Highland Mist (9 page)

Celia should have brightened any room, and she probably did dispel a little of the gloom. She was wearing a dress of scarlet satin that for some reason didn’t fight with her hair, and a wide collar of pearls adorned her slender throat. There were pearl studs in her ears, and her teeth were like small and perfect pearls between her scarlet lips as she talked and smiled continuously.

Toni, for some reason, had chosen black ... a shadowy black net dress that emphasised her youthful gravity, and highlighted her burnished brown hair. To a casual observer she and her mother might have been sisters; but only to a casual observer. For Celia scintillated like the many facets of a diamond, and had all the poise in the world; whereas Toni...

Euan MacLeod’s shrewd blue eyes were often on Celia, but then they were often on Toni, too. The girl was completely unawakened, he thought. A brown-eyed Peter Pan who might never grow up unless ...

And marriage to Charles Henderson, he was fairly certain, would never enable her to grow up.

But it was Celia he took for a short stroll on the terrace, in the moonlight after dinner. And it was Celia who clung to his arm. It was Celia’s perfume that filled every corner of the drawing-room until they went to bed, and when he went to bed at last it was that perfume that clung to his nostrils.

He discovered that she had dropped a small lace-edged handkerchief in the hall after dinner, and he had picked it up and put it in his pocket. He had forgotten to return it.

Now he put it away carefully in a drawer of his dressing-table.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Charles arrived for the weekend, but in the few days before his arrival Toni discovered a lot about Inverada, and found she had a great capacity for enjoying herself in a simple way.

Celia was no walker, but she seemed glad to get Toni out of the house with instructions to go for a nice long walk, and have a good look at the scenery. Admittedly it was at its best at that season of the year, and Toni acted upon the advice with alacrity, not minding because no one accompanied her, and the miles she tramped were lonely miles. Celia insisted that there was a great deal to be done at Inverada, and she and Euan must work together to bring about a transformation of the present house. She was all for getting an Edinburgh firm of interior decorators to inspect the place and be responsible for the greater part of the transformation; but Euan—who would be footing all the bills—disagreed with this. He didn’t think Inverada was the type of house to be taken over by a firm of interior decorators, who might beautify it but destroy its atmosphere.

Toni agreed with him, but Celia looked faintly mutinous when she realised she was to be opposed in a favourite scheme. She tried cajolery, persuasiveness, even slightly flagrant coquettishness, to get her way, but Euan remained firm. He had no objection whatsoever to Celia walking him round the house and appealing to him with her enormous blue eyes, but he was a man of iron and his mind was made up.

While he was tenant of Inverada he would do nothing to spoil it, but Celia could have all the new curtains and carpets and fabrics for chair-covers, and so forth, she wanted, provided they didn’t clash with their period background. And he was willing to allow a few reputable craftsmen to get to work on the background—the damp-stained panelling and the peeling paintwork—if she would not urge him to go farther than this.

So Celia ceased making demands and became sweetly appreciative, and the two of them went into conferences daily over the agreed work of restoration and Toni put on her sensible brogue shoes and went for long walks on the moors, or down by the loch shore, and was happy because even alone this was much more like fun than standing over the stove in her mother’s London flat, and thinking up new dishes for her dinner parties.

She felt so carefree that she frequently took off her stockings and waded through the bums when she came to them, and high up on the moors she listened to the song of the birds and marvelled that anyone ever lived their lives in cities. She plunged into the quiet of fir woods and larch thickets and decided that their aromatic perfume was worth much more, if it could have been crowded into a cut-glass bottle, than her mother paid for her expensive Paris perfume.

She walked so far and so fast in those few days that her feet in the unaccustomed brogues became blistered, and MacLeod was quite annoyed with her when he caught her limping home through the pine-scented dusk one evening when he went out to look for her.

“This is absurd,” he declared, making her sit down on a stone and take off her shoe in order that he could inspect the
extra-large
blister she had acquired that day. “This prowling about like a gipsy has got to cease. At least, unless there is someone who is willing to go prowling with you.”

“There isn’t,” she returned happily, and then winced when his fingers probed the blister, and he shook his head grimly.

“What a girl! Chills, blisters ... stupidity!”

“I’m not stupid,” she assured him, and looked up at him with a gleam of something that was almost provocative in her big brown eyes, as soft as velvet in the dusk. “I’m not really a bit stupid. It’s simple that you think I am.”

“You’re quite unable to take adequate care of yourself. I shall have to carry you the rest of the way home now because of that blister on your foot,” and he swung her up in his arms as he spoke. With a little gasp she realised that he was carrying her with the utmost ease—as he had carried her once before, only through deep untrodden snow—and when they plunged into the heart of a pine wood he didn’t even pause because of the deeper twilight beneath the trees. “There’s news for you at the house,” he said. “A telegram from the conquering hero Charles!”

“What?” she said. And then: “Oh!”

His voice sounded jibing in the gloom as he asked her:

“Aren’t you terrified in case he’s not coming?”

“Isn’t he coming?” with an acute and extraordinary awareness of the dark chin on a level with her cheek and the swinging cloud of her hair.

“I’m afraid so. The telegram simply states—it was addressed to your mother, by the way!—that he’ll be here tomorrow evening.”

“Oh!” she said, somewhat feebly, again.

He came to a halt in the very middle of the wood, and invited her to listen to a sudden liquid babble of sound. At first she wouldn’t believe that they were nightingales who were pouring forth their hearts in the wood—two of them, singing against each other, running up and down the scale in the still, warm night, and threatening to burst their throats.

“But it’s unbelievable!” Toni protested. “In May! I thought one had to wait until June at least to hear nightingales.”

“Not up here in the north. It’s been warm as a June day today, anyway.” Which was true. “Look at that blue, blue sky above our heads! Did you ever see anything like that before, Toni?”

Her hair swung against his shoulder.

“No. Not even in Switzerland.”

“You don’t have to go to Switzerland to see blue skies—or snow,” he added reminiscently. “We get plenty of both here at Inverada.”

She was silent, and he was silent, and he made no move to go on. She began to be uncomfortably conscious that she must be a weight in his arms, but if she was it didn’t seem to be troubling him. Suddenly he asked quietly:

“What do you want most of all from life, Toni?”

“I ... don’t think I quite know,” she answered, after a pause.

“Charles?” he enquired, with harsh, grating mockery, turning his head so that his blue eyes were looking into hers ... or she could see the blue gleam of them in the dusk.

She looked back at that blue gleam, and while she did so her heart started to beat strangely, and rather heavily, as if she had been climbing a hill at too great a speed, with the result that she began to feel breathless. She wanted to look away from him, but somehow she couldn’t. He was compelling her to meet his eyes.

“Don’t tell me you’re not sure?” he said, mockery in his voice playing along her nerves.

“I...” she began, and then closed her lips. The truth was that she was no longer sure that she wanted Charles—her mother’s property!—above everything else in life. And in any case, it was nothing to do with him.

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “You may get Charles one day—you almost certainly will!—but if he ever kisses you like this I’ll give away everything Uncle Angus left me to feed the poor of destitute countries!” and she felt his mouth burning against hers, scorching her as if it was a fire.

It was a hard, fierce kiss, pressed most unfairly on her lips at a moment when she could do nothing to prevent it—when she wasn’t even prepared for it!—and not merely did it rob her of breath, but it changed the whole course of her life for her, there and then, in the heart of the tiny Scots fir woods.

The nightingales had stopped singing—afterwards she wondered whether it was surprise that had rendered them voiceless—and she herself was quite incapable of speech for several seconds. Euan drew a long breath, as if this time it was he who had been climbing a hill too fast, and then plunged forward into the wood, miraculously keeping low branches away from her face, and still carrying her as if she was no greater burden than a feather.

But when they reached the house she didn’t dare look at him ... she knew she couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes for an instant. Her face was burning most revealingly, and she felt like someone who had received a shock.

Euan set her down quite casually.

“Shall I come up to your room and dress that heel? Or can I do it in the bathroom if you’d rather.”

She looked at him quickly, and then away. She had never seen him look more imperturbable ... even slightly bored.

“No, thank you, I’ll do it myself,” she said, and not even noticing the pain in her heel, made for the stairs.

The next night Charles arrived, and from the look in his eyes when he shook hands with Toni he was quite charmed to see her. Celia he merely glanced at casually, and then fastened his look once more upon Toni.

“Heavens, what a long week it’s been!” he said, as if he meant it. “I wanted to get away earlier, but it wasn’t possible. Quite a few things on hand, for once, and this was the first opportunity I could seize to get away.”

Euan looked at him sardonically, but said nothing. Celia, in golden silk, and simply wreathed in smiles, assured him that they were delighted to see him. Toni, she also assured him, had been thrilled by his telegram.

“Were you, Toni?” he asked, his grey eyes lighting up as he waited for her confirmation.

Euan made an impatient movement towards the drawing-room door.

“Let’s have a drink,” he said. “I’m sure you can do with one, Henderson, after your journey.”

And Toni was saved from uttering a barefaced lie. For never again would anything Charles could do or say thrill her. Euan MacLeod had seen to that ... with one single whimsical kiss!

After dinner Celia insisted that Charles take Toni out on to the terrace to watch the late moon-rise.

“It’s a sight you simply mustn’t miss at Inverada—not at this season of the year, anyway,” she said. “And I’m sure Toni’s simply dying for an opportunity to be alone with you, Charles,” she added, with an archness that astounded Toni, and made their host look a trifle bleak. “The sweet child has done nothing but talk about you ever since we left London! I’m afraid that little trip you made up here together has put ideas into her head!”

Outside on the terrace Charles took Toni’s hands and asked her bluntly whether her mother’s words were true. She was wearing a short evening gown of leaf-green velvet, the moon as it rose behind the pines was silvering her hair and the childish curves of her face, and she looked even more like a young dryad that had escaped its element than she had looked in her mother’s drawing-room in London, when she had worn her new water-green nylon dress.

“If I make an admission to you, Toni, will you make one to me?” he asked, holding her hands so tightly that she didn’t even try to snatch them away. There was a slightly rueful look on his handsome mouth, an even more rueful smile in his devastatingly good-looking grey eyes. But, for the first time, as she met the direct gaze of those eyes, Toni’s heartbeats refused to quicken, and in fact she had never felt calmer and more composed in her life. She realised that the fascinating Charles of her schooldays—and right up until a few days ago—was no longer fascinating to her. He was just a very attractive bachelor and an old friend, and he was saying all the wrong things when it was far, far too late.

“I ... what sort of an admission do you mean?” she asked, wishing she could free her hands, and wishing still more that her mother could behave now as she always had behaved, and not like a coy parent with some special scheme of her own on hand to be hatched.

Charles shook his head at her.

“I may have changed, but you’re still the same, aren’t you, Toni?” He looked at her searchingly. “You haven’t changed ... in any way?”

Toni appeared perplexed.

“What do you mean?”

He smiled still more wryly.

“You’re still the same charming schoolgirlish creature who looked upon me as her ‘Uncle Charles’. Remember? Uncle Charles, who had an excellent memory for favourite brands of chocolates, and enjoyed taking an adopted niece for a drive? I used to think you quite liked me, but never in my wildest dreams did it occur to me that one day I would want the niece to turn into something else, and hope and pray she’d stop thinking of me as an uncle! Toni ... Ever since we came up here to Inverada together I’ve been tormented by the fear that you’ll never stop thinking of me as ‘Uncle Charles’ ... someone quite outside your age group.”

“Oh, Charles!” Toni gasped.

He caught her by her shoulders.

“That night you met me at Euston, and your eyes were so big and brown—with a spark of excitement in them!—and you were so thrilled at the idea of going off on some sort of adventure, I began to be interested in you in a different way. I began to watch you constantly and to take a kind of delight in watching you, and when you were ill in that ghastly cottage for the first time in my life I felt half demented with fear in case something happened to you. I was furious with Celia for letting you run the risk—you, who obviously aren’t a terribly strong type—of travelling north at such a season, and I was livid with MacLeod because he was the only man who could do anything for you, and I thought he wasn’t the right type. Toni—” his fingers bit into her shoulders—“since then I’ve faced up to the astounding truth, and I know that I’ve fallen headlong in love with you!”

Toni stood absolutely still between his hands, and her only sensations were sensations of regret because this was a declaration that had come too late. It was something she had longed for, but now didn’t want, and the irony of it rendered her dumb.

Charles pleaded a little huskily:

“Darling, if I’ve shocked you—?”

But she shook her head.

“No, you haven’t shocked me.”

“But you’re not interested in ... anything I’ve told you?”