Fantails (25 page)

She found the door unlocked. Vee’s bicycle was easily identified, since she had had it painted deep blue so as to be able to recognise it quickly from a number of others. One tyre was flat. With shaking hands, she pumped it up, terrified that at any moment someone might hear and come to investigate. At last it was in order and she set off, not taking the way along the drive and through the village, where Sherry, when he found that she had gone, would almost certainly follow in pursuit, but going instead along a little-used back avenue in the opposite direction. She had no definite plan beyond getting to a station, preferably one where Sherry would not think of looking for her. Unfortunately she was now heading away from the main line and had no idea whether this road would take her to some branch line. Hoping for the best, she rode fast, feeling that the main thing was to put as many miles as possible as quickly as might be between herself and Crail.

She thought she must have gone about eight miles when by the post office in a tiny hamlet she saw a little group of people. Most of them carried flowers or a basket of vegetables; they looked like townspeople waiting for a bus to take them home after an outing in the country. Logie stopped and asked them whether a bus would pass this way soon. They told her that a bus to Darlington would be coming at any moment. She was surprised, having had no idea that any Darlington bus came so far afield; they explained that it ran once a week, on Darlington’s early-closing day. This was a marvellous bit of luck! Quickly she pushed the bicycle up a garden path to the open door of a cottage. A pleasant young woman came at once in answer to her knock. Logie said, “This bike belongs to Mrs. MacAirlie of Crail. I have to catch the bus here. May I leave it with you? They’ll arrange to have it collected in a few days, I expect.” The woman said the bike could stand in her shed and would be in no one’s way. Logie was writing down her name and address when a red bus came roaring through the twilight. She was the last to enter it, but there were several empty seats and with a sigh of relief she sank into one, thankful to have got so far on her journey. Sherry would never dream of going to Darlington to look for her; almost certainly by now he must be speeding in the direction of Catterick.

Nature is often merciful in time of crisis. Exhaustion and reaction played a kindly part in numbing Logie’s feelings. Throughout the journey to Darlington she was in a condition of dazed apathy, only vaguely conscious of the misery that waited to attack once more when she should have recovered from her weariness. Her luck still held, for the bus terminus was near the station. She could not eat, but had a cup of tea in the buffet on the main platform, and after waiting only half an hour got on a train from which, in the small hours of the morning, she would alight at Peterborough, from whence another train would take her in the direction of home.

Sherry, frantically searching Catterick station for her, had no notion that Logie was in the express that thundered through as he stood impatiently on the platform waiting for a friendly woman porter who had gone to see if she could find “a fair young lady, not very tall, with curly hair the colour of honey” in the ladies’ waiting-room.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It
was a brilliant morning, crisp and gay. The bitter odour of chrysanthemums had ousted summer’s sweeter fragrances. The garden of Swan House was emblazoned with their gold and bronze and amber and the flame and ruby of the dahlias. Peacock butterflies and red admirals were flirting with the michaelmas daisies, and through the windows of the room where Alison and Jane and John were sitting down to breakfast sunshine streamed in cheerfully.

Alison spooned porridge from a blue bowl into John’s plate. The bowl was rimmed with white, and a verse was written round it in white lettering. “Read it to me, please,” said John, as he had said every morning since he came to stay here.

Jane recited it:

“Some ha’e meat but canna eat,

And some wad eat, but want it;

But we ha’e meat and we can eat,

And sae the Lord be thankit!”

“It seems a queer thing to put poetry about meat upon a bowl that’s meant for porridge,” John said pensively. “We haven’t got meat in it at all. It’s porridge we’ve got. Or maybe stewed fruit if it’s lunch-time.”

“It’s a Scotch bowl,” Alison explained. “The Scots call any sort of food meat.”

“Why? Don’t they know any better?”

“I expect they think it’s the other way about, and
we
don’t know any better!”

John considered this, then smiled tolerantly. “Pore things! But it’s a nice bowl, anyway.”

There was a knock on the door. Jane went to answer it. MacNeish was there, wanting to speak to Alison. “The Doctor telephoned last night, but it was late and there were no lights showing over here, and so I thought I’d best wait till the morning. He bade me tell you he’ll be back some time to-day. Miss Liskard has arranged with Dr. Wales of Bungles to see any urgent cases for him in the meantime ... Sir Howard died last night an hour or two after the Doctor got there. It’s a terrible pity—he was a real nice gentleman. He’ll be a great miss to the Doctor.”

“It was Sir H’ard that gave me my Meccano,” John said. “He had an eyeglass. Will he have it still in heaven?”

“He’ll have it if he needs it,” Alison said diplomatically.

“It was spectacles he wore to work in. The eyeglass was more for social wear, as you might say,” MacNeish said.

“He won’t be working up in heaven, so it’ll be his eyeglass that he’ll wear up there,” John decided; and with this point happily settled they began their breakfast. Barely had they finished it when Barbara and her small brother David appeared. David had become a great crony of John’s. They wanted Jane and John to go with them to gather blackberries on the common.

“A very good idea,” said Alison. “Never mind about your chores, Jane. I’ll see to them for once. You don t want to waste a minute of such a lovely morning. I’ve got some rock cakes you can take with you for elevenses. Picking blackberries is hungry work!”

She had washed up the breakfast things and was putting out sheets to air for Logie’s bed when the wicket door of the coach-house banged. Someone came bounding up the stairs, and Sherry burst in. “Is Logie here?” he cried.

“Logie? No! I thought she was with you at Crail and that you were both coming back to-morrow. What’s happened?”

“She left Crail last night. We had a—a quarrel. I was so sure I’d find her here!” He looked so exhausted and distraught that Alison hid her own concern and said soothingly, “Probably she’s on her way here now. Did you come by road?”

“Yes, after I’d searched every station within miles of Crail, trying to get news of her.”

“Then she would have had to come by train?”

“I imagine so. She must have gone off on my mother’s bicycle—it’s missing. But I couldn’t find a soul who’d seen her.”

“She’d have to change at Peterborough and at least once after that. I don’t know much about the trains from there, but it takes ages. Probably she won’t get here before this afternoon. Have you had breakfast?”

He shook his head. “No, but I’m not hungry. How can I find Logie? She may be sitting tired out at some miserable little station waiting for a train that isn’t due for hours. What the deuce am I to do about it?”

“Nothing. Sit down and have some coffee; then when she does come you’ll feel far fitter to put things right. You must be worn out, coming all that way with no sleep and nothing to eat. I’ll go and put the kettle on.”

She heard him pacing restlessly about the room while she was in the kitchen, and wished he would sit down and rest. What could have happened between him and Logie? Logie’s last letter—all her letters, for that matter—had sounded utterly happy.

In a few minutes she took him a pot of steaming coffee and a plate of hot buttered toast spread with anchovy paste, a favourite of his. “Eat that up,” she commanded him, “and you’ll feel quite different.”

He said again he wasn’t hungry, but she poured him out a cup of coffee, and when he had sipped it he began to eat. Alison knew she ought to be preparing the stew for lunch, making the beds, mopping and dusting, but all that would have to wait. They could have eggs for lunch. Taking up a jumper Jane was knitting, she sat down on the window-seat as though she had nothing in the world to do but keep him company. Presently he said, “I want to tell you something of what’s happened.”

“Don’t tell me anything you’ll regret.”

“I won’t. But this is something that you ought to know. I should have told you when I first came here.” Plunging one hand into a pocket he brought a crumpled bundle of newspaper cuttings, and gave them to her. “Any one of these will tell you the whole story more quickly than I can.”

“What a horrible experience—poor Sherry!” said Alison when she had read one.

“M’m. ... I came here to escape, to get away from everyone I knew, from the embarrassment of their sympathy and my mother’s exasperation at the gossip it would cause, and the humiliation of knowing that wherever I went, in London or at home, people would say to one another, ‘That’s the fellow who was thrown over at the last moment for a richer man by the girl who was going to marry him the next day.’ I drove off into the blue—thought I might go and stay with cousins I rather like, in Scotland. Saw the name Market Blyburgh on a signpost, thought of Andrew, and landed up here ... After lunch, I was alone in this room for a few minutes. I took up your
Daily Echo,
obviously unread, saw a lot of dope on the front page about my ‘broken romance’ and on the spur of the moment tore it into shreds. I wanted to leave all that behind me. That’s why you never saw it in the papers, as you don’t take the Sunday ones.”

Pouring out his second cup of coffee, Alison said, “I guessed you’d had some disillusioning experience.”

“Was I so warped? I am afraid I must have been abominable company!”

“You were delightful company. But you were cynical and bitter. And you took such a poor view of humanity in general that it was obvious that some individual in particular had hurt you.”

“Only my pride, though at the time I thought it was my heart! ... So I stayed on and never told you.”

“My dear, why should you? It was no concern of ours!”

“Not then, perhaps. But later—”

“Surely you told Logie later?”

“No. That’s what has made all this trouble.” Her expression made him add, “No need to tell me what you’re thinking. I know only too well what a fool I was. Time and again I was on the verge of telling her. But when it came to the point I couldn’t bring myself to take the risk.”

“What risk?”

“The risk that she would think—as she
did
think when she found out—that it was only ‘on the rebound,’ as they say, that I had asked her to marry me. A sort of gesture to the world in general, and Zara in particular, to save my face.”

“She
couldn’t
have thought that!”

“Unfortunately she did—and does. If only I had had the sense to take the risk and tell her when the right moment came along! Several times I was on the verge of it. Then I lost my nerve. I couldn’t stake security to gain it.”

Alison thought: And so you took the greater risk of letting her find out for herself—and lost, poor boy! But all she said was, “Have some more coffee?” for she had learnt the grace of keeping silent when to speak would hurt.

“No, thanks—though you were quite right. I feel entirely different for having filled the aching void!” He rose and began to wander restlessly about the room, taking up a book, laying it down, staring at a picture, turning the pages of a magazine. She longed to comfort him, to tell him this was no more than a passing storm, soon to be forgotten, even laughed at tenderly in years to come. Yet it was difficult to comment on what he had told her without seeming to criticise; nor did she wish to seem inquisitive concerning matters that concerned only Logie and himself. So she sat knitting quietly until he said abruptly, “It mightn’t be a bad idea to go along to the station and find out about trains. That would give us some idea of when she could get here.”

“Yes, a good plan. But I rather think a train from Norwich is due round about half-past eleven. It’s nearly that time now. You might run into her. And it would be better, don’t you think, to meet here rather than on the road or in the station?”

“You’re right, as usual—wise little Alison!” Sherry smiled at her affectionately. “If she isn’t here by twelve, I’ll go and make enquiries about later trains ... Look here, I’m sure you’re dying to be making a pudding! Don’t bother about me. You’ve been an angel, but you mustn’t let me be a nuisance!”

Mary was at that moment uppermost in Alison, Martha temporarily routed by his need of her to share his waiting. An aching heart was, after all, a greater evil than an empty stomach, and more difficult to cure! They must have boiled eggs for lunch, and bread and honey by way of pudding. “Nonsense!” she said. “I’m glad of an excuse for being lazy!” And sat there knitting while the time dragged on, leading him on to talk about the wedding as though there were no doubt whatever that it would take place.

Never in her life had Logie known such weariness as beset her in the last long hours of her journey home. The third-class carriage she had joined at Darlington had been crowded, so that she had not been able to get a corner seat. Two women had talked interminably in shrill, nasal voices, and in consequence she had scarcely slept. At Peterborough she had had to wait two hours for her connection; after that there had been two more changes. By the time the train carried her through the familiar country approaching Market Blyburgh she was mentally and physically exhausted, aching and stiff from head to foot. Her eyes smarted, her hands were grimy, her face felt parched, as though her skin would rustle if she touched it; she felt dirty and dishevelled and utterly forlorn.