This Merry Bond (6 page)

“Then why—”

“Because there’s no one else. Because you’re our richest neighbor, to put it crudely, and if you won’t help us we’re sunk.”

“Oh, I see—money,” he said and there was a curious inflection in his voice that made her wriggle uncomfortably. “Do I understand you want to borrow money from me?”

She bit her lower lip hard.

“Yes, I’m afraid I do,” she said in a small voice.

“How much?”

“Five thousand pounds.”

“Five thousand. That’s a large sum.”

If he was surprised, he managed to disguise the fact admirably, but his whole manner subtly changed. When he next spoke he had become the hard-headed businessman, the true flesh and blood of old John Shand.

“What security have you to offer?”

She stared at him, blinking a little.

“Security?” she stammered. “Why—I don’t know. We’d pay interest, of course.”

“Naturally.”

“What exactly do you mean?”

“On a loan of this size it’s usual to offer some sort of security in lieu of default,” he said.

She flushed.

“Surely my father’s word—” she began hotly, but he broke in with gentle irony:

“Another gentleman’s agreement? I’m sorry, but I’m a businessman, and that kind of proposition doesn’t appeal to me.”

“Is that another way of telling me you don’t trust either of us?” she asked, her cheeks now scarlet.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “But I think your father’s word has not always been his bond in the past. That’s why you’ve had to come to me now, isn’t it? Well, as
I
think I told you once before, I come of working stock and I like a deal to be square. Just one thing. Did your father se
n
d you here?”

“No,” said Nicky, humiliated beyond words. “And I wish to goodness I’d never thought of the idea myself.”

He leaned forward in his chair.

“I repeat, Nicky, I’m a businessman, and if you can offer any reasonable security I’ll put up the money.”

“What security have I?” she demanded bitterly. “There’s only myself.”

“Yes, that’s so, but in what capacity?”

She looked at him, her long bright eyes restless and unhappy. In her humiliation she flung back:

“Any capacity you like. There’s only one really, isn’t there?”

“You would suggest a weekend in some discreet spot?”

She couldn’t make out if he was serious or not.

“Why not?” she said flippantly. “If you could stand it that long.”

“I see.” He folded his arms across his chest and regarded her steadily. “You put a pretty high value on your services.”

All at once she wanted to weep. She wanted to cry: “I’m not like this. How did we land in such a situation? I want to keep your respect, not lose it.” But then she thought: Perhaps I never had his respect in the first place. How shall I deal with this? Michael would know how.
And she suddenly longed for Michael’s return from those distant places, for someone of her own kind to stand beside her and give her back her self-esteem.

Simon was speaking again.

“Under the circumstances, I suppose that is the best you can offer,” he said. “I’m prepared to take it.”

She stared at him.

“Are you serious?” she said at last.

“Perfectly. Weren’t you?”

She lifted her head a little higher.

“If the arrangement suits you, it suits me,” she said in a hard, brittle little voice.

“Very well, then.” He unlocked a drawer in the desk and took out a check book. “You won’t object, of course, to having our agreement down in writing,” he said in an expressionless voice. “It’s quite usual and this, you will admit, is rather a peculiar case.” She nodded, unable to speak for the moment. He pulled a sheet of foolscap to him and wrote steadily for a few minutes, putting his signature at the bottom. He handed the paper to her to read through, then taking his pen, she signed her name beneath his without a word, and watched him fold up the agreement and lock it away in the drawer.

He gave her the check, and she got slowly to her feet and stood twisting it between her fingers.

“What did you say the date of repayment was?” she asked with lips that trembled a little.

“January the thirty-first. It was down in the agreement.”

“I didn’t notice.”

For a moment his gaze was more kindly as it rested on her pale, still face.

“You should never sign anything you haven’t read through properly,” he said and walked to the door. “Sure you won’t stop to lunch?”

“Lord almighty, no!” she exclaimed fervently.

At the front door, she said with an effort at recapturing her old nonchalant attitude:

“Goodbye, and thank you. After all, there’s not really much risk for either of us, is there? And one has to take a chance.”

“I hope you’re right,” he told her gravely, and watched her slim erect figure pass from the sunlight into the shadow of the trees.

But, safe on her father’s territory, she began to run, and the difficult tears, restrained so long, ran down her face unchecked.

“Oh, Charles! The things I do for you!” she sobbed aloud. “The things I do for you!”

CHAPTER
FIVE

Charles asked no questions

When Nicky said: “Foreclosing date is January the thirty-first, darling, so get busy with the markets,” he replied:

“Bit of a usurer, isn’t he? But these rich tradesmen are all alike. We’d better ask him around to dine or something.”

“No,” said Nicky violently. “At least—not yet.”

Charles went off presently on one of his brief disappearances to London, and Nicky elected to go with him. They spent a week of racketing around nightclubs and returned with a crowd of weekend guests.

Charles bought a young horse that pleased him mightily. He was in great form these days and stopped at Nye for longer periods than before. The weeks slipped by and somehow that invitation to Simon Shand was never sent. Nicky saw him once or twice out hunting, but he must have been away a good bit himself, since nobody heard of him for some time. A wet November slid quickly into an even wetter December and Christmas was almost upon them.

“The usual family Christmas again, Charles?” Nicky asked with resignation.

“I’m afraid so, my sweet. It’s all we ever do for our relations.”

“But Aunt Alice!”

“Well you can’t have Hilary without Alice, and you know you want him.”

“Darling Uncle Hilary, of course I do! Charles, isn’t Michael ever coming back?”

“Oh, he’ll blow in some time when you least expect him. His is the life, Nick. I’ve a good mind to go and look him up wherever he is and racket around with him for a bit.”

“Well, not till after Christmas, darling,” Nicky said firmly. “I’m not coping with Aunt Alice alone, thank you.”

They were all to arrive on Christmas Eve. Hilary and Alice Bredon, and old Lady Edderton, an aunt of Charles by marriage.

Mouse and Nicky worked feverishly all morning with holly and mistletoe. They were still at it at three o’clock when the front door bell pealed and quite unexpectedly Simon Shand walked into the great hall.

Mouse gave him a brief greeting and went on with her work of decorating the fireplace, but Nicky stared at him open-mouthed. “Oh, hullo!” she said a little blankly.

She was winding a long garland of holly around one of the big chandeliers, and Simon stood surveying her with a friendly smile. She was wearing an old green smock, and was flushed and dishevelled, and she had a piece of holly rakishly stuck behind one ear.

“I’ve brought you a Christmas cake from my mother,” he said. “One of the real old-fashioned sort we get in the north. She made it herself.”

The homely and utterly unexpected gesture touched something unsuspected in Nicky.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “How lovely of her! Do let me look.”

She scrambled down from the steps and took the parcel he was carrying.

“Quick, Mouse, the scissors!” she cried. “Oh! Isn’t it lush? Look, Mouse! You could never buy that in a shop.”

Her pleasure was so spontaneous that Simon glanced at her with interest. So there was simplicity in her after all! Mouse said with respect that it made her think of her younger days when the best houses would have died rather than send out to a caterers for food. “I’ll take it to the kitchen and put it away at once,” she said. Nicky stood looking at Simon after Mouse had gone. It was the first time she had been alone with him since that distressing morning in his den, and some of her embarrassment returned.

“We’re in the most awful muddle still,” she said a little nervously. “Mouse and I have been at it all day and the servants are much too busy decorating their own quarters to lend a hand.” She paused suddenly and a faint flush stained her high cheekbones.

“I didn’t think of sending anything up to the Towers,” she said. “I never thought your mother would trouble. But I’ll get Giles to pick masses and masses of violets—we have thousands—and you can take them back to her. Do you think she would like that?”

“I’m sure she would be most touched,” he said gently.

“Stay and have tea and help us with the decorations,” she said impulsively. “It’s rather fun really.”

“I’d like to,” he replied simply. “Give me some orders.”

All afternoon they worked on the decorations together. Nicky was more natural than he had ever seen her. The simple performance of an old-established custom seemed to disperse that defensive attitude she always had with him. With the advent of tea and Charles simultaneously, however, some of the old restraint returned. Quite unconsciously Nicky and her father ranged together against him, keeping him gently outside their cir
c
le. But, sitting around the library fire listening to the rain beating against the window, it was difficult not to be friendly. Dogs lay peacefully asleep at their feet and there was a smell of crumpets in the air. Looking at Nicky, Simon began to wonder for the first time how old she really was, for sitting on the floor, her crumpled smock pulled up to display her knees, and her tousled red hair falling over her face she might have been still in the schoolroom.

“Well, we can’t idle,”
she said
s
uddenly
. “We must do the tree now.” She jumped up, scattering the dogs, who awoke with yelps.

“It’s no use asking you to help, Charles, I know,” she said. “You never will.”

He smiled a little crookedly.

“I’m too old and too disillusioned to enjoy getting myself pricked with holly, my pretty. I leave that to your decorative self. The sprig behind the ear is very—provocative, isn’t it, Shand?”

“Silly old fool!” she laughed and snatched the sprig out of her hair and threw it on the fire.

They stood in front of the tree when it was finished and Nicky said dreamily:

“Lots of these decorations are the same ones we had as children. Mouse always dismantles the tree herself. I remember Michael and I always passionately wanted the angel on the top. Charles brought it back one year from Munich. But Mouse never allowed anyone to have it—not even us—and it was always put away again for next year. We used to think it awfully mean.”

“It really is a story-book picture,” Simon said, and indeed, the great hall of Nye soaring to the shadows in lovely arcs and curves of ancient timber, with its minstrels’ gallery hung with holly and in the very center the lighted tree glowing and dancing with fire in the half-light, might have been an illustration to any Christmas fairy tale.

He thought fleetingly that he had likened Nicky once to an illustration in an old French book. The Bredons and Nye had this pictorial quality—something oddly attractive and not quite real.

“Let’s go and find some sherry as a reward for our labors,” Nicky said, leading the way back into the library again. “I suppose my revered relations will be arriving any minute. How sickening, it’s going to be a wet Christmas.”

“I’m glad you can come on Boxing night,” she said with polite formality as they stood by the fire sipping their sherry.

The Shands had all been asked, since it was to be a big affair. They couldn’t very well be left out, but Nicky had been highly relieved when John Shand had refused on behalf of himself and his wife.

“What are you going to do—dance?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” she said with a grimace. “You’ll have to make up your mind to a thoroughly old-fashioned evening. We shall play childish games and drink punch at twelve o’clock. The family expect it, you know.”

But when, on Boxing night, after they had sat down thirty odd to dinner, they raced all over the house playing hide-and-seek and other time-honored favorites, Simon observed with amusement that no one entered more wholeheartedly into the proceedings than Nicky. She wore white and her wide whirling skirts flew about her as she ran, her slender young body scarcely ever still.

Only Charles stood slightly apart watchi
n
g his guests with that puckish, half-cynical smile that was so much a part of him.

Alice Bredon sat by the fire, disapproving of everyone and everything, her back like a grenadier’s, but old Lady Edderton, seventy if she was a day, was enjoying everything. They played sardines, and Nicky went to hide. Simon, who didn’t know his way about the house, frequently got lost, and quite by accident stumbled on her hiding-place before anyone else discovered it. Her white dress betrayed her, and he slipped behind the heavy tapestry hangings of a hidden alcove and sat down in the deep embrasure beside her.

“Who is it?” she whispered.

He didn’t answer at once, but put out a hand to feel for her. It was too dark to distinguish faces.

He felt her draw back into her corner.

“Freddie, if it’s you—” she said with quite a different note in her voice.

“It isn’t Freddie. It’s me—Simon,” he said gently.

“Oh.” He could feel her relax and knew she was leaning forward trying to see his face. “Are you enjoying the party?” she asked in a whisper again.

“Very much,” he whispered back. “It’s Christmas as it should be, don’t you think?”

“I think so, really, but Charles hates it.”

“How old are you, Nicky?”

“Twenty.”

“Is that all? Why, you’re quite a baby really.”

“Did you think I was older, then?”

“Perhaps not really. But at times you seem sophisticated and assured—which is what you aim for, I expect.”

“It’s what I am.”

“Not entirely. Underneath I suspect you’re quite different.”

For a moment she was intensely aware of him, intensely conscious of their isolation from everyone else, and knew again that strange attraction she had experienced so unwittingly with his kiss. For a wild instant she wanted him to kiss her again. There in the darkness he seemed to have no individuality. He was entirely male and she was acutely alive to him.

There were footsteps and giggles in the long polished corridor, a hand came through the curtains and poked. With smothered laughter Liza and Freddie squeezed themselves into the embrasure.

Later, when they all trooped downstairs again, Liza hung behind.

“Sorry if I interrupted, darling,” she said to Nicky in her high shrill voice. “I didn’t know it was an assignation. Why didn’t you tell me? I’d have held off the others for you.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Nicky said sharply. “There was no assignation, and you didn’t interrupt anything.”

She knew Liza’s tongue. She was the source of most of the scandal that got about Hammertye.

“So
you
say, my sweet. Anyhow, I don’t blame you.”

Liza wandered off in search of Freddie, doubtless to bait him with her idea.

But Nicky saw nothing of any of the Shands until the end of January, when the weather changed abruptly to bitterest winter. The countryside awoke each morning to hard black frost and hunting was stopped. Presently the snow came and people took improvised sledges up on to the Downs and made bob runs.

Nicky was out all day revelling in the dry crisp weather, but Charles huddled over a fire, shivering and cursing the English climate.

“This settles it,” he told Nicky one evening. “I’m off as soon as I can fix things up, and if you’ve any sense you’ll come with me. You must have had enough of Nye by now.”

“But, darling, it’s only because you won’t get out you’re so miserable,” protested Nicky, who didn’t want to leave England yet. “They were skating up at Bassetts Ponds today. Old Shand has opened it to the public. You know you adore skating.”

“In its proper place, and that’s Switzerland with all the accompanying etceteras. This country isn’t adapted to winter sports,” Charles grumbled. “Anyway, I want warmth, not ice.”

But he consented to go with her to Bassetts Ponds the next day. He was a good skater and next to Michael there wasn’t anyone Nicky preferred as a partner. She thought of the many winters when she and Michael had skated together on the old hammer ponds, Michael teaching her outside edges and the intricate spins that he did so gracefully himself.

The woods rang with laughter and the crisp clicking of skates, and Nicky saw Mary Shand, superintending a huge urn, from which she dispensed hot soup to the skaters.

“This reminds me of my girlhood,” she told Nicky comfortably. “We had fine ice skating parties in Cumberland. The snow was so deep in the roads the farmers used to come in sleighs, and many’s the ox I’ve seen roasted on the ice.”

Nicky felt the same sense of warmth and serenity that she had experienced upon their first meeting. She drank her soup and talked with pleasure to Mary Shand. Old John, looking on with his usual aggressive expression, nodded to her curtly and moved away. His unmannerliness was motivated by embarrassment as much as personal dislike if the truth were known, for although he had nothing but contempt for the Bredons, he was entirely at a loss as to how to deal with them.

Simon was skating with Stella Lucy, who was not very expert, and he glanced curiously at Nicky as he passed her chatting to his mother. She wore a bright emerald green woollen cap from which the ends of her red hair turned outwards and upwards like a little girl’s. Simon handed Stella over to her father and joined Nicky with a group of others by the soup urn. Braziers of burning charcoal stood around the ponds and people were blowing on their fingers and holding them out to the warmth.

“We haven’t had anything like this for years,” Simon said, taking a cup of soup from his mother.

“No. We won’t be hunting till next month now, I suppose,” said Nicky, and someone asked what the date was.

“The twenty-fifth of January,” Mary Shand replied, in her deep north-country voice.

Something suddenly clicked into place in Nicky’s brain. January the thirty-first was the date on which Simon’s loan was to be repaid. Less than a week away and she had no idea what Charles had done about it. A loan, like so many other things in the Bredons’ casual philosophy, was a thing quickly pushed on one side and forgotten until it became pressing. After the first awkwardness, Nicky had never given it another thought.

She looked up to find Simon’s eyes upon her and she wondered what he was thinking. He had never mentioned the matter from that day to this, just as he had never again kissed her. But there was something in his expression that made her feel distinctly uncomfortable before he looked away and spoke to someone else.

She decided that she must tackle Charles that very evening.

But Charles laughed it off and refused to take the matter seriously at all.

“Don’t be so ridiculous, Nick,” he protested. “The fella’s a reasonable being even if he is a blooming tradesman. He’ll just have to wait like everyone else, that’s all. Just imagine putting a time limit on a friendly loan, anyhow! I never heard of such infernal cheek. In any case, I’ve definitely decided to clear off abroad till the spring, so the thing’ll have to wait till I come back.”

For the first time in her life Nicky felt distaste for the easy shiftlessness in which she had been reared since childhood. Everything slid off Charles’s airy shoulders, and she had never before stopped to think that the responsibility must fall on somebody. It was useless to argue with him once his mind was made up, however, and Nicky went up to bed with vague forebodings.

Oh, well, it couldn’t be helped. As Charles had said, Simon would have to wait for his money like everyone else, and as for that ridiculous bargain they had made, well, naturally he wouldn’t hold her to it for a single instant. The man wasn’t quite crazy, and he had been educated a' gentleman even if he hadn’t been born one.

She asked Simon to dine at Nye on the thirty-first. Charles was in London, and she took Mouse into her confidence.

“I want a very
special
sort of dinner,” she said. “Intimate—with good masculine food and just the right wine. Something that will make him mellow and receptive—you know.”

“What are you trying to do to the poor gentleman?” asked Mouse with one of her disapproving looks. “He may be very nice-spoken, but he’s trade all the same, and you shouldn’t make eyes at him, Nicky.”

Nicky burst out laughing.

“Make eyes at him!” she exclaimed. “Why he doesn’t even like me very much—not as a person, I mean. You’ve got it all wrong, Mouse darling. He lent us money, and I’ve got to ask him to wait for repayment, that’s all.”