No More Meadows (11 page)

‘I have,' she smiled, wanting to kiss them, but unable to catch their darting, exciting bodies. ‘I've been in it too. It can go more than a hundred miles an hour if it wants, and you don't have to change gear.'

‘Gosh!' they breathed, as if they had glimpsed heaven.

‘What's occurred, Chrissie?' asked Roger, coming up the path and jerking his head towards the Buick. ‘Got yourself a rich boy friend at last?'

She wished that they could have seen Vinson Gaegler first in uniform. Roger and Sylvia were so critical, and he looked better in uniform than in the overpadded tweed jacket and smooth-textured slacks that he wore today.

The introductions went off quite well. Americans always knew how to make conversation to new people straight away, without standing about awkwardly. The children were already well disposed to him because of the car, and he pretended that he had brought candy just for them, although he could not have known they would be there.

‘Candy means chocolate and sweets,' said Jeanette, who had an American airman of her own at Farnborough. ‘I know.' They rushed off to the kitchen, jostling their grandfather as he wandered in from his study.

Having been warned by Christine, he did not say: ‘Good
God, you here again?' but: ‘I have to thank you for the cigars. It was extremely kind of you, Captain er –'

‘Gaegler,' said the American, not correcting him about the rank.

‘Of course. Excuse me. I've been working. Just an absent-minded author. You know what writers are.'

Everyone laughed, as they always did at Mr Cope when he became literary, and the American looked from one to the other wishing to join in the joke, but not understanding.

The children were cross because Christine was going out for the day. ‘Just when we come,' they said, sucking at bars of chocolate marshmallow and kicking the furniture. ‘And you said you were going to teach us how to bowl a legbreak.'

‘Christine was captain of the eleven at school,' Sylvia explained to the American, which left him more mystified than before.

She and Roger were also disappointed that Christine was going out to lunch. ‘Got something better to do this Sunday, eh?' said Roger, when she came back from getting her coat. ‘Well, I don't blame you when the chap has a car like that. Cuts out the English boy friends a bit, doesn't it, Miss Cope? Well, so long, you two. Don't do anything I wouldn't do – and that gives you plenty of scope.' He winked at Vinson Gaegler, who laughed with him, eager to join in the fun and be one of the family.

‘Your folks are swell,' he told Christine, as he started the engine and turned the car on the sandy road, his thin, knuckly hands grappling the big steering-wheel.

‘I'm glad you liked them,' she said. ‘I feel bad in a way about going out, because we're usually together on Sundays. Poor Geoffrey was a bit peeved too, because I'd promised to finish a chess game.'

‘You're very good to your family,' he said. It was his first personal comment about her.

‘Not really, but we get along all right.'

‘I like to see a family all together,' he said, taking a corner on the wrong side. ‘My goodness, will I ever learn to drive on the left? My parents are divorced. It doesn't help.'

‘I thought you were a Catholic –?'

‘Yes. My father is, but he didn't think too much of it when it came to going off with a chippy. That broke up the home somewhat. And to tell you the truth, none of us are too close. I think it's wonderful to be in a family home like yours.'

‘You must come another Sunday and have lunch with us,' Christine said politely. That was the sort of invitation you could throw out, and not have to abide by if today did not go well.

‘I'd appreciate that very much,' he said.

They drove down the Portsmouth road. The American wanted to go to a hotel that another officer had recommended. He expected that she would know of it, and she felt that she ought to. It felt odd to be piloted through one's own country by a foreigner.

When they turned off the main road he knew the way exactly. He had looked it up on a map before he started out, and drawn a little chart for himself. He was evidently a methodical and efficient man. He drove fast but well, and slowed down strictly through towns and villages.

‘You're the first person I've ever driven with who's stuck to thirty miles an hour in built-up areas,' Christine said.

‘But that's the speed limit. I've got a book of your traffic laws.'

‘I know, but no one ever does it. If the police do stop you, you can always say you didn't see the sign. They don't believe you, but they let you off the first few times.'

He thought that funny. ‘Gee,' he said, ‘back home the cops are tougher than that. They'll fine you right on the spot without a trial. You don't fool with them if you want to keep out of jail.'

He sounded as if he admired that, and he had laughed at the English police, so Christine said: ‘Sounds like the Gestapo to me. I suppose America has to have police like that, to stop them going back to the lawless jungle we discovered.'

‘Now don't let's be like that,' he said, looking straight ahead. ‘We're supposed to be friends, remember?'

She did not know whether he meant he and she, or England and America. ‘I was only joking,' she said. ‘I like Americans awfully. I always have.'

‘It's odd,' he said. ‘You know it? Plenty of English people say that, yet they can't be with an American more than a certain length of time without starting to goad him. Same thing happens the other way around. I suppose it's because we're each trying to disguise the fact that we admire each other a hell of a lot.'

The hotel was a converted country house, standing by itself in a rolling park that had been partly ploughed up for crops during the war and would never get back to its mellowed pasture again. The formal garden had been maintained, and there was a putting course on the lawn in front of the gravel sweep. The interior was gracious and not too chintzy, attractive to the American, but a little sad to an English person who could imagine it as the private home it could never be again.

He took her straight to the bar, which was in what used to be the gunroom. A few rifles and an old blunderbuss still stood in the racks to make the bar picturesque, and two stags' heads and an assortment of stuffed game stared frozenly from the walls.

The American ordered drinks quickly. Alcohol seemed very necessary to him, and he did not speak until drinks came. He looked critically at the size of the glass, downed half his drink and then looked round more happily.

‘Chuck was right,' he said. ‘This is quite a place. All the atmosphere you want. I wonder if the family left these hunting trophies behind when they sold the place.'

‘Oh, that isn't hunting,' said Christine, wishing to enlighten rather than correct. ‘Hunting is only what you do with hounds. Foxes and hares and otters, and drag hunts with aniseed. This is shooting.'

‘Mm-hm.' He did not pay much attention. In America, shooting was called hunting, and that was that.

An elderly manageress in creased black silk, with a tilt to her hennaed head that hinted at better days, came to ask them if they were taking lunch, because it was quite ready. She meant that if the kitchen staff did not get off on time they would give notice, but the American ordered another drink and they stayed in the bar for quite a time before they went into the diningroom.

It was a dignified, high-ceilinged room with panelled walls and
french windows leading to the rose garden. The small restaurant table and wooden chairs looked as out of place as village children at the annual party in the baronial hall.

There were only a few people lunching, because the season had scarcely begun. One of the couples had two small boys, evidently on a day out from a local boarding-school. They were very little boys, with button noses and slicked-back hair and dangling legs that would have looked more at home in shorts than in their long school uniform trousers. Their parents were too old for them. The father looked bored and the mother ate carefully, having trouble with her teeth and the rhubarb pie.

An elderly couple were obviously residents, for they had sauce jars and a packet of crispbread and a bottle of medicine and a half-empty bottle of Empire wine on their table. The two other people in the room were young and meekly self-conscious. They spoke in whispers, not watching each other eat, and trying not to look as if they enjoyed the food. They might be honeymooners, adventuring into more expensive places than they were used to, but secretly regretting that they had not stuck to the teashops where they had done their courting.

Christine did not know whether the American would enjoy watching and commenting on people in restaurants, so she said nothing, while he studied the menu.

‘The chicken sounds the safest,' he said, with the experience of one who has spent two weeks in England. ‘How would that suit you, Miss Cope?'

‘Please don't call me that. It reminds me of the shop.'

‘All right, Christine,' he said. ‘Soup then, and the chicken? And we could try their apple pie.'

The waitress was setting tables for dinner at the other end of the room. He finally caught her eye; and when she had taken the order, Christine asked: ‘What shall I call you then? Vinson is a sort of difficult name. I couldn't call you that.'

‘It's a family name,' he said a little stiffly. ‘I'm proud to bear it.'

It was another of these rather difficult moments when one of them unintentionally offended the other by having a different point of view. An American did not see anything odd in being called Vinson. Their minds went away from each other, but he
brought them together again by saying: ‘Some of my friends call me Vin. I wish you'd call me that.'

‘Sounds like a bath cleaner,' she said and laughed. ‘I like it,' she added quickly before her laugh could push his friendliness away again. ‘Well, here's to you, Vin.' She raised the glass of water which he had asked the waitress to pour.

‘Here's to
us,'
he said, and she dropped her eyes in sudden dismay before the brown-and-amber gaze of his. Don't try and tie me down, her thoughts fluttered. Don't let's start all that. We'll never be anything to each other, and I can't be bothered to play the game of pretending that we might.

When she looked up his eyes had moved away, and after that he was friendly and quite casual towards her. They had coffee in the sunny drawing-room and looked at magazines, and Christine tried to explain the jokes in
Punch
to him. The manageress, who roamed uneasily through the house like a family ghost, came in and told them a long story about when she had been to America with her husband, now, alas, passed away with the full glory of a military funeral.

They escaped from her and went out to the putting course. Vinson started by letting Christine win the first two holes, but when he saw that she was quite skilful he competed seriously against her and was pleased when he won.

They stopped for tea on the way home. The evening was warm and smelled of summer. Cresting a hill, they saw London lying before them in a clear sea of sunset, remote as a mirage.

When they reached streets and people again, Vinson said: ‘You'll come and have dinner with me, won't you, Christine?'

‘I can't very well. I'm not dressed for it.' She was wearing a tweed suit with a yellow sweater, which would not be suitable for the kind of place he might want to go.

An Englishman would have said: ‘What does it matter?' scarcely noticing what she wore, and leaving her to bear any embarrassment that might arise; but the American, trained to take women seriously, said: ‘I see your difficulty. We'll go to the club then. I can get you a steak there, a real steak like you can't get anywhere else.'

It sounded better than going home to family cold supper and the remains of the day's washing-up to be done, and Geoffrey
disgruntled because he had not had his game of chess and Aunt Josephine did not make his bed tightly enough.

‘All right,' she said, ‘but don't think I'm accepting only from greed. I seem to have done nothing but eat all day.'

‘It's been a good day, hasn't it?' He turned to look at her with his black eyebrows raised.

She said: ‘Oh yes, lovely,' and he seemed relieved, and said: ‘I'm so glad you enjoyed it. I wanted you to.'

It was too early to eat, so Vinson suggested that they should go up to his hotel room, where he had a bottle of whisky. If Christine said no, it would have looked as if she feared he had designs on her, so she went up to his room with him, hoping that he had not.

He was very proper. He poured out whisky and showed her his colour photographs and made it seem so unlike a bedroom that she did not have to avoid looking at the bed, but could even sit on it and take off her shoes.

They talked for a while. They were friendly together. Vinson suddenly said: ‘You're very kind to me. Why are you so kind?'

‘Why? Because I like you, I suppose.'

‘Do you? I certainly hope you do.' He was standing in the middle of the room, poised on the balls of his feet, and she thought then that if she had given the smallest sign he would have come over to the bed. She got up, pulling down her skirt and wanting to hitch her suspenders.

‘Well, I'm hungry,' she said. ‘What about that steak?'

He took his eyes off her and went quietly to get her coat.

The steak was enormous. It was so big and garnished with so many fried potatoes and onions that it had to be on an oval dish instead of a plate. When it was set in front of Christine she thought it was for the two of them and began to cut it in half, but another oval dish the same size was set in front of Vinson, who attacked it without surprise. Christine was left with half the steak on her plate, and she said that she wished she could put it in a paper bag and take it home for the dogs. Vinson laughed, to make sure that this was only meant to be a joke.