This Merry Bond (11 page)

At the door of their room he paused and knocked, but there was no reply. He tried the handle but the door was locked.

He called softly:

“Nicky, it’s Simon. Open the door, darling.”

But there was no sound from inside the room, and under the door there was no ray of light.

CHAPTER NINE

N
icky stood at her bedroom window the next morning, staring out on to the unfamiliar country. Below her, as far as the eye could see, stretched miles and miles of rolling moor, dark and brooding under a gray rain-washed sky. A strange, desolate country, as unlike the familiar wooded grasslands of Sussex as Nicky had ever imagined.

She shivered a little and pulled her long green housecoat more closely around her. She had slept heavily from sheer strain and exhaustion, but the morning was chill and accusing, and she knew she had to face Simon.

Almost immediately there was a knock on her door and he came in. He was fully dressed, and by the mud on his shoes, she guessed he had been up early tramping the moors. She leaned against the window frame and waited for him to speak first.

“What’s your explanation?” he said quietly.

She knew suddenly that she was a little afraid of him, but before she could speak he continued.

“Was it necessary to lock me out of my own room? I knew you were tired last night. I wouldn’t have bothered you.”

She rushed defiantly into speech. “I told you, Simon, that you could force me to marry you, but you could never force me to live with you. I don’t think you believed me at the time, but I meant it.” He stood looking at her, his hands in his pockets, and the cold morning light struck full on his face. There was a definite change. He looked older, and there was a grim set to his mouth and jaw that was very reminiscent of his father.

“I didn’t believe you,” he said in harsh tones, “because I didn’t think you capable of such dishonesty.”

“I wasn’t dishonest!” she flared, the quick color staining her cheekbones. “It was simply a matter of
quid pro quo.
You forced me to keep a bargain. Well I have—to the letter.”

“You’ve never kept a bargain in your life, Nicky,” he said and his voice was cutting in its contempt. “You’d wriggle out of anything. You haven’t any conception of honor as ordinary people see it. You’re just a common cheat.”

Her hands flew to her flaming cheeks.

“You’re the first person who’s ever called me that,” she said in a voice that shook. “And you’ll be the last. I won’t stay with you.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” he said quietly. “You’ve made a fool of me once, my dear, but you’re not going to do it again. You’ll remain my wife in the eyes of the world at least
.
Don’t worry. I shan’t come near you unless you ask me to yourself. If you’d had the courtesy to explain your reasons last night I might have felt very differently this morning. But to lock the door on me was insulting. Do you imagine it was pleasant to have to go downstairs and ask for another room? You don’t humiliate me twice, Nicky.”

The anger suddenly went out of her. She had an unexpected impulse to go to him and put her arms around his neck and say: “I’m sorry. I was wrong. Let’s start again.” But she had done him an unforgivable injury. She had made a fool of him, and he wouldn’t easily forget that.

“I—I—” she began, but he cut in quickly:

“Well, you can go on with your cheating. At least we know where we are now. But you needn’t trouble to lock your door after this. In future we’ll have separate rooms.”

He turned on his heel and went out of the room without giving her another glance.

They spent the next week in the north, stopping several days in Halifax, where Simon had business to attend to at the factory for his father.

“You’ll have to come along with me the first time, if you don’t mind, Nicky,” Simon said. “They’ll expect it.”

Indeed they were given a royal welcome, and Nicky was taken all over the factory and finally told to choose some leather for a special pair of shoes. Here, at any rate, she sampled the rough friendliness of north-country people. And here in the north, Shand was a name as famous as Bredon was in the south. Nicky was touched and surprised at the affection with which they spoke of old John Shand.

But when Simon’s business was completed there seemed no point in prolonging their honeymoon any further. Simon said there was plenty to attend to at Nye, and Nicky agreed, with a certain amount of relief, to cut out Scotland and return home.

It had been a strange week. Simon was always courteous and considerate, but he seemed to have retired into an icy reserve that Nicky felt quite unable to break through. How, she wondered a little wearily, was this crazy marriage to end? It wasn’t conceivable that they should continue indefinitely in such mutual estrangement, but she herself was too resentful and unhappy to try and understand all that Simon might be feeling. Indeed she had no direct means of knowing what he felt. It never occurred to her that he was, of the two, more sensitive than herself. She remembered only his contempt and she was prepared to match it with an equal scorn and no surrender.

And so they returned to Nye, unheralded except for a wire to Mouse in the morning, and they drove unnoticed through the village and the gr
e
at iron gates of Nye.

The chestnuts had flowered, and as the car passed beneath that spreading canopy of beauty, Nicky, though she had seen the sight a hundred times, felt the tears sting her eyes. This was home. This was Nye, the beloved inheritance. No matter that she returned with a stranger beside her. Nye was too strong for any alien spirit.

Simon, glancing at Nicky’s ecstatic face, felt his own heart lighten. Perhaps things would be easier here. But as he followed her into the familiar hall and watched her fling herself upon Mouse, he knew this would not be so. Nye was only another barrier he had built between them, and Nicky, returning unchanged to her old home, was farther from him than ever.

Mouse was scolding Nicky. “A nice thing, I must say, running home a week after you’re married, and nothing prepared,” she grumbled. “What were you thinking of, sir?”

“The weather was bad, and Nicky was homesick, I think,” Simon said with a smile.

Mouse snorted. “Homesick! On her honeymoon! You mark my words, sir, if you start giving in to Nicky now you’ll have endless trouble with her. And I ought to know.”

She said no more but gave him a long shrewd look as she saw the sudden weariness in his face.

“That theory doesn’t always work out,” he said and stooped to pat-one of the dogs.

“The village had planned a welcome,” Mouse said crossly. For some obscure reason she felt she wanted to shake Nicky. “Everyone will be disappointed, but what’s that to you?”

“Oh, Mouse!” Nicky sounded a little tearful. “Don’t be so cross. There’s still my coming of age. Aren’t you pleased to see me back? Say you are at once, you horrid old woman, or I’ll do something dreadful to you!”

For a moment it seemed as if Mouse was not to be cajoled, then her little beady eyes began to twinkle and she struggled against a smile:

“Oh, get along with you! I’ve had enough of your nonsense. Go upstairs and change your shoes; you look cold.”

And as he watched Nicky run laughing up the stairs, Simon thought how simple his marriage would be if he could adopt nursery tactics as successfully as Mouse.

It was a strange homecoming. Simon, tired and depressed, all the high hopes of his marriage quenched, was conscious that first evening of being a guest in his own house. Nicky’s complete change of manner on her return home, hurt him. He thought that their disastrous honeymoon had most likely left more on him than on her, for she at least had expected nothing, whilst he had hoped for so much.

Nicky felt a little strange herself. It was odd to see Simon sitting in Charles’s place at the head of the table and listen to him giving orders to his servants. Striving after justice, she told herself that she had no right to resent his authority after all he was doing for Nye, but she knew that she would resent it in the days to come.

She looked at him several times at dinner with swift uneasy glances and wondered what he was thinking. He was very silent and his grave, rather severe face was impossible to read. She had no means of understanding the discouragement and depression that had seized him. She only thought that he seemed cold and withdrawn, and she was relieved when the meal was over and she could curl up with a book by the library fire. But when bedtime came she went with a faint sense of panic to the big room where she had never slept before, and looked at the two beds standing side by side turned down in readiness. She was still standing by the fire fully dressed when Simon came up.

The room seemed very quiet. Nicky, as she saw Simon standing just inside the door watching her with an expression she didn’t understand, knew suddenly that the situation was no longer in her hands. She had thought quite simply that the consequences of her marriage depended entirely on herself, but she knew now that if Simon chose to enforce his bargain she was powerless. He had shown himself all along to be a man who did not give in easily. He had held her to every agreement. There was no reason to suppose that in fairness to himself he would indefinitely put up with the situation.

She wasn’t aware that the defiance of that first morning had gone out of her, that she was looking at him with an unconscious plea to his generosity. His voice was gentle as he said:

“Aren’t you going to get undressed? It’s quite late.”

“Yes,” she said. “In a minute.”

He came and stood beside her in the circle of firelight.

“Listen to me, Nicky,” he began quietly. “The village is sufficiently interested in us to discuss us well with the servants. It didn’t matter particularly what the staff did and thought in strange hotels this last week, but I’m not going to have gossip in a place where everyone knows us. I’m afraid that means you’ll have to put up with me in your bedroom. Oh, don’t worry,” he added with a trace of weariness in his voice. “I shan’t trouble you.”

All at once Nicky wanted to weep. She knew a forlorn impulse to feel his arms around her.

“Simon—” Like a child, she slipped a hand into his and he could feel her long fingers nervously flexing and unflexing between his.

Misunderstanding her unwonted gentleness, he said with a weariness that touched her:

“My dear, surely you don’t think there would be any pleasure for me to force you into something you so clearly hate?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t think it mattered to you,” she said, and he gently released her fingers.

“Have I deserved such a harsh opinion from you?” he asked a little sadly, and she held her fingers to a mouth that suddenly trembled. She didn’t want to cry.

“No,” she said. “Perhaps I don’t always understand.”

“Perhaps neither of us do,” he said. “Perhaps that’s a thing we shall both learn in time. And, Nicky, one thing I do ask. It would upset my mother terribly if she thought things were not right between us, so will you try not to hate me too badly when she’s about?”

“
I
don’t hate you, Simon,” Nicky said a little desperately, but he only smiled and went into his dressing room and closed the door.

But she did hate him many times in the weeks to come. The work on Honeysett’s cottage began almost at once, and Nicky watched the process of demolition with a sore and angry spirit. The subject was never mentioned between them, and although Simon tried to get her to cooperate with him over other improvements and alterations to the estate, she refused to take an active interest.

At first he made a point of consulting her, before making any drastic changes, but she held so resolutely aloof from all his suggestions and plans that in the end he gave up trying and went his own way. He didn’t realize that his own reserve made it difficult for her to be natural with him. He only knew that the early promise of their engagement had never fulfilled itself, and by the end of that cold wet April he knew he should never have married Nicky.

To smother his unhappiness, he flung himself into the work of running the estate, proving very quickly that he had an excellent grasp of such matters. The tenants liked him. He was considerate and conscientious, and he paid good wages. Charles had not been popular, although the Bredons had been squires of Hammertye for generations. He was abroad so much and had never bothered to effect personal contact with his tenants. Nicky would have been surprised to learn that her own success was due largely to the fact that she was Simon’s wife, and not because she was Charles’s daughter.

Nicky herself missed Charles badly. There was little enough companionship in her relations with Simon, and with his grave preoccupation with the estate, he already seemed older than Charles. Restless and unhappy, Nicky made sudden escapes to London where she picked up the threads of old relationships and danced her boredom away in nightclubs. She began filling the house at weekends again with the old rackety crowd and when Simon protested at last, Nicky flared up into one of her old childish tempers.

“You can’t have it all your own way, Simon. You’ve got Nye to play with now and you can hardly begrudge me my small amusements. After all, this used to be my home.”

“I hope it’s still your home,” Simon countered gravely. “And I certainly don’t begrudge you any fun, my dear. But half of the people who come here only come for what they can get out of us.”

“What do I care? They’re good value, putting it at its lowest, and that’s more than can be said for your sticky north-country friends who come here,” she retorted.

Simon regarded her thoughtfully. “I’m sorry if you find my friends dull,” he said quietly. “They don’t come very often, you must admit. But if we’re going to discuss values, I can’t say that I agree that most of these people are good value. I dislike spongers, especially when they are pretty shaky morally as well.”

“Oh, don’t be so priggish and
bourgeois,"
she cried, and he replied as once before:

“
I
come of
bourgeois
stock, and I look at things differently, it appears.”

But he wondered rather wearily if he was perhaps a prig. Up to a point, he could refuse to entertain people whom he considered undesirable, but it was useless under the circumstances to stop Nicky going out with her friends. It would only precipitate another crisis, and in these early, difficult days he was anxious to avoid anything that would further widen the breach between them.

Mary Shand, if her wise eyes saw more than they were meant to see, said nothing. She liked Nicky, who was always charming to her, and she had a certain sympathy for any young girl marrying into Shand traditions. Simon would never be as stiff necked as his father, but Nicky was young and untried, and as yet not adaptable. Mary wondered a little about that brief honeymoon, though she never discussed it with her husband.

But Mouse saw further than any of them. She had never approved of the marriage in the first place, but she had come to respect Simon and was of the opinion that Nicky might have done a great deal worse. She was worried. They didn’t behave like a newly married couple and it clearly wasn’t right for a young bride to go off and jolly with Tom, Dick and Harry, leaving her husband sitting at home.

“You’re not behaving yourself, Nicky,” she said once after a particularly noisy weekend was over. “It’s plain to see Mr. Simon doesn’t like your friends, and small wonder; but you’re doing it on purpose, just as you and Michael used to let your white mice run all over poor Mrs. Bredon-Thomas because she didn’t like it. It’s not right.”

But Nicky didn’t flare up.

“You don’t understand, Mouse,” she said in a dispirited voice. “If it was just as simple as white mice ... If Michael were here now, perhaps ... it would be someone to laugh with at any rate. I wonder if he’ll remember to write for my coming of age. He never took any notice of the wedding.”

Nicky’s coming of age! Simon smiled as he superintended the preparations. After all, she wasn’t very old. He remembered his own coming of age, unheralded by any feudal pomp. There had been a strike in the factory and he had spent that day working overtime with the few older
e
mployees who had carried on.

Nicky’s wedding day had been disastrous. At least her birthday should be perfect. Invitations went out wholesale. Simon spared no expense in the arrangements. A first-class band was engaged for the evening, and while the guests danced in the great hall, the villagers were to do the same in a large marquee to be erected in the park. Charles had promised to come back for the occasion, and as the time approached, Nicky began to realize how much she was counting on his return. He had been her constant companion for so long that she missed him unbearably. His short, infrequent letters filled her with nostalgia for the little foreign towns that they had visited so often together.