This Merry Bond (4 page)

She met Simon Shand at the usual functions, but since that last encounter at Bassetts Ponds he had made no further effort to get to know her better. He was seen a great deal with Stella Lucy and, in common with everyone else, Nicky suspected a mild affair and thought no more about it. But the old anger remained. Gradually she began to realize that his attitude was as high-handed as her own. She had made her position toward the Shands very clear in the first place and he was making it equally clear in a far more courteous fashion that he had little use for the Bredons. Very well, then, let him try high-hatting her! There were still one or two houses left where breeding mattered more than money and where Sir Charles Bredon’s daughter would find a welcome when John Shand’s son would not.

But in this again he puzzled her. She could swear that he had no interest in her whatever, until at one of Liza Coleman’s parties he took her home because he considered her own escort too drunk to be trusted. She remembered that little incident very well. He had taken no notice of her the entire evening, but he must have been observant of more than she had imagined, for he had left Stella abruptly and crossed the room to where Freddie Whiteman was trying to help Nicky into her coat.

“Were you leaving?” he asked quite politely.

“I’m taking Nicky home, ol’ boy,” Freddie said and winked broadly. “Maybe not see me back again tonight. I’ve taken Nicky home before.”

There was no scene. The astonished Freddie found himself once more propping up the bar, and Nicky was being tucked with strong capable hands into Simon’s car.

She looked at him curiously.

“Why have you bothered?” she asked.

He got in beside her and began pulling on his driving gloves.

“I really didn’t think he was in any fit condition to drive,” he, said.

“I’ve driven with Freddie when he’s been tighter than this,” she said with a hint of bravado. “As you heard him say, he’s taken me home before.”

“I shouldn’t have thought,” said Simon quietly, “that you would much care for that remark he made.”

She felt herself flushing in the darkness. What was there about this man that always got her back up? He seemed to have a knack of putting her gently but firmly in the wrong.

“That’s old-fashioned and rather provincial,” she retorted. “My father’s taught me to handle my men properly.”

They drove back in comparative silence after that.

Suddenly he said out of the darkness: “You mustn’t confuse your issues, you know. Old-fashioned and provincial are not necessarily the same thing, though I admit I’m probably both. I come of provincial stock.”

She could have gladly hit him, then unreasonably felt a desire to cry. There was some quality about him that unsettled her and made her feel frequently ashamed.

The headlights of the car struck the dark trunks of the chestnuts as they turned into the avenue, sending long shadows stretching ahead in grotesque distortion. They stood outside the silent house for a moment. Nicky didn’t ask him in, and she stood in a clear patch of moonlight, her lifted face half angry, half unhappy in the silver radiance. She was aware of Simon standing close to her, his disconcerting eyes gravely watching her.

With a quick, unexpected movement he bent and kissed her and for an instant she yielded to an unexpected attraction she only half-understood and had never met until now. Then, with an instinct that was too quick to control, she slapped him hard across the face.

He didn’t seem in the least disconcerted, but stood looking down at her, amusement only too plainly written in his eyes.

“After all,” she said with a sort of frightened anger, “you’re just the same as any of the others and have to make love to the girl you see home.”

He shook his head at her, his grave mouth relaxing in a smile.

“I thought it was considered provincial to slap a man’s face these days,” he said very gently.

The quick tears stung her eyes.

“Chalk that one up, Simon Shand, and I hope you’re satisfied!” she cried.

“Quite,” he replied. “I learned something I very much wanted to know. Good night.”

He lifted his hat and went back to his car without a word of apology.

It seemed to Nicky, on looking back, that these small incidents were cumulative, the insignificant pointers to the final relationship between the Shands and the Bredons. On the face of it, it seemed impossible to arrive at any workable understanding between them. The very existence of the Shands had rankled from the day when Nicky and her father had come home to find the Shand mansion overlooking the Nye acres in all its blatant ugliness. She could not at that time understand old John’s honesty, his dislike of humbug and hypocrisy. She thought with her father that the old man was an impossible boor, a moneyed tradesman trying to assert his own importance. It was pardonable to be rude to John Shand, for he had no manners himself.

But Simon couldn’t be dismissed in the same category. Had he not been his father’s son, Nicky knew she would never have dared to be so insolent. Simon Shand was a thorn in the flesh, for he had a simplicity that was always to puzzle her. She had too little experience as yet with standards that were other than Bredon to recognize a quality in him that was greater than her own or Charles’s. She only knew that he had a knack of making her feel small and that he didn’t conform to what she deemed to be the Shand pattern.

She sat on the floor one evening by her father’s chair and tried to argue it out.

“What is it about us that riles old Shand so much, Charles? It’s obvious why he riles us, but I can’t see—”

Charles laughed.

“You’re a perfect example of the ruling
classes
, my sweet,” he said lightly. “Implicit faith in your own powers of rightness with never a thought to the masses!”

“Oh, Charles, that makes us sound horribly self-righteous,” she protested, half-laughing.

“Well, so we are. And so in his lower middle-class fashion is old Shand. That’s what makes him so impossible. Now the son’s a different kettle of fish altogether. Hilary’s right, you know; there must be some good blood somewhere. Probably the mother’s side.” “He’s just as self-righteous,” Nicky said sharply, then amended with reluctant honesty, “At least he’s so often right. Perhaps it isn’t the same.”

“See much of him?”

“No. I don’t think he likes me.”

“Curious!” said Charles with mock irony.

“Oh, he’s no different from the others really,” she was stung to retort. “You always said there’s very little difference between men where women are concerned, and you’re right.”

“I see,” said Charles and shot her a quick look. “Do you like him, Nick?”

“Not much. I don’t like any of the Shands. But the neighborhood seems quite ready to put up with the boots and shoes for the sake of an eligible bachelor. Liza told me that he’s made thousands out of the business since the old man gave up.”

Charles sighed.

“Yes. Between the two of them they’re worth a fortune. I could do with a quarter of it to set Nye to rights.”

She hugged her knees to her chin in the firelight.

“Are things bad just now darling?”

“Pretty tight. Some more land will have to go if things don’t get better.”

“Oh, Charles! Nye isn’t building property to be sold off in plots,” she said angrily.

Impatiently, he shrugged still farther into the deep chair.

“Don’t be a fool, Nicky! I don’t like selling land any more than you do, but bills have to be settled some time. Shand doesn’t want to build on his land, anyway.”

“Shand again!”

“Well, darling, he’s camped on our boundaries with the sole idea of acquiring most of our land, so he’s decidedly our best buyer.”

She was silent, staring into the fire, but it struck her, not for the first time, that Charles didn’t greatly care what became of Nye. She knew he couldn’t sell the house, which was entailed, and that at least was one safeguard for the future, but he was so much a wanderer at heart that he could never love any one piece of earth sufficiently to make sacrifices for it.

Almost as if he voiced her thoughts
,
he said: “You don’t really want to spend the winter here, do you, Nick?”

“But Charles, we’ve only just come back!”

“All right, all right. I just thought things were a bit depressing and we might go off somewhere until they get better.”

She had a quick unfamiliar stab of fear.

“Things aren’t
really
bad—not worse than usual, are they?” she asked and turned to look at him. But his face was in shadow and only his hands—long, narrow hands like her own—twisted and fidgeted in the firelight.

“Oh, something will turn up,” he said in his old casual manner. “And after all, one’s got to take a chance. What have you been up to lately?”

“Nothing much,” she answered, relieved at the change of subject. “Oh, I’ve been run in again, darling. I forgot.”

“My good child, this must be about the tenth time,” said Charles impatiently. “How do you think it looks for a magistrate’s daughter to continually come up before the courts?”

“Lucky for the magistrate’s daughter,” Nicky said unabashed. “They let me off lightly in consequence.”

“Well, I’ll be surprised if you’re so lucky this time, my pretty.
They’ve put old Shand on the bench since we came back.”

“These Shands!” cried Nicky with exasperation. “I fall over them wherever I go! Anyway, he won’t dare make himself unpleasant.”

But John Shand dared to make himself very unpleasant indeed. He made it quite clear from the start that his sympathies didn’t lie with the Bredons. They had got away with too much in the past, riding roughshod over the law and all the canons of society because everyone was too class-conscious to treat them like ordinary people.

Perhaps the sight of Nicky defending her cause with a charm she would never have wasted on him otherwise went a long way to hardening the old man’s heart. Perhaps he saw the grin and barely perceptible wink that passed between father and daughter as Nicky finished speaking, and his choleric temper was roused, but the words which passed audibly enough between himself, old Colonel Evershot and Sir James Mosspaul were heated and violent.

He argued, his accent becoming stronger than ever as he made his points, that there was too much speeding through the village, the children were coming out of school at the time—any one of them might have been injured, perhaps killed—and that if they thought because the defendant’s father was a magistrate she should be treated any differently from anyone else, he for one would, show them where they were wrong. He demanded the maximum penalty and delivered a blunt and lengthy reprimand to the defendant.

Standing there before the bench, Nicky watched them all with amusement at first. Old Colonel Evershot, red and uncomfortable and avoiding her eye; Sir James, his pompous bluster pricked by the unexpected onslaught. She watched old Shand, and saw that Simon was like him in one thing—that direct, disconcerting gaze of shrewd blue eyes. But there the resemblance ended. John Shand looked what he was, a hard-headed north-country tradesman who had built up his present position by that very directness and lack of compromise that carried his demands forward now.

In spite of herself, she felt a fleeting admiration for his courage; then his blunt, contemptuous words began to sting her. Before she could stop herself, she was answering him back, and it wasn’t until she caught Charles’s disapproving eye that she realized she was contributing to a disgraceful public scene.

Shand carried the day, as indeed in the face of what he had just said, no different outcome could have been expected. Nicky turned her back on the magistrates and immediately left the courtroom with her father. The smiles of her friends were not all sympathetic, and right at the back of the court she saw Simon, leaning against the wall looking at her curiously.

The coffee room of the Nye Arms was empty when she arrived. It was late afternoon. The bar would be opening in less than an hour, and Nicky ordered herself some tea and buttered toast while she waited. Some of the gang would be sure to come along.

She looked around the dark little room with its low, raftered ceiling and thought of the many parties it had witnessed. Twenty-first birthdays, and smoky sessions in the small hours on the way back from a dance. With a slight feeling of shame she remembered, the many times they had awakened the proprietor after he had gone to bed. Charles was his landlord, and because she was Charles’s daughter she supposed he hadn’t liked to refuse.

She wondered, almost for the first time, how many people didn’t like to refuse her things because she was Charles’s daughter. It wasn’t a comfortable thought. Nicky suddenly realized that she wanted to be liked for herself.

“Myself alone!” she declaimed aloud with memories of some comic song lighting an unsuspected streak of sentimentality in her.

Someone came into the coffee room and she looked up quickly.

“Oh,” she said disgustedly as she saw Simon standing in the doorway.

“I saw your car outside,” he said.

“Come to gloat?” she asked with her mouth full of buttered toast.