Ever After (8 page)

He broke off in the middle of a sentence, as though struck by a startling idea. He looked from one to the other of them, his eyes coming last to Sue, who looked back inquiringly.

“I say,” he began with sudden diffidence. “Would you care to—well, no, I suppose not, but just in case—that is, we might all go down there for Easter, you know, if you’ve nothing better to do.”

“Oh!” cried Virginia. “Oh, Bracken,
let’s
!”

The Major’s eyes waited on Sue. He sat leaning a little forward, waiting for her to speak. But Sue, for whom things sometimes began to
whirl, was silent, so he said:

“I think you’d be comfortable there, I’m only just back from having a look myself, and they did me quite well. My aunt’s cook stayed on in the house as caretaker, and she could wangle enough maids in the village to look after us. As a matter of fact, I’m afraid the old lady rather goes with the house. I haven’t the heart to turn her out, at least until it’s sold—”

“
Of 
course
we’d be comfortable!” said Virginia, and trod on Bracken’s foot under the table to indicate to him that she simply had to go to Farthingale for Easter.

“Won’t you please say you’ll come?” the Major entreated Sue.

“Why, yes—if the children would like to—” she began uncertainly. “I think it would be delightful.”

“Are the children willing?” he demanded of Bracken, with his severe eagle’s glance.

“Quite willing,” Bracken said at once. “If you’re sure it will be convenient to you.”

“That’s settled, then,” said the Major with relief. “I’ll write Mrs. Poole at once to engage some maids and have things ready for us. My aunt had a very poor opinion of men, and the indoor staff has always been entirely female. By the way, when is Easter this year?”

“Round about the nineteenth, I think,” said Bracken. “Will that give you enough time?”

“Too much time,” said the Major with another look at Sue. “I shan’t know what to do with myself till then. I say, couldn’t we take in a theatre together or something like that in the meanwhile?”

“Aunt Sue would go to the theatre every night of her life if she could,” Virginia said, a little patronizingly.

“Splendid! Let’s go and see Mrs. Pat!”

“As Lady Hamilton?” Bracken raised his eyebrows and flicked a glance at his charges. “Do you think they’re old enough for that sort of thing?”

“Oh, possibly not,” said the Major, taking him quite seriously.
“Well, then, what would you like to see?” he inquired of Sue.

“Rosemary,”
she replied with a note of defiance.

“But, darling, you saw that last Tuesday evening!” Virginia objected, and Sue’s dimple showed.

“I liked it. I want to see it again.”

“
Rosemary
it is!” said the Major, without asking anyone else’s preference. “We’ll dine at Gatti’s, what, and go on to the play. I’ll see about the tickets tomorrow. Which night would suit you best?”

Sue looked appealingly at Bracken. It was one of the times when she felt her inadequacy as Eden’s substitute, for she was sure that Eden would have been able to keep all their engagements in her head, whereas she herself had to write them all down in a little book which was never to hand when she needed it. But Bracken took out his own engagement book and consulted it and said not before next Wednesday.

“Wednesday, as ever is!” cried the Major, who apparently had no need to consult his own engagements. And— Five days to go, he thought. Five days too many. Good Lord, what’s the matter with me, I’m thinking like a subaltern in love! His hooded, eagle’s eyes went back to Sue. In love. But that’s impossible. My leave is up in July.

S
UE
, all unconscious, went on serenely if a little bewilderedly through her fascinating days as Virginia’s chaperone. On the Wednesday morning at breakfast as they laid their plans for the day, before Bracken set off for Fleet Street, he said:

“Isn’t it tonight that Aunt Sue’s conquest is taking us to see
Rosemary
?”

Virginia laughed, and Sue looked uncomprehending.

“Why,
Bracken
, what
do
you mean?” Bracken demanded of himself, in exaggerated tones. “Look at her, Ginny! Pretending she doesn’t know she has the Major hog-tied!”

“What nonsense,” said Sue firmly. “It’s Virginia he wants to see, and you know it.”

“Virginia, my neck!” said Bracken inelegantly. “Virginia never worked harder in her sweet life and got nowhere! It’s you he’s after, Aunt Susannah, and I’ve got my eye on him, I don’t trust the Army as far as I can kick it!”

“Now, Bracken, you’ve made her blush!” cried Virginia,
accepting her own defeat with entire good nature, and at that Sue got really pink.

“I don’t think it’s nice of you to make fun of an old lady,” she objected, not quite sure how to take them, even now.

“Fun!”
shouted Bracken. “I don’t call that fun to have
two
giddy enchantresses on my hands at the same time! We brought you along to lend respectability to Virginia, if possible, and what happens? You go and hook the Army!”

“But that’s not
true
, Bracken, I—”

“Did he ask
me
what I wanted to see tonight? Did
Virginia
get any say-so? Not at all! You said
Rosemary
, and to
Rosemary
we go!

“Well, I’m s-sorry, I never meant—”

“Now, Bracken, stop teasing her!” Virginia went to the rescue. “It’s all right, darling, we don’t in the least mind seeing it again. Behave yourself, Bracken, isn’t it about time you went to work?”

“By the way, when
is
Easter this year?” remarked Bracken
sotto
voce,
glancing at the clock and picking up his hat. “Oh, I say, that’s
much
too long! Whatever will I
do
with myself till then? Yah, it’s a way they have in the Army!”

There was a silence when he had gone. Then Virginia caught Sue’s troubled, doubtful eyes and laughed again.

“Honey, you look so
guilty
!” she said. “You mustn’t mind Bracken, and anyway, I think it’s cute.”

“But, Virginia, the Major didn’t
really
take any notice of me, that is, he was just being kind because I’m not your mother, and he could see that I felt strange here—he’s a very kind-hearted man, you can see that,” she pointed out earnestly.

“Oh, very! I’m sure the Dervishes would agree with you!” said Virginia solemnly.

He sent them flowers, which arrived while they were dressing for dinner. Camellias for Virginia—and for Sue, red roses. Bracken’s left eyebrow flew up when he saw them, and Virginia pinched him, hard, so he said nothing. Sue seemed quite unconscious of the significance of red roses, and only said how well they went with her new evening bodice, and how had he guessed what colour she was going to wear. Virginia, choosing a pink silk muslin dress in honour of her camellias, wondered who was going to be chaperoning whom, at this rate.

Sue had always shied from décolletage when dining in a restaurant, and her evening bodice, which was of pale blue Russian net over grey glacé silk, had a high blue satin collar-band topped by a lace Toby-frill which framed her face. The long sleeves were tight from the ruffled wrists to above the elbow, where a wide double net ruffle made fullness to the shoulder. The red roses
nestled into a blue satin sash above an embroidered silk skirt. Virginia’s silk muslin was cut with a low V in front, and her long rucked sleeves and kilted flounces edged with lace were the very latest thing. They both wore short brocade theatre jackets banded with fur, and carried fans.

The Major was proud of his handsome party and ordered
champagne
, which Sue had learned to appreciate, and Bracken alleged that his favourite aunt was rapidly becoming a drunkard. Sue protested hotly that she never had more than one glass, and Bracken agreed that she didn’t as a rule have one in each hand, if that was what she meant. The Major laughed delightedly at this rude family wit, and began to feel as though he had known these people all his life and would never part with them again. Their easy, unself-conscious affection for each other, their unfailing tenderness even in their teasing, bewitched his lonely heart into yearnings it had not felt for years. He had not been aware that life could be like this, warm and light and laughing, or that women could be so easy to talk to and to entertain.

His own young wife, bearing and losing her first child in India all those years ago, had become in his memory a rather fretful wraith whom it had not been much fun to live with. These hearty American women with their expensive pretty clothes and their spontaneous gaiety and their cosseted confidence that all was for the best in this best of worlds were a revelation to him. And Sue, with those white threads in her coppery hair and some mysterious wisdom in her eyes seemed to him a dream come true—a dream he had hardly known he had. Not young enough to be frightening to a man of his years, but still young enough…. Now, look here, the Major told himself severely, if you go on like this, old boy, you’ll be making a complete ass of yourself.

But before the evening was over, Sue, having had it pointed out to her at breakfast, began to perceive that the Major was perhaps being a little more than kind to her. No one else but Sedgwick had ever listened to her least remark with just the same attentive
concern
. His lingering gaze, so unlike Sedgwick’s in everything but a sort of wistful adhesiveness, drove her own steady eyes more than once to her plate or to some distant point in
the room. She didn’t dare look at Bracken or Virginia, for she felt in them an increasing alertness, a sort of suppressed expectancy which embarrassed and confused her. Sue had never been courted before—poor Sedgwick had hardly had time to begin before that terrible day when Ransom had told them it was impossible, and then everything had been over for them. But Sue had the born writer’s sixth sense about things which lay outside her personal experience, part intuition, part atavistic memory. She had written love scenes in
her books, and apart from Sedgwick she knew, in her cultivated imagination, how a man in love behaves. And the Major, apart from the champagne, was behaving besottedly.

Small as her worldly experience had been, by the time she went to bed that night at Claridge’s Sue was forced to recognize that by some freak of male nature, the Major was very much taken with her astonished self. She had done nothing, she was sure, to bring such a thing to pass. She had minded her own business entirely, while Virginia tried her best to flirt with him. Well, then. But the Major, incredibly, was not interested in Virginia. It was to Virginia’s Aunt Susannah that his seeking, tell-tale eyes returned again and again. And Sue’s reactions came in a rather unexpected sequence. But he doesn’t know anything
about
me, she thought first. But I must be
years
older than he is, she thought next. And then, belatedly—But no one could ever take Sedgie’s place.

Their engagement calendar by then left little room for additions before Easter, but the Major did turn up, looking more than pleased with himself, at several social functions to which they also had been invited. Once, at a tea in Grosvenor Street, he arrived in a group of officers who had been to the Palace for an investiture, wearing full dress uniform and blazing with decorations. He was modesty itself under the smitten stares of Sue and Virginia. But somewhere at the back of his level eyes, in the laughter-wrinkles at their corners, there lurked the look of the cat with canary feathers sticking to its whiskers; he was caught, but the bird was inside—Sue had seen him at his best, wearing the uniform he loved.

They did go again to dinner and the theatre with him. He had got tickets to the new Savoy opera this time, where Mr. George Grossmith was behaving characteristically as the highly improbable king of a highly impossible country called Vingolia. Never having seen Gilbert and Sullivan, Sue never missed them from this imitation product, and Virginia had long adored the agile Mr. Grossmith.

On the Thursday before Easter Sunday, Bracken and Sue and Virginia descended from the train at the little station of Upper Briarly on Cotswold—it was the line which ran from London to Oxford to Worcester, and so the service had proved surprisingly good for so remote a place. They found the Major, wearing
well-aged
tweeds, waiting with a carriage and pair driven by a
coachman
in his aunt’s brown livery. He had left Town a few days before them in order to see that Mrs. Poole had done everything necessary, and he was determined to entertain his guests in style if it took a year’s pay.

They drove across the wold at sundown to the village of Upper Briarly, which was a mile and three-quarters from its railway station, in a fold of the hills where the infant river Windrush ran. The road was built of yellowish Cotswold stone, and low stone dry-walls bordered it on either side, enclosing green fields where black-faced lambs frisked on match-stick legs. The fruit trees were in bloom—snowy pear and plum, and pink peach blossoms in the sheltered corners of the farmyards. The hedgerows were freshly green, and poplars and chestnuts were leafing, though oak and elm were backward still. Pale primroses starred the roadsides, and wood anemones and daffodils showed under the trees. The weather had been unsettled and cool, with sharp showers, but the sun was
setting
red and the Major said it would be fine tomorrow.

The far horizon was the vast parapet of the wold, but the village of Upper Briarly lay snug beside the river at the foot of a wooded slope. No Briarly could well be lower, so it was the only one, and the clear cold stream ran right down the middle of the single street, dividing it into two. Low green banks sloped to the water’s edge on either side, and a low stone bridge flung its triple arch across just above where the old ford was. Trout lay idle in full view against the clean gravel bottom, their noses upstream. Beyond the bridge four white ducks rode serenely on the water while others preened themselves on the grassy bank. The old grey village houses faced each other across the broad thoroughfare. Vines garlanded their narrow mullioned windows, wallflowers and forget-me-nots bloomed at their feet. The gables were small and sharp and capriciously placed in the steep slate roofs. A child in a clean white pinafore looked out of a cottage door as the carriage passed, and waved, and they all waved back.