Theirs Was The Kingdom (97 page)

Joanna said, briskly, “Put the hamper down here, Clint, and begin laying out, Helen. First I intend to show Rowley the haunted oak. I know just where it is,” and before either one of them could comment she put her arm through Rowley’s and walked him purposefully over the crest and down a narrow path leading to a copse some two hundred yards nearer the fenced, cultivated land.

This was supposed to be Helen’s cue, but now that the moment had arrived her heart began to beat almost painfully, for what had seemed so subtle in rehearsal now appeared to her as something grotesque and farcical. She remembered her briefing perfectly, however. She was to encourage Clint to be forward, more forward than he had ever been, Joanna had urged, and everything would follow on from that and there had seemed no special difficulty about this, for Clint had never needed encouragement in this respect.

She said, sitting back from the hamper, “Let the picnic wait. I’m not hungry, are you, Clint?”

And he replied, smiling, “Not in the least, my dear,” and at once, just as she anticipated, he put his arm round her and kissed her, holding the kiss for that much longer than was considered permissible. Gently, as though it was no more than a part of the accepted ritual, she raised her hands and pushed him off, saying, “That’s the trouble with you, Clint. You never pay the girl the compliment of asking first, do you?”

“Not when I find myself with one as tempting as you,” he said, cheerfully. And then, looking at her in a way that made her feel uncomfortable, “After all, you did set yourself out to turn a man’s head today, didn’t you?”

Thinking by this he must have an inkling of what was going on she replied, quickly, “Why do you say that, Clint?”

“Oh, for no special reason. It’s meant as a compliment. You and Jo always dress well but everything you’re wearing is first time on, isn’t it? I notice these things. My mind isn’t cluttered with people’s insides and visions of the next world, like poor old Rowley’s.”

“I’m not sure I follow you, Clint.”

“You don’t? Well, put it this way. I’ll take this world. It’s good enough for me,” and he embraced her again.

It occurred to her then that she ought to contribute something positive to the switch, apart from the purely passive role that had resulted in leaving Joanna an open field with Rowley all this time. After all, with the other two out of sight beyond the hill, there was no risk at all in letting herself go and she had to admit that Clinton was far better at kissing than most of the young men she had embraced. Deliberately, and now beginning to enjoy the fun of the occasion, she let his weight incline her against the bank, but she was unprepared for developments resulting from this overt encouragement. At once, it seemed, he was more or less on top of her, and kissing her in a way that was quite new to her, so that it occurred to her that things were happening at a speed neither she nor Joanna had anticipated, and that this was likely to interfere with what Joanna had called “the split-second timing” of the plot. Crushed under him, and without the slightest opportunity to see whether or not the others were in view, it was all she could do to hold him off, for he soon became very much the man in possession. Before she could utter a word of protest, he had undone three of the jet buttons of her jacket bodice and slipped his hand over her breast but outside her chemise, although she knew very well it would not stay there for long.

The Swann girls, who regarded themselves as experienced flirts, had a scale in male licences and its application depended upon a variety of factors, including the degree of privacy, the amount of light available, the seriousness of the young man involved, and the degree of physical appeal a particular beau exercised. The scale began with the chaste kiss on the cheek or brow and advanced progressively to the point Clinton had now reached, in a bound, as it were, and moreover in the open and in broad daylight, with the prospect of being overlooked from the top of the ridge. This was not part of the plan. In fact, it struck Helen at once that the plan was beginning to miscarry, and might well end in a moment of frightful embarrassment, so she brought both arms down, caught Clint’s adventurous hand at the wrist, squirmed her head free and said, firmly, “
No
, Clint… Not here… please!”

To her surprise he seemed to regard this protest as no more than formal. Without removing his hand he said, “Nonsense. Why do you suppose they went off and left us?” and at once began kissing her again, his range extending to that section of her neck and shoulder exposed by the unbuttoned bodice.

It was not that Helen resented this as too outrageous on his part. In more propitious circumstances, in the back of a cab returning from a dance of a winter’s night, for instance, she had allowed her escort privileges that amounted to the same thing, particularly when wearing a low-cut evening gown, or when, full of cider-cup at a hunt ball, she had allowed one of the Arscott twins (good-looking boys both) to pinch her bottom. It was the hovering presence of Rowley that scared her, so that she forced herself half out of his embrace, tore his hand free, and shouted, “No, Clint! You mustn’t! Stop it at once!”

It was at that moment that disaster swept down on them both, just as she had feared. There was a sudden rush of feet and Clinton was plucked from her and sent staggering ten yards further down the bank, and there was Rowley, looking down at her with an expression she could only think of as outraged as she began fumbling madly with the fiddling little buttons of her bodice, her cheeks flaming, her hair, shorn of half its pins, falling over her shoulders.

At that moment it was not of Clinton she thought but Joanna, feeling that she could have strangled her with bare hands for embroiling her in such a degrading situation. But Joanna, strangely, was nowhere to be seen.

When the last of the elusive buttons had been pushed into its buttonhole she scrambled up, ignoring her new bonnet that had slipped off in the struggle and now lay in a clump of primroses at Rowley’s feet. Clinton, a few yards down the slope, was looking almost as embarrassed as she felt but truculent too, as he faced the glowering Rowley. But then he obviously decided to brazen it out, saying mildly, “Oh, don’t be such an ass, Rowley! It was nothing. Ask Helen if you don’t believe me. And do stop looking like the wrath of God!”

His brother, improbably, seemed to consider this statement, as though weighing its authenticity, and Helen was so absorbed in the interplay between the two brothers that for a moment or so she almost forgot her own embarrassment. Rowley said, at length, “She was telling you to stop. I heard her quite clearly from back there. Damn it, I knew you were selfish, Clinton, but I didn’t reckon on you being a cad. Do you know I’ve a good mind to punch your nose here and now!”

But the threat seemed to put Clinton on his mettle, for the last of his embarrassment faded and he grinned as he said, “No harm in trying, old boy. You’ve never succeeded in the past, have you?” On that they began squaring up to one another so that a sparring match seemed inevitable.

But then, with a rush, Joanna appeared, quite out of breath, crying, “
Stop
it! Stop it, both of you! What on earth
are
you? A couple of schoolboys?”

“He isn’t at all events,” Rowley said, quietly. “Ask Helen how he was behaving.”

“I don’t have to,” Joanna said, coolly, adjusting to the situation with what seemed to Helen amazing speed. “What on earth got into you, rushing away like that and tearing them apart… She didn’t scream for help, did she? For Heaven’s sake, Rowley, do stop being so… so stuffy and self-righteous and pompous!”

It was the look that Rowley directed at her that reminded Helen of her own involvement in this ridiculous scene, played out between the four of them on an open hillside overlooking the great grey mansion below. It was the expression of a trusting child, struck by a parent for the first time, or that of a spoiled puppy at the receiving end of a beloved master’s boot, so that she thought, “By God, she’s hard!… And this crazy plan wasn’t hatched for my benefit, as I supposed… All she’s about is to show herself to Clint as the easygoing one of the pair.” The recollection of her careful briefing returned to her like a sour taste, Joanna sitting in her basket chair beside the fire prophesying, “Within five minutes of me taking him away, Clint will kiss you and all you have to do is to protest, as loudly as you like…” and when Helen had asked how this was likely to steer Rowley her way, Joanna had hugged herself with glee, saying, “Don’t you realise, you little goose? Rowley has seen himself as a knight in armour since he was six. The very fact of you having to defend your honour against his brother will make him see you in an entirely different light… After that, of course, it will be up to you, but at least he’ll
be aware
of you. Apart from that, if I take Clint’s part, he’ll begin asking himself what he saw in me in the first place!”

It had all seemed so clever and artful but logical too she would have said, having regard to the diverse temperaments of the brothers. But somehow it hadn’t worked out that way and now, the memory of Rowley’s glance at her unbuttoned bodice returning to her, she felt so wretched and degraded that she could have burst into tears. She managed to restrain herself, however, sufficiently to turn away and begin walking along the lip of the escarpment in the direction of the village, aware only of the need to put distance between herself and the scene of an incident that involved the sacrifice of her dignity and his.

She had gone, perhaps, two hundred yards before Rowley caught her up. He was holding her bonnet by the strings and looking, she thought, very composed considering the circumstances. “You forgot this,” he said, in level voice. “Put it on before we pick up the trap and drive back. You’ll want to go straight home, I imagine.”

“I don’t care where I go,” she said, savagely, “so long as it’s a long way from here!” But she took the bonnet and rammed it on, pulling the strings taut with such a jerk that she bit her tongue. He said nothing but fell into step with her as they reached the hillside path that led down to the façade of the Sidney mansion. In silence they passed through the lych-gate to the spot where the loafer they had hired to watch the horses was fast asleep, his back to the churchyard wall.

She busied herself with her hair and the removal of traces of bracken from her skirt and jacket whilst he was harnessing the pony to the trap. Then, still without a word, he handed her in and they set off, not towards Leigh and the Tonbridge road, as she had expected, but up a narrow, leafy lane in the general direction of Sevenoaks.

They had gone about a mile when the lane broadened out and he pulled over on to a verge under some mature beech trees. It was a pretty spot, the bank starred with dog-violets and wild daffodils, fallow land stretching away to a belt of woods on the horizon. Blackbirds sang and a startled hedge-sparrow whirred from her nest in a moss-lined cavity of the bank. Seeing the bird, he smiled and moved on fifty yards or so, saying, casually, “She’ll be sitting. Pity to scare her off. Hedge-sparrows often desert if it happens a lot, and it will here on a road.” And then, letting the reins go slack so that the pony could crop, “Right. Now tell me what happened, Helen.”

She was very confused now, not knowing in the least what to make of his calm and relaxed mood.

“I’ll do no such thing. You saw what happened.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, genially, “but I mean
before
I arrived on the scene. According to plan, that is.”

It occurred to her then that Joanna must have been so indiscreet as to give him a direct hint of how Clint was likely to behave the moment he was left alone with a girl, so she compromised, saying, “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. I wasn’t looking for help. I had no one but myself to blame. It wasn’t Clint’s fault, not really.”

“I didn’t think it was. But something in the way of a rescue was looked for from me, wasn’t it? All I’m interested in knowing is why.”

She was silent, realising what complete idiots she and Joanna must have been to assume he could be taken in so easily.

“Well?”

She said, sulkily, “I’d prefer not to say. Let’s drive back to the stables, and take the next train home.”

“Not on your life,” he said, “or not until I discover exactly what you were up to and what Joanna was up to. Not if I have to sit here all night, with you beside me. Then you really would be compromised and no mistake.”

She was amazed that he could threaten her in those terms but had no doubt at all that he meant what he said, and that made her regret having separated herself from Joanna, whose fault it was that she had landed herself in such a scrape. She decided to see what could be done with bluff. “If I told you the full truth,” she said, “you would be more embarrassed than I was the moment you pounced on us back there. Just leave things as they are, Rowley. I made a fool of myself and so did Joanna, but it won’t help anyone to discuss it, least of all with you.”

“No,” he said with a half-smile, “I suppose not, but it might teach me something about women and I’m beginning to think that part of my education has been very neglected. Let me clear the air for you. That detachment on Joanna’s part was planned, but I was meant to come running back at a given moment. That’s true, isn’t it?”

She was silent, biting her lip and wishing the Kentish landscape would erupt like Vesuvius, or that a herd of mad elephants would come stampeding round the bend ahead, but he went on relentlessly, “Well, at least you don’t deny it, so from here on I’ll rely on guesses. Clint got down to business sooner than either of you anticipated. And also went further than you were prepared to tolerate. That’s true also, isn’t it? What I don’t understand is the real reason behind the charade. Were either of you trying to compromise Clint? Has he been too slow in coming up to scratch? Something of that kind?”