Fantails (8 page)

“He took a great fancy to the place and to Swan House, and said jokingly to Tom that if ever he wanted a locum or to sell the practice, he was his man. Tom thought no more of it at the time, but when this American business came along he got in touch with Hugh and asked if he’d been serious—never expecting that it would come to anything. But the little boy had measles very badly a short time ago and it left him very poorly. I fancy that’s what made Hugh’s mind up for him. I gather that his sister-in-law is coming to help him settle in. You’ll drop in on her, won’t you, in case she wants the low-down on the local shops or anything like that?”

“Of course I will,” Alison promised her. She hoped the sister-in-law would not turn out to be alarmingly sophisticated. “Will Mrs. Moffat stay on with them?”

“Yes, and they’re bringing servants from London. A married couple who have been with Hugh for years ... Hugh will be coming to stay for the last few days before we go, so that Tom can take him round the practice and hand over his cases.”

“We’ll miss you,” Alison said, thinking that though she would be sorry to lose Tom and Ella, the prospect of new neighbours was not unattractive and would be good for them. When Mrs. Sinclair left, exclaiming that she would never get through all that must be done before leaving Swan House, she considered the matter of a new post for Logie as she made her pudding, and had come to a decision by the time Logie came flying up at lunch-time, full of the news, and ending “What should I do about a new job, do you think? This Dr. Brandon’s bringing a proper trained secretary who can do dispensing too. I shan’t be wanted.”

“I shouldn’t hurry into anything you might regret,” Alison advised her. “Better to think things over for a little before you come to any decision. You were due, in any case, for a holiday.”

Logie looked relieved. “I was, wasn’t I? I’ll take it when the Sinclairs go, and look about. Something will turn up, I suppose.”

“Sure to,” said Alison, hoping that “something” might be marriage. For all that people talked of modern girls, woman’s emancipation, and the equality of the sexes, human nature, she was convinced, stayed fundamentally unchanged. A home, a husband, and children were, she was certain, the desire of ninety-nine girls in a hundred. Often their creative instinct ultimately found expression in some other way—music, painting, gardening, needlework, charity, a career. But Logie had no talent in particular, and it was impossible to picture her, so essentially feminine, finding lasting satisfaction in a career, even if she had the opportunity to make one.

She was pleased when Sherry arrived at tea-time, bearing a fine fat pair of ducklings he had bought in Norwich market, and announced that he had told them at the Painted Anchor that he would be staying on there for another week.

“Well, but I don’t
like
milk pudding,” said John Brandon. “I’d rather have some gooseb’ry tart, the same as you an’ Daddy.”

This was his first meal at Swan House. Hugh Brandon had been established there for several days, having taken over the practice a week ago and moved in with his servants the day after the Sinclairs’ departure. His sister-in-law, Lucia Brill, had brought John here this morning, having taken him to a hotel at Southwold for a week during the upheaval of the move. The house in Harley Street had been let furnished and Swan House was in good order, but it had been as well to lighten the servants’ task of getting the new
menage
running smoothly by having John elsewhere.

It was a new
menage
in more ways than one. In London John had been in the care of a nurse trained at a college in every aspect of child care. She had looked after him efficiently and kindly, but recently his father had felt that she regarded him too much in the light of a machine that must be kept in good running order, much as a mechanic might regard the engine of a car. John was, his father thought, too much the slave of timetables and food charts and routine, and though these things were good up to a point, they could be overdone. It would do John good to have more freedom. It was time, too, for him to become less the nursery baby, more the small boy, sharing his father’s meals in the dining-room. So Miss Heald had gone to take charge of a new baby, and Hugh had asked Lucia, the very-much-older sister of his dead wife, to stay with them at Swan House until a pleasant country girl could be found to keep an eye on John and help the MacNeishes, a middle-aged Scots couple who had been with him since shortly before Melanie’s death, when John was born, five years ago.

John was a fragile little boy. His hair fell in a pale silky fringe on his high forehead and rose in a crest like a plover’s on the crown of his head. His grey-blue eyes were round and questioning in the pale triangle of his face. His lower lip stuck out in protest as he disconsolately stirred his semolina.

Lucia said briskly, “Nonsense, darling! Milk is protein, and you need lots of that to build you up and make you big and strong!”

“I’d rather have some gooseb’ry tart and grow up little an’ weak.”

“Gooseberry tart isn’t what you
need.
Little boys have to have a
balanced
diet, dear!”

Lucia was a tall woman of forty-five, heavily built, dark-haired, and sallow. Her small black eyes behind her horn-rimmed spectacles were like a pair of currants in the large bun of her face. She hoped that Hugh was noticing how capable she was being with John, matter of fact and sensible. John had calmed down nicely after his first excitement on arriving here an hour ago. It wouldn’t take her long to get him into her own ways. She had always been good at managing people. Years ago, when she and Melanie, his mother, had been left orphans, at eighteen she had taken complete charge of her ten-year-younger sister and been like a mother to her. She would be a mother now to John. Hugh would soon see that she was indispensable to the little boy’s well-being. Her stay here would be indefinitely prolonged until all question of a date for her departure gradually faded and her home was here. John should belong to her as Melanie had belonged to her. If Hugh had notions later on about sending him to a preparatory school, she’d manage, somehow or other, to put a stop to it, stressing John’s delicacy, his sensitiveness, his need of all the mother love and understanding she could give him.

Hugh Brandon’s eyes, dark hazel, deep-set and enigmatic, gave no clue to his thoughts. Long practice in inscrutability, born of a doctor’s frequent need to mask a painful truth, stood him in good stead with Lucia. He was thinking now, as he had thought many times before, how singularly unattractive Lucia was in every way, and marvelling that two half-sisters could be as different as she and Melanie. Even the ten years between them and a different father did not seem enough to account for Lucia’s swarthiness compared with Melanie’s ash-blonde fragility, Lucia’s assertive manner compared with Melanie’s gentle reticence, Lucia’s maddening tactlessness compared with Melanie’s charm and sweetness ... Already Lucia was getting on his nerves. He told himself that he had been a fool to have her here. Better to have brought Miss Heald till such time as he had found the ideal successor. Yet he felt a brute for grudging her the delight of being with John ... Melanie, knowing all her faults, had loved her and for Melanie’s sake he wanted Lucia to be happy.

He had half forgotten, though, with how absorbing a passion she had loved Melanie, had half forgotten that the tentacles of her devotion had been strangling in their jealous possessiveness until through marriage Melanie had escaped, though not without a tussle between that same possessiveness of Lucia’s and his own determination ... He had forgotten all that until now he was reminded of it by the look on Lucia’s face, brooding and dark and tense, as she watched John struggling to force down his cold and claggy pudding.

Well, he would have to look about at once for some nice country lass, honest and clean and free from complexes regarding diet and what not, put her in charge of John, set Mrs. MacNeish, homely and full of kindly wisdom, to watch over the pair of them unobtrusively. That done, he would thank Lucia for her help and send her back by car to Earl’s Court, where she had a tiny flat. He had a shrewd suspicion that she hoped to take root permanently in his household, but it would never do to let her have the chance of winding those taut, clinging tentacles of her devotion stiflingly about John’s budding personality. He’d let her down as gently as he could by telling her they counted on a visit from her next summer. He wasn’t going to sacrifice John for all the emotionally unsatisfied women in the world.

“Eat up, now, darling!” Lucia said again. This time John pushed his plate away. “I aren’t going to eat up. There isn’t any room for more.”

“Well, just this
once,
perhaps!” Over the small fair head Lucia looked at Hugh and made a series of meaning grimaces. “To-day
is
rather different, I think, don’t you, Daddy?”

Hugh winced. He couldn’t bear the way she had of addressing him as “Daddy” when John was there. “Leave it, John, if you can’t get down any more of it.”

“There! Daddy’s let you off! And now we’ll go and have a nice rest in our new beddy-ba, and when it’s time to get up we’ll go for a nice walk with Auntie Lucia and explore this lovely place we’ve come to live in. And if we’re
very
good I shouldn’t wonder if there might be a surprise for tea! I smelt a smell of baking in the kitchen before lunch!”

John’s small face expressed no pleasure at the delights in store for him. “Bill Chauncey didn’t have to rest,” he said.

“Bill was a little boy we met at Southwold,” Lucia told Hugh, “staying with his parents at the Swan. Nice people, very friendly but not
quite,
you know.”

“Not quite what?” John asked.

“Not quite sensible about bringing up Bill. It’s good for little boys to rest. You will excuse us, won’t you, Daddy? Someone I know is half asleep already, tired out with all the excitement of coming here.”

“Of course. I’ve finished, in any case.” Left alone, Hugh lit a cigarette, then strolled to the french window and stood looking out into the garden. He was above the average height, broad shouldered, of athletic build. He had dark hair, peppered with silver at the temples; it grew back with a slight ripple from a square forehead. His features were clear-cut, his mouth was strong and sensitive; his deep-set hazel eyes, betraying nothing of himself, were penetrating in their scrutiny of others. His deep, deliberate voice, that could be harsh and brusque when he was dealing with some silly woman’s fancied ailment, could also be both gentle and reassuring when real suffering was involved.

Hearing Lucia warning John: “Careful, darling! Mustn’t fall and bump your knees!” as they went upstairs, Hugh frowned impatiently. Wrapping a child, even a delicate child, in cotton wool could do more harm than good. In a day or two, perhaps to-morrow, he must have a word with Lucia. John must have the chance of playing by himself, too. In London that had been impossible. You couldn’t turn out a child of five to play alone in the park, and naturally Miss Heald had been with him when he was playing in the nursery. That was one of the chief reasons why Hugh had come here. It would do John good to potter about in the garden on his own, free from the cramping consciousness of watching eyes, learning, as London children never could, the pleasures of clean country dirt, of climbing trees, dabbling in water, lurking in the bushes stalking lions and Red Indians in the unconscious persons of the gardener and the tradesmen’s boys. Yes, he would speak to Lucia this evening. Might get John a sand-pit...

He heard the front door open and close and footsteps in the hall. Miss Liskard, his secretary, had returned from lunch. He had arranged for her to live out, in rooms the Sinclairs recommended, though there was room enough in Swan House for her. Better for her to be away from work out of working hours, as she had been in London. He had taken her over with the house in Harley Street, eight years ago, capable, middle-aged, and pleasant. No sense in altering a satisfactory relationship by altering its basis without need. Familiarity need not necessarily breed contempt, according to the old adage, but in his experience it could and often did breed irritation.

He ground his cigarette out in an ashtray. Some men would have tossed it in the garden, but Hugh hated mess. He’d have a word first with Miss Liskard, then set out on the afternoon round. His calls this morning had included two at farms; one on a gamekeeper with a nasty septic foot; one at a country vicarage to see a child with measles; one on a charming elderly lady living alone in a corner of a great house, full of courage and humour; one on a retired general with a passion for heraldry; one on a young mother and her first baby, an eight-pound son. All of them kindly, friendly, pleasant people, genuine and simple hearted. All of them free from the poses, complexes, and inhibitions such as he came across too often among the wealthy women patients who consulted him in London. His round had taken him through a village where old cottages of rosy brick with curved Dutch gables clustered about a green where fat white geese were grazing; by farms where redpoll cows stood in the shade of ancient oaks, knee-deep in buttercups, and women in print frocks of blue or pink fed calves and chickens in the apple orchards; by quiet streams where willows leaned to look at their reflections. He had left London taut and strained. Already life had taken on a simpler, saner aspect. He had begun to feel smoothed out and relaxed. He had begun to think that there were more advantages in coming here than the benefits to John...

To-day was Wednesday, and on Wednesday afternoons it had been Dr. Sinclair’s habit to visit only a few urgent cases, keeping as much time as was possible as leisure for himself. Hugh had decided to continue with the custom. On Wednesdays after tea, patients permitting, he would take John on the river or to the sea, or on some other ploy a small boy might enjoy.

Returning home towards five o’clock he found John and his aunt finishing tea. He asked how they had spent the afternoon. “We went out to investigate the shopping possibilities when John had had his rest,” said Lucia, and went off into a long account of how the butcher had been none too civil when she asked for kidneys or sweetbreads to be delivered every Tuesday. “He actually asked me if I didn’t know there was a peace on!”

Not a very entertaining afternoon for John, thought Hugh, glancing at his small son’s drooping shoulders. “Like to come out with me, John, when I’ve swallowed down this hot tea?” he suggested. “I’ll take you to the river if you like.”