with holding hands. Were you lovers? Keep smiling.’

I hesitated.

I had always intended to tell Rafe the truth but it had been impossible to find the right moment. Each day that passed seemed to make my confession more difficult. His pride was his tenderest part and naturally he would be annoyed to have been misled. And sometimes I thought my youth and supposed innocence were what he liked most about me.

‘Well?’

I opened my mouth to deny it.

‘Marigold!’ Evelyn waved an imperious hand. ‘Come and meet Lady Peckover.’

Rafe’s godmother, a gorgon in moiré and diamonds, cross-questioned me about my parents and grandparents and my prospects of inheritance and seemed to think very little of any of them, but I was grateful for the reprieve. For the rest of the party I talked and nodded and smiled while trying to decide what to say to Rafe when the guests had gone. I might admit that I had been under pressure to consent to some sort of relationship with Sebastian, which would account for the sham engagement, without actually confessing that I had cold-bloodedly traded my body umpteen times for the sake of my ambition.

I was only a little less anxious about what I was going to say to Sebastian. I knew that once I had convinced him I was giving up dancing for good, I would matter less to him than the poor legless tramp who played the mouth organ outside Piccadilly tube station, but Sebastian was not a man to take disappointment well. If he suspected that Rafe was jealous he might hint all sorts of dreadful things about me just to pay me out. I dreaded to see disillusion in Rafe’s candid blue eyes. By the end of the party I had decided one thing only. I was in a hole.

Fate – or the Nornor – had postponed the moment of truth. Just as people were starting to go, poor Kingsley had tripped over an umbrella and fallen, hurting his wrist. Rafe was deputed
to take him to the hospital. The business was complicated by Kingsley thinking he was going to a regimental dinner and insisting that Spendlove fetch his medals. Rafe had driven away looking thoroughly unhappy. I had longed to comfort him.

Sebastian had been taken off by Conrad, but not before the former had kissed me and squeezed my earlobe so hard that I could not suppress a small scream.

At the time, though naturally sorry for Kingsley, I had been extremely thankful to have escaped my own personal Ragnarök, but I had woken that morning to the disagreeable realization that the evil hour had only been postponed.

‘What am I going to do about Sebastian?’ I asked Conrad with the kind of despair that does not hope for an answer.

Conrad withdrew his eyes from the nest and fixed them on me. ‘
Are
you going to marry him? Of the two suitors, I would advise Rafe as being most likely to grant his wife an easy moment or two in the ensuing years. Sebastian has a dangerous look in his eye. If he were a horse, I should take care not to find myself alone in the stable with him. But perhaps etiquette dictates, as with dinner engagements, that, having accepted the first, one ought to refuse the second, however superior its attractions.’

I could not expect him to sympathize. In my present predicament I must appear ridiculous.

‘You wouldn’t mock if you only knew. Of course I’m not going to marry Sebastian. I’d rather be torn to pieces by wild beasts. I’ve got to make him see he can’t go around telling people we’re engaged. I’m working this morning and this afternoon. It’ll have to be during my lunch hour. Do you know where he’ll be?’

‘With me at the Castle in Carlisle. Golly is taking Sebastian to lunch and I – at a considerable sacrifice of my own pleasure and convenience – have agreed to go with them. I am to be the …
die Zugabe
… how do you say “makeweight”, as in a boat?’

‘Buoyancy bags, do you mean?’

Conrad frowned. ‘Certainly not. I am to keep stable the negotiations. Golly is afraid of giving Sebastian too much power. The opera is her infant and she wishes to be in charge of its upbringing.’

‘Damn, blast and bloody hell!’ I said with considerable energy.

‘Is it as bad as that?’

‘Worse. I don’t know you well enough to use the sort of language that might come anywhere near to expressing my true feelings.’

Conrad put the binoculars into their leather case and slung them round his neck before saying, ‘We shall have returned to Hindleep by six o’clock. You could come and meet Sebastian then. I can arrange for you to be alone.’

‘Thank you, that’s so kind, but Rafe’s picking me up at six. We’re going out for dinner. He’ll have been in Carlisle all day sitting on the bench.’

Conrad looked surprised. ‘
All
day? What makes this bench so peculiarly attractive?’

‘I mean it’s his day for being a magistrate. You know, like a judge.’

‘Ah,
der Richterstand
. I understand.’

‘I’ve got to be able to tell him that it’s all finished between me and Sebastian … you see, Rafe doesn’t know …’ I felt myself blush. ‘… I didn’t tell him that Sebastian and I … oh, it’s such a mess.’ I hugged myself and clapped my hands against my arms because the sweat was cooling on my skin and though it was sunny the air was still bitterly cold. ‘Sebastian wanted to stop me joining English Ballet. He didn’t ask me to marry him … he just assumed I’d be only too delighted.’

Conrad looked sceptical. ‘He seems to have more than his fair share of audacity. Do you tell me that when he made this announcement he was no more to you than the man on the Clapham omnibus?’

I blushed harder. ‘Well, we had been … I was his girlfriend … of course I went to bed with him … Sebastian runs the LBC like a dictatorship … what else could I do?’

‘Ah.’ Conrad lifted his eyebrows. ‘Indeed. What else
could
you do?’

I was perfectly alive to the sarcasm in his voice, but my pride was already in the dust. ‘Sebastian’s incapable of loving anybody. He’s hard and cold and cruel and the very idea of being married to him makes me feel horribly sick.’

‘In that case,’ to my relief Conrad smiled suddenly and looked perfectly human and friendly, ‘if I were you I should send etiquette to the devil and favour the second engagement.’

‘I know you’re not taking any of this seriously. But when I tell Sebastian I’m giving up dancing to marry Rafe he’s bound to want revenge. He might tell Rafe about our affair … you see I
had
to … I wanted to dance more than anything in the world … oh dear,’ I shivered hard.

‘I think I do see.’ In the bright early light, Conrad’s large eyes were blacker than coal or soot or ink or anything black is usually compared with. For a moment he looked thoughtful. Then he said, ‘I want to show you something.’

‘What?’

‘Come and see.’

My curiosity grew as we walked in single file along a path that petered out in a tangled thicket. When Conrad dropped onto his hands and knees and began to crawl through the undergrowth I remembered that there were doubts about his sanity. The tunnel seemed to go on for a long time and I could see little but the soles of Conrad’s shoes as he crawled ahead of me. My legs were bare except for my practice tights and the ground was covered with prickly twigs and pine needles. I was sure that Conrad was as sane as anyone – if anything, saner … it was probably I who was going mad, driven to lunacy by the impossibility of reconciling the needs of those I loved … I thought of Sebastian … and hated … My incoherent train of thought tailed off as I grew conscious of a sound not unlike London traffic in the rush hour. After another ten metres or so, the tunnel ended in a glittering arc and the volume increased to a roar like a jet engine’s slipstream.

I scrambled into the light and found myself kneeling on a lip of rock. Ahead of me was a sheer drop to the valley floor. We were probably directly under Hindleep now, but it was hidden by a projection of land above. The sound of crashing water was close and I could see droplets flying outwards and flashing in the sun’s rays. I heard Conrad’s voice raised above the din.

‘Come to your left. Be careful! The ground is slippery.’

I inched my way along a ledge less than a metre wide. When I was on my own two feet I had no fear of heights. I rounded a shoulder of rock and saw Conrad standing about five paces away. The water fell in a torrent so close to him that droplets sparkled on his coat.

‘Quick!’ he commanded. ‘I am in danger of drowning!’

We sidled further along the narrowing ledge and entered a sort of cave behind the waterfall. The sun shone through the curtain of water, splitting it into the colours of the spectrum. From within two feet of the edge the cave was quite dry, with a floor of leaves and earth. I was surprised to see the remains of an iron bedstead in one corner.

‘I read about this place in Ratcliffe’s diary.’ Conrad looked about him with an air of satisfaction. ‘It took me some time to find it. Ratcliffe paid a local man to live here as a hermit. But people were so afraid of the precipitous approach that they refused to visit and the fun went out of it. Also in winter it must be damp and disagreeable.’

To the left of the waterfall, the mouth of the cavern widened, affording a view of natural terraces on the hills across the valley where sheep ambled, tearing up mouthfuls of grass.

‘If this is paradise,’ I said, ‘then it more than lives up to reports.’

‘Goethe said all beauty is a manifestation of natural laws that we would otherwise be unconscious of. What do you think?’

I found it flattering that Conrad always talked to me as though I might have ideas of my own worth listening to. Sebastian spoke to me as though I had the intelligence of a
worm. Rafe treated me as someone delicately female who it was his privilege to humour and protect. Or should it be ‘whom’?

‘Well,’ I said, plucking up courage, ‘if beauty is really a manifestation of natural laws, then we all ought to admire the same things, shouldn’t we? And we obviously don’t.’

Conrad gave me one of his piercing looks until I felt my seriously underused brain had been cauterized in its darkest recesses.

‘Lucky old hermit!’ I said, feeling quite uncomfortable under such scrutiny.

‘The post had its disadvantages. Ratcliffe insisted he learned his poetry by rote so that he could recite it to visitors. And he was not a very good poet. You are shivering.’

He took off his coat and handed it to me.

‘Oh, but then
you
’ll be cold—’

‘Put it on. I kept horses as a boy and I know that they must have rugs after exercise.’

I did as I was told. A moss-cushioned rock made a soft seat. We had to raise our voices to be heard above the cataract but otherwise I was as comfortable as in a drawing room. In my present circumstances I felt I could have been completely happy as the hermit, even taking the poetry into account.

Conrad remained standing, turning his back to me to stare out across the valley. For some time we were silent. This gave me time to wonder if I had been wise to take him so much into my confidence about Sebastian. He was Isobel’s lover and would be bound to tell her my misdeeds. And she would tell Rafe. It would sound much worse from a third party …

‘Why don’t you try Rafe with the truth?’ asked Conrad abruptly.

‘I can’t. He’s so honourable. He wouldn’t understand that one might want something so badly, a good thing, that you’d be prepared to do anything – perhaps nothing
wrong
exactly but not particularly edifying – to get it.’

‘You don’t think you may be exaggerating the high tone of his principles?’ Conrad twitched his lips. ‘He is but a man.’

‘You’re laughing at me again. I admit Rafe’s always been my hero, ever since I was a girl.’

‘And now you are an old lady you want to keep him on the pedestal, a plaster saint.’

‘You think I’m an idiot.’

‘No. I think you are romantic. You like to live in a fairy tale and Rafe is to rescue you from the evil enchanter. But who is your von Rothbart? Not Sebastian, surely? I do not believe he is evil. Merely an opportunist.’

‘You don’t know how sadistic he can be. I know that sounds melodramatic but you haven’t seen the side of him he shows to the girls he … he’s interested in.’

‘He has never attempted to make love to me, certainly.’

‘He would if he thought he could get something out of you by it.’

‘In my experience, one’s best protection against the manipulation of others is to be transparent in all one’s dealings. Open and honest always, even if other people may dislike it.’

I had to admit Conrad practised what he preached. He was polite to Evelyn’s friends but made no attempt to earn their good opinion. He had told the archdeacon that he distrusted all religions and never went to church. He had informed Lord Dunderave that, in his opinion, anyone who gave funds to a political party should be automatically excluded from receiving a peerage. And he was not gallant. The wife of Kingsley’s agent, trying to flirt with him, had asked him to guess how old she was. He had said forty-five without a second’s hesitation. As this was two years older than her actual age, or so she claimed, she had gone away looking cross. Perhaps it was this refusal to dissemble that had made me feel he could be trusted … that I might ask him to help me.

I thought about injecting some transparency into my dealings with the world. But if I had refused to make love with Sebastian he would have blighted my career. If I now told Rafe the truth about Sebastian he would be grieved, disappointed, perhaps disgusted. He would most probably end our engagement and
withdraw into depression. I would have to go back to London and try to climb ballet’s greasy pole again. Dimpsie would turn to drink. I would be fiancé-less, jobless, guilt-ridden and broke. Would my gleaming integrity be sufficient compensation? On the whole I thought not.