Mine for a Day (2 page)

“Did you go with him to the bridge works?” She felt she must ask something—anything—to break the dangerous silence.

“No. We just had lunch together, and he went alone.”

“I suppose you have been shopping?”

Leila was not really curious about her cousin’s afternoon activities, but she felt a nervous urge to make conversation of some sort.

Rosemary didn’t answer at once. She picked up a nail file from her dressing-table and, crossing to a chair by the window, sat down
and began to file her nails with considerable concentration.

“No. I wasn’t shopping,” she said at last. “I—met a friend. Someone who used to be in Durominster and whom I hadn’t seen for quite a while. We went and had coffee together.”

“An old school-friend?” Leila asked absently.

“Oh—no. Not a girl.” Rosemary’s good-natured laugh meant that, though she liked and got on with her own sex, she would not have wasted half an afternoon sitting over a cup of coffee with one of them. “It was a man I met at our amateur dramatics last winter. You’d like him, Leila. He has a very interesting and
original
way of looking at things.”

Leila felt perversely that she would not like him. And an uneasy suspicion began to take shape in her mind.

“Was it the man who came to produce for you?” she enquired bluntly.

Rosemary looked up.

“Oh, I suppose Mother told you about him?” She spoke quite coolly and without any sign of being taken aback.

“I expect she drew quite an alarming picture, Mother was always inclined to panic and exaggerate, where my masculine friendships were concerned.”

Leila thought this sounded most unlike her rather stolid aunt, but remained diplomatically silent. And presently Rosemary went on, as though a brilliant idea had just come to her:

“I hadn’t thought—But, if Jeremy were a friend of
yours,
that would simplify things.”

“What things?” enquired Leila, with rather deliberate obtuseness. “An
d
, in any case, he is not a friend of mine, so the situation doesn’t arise.”

“We could pretend he was.” Rosemary appeared to be thinking aloud.

“For what purpose?” Leila asked, remembering sundry occasions in their childhood when Rosemary had involved her in doubtful situations before she knew where she was.

“Well, you see”—Rosemary’s voice suddenly took on an indescribably confidential and persuasive note, a flattering tone which seemed to suggest that only to one as intelligent and warm-hearted as her cousin could she completely unburden herself—“you see, Jeremy is going to be in Durominster for a week, and he is a very good friend of mine. I don’t want to hurt him or slight him in any way, and yet I know Mother will be terribly high-hat and difficult if
I
invite him home.”

“With some reason,” replied Leila, resisting—though with distinct difficulty—the appeal in her cousin’s voice and face. “It isn’t usual to entertain one’s old flames in the week before marrying someone else, I imagine.”

“Oh, nonsense! One needn’t make heavy weather of
that
,”
declared Rosemary, with an air of bringing worldly common sense to bear on a very usual problem. “It’s only a case of wanting to be hospitable in my own home without having Mother make difficulties. I thought if you’d just say that you had known Jeremy in London—you might easily have done so, you know—then Mother wouldn’t go worrying herself for nothing when I ask him to the house.”

Rosemary made an airy little movement of one hand, to show how unimportant the whole thing was.

“Rosemary, will you p
l
ease think for a moment what you are asking me to do.” Leila’s tone made even her cousin look at her with unwilling attention. “You expect me to tell a deliberate lie to Aunt Hester—
”

“Oh, Leila, a little rearrangement of the truth!”

“—for the very unworthy reason that you want to have fun with one admirer, just a week before you marry another. Can’t you see it’s impossible?”

“Darling, don’t be so
moral
and so easily shocked. You make my conscience come out in goose pimples when you talk like that,” Rosemary declared with a laugh. “If you
d
on’t want to do it—there’s an end of it. No one is pressing you.”

And she appeared to dismiss the incident with a careless good nature which made Leila feel a little as though she had stepped on a stair that wasn’t there.

Indeed, afterwards, when she thought about it, she wondered if she had sounded ridiculously smug and virtuous. But she was not inclined to waste much thought on that. She was too much absorbed in the overwhelming fact that this evening would probably be the last time she would see Simon before his wedding day.

He came early and, because Rosemary was not yet ready, and her uncle and aunt were busy on affairs of their own, it fell to Leila to greet him and talk to him in the first quarter of an hour.

They had always been on easy, though not specially intimate,
terms. But Leila was glad that on this occasion she had some definite topic to discuss with him. She enquired after his mother immediately and, in concentrating on just the right degree of friendly sympathy, she found it easier to control and steady her own feelings.

“She’s very ill, Leila.” Simon gave a quick sigh and frowned slightly. “I wish I could have gone to her today, but it was impossible.”

“Was she expecting you today?”

“Oh, no. Not expecting. In fact she probably doesn’t even know that my sister sent for me. Her idea would have been to keep from me anything which might spoil my wedding. She is like that.”

He walked over to the window restlessly, his hands thrust into his pockets, and for a moment he leant against the side of the shutter and stared out into the garden as though he had forgotten Leila’s presence.

“I’m so very sorry.” Leila stood at a little distance from him, wishing that she had the right to go to him and put her arms round him. “I know how terrible it is to love one’s parents very much and have to be anxious about them.”

He looked at her then, his glance softening in one of those quick and complete changes of expression which transformed his face.

“Poor child!” He held out his hand to her, in an unselfconscious and instinctive impulse to communicate and receive comfort by the simplest of all means. “I remember—Rosemary told me. You lost both your parents less than a year ago, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” She went to him and put her hand in his, indescribably touched by the gesture, and hardly knowing if the feel of his strong, warm fingers round hers gave her more pleasure or pain.

For a moment they stood there, side by side, in silence, in a mood of completely shared sympathy and understanding. Then he gave her hand a slight squeeze and let it go, before he said, in his normal, energetic tone of voice:

“Not that I want to accentuate the anxiety. Frances—my sister—said there was little immediate danger. But probably there will have to an operation, and her heart isn’t too good.”

Leila started to say something else encouraging. Then she saw the expression in his keen, dark eyes change once more. Rosemary’s voice was heard in the hall, and his attention, which had been all Leila’s until that moment, was switched off like a light
.

He went eagerly, forward, as Rosemary came in, with a gay, remorseful:

“Hello, darling. Have I kept you?”

It was an evening like many others that Leila had spent during the last few weeks. Though Rosemary and Simon had an acknowledged prior claim on each other, they spent more than half the evening with the rest of the family, discussing and settling final details, which had become the more urgent since Simon might not be available again until just before the wedding. Leila talked to him, looked at him, listened to him, as she had on many previous occasions. Only this time she could not altogether suppress the thought—

“This, in a sense, is the last time.”

No one in the house, she was certain, had the remotest idea how she felt about Simon—much less Simon himself. And that was all the comfort she could take to bed with her, when she went finally to her own room. That, and the remembered feel of her hand in his.

During the next, busy days, Lei
l
a contrived somehow to keep her own feelings just below the level of her consciousness. She half dragged herself with work and details of organization, and a rigidly determined absorption in anything but her own personal feelings.

It was no wonder that her aunt said, more than once:

“I don’t know
what
I should have done without you, Leila! You really are a good girl, the way you’re ready to take almost everything off my shoulders.”

“I like doing it, Auntie,” Leila assured her. And wondered if any girl before had ever worked so hard to marry the man she loved to someone else.

Rosemary, the heroine and centre of all this, drifted in and out from time to time, smiled charmingly on everyone, said how good and sweet Leila and her mother were, and seemed willing to let them make all the decisions.

It was as though she were in some world of her own, and when she spoke to them and smiled at them, her mind and spirit were elsewhere. A not entirely inexplicable condition in a bride whose future husband had been snatched away from her, of course. But, somehow, Leila didn’t believe that thoughts of Simon accounted for Rosemary’s dreamy remoteness. For when she spoke of him—which she did quite often—it was with the same faintly detached air that she used towards her family.

Aunt Hester, too, was evidently not without her puzzled impressions, because she said sharply, when only two or three days divided them from the wedding day:

“My dear child, it is
your
wedding, you know! Sometimes you behave as though you aren’t expecting to be married at all on Wednesday.”

Rosemary bit her lip and, for a moment, a look of such unwanted distress came into her face that Leila’s heart melted.

“It’s a difficult time for her, with Simon away, Auntie,” she exclaimed a little protectively.

Rosemary flashed an endearing smile at her.

“Dear Leila always makes excuses for me,
”
she said, and putting her arm round her cousin she suddenly pressed her warm cheek against Leila’s in a most unusual gesture of affection. “Sorry, Mother. It’s tiresome of me, I know. But it won’t be long now before—everything is settled.”

Leila wondered if she fancied that faint hesitation before the last three words, and whether her aunt was entirely satisfied with this way of describing a happily planned marriage. Then she told herself
no
t to be fanciful.

During the weekend Simon wrote to say that he would be back in Durominster by Tuesday.

“I should think so, indeed!” Aunt Hester exclaimed, when Rosemary read out this information at the breakfast table on Monday. “Even that doesn’t give him a clear day before the wedding.”

“There’s never very much for the bridegroom to do, except get in the way, just before a wedding,” Leila reminded her consolingly.

While Rosemary simply smiled a little absently and said nothing.

“How can she be so calm about his coming?” Leila thought, her own heart beating faster at the realization that she would see Simon again tomorrow. But she could not be impatient with her cousin that day, because Rosemary seemed to seek her out and to draw some sort of needed reassurance from her company.

It was such an unusual thing for Rosemary to require any sort of reassurance from anyone that Leila was puzzled and touched. She was probably only suffering from natural, pre-wedding nerves at the moment, but instinctively Leila took pains to show all her very real affection for her, as though she felt Rosemary might need it. And her young cousin responded with a demonstrativeness which Leila had hardly expected.

Indeed, that evening she came to Leila’s room to say good night to her, and sat on the bed and talked for a while. Mostly of the times when they had been children together—and of occasions when Leila’s good sense had saved her from scrapes.

“I didn’t know you remembered so much,” Leila declared, with a laugh. “I’d forgotten most of this myself, until you reminded me.”

“I only remembered rather lately,” Rosemary admitted. “But you’ve been so good to me during the last weeks, Leila. I guess that reminded me that this wasn’t the first time. But I want you to know—and remember—that I appreciate all you’ve done for me.”

“Dear, I know you do!” Leila was vaguely disturbed that the usually flighty Rosemary should talk like this.

“Don’t make so much of it.” And, on a sudden impulse, she reached out and took her cousin’s hand. “There isn’t anything—wrong, is there?”

“No, of course not!” All at once Rosemary laughed, and was herself again. “I didn’t mean to get all solemn. Only—I wanted to say that. And now I’m going, and you can go to sleep at last.”

She kissed Leila lightly then and went away. But even after she had gone, to the sound of that reassuring little laugh, Leila lay awake, unable to banish the vague sense of worry. She had expected to fill her thoughts of Simon, on this night before his return. But it was Rosemary who thrust her way to the front of her consciousness, and Rosemary who followed her into her somewhat troubled dreams when she slept.

Like most dreams, they had nothing very clearly defined about them. Only Leila was conscious of a sense of foreboding—and always in connection with Rosemary—as though some danger were coming near.

Indeed, the idea of approaching danger was so clear that at last she actually woke up, with the unpleasant sensation that someone was in the room, or had only just left it.

As she looked rather fearfully round the moonlit room—quite empty except for herself—the thumping of her heart subsided, however, and she dropped back on the pillows again, telling herself that she was absurd to frighten herself with her own imaginings.

When she woke once more, the September sunlight was pouring into the room, and she lay for a few minutes, drowsy and relaxed. Then she recalled her scare of the night before, and smiled a little as her sleepy gaze travelled once more over the room, so bright and reassuring now in the morning light. One had such preposterous ideas in the middle of the night! By daylight—

Leila’s thoughts and glance came to a simultaneous stop, both of them focusing wonderingly on the alien object propped against the dressing-table mirror.

That letter had not been there last night when she had put out the light.

She jumped out of bed and ran across the room, the vague misgiving of the night before suddenly returning in full force. Standing there in a long shaft of sunlight from the window, she tore the single sheet of paper from its envelope and began to read. At a glance she had recognized Rosemary’s round, rather schoolgirlish hand writing, an
d
the very first sentence drove the colour from her cheeks.