This Merry Bond (9 page)

“For obvious reasons. She’s the last of her line. It’s quite simple—all done at Somerset House. Don’t you agree, Simon?”

“No, said Simon, “I can’t say I do.”

He was standing a little apart from the others, smoking a cigarette, and had spoken very little the whole evening.

“You
don
’
t
!”
Mrs. Bredon-Thomas exclaimed incredulously. “But good gracious me, young man, why ever not?
My
husband raised no objection when I married him. He said he was only too proud to have the name of Bredon joined to his own.”

“But don’t you think,” said Simon in the gentle voice Nicky was beginning to recognize as dangerous, “that when a woman marries a man, his name alone should be good enough for her? It’s the usual thing, you know.”

“Quite,” said Hilary Bredon’s dry tones behind her, but John Shand, whose color had become more and more choleric as the conversation proceeded, broke in with a roar that made everyone jump.

“I’m durned if I’ll have any nonsense of that sort,” he said, bringing one clenched fist down into the palm of his other hand. “If the name of Shand isn’t good enough for you, Nicky, then you can do without it.”

Nicky, standing straight and stiff beside Mary Shand, met his angry stare with one equally angry.

“Durn nonsense!” Shand went on furiously. “All this new-fangled talk. You don’t think the name good enough for you—any of you. That’s all it amounts to.”

“It wasn’t
I
who said it,” Nicky retorted.

“Don’t be a fool, Nick,” came Charles’s lazy tones. “We all seem to be very heated over something which, as far as I’m aware, has never been mentioned before. How about a four for bridge? Will you play, Shand?”

“Never learnt the game,” the old man muttered, and crossed the room to his wife.

“Oh, dear,” twittered Mrs. Bredon-Thomas, a little taken aback at the result of her remarks. “I do seem to have made you all angry. I only thought that as Nicky would have to leave Nye
..
.” She trailed off into silence, but Nicky felt an unfamiliar stab of pain. Leave Nye! She had never even thought about it. For the first time she realized what her marriage was going to mean. She would leave all this, the heritage of five hundred years, to make her home with a stranger.

She heard Charles reply to some question she had missed.

“Oh, I shall shut the place up and go abroad again. I’m afraid our stately home of England is a bit of a white elephant really.” Charles didn’t really care, Nicky thought unhappily. He only wanted to be free to roam away the rest of his days in the pleasant spots of the world.

Simon, watching her across the room, had seen the pain in her face, a pain that sharpened her features into unfamiliar lines and found an echo in his own face. He remembered her as he had first seen her that day in early autumn running between the chestnuts, her eager feet impatient to carry her swiftly to the house, and he went over to her and put an arm around her thin shoulders.

“Come and play for me,” he said gently. “I’ve always wanted to hear you again.”

She sat down at the big Bechstein at the other end of the room and began playing snatches of Schumann. Simon, leaning against the piano, watched in silence for a little, then said appreciatively: “You play well.”

She smiled, a stiff, rather absent little smile, and he knew she wasn’t really aware of him as a person.

“My only education,” she said. “Charles always insisted upon tutors wherever we went. I think it must have been his one sentimentality. My mother played brilliantly.”

But presently, she looked up at him and said in a rather hard little voice:

“Why do you dislike the idea of carrying my name as well as yours?”

He moved a little impatiently.

“I don’t dislike it,” he said. “I just don’t think it’s important.”

“It’s important to me.”

He raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

“After all, ours is a great name, and it’s true I’m the last of my line.”

“You didn’t think of that before tonight, my dear.”

“Well, but Simon, I think you should consider it.”

“It isn’t entirely a question of what I think,” Simon said patiently. “It would hurt my people very much if I changed my name. There’s the other point of view besides the Bredons, you know.”

“But adding ours to yours isn’t changing it,” she persisted stubbornly.

That familiar note came into his voice.

“Well, it isn’t really any good discussing it,” he said quietly. “If you marry me, Nicky, you must take me as I am, and I’d advise you not to pursue the thing any further with my father. It can do no good.”

“
I
didn’t start it,” she said angrily.

“I know that,” Simon said with a sudden smile. “That’s why it’s so obviously foolish to take it seriously, isn’t it? Perhaps we’d better go back to the others or they’ll think we’re quarrelling.”

He met her two days later striding through the West Spinney, a pack of dogs at her heels. She wore an old pair of corduroy slacks and a vivid
green sweater, and he stood in the shadow of an oak tree and watched her with pleasure as she came unconsciously toward him. She walked
straight into his arms almost before she was aware of him, and unexpectedly the color flew to her cheeks. It was still so unfamiliar, to be made
love to in her father’s woods,, and after he released her she said nothing at all, but stood staring at him, the heavy hair tumbling over her eyes.

“Has no man made love to you before, Nicolette?” he asked her softly.

She shook her head.

“I never liked it before,” she said simply.

He felt oddly touched, and pushed the hair back from her face with gentle fingers.

“And yet you gloried in your reputation when I first met you,” he said.

She grinned slowly, her long eyes tilting at the corners making her look very like Charles.

“Was it as bad at that?” she asked. “I suppose I used to feel I had to live up to the Bredon tradition. I think even Charles didn’t really know how far it went.”

She said it with simple pride. It had clearly never entered her head that a parent’s first duty should have been to find out. Simon reflected that in some ways Nicky was curiously innocent. She took the fact of her father’s
affaires
for granted, but the knowledge never touched her directly.

“I think I saw through you pretty early on,” he told her gently.

“Did you, Simon? Did you really?” she said. “How disappointing. I always hoped I’d fooled you more than anyone. I thought I had. I thought you had an honest contempt for me. You had, too, hadn’t you?”

He shook his head.

“You always interested me. You were such a mass of contradictions.”

“I feel—” She hesitated. “I feel quite often that I don’t know you at all. I don’t even know what you think of me.” There was humility in her voice and an unconscious pleading.

“You’ll have a long time finding out, won’t you, sweetheart?” he
said, and the small endearment was the first she had heard from him, and sounded strange on his lips.

He turned and walked back with her, the dogs scurrying before them in the wet undergrowth, and presently they came out into the open parkland. Nicky sat on a gate screwing up her eyes in the winter sunshine as she looked away to the gracious facade of Nye rising from the brilliant green of its rolling lawns.

“You hated me for encroaching on your land, didn’t you?” Simon said.

“Yes.” She turned to look at him. “Sometimes I think I could hate you again.”

“For taking you away from Nye?”

“Perhaps—and other things. I can’t explain. Only I feel inside that we’re really antagonistic. When Michael and I were children we used to play a silly game called Common Enemy. When we met people we didn’t like we had a secret sign and then we baited them. It gave us a queer warm feeling inside of being united. I’ve never felt it with anyone else.”

He was silent for a moment, then he said:

“Would it make you happy to live at Nye when we’re married?”

“Live at Nye?” She didn’t understand, and he went on, watching her curiously:

“I’ve been to see your father, Nicky. I know he finds the place rather a burden, and I had thoughts of buying it and giving it to you as a wedding present. I understand he can’t sell, but he’s quite willing to lease me the house and allow me to make any improvements to the estate that I think fit. Would you like that?”

For a moment she sat very still on the gate, looking down at him, while her face went very white. Then the tears filled her eyes, and ran down her cheeks, and she sat staring at him speechlessly.

“Why, Nicky!” he exclaimed, both touched and distressed. “Does it mean so much to you?”

She slipped down from the gate and for the first time flung her arms round him and held him close.
“That’s the sweetest thing you’ll ever do for me, Simon,” she said and raised her wet face to kiss him.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

T
he arrangement suited Charles admirably. Long ago he had found Nye a heavy burden. The money that for years should have gone to the support of the estate and the tenants had been poured into his stables, his cellar, and his doubtful speculations. Simon proposed paying him a nominal rent and putting the entire place in order again providing he was given a free hand. Charles, knowing very well the expenditure this would cover, was thankful enough to receive any rent at all. The work was to start straight away, so that the house would be in order when Nicky and Simon returned from their honeymoon, and Charles made plans to go abroad immediately after the wedding.

They were to be married early in April. Nicky, in spite of protests, refused to have the conventional white wedding, but insisted that they be married quietly in the village church with only their most intimate friends and relations present. In this she was thankfully seconded by Charles and Simon, but Mary Shand was frankly disappointed.

“I love a big wedding,” she said regretfully, “and Nye would be such a beautiful setting. But you modern young people don’t seem to mind about these things any more. I suppose I’m just a silly romantic old woman.”

Nicky liked Simon’s mother. With her she lost that feeling of aggressiveness and antagonism that John Shand always roused in her. For the first time she wondered what difference it would have made to her life if her own mother had lived, and she envied Simon that close, harmonious relationship she had never known herself.

Mary was wise. There were several things about this affair that puzzled her, and sometimes worried her a little, but she never interfered. She knew that Nicky wasn’t in love with her son in the conventional meaning of the word, and that didn’t very much concern her. She had not been in love with her own husband when she married him, but things had worked out very well, and she had never thought regretfully of any other man. But Nicky was not naturally adaptable. She had never learned that it is politic to give in upon occasion, and Simon was too like his father in many ways to adapt himself to new conditions entirely unaided.

Mary was not happy about the changing hands of Nye. She considered that every young bride should leave her father’s house for her husband’s, and in her eyes Simon had, by his own generous gesture, raised a barrier against himself that must lead to ultimate trouble. For it was perhaps inevitable that they shouldn’t see eye to eye over the running of the estate. Simon, when he went more thoroughly into things, was horrified at the neglect into which the place had fallen. It filled him with indignation that Charles should have been content for so long to allow the tenants to get along as best they could only doing repairs when he was forced to, forever procrastinating.

What to Charles and Nicky was picturesque antiquity was to Simon a crying scandal that should never have been tolerated. Like his father before him, he was thorough and unsentimental in his methods, having little regard for tradition when it clashed with his conception of efficiency, and the state of some of the cottages led to angry scenes between himself and Nicky.

“Half of them should be pulled down,” he told her after one inspection. “After we’re married I’m going to make it my business to see that some decent cottages are built for these people.”

“They’ve lived in them for generations,” retorted Nicky. “And those cottages are some of the loveliest in Hammertye.”

“They ought to be condemned,” Simon replied. “It’s monstrous that human beings should be asked to live that way.”

“You just don’t understand, Simon. The cottagers wouldn’t
want
to move.”

“It isn’t a question of what they want. It’s entirely a matter of hygiene.”

“Oh!” Nicky poured all the scorn she could muster into the exclamation. “You talk like all social reformers who haven’t lived among country people. You think you can just play God and arrange their lives for them and expect them to curtsey and say, ‘Thank you, sir.’ ”

“Don’t be absurd, Nicky,” said Simon impatiently. “It’s only a matter of common sense. Everyone’s got to learn. Once you get people living a better way they’ll be just as contented as with the old way, and at least we’re helping progress instead of standing still.”

“Nye has stood still for five hundred years and is none the worse for it,” Nicky said grandly, and Simon laughed.

“Nye didn’t have electricity five hundred years ago, or plumbing, or drainage. Try to be reasonable, Nicky,” he said.

Nicky appealed to Charles, but he only shrugged his shoulders and declined to take any part in the argument.

“After all my pretty,” he said with his sly,' puckish grin, “he’s paying, so he can call the tune.”

There were times when Nicky almost hated them both. Simon for his high-handed methods, Charles for his indifference. She delivered long tirades to Mouse, but unexpectedly, Mouse agreed with Simon.

“The state of the cottages has long been the talk of the place,” she said disapprovingly. “Your father would have had the Council down on him before long, anyway. Mr. Simon has the right ideas; don’t you go quarrelling with him, Nicky. He’s doing these things as much for you as for the tenants.”

It is difficult to say whether during the weeks of their engagement Simon might have made better progress with Nicky if he had shown her more plainly that he was in love with her. He was not a very demonstrative man and his fear of frightening her led him too often into the mistake of hiding his real feelings from her. She grew to accept him as someone who gave her an unfamiliar sense of security, strange as it was sweet. But she knew so little herself of the art of making love that she could not make it easy for him, neither did she altogether realize how much was lacking in their relationship. She only knew that when he kissed her he stirred something within her she hadn’t known existed, that when she lay in his arms she knew contentment. But what she called the Shand side of him she could never reconcile to the Bredon side of her. Their arguments were hot and passionate on her part, logical and final on his, and she soon came to know him for a man who would never compromise to save her face.

Only once did she broach the subject of keeping her own name as well as his once they were married. He had brought her a charming little string of pearls as an unexpected gift, and they had sat in front of the schoolroom fire in the growing dusk.

“Simon, won’t you take my name with yours when we’re married—to please me?” she had said tentatively.

But he said quite definitely with that odd little inflection in his voice that she had come to recognize when his mind was made up: “As far as I’m concerned, darling, that subject’s closed. We won’t discuss it.”

And yet there were times when he gave in over something quite unexpected, times when she would put her arms around his neck and know that even when he was most adamant he was usually right. But it was only a week before the wedding that the final rift came so swiftly that it seemed any purpose would have served for the misunderstanding. Nicky, overtired with the endless preparations, acknowledging wedding presents, dealing with relations and the inevitable press, was in no mood to be reasonable when Simon announced one afternoon that Honeysett’s cottage must be demolished.

“But, Simon, you
can
’
t
!”
she cried in horror. “That cottage is as old as Nye. Archaeologists come and look at it. It has some of the finest timbering in Sussex.”

“I’m very sorry, Nicky,” Simon said a little wearily. “I don’t like destroying beautiful things any more than you do, but that cottage can’t be allowed to stand.”

“Honeysett won’t go.”

“Honeysett is perfectly willing to go. He says he’s been agitating for another cottage for years.”

“Well, let him go, then. No one has to live in it. But you can’t pull it down. Charles wouldn’t allow it, anyhow.”

“I’ve spoken to your father,” said Simon patiently. “He completely agrees with me. He says he would have pulled it down years ago if he’d had the money.”

“I don’t believe it. Even so, you can’t. Michael would be furious.”

“Michael!” He raised his eyebrows. These constant references to the absent cousin were beginning to get on his nerves.

“Well, Nye goes to him eventually.”

“Then the less liabilities he finds when he inherits, the better pleased he’ll be, if I know the Bredons,” Simon said more sharply than he intended, and he saw Nicky’s chin go up.

“Because you insist on reforming Nye is no reason why you should sneer at us,” she said with a slight tremble in her voice. “No one’s asking you to do it, anyway.”

His face softened.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sneer. But you are being a little difficult, you know. Try to see my point, will you? If I don’t pull the cottage down it’ll fall down, anyhow, in another year or so, and in the meantime I’m not going to risk disease spreading to the other cottages. I’m sorry, darling, but it’ll have to go.”

There was silence. They had just finished tea in the library, and the curtains were still undrawn, revealing a dark wintry sky outside. The firelight reflected in the old Queen Anne silver was cheerful enough, but a wind was getting up. It would probably be a rough night.

“If you pull down that cottage, Simon,” Nicky said very distinctly, “I won’t marry you.”

He glanced across at her, startled for a moment, then he frowned.

“Don’t be childish, now,” he said, trying to hide his impatience with her. “You seem to think I’m doing this entirely to spite you. I do assure you there’s no question at all as to the necessity for such a course.”

She got up and stood with her back to the fire.

“I mean every word I say,” she said. “Are you going to pull down Honeysett’s cottage or not?”

“Yes, Nicky, I am,” said Simon quietly.

She pulled off her ring and held it out to him.

“I’m sorry. Our engagement’s at an end,” she said, and he thought he detected faint satisfaction in her voice.

He didn’t take the ring and presently, a little nonplussed, she tossed it on to the shining tea tray.

“Sit down, Nicky,” he said then.

“There’s nothing more to be said,” she muttered.

“On the contrary,” replied Simon gravely, “there’s a great deal more to be said. Sit down.”

Against her will, she sat down on the extreme edge of a chair.

He leaned forward, clasping his hands between his knees. “Nicky, have you ever thought what would happen if everyone ran out on their bargains as you do?” he began quite gently.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, trying to avoid his eyes.