Fantails Read online

  Alison forced a smile to lips that felt strangely stiff and numb.

  “I think things usually work out for the best in the long run. Something will turn up for her ... It’s odd that you should tell me this to-day. All morning I’ve been rather worrying about Logie—thinking that Market Blyburgh is rather dead for a young girl, wondering about her future ... Probably this will turn out to be the best thing that could have happened, from her point of view. Working for Tom was an ideal beginning for her, but it’s bad for anyone of Logie’s age to settle down in too much of a groove.”

  “Did you ever think she might perhaps find work in Norwich? Then she could come home for the week-ends?”

  “Yes, I’d thought of that. But without training or experience she couldn’t earn enough at first to keep herself, away from home. And though there’s only Jane to educate now, we aren’t much better off than when they were all three at school—other expenses have gone up so enormously, and income tax as well. To help her out wouldn’t be easy.”

  “I see.” Ella was looking at her thoughtfully, at her troubled brown eyes, her generous, wistful mouth. “How old are you, Alison?” she demanded suddenly.

  “How old am I? I’m thirty-five. Why?”

  “I was wondering whether you ever thought of your own future, that’s all. Because if you don’t, it’s high time that you did, my dear! You’ve given up the best years of your life to those three—oh yes, you have!—and in a very few years now Jane will be able to stand on her own feet. How about planning what you’ll do when they don’t need you any longer?”

  “That time mayn’t come for years. Jane ought to have some sort of training. Then it would be nice if she and Logie were to get work in some town where they’d have opportunities of making friends of their own age, and they’d need me to make a home for them. For Andrew too when he comes home on leave.”

  “Alison, I could shake you! Unselfishness can be carried so far that it becomes a vice!”

  In all the years that Ella Sinclair had known Alison she had never seen her ruffled, so it was startling now to see her cheeks flame as she cried: “If something must be done, one may as well do it with a good grace outwardly, no matter what one may be feeling inwardly. And I loathe people who parade their miseries to the world and revel in being martyrs! And to have hard-won self-control mistaken for—for milk-and-water meekness is just maddening!”

  Ella was remorseful. “My dear, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean—”

  Alison laughed, a trifle shakily. “I know you didn’t, and I’m sorry for exploding. Now let’s talk of you and Tom. When will you know for certain if you’re going?”

  “It’s practically certain now, but don’t say anything to Logie or to anyone else just yet. I have a feeling that it’s better not to.”

  Hurrying back down the garden path, Mrs. Sinclair realised remorsefully that she had never given Alison the credit due to her for her unfailing cheerfulness and good humour, unsuspecting that at times it covered heartache and frustration. The moaners of this world, she reflected were far too often given the sympathy that was more deserved by those who made a gallant effort to hide their troubles ... Then, as one does, she forgot Alison in the annoying discovery that the fish for lunch had not arrived.

  Oh dear, thought Alison, oh dear! I was an idiot to flare up like that! Then she began mechanically to carry out the remainder of the morning’s tasks, her thoughts all centred once more on the problem of Logie’s future.

  How peaceful it would be if there were only someone with whom she could share a problem such as this! How restful to be able now and then to lean on someone else’s strength, instead of being always leaned upon! Suddenly Alison felt very tired.

  Barely had Logie flung wide the windows of the waiting-room and surgery when the bell rang. She went to answer it, and the day’s work began by listening to a long account of Mrs. Watson’s “bronickle catarrh.” It was a busy morning, as most mornings were for Logie. Surgery over, there were instruments to be sterilised, accounts brought up to date, letters to be typed. An urgent summons came for Dr. Sinclair after he had set out on his round, and to track him down meant putting through several telephone calls. A frightened woman brought a small boy bellowing from the pain of a scalded foot. Logie administered first aid and a strawberry from the garden to the child, sympathy and a cup of tea to his mother. By one o’clock she was a trifle tired and very hungry.

  Mrs. Sinclair met her in the hall as she was going out to post the letters she had typed. “Logie, would you mind?” She held out a letter of her own. Logie took it. “Yes, of course. Did you find Alison?”

  “Yes. I forgot to tell her Crumpet’s taking orders for greengages, so will you remember, if you can?”

  “I’ll do my best!”

  The market-place was empty. Market Blyburgh had gone home to have its midday meal. Outside the Painted Anchor a few cars were drawn up, ancient Fords and Morrises and Austins belonging to local farmers, a couple of sleek new ones owned probably by wayfarers passing through to Norfolk. Through its open door as Logie passed wafted a blend of beer, tobacco, and roast mutton to mingle with the smell of hot tar rising where the road had been recently mended and was now oozing a little in the heat of the sun.

  Logie went to the letter-box at the corner where the High Street entered the market-place. She heard a car draw up behind her as she dropped the letters in the box, and turned. Behind her was a dark-grey drophead coupe, long and low and sleek. Even Logie, usually unobservant where cars were concerned, knew it for a Rolls.

  The hood was open. The driver leaned towards her. He was a man of four or five-and-twenty. His well-shaped head was set on broad, lean shoulders. He had dark-red hair with a slight crisp wave. His face was square, his features blunt and strong. He looked as though he knew what he demanded from life and meant to get it. His voice was deep and pleasant as he asked: “I wonder if you can tell me ...” then broke off with recognition in his keen grey eyes.

  “You’re Logie!” he exclaimed.

  Startled, she looked at him uncertainly. Surely she couldn’t have forgotten him if they had ever met?

  “Yes,” she said hesitantly, “yes, I’m Logie Selkirk. But I don’t remember ...?”

  He finished for her. “You don’t remember meeting me, because we’ve never met. In spite of that, I know all manner of things about you.” He leaned back, one arm outstretched along the back of the seat, and smiled at her. “You were named Logie after an old house in Scotland where your parents spent their honeymoon. Your father was a doctor. You once ate seven strawberry ices one after another—”

  “I call it mean to drag up something that happened eleven years ago!” she protested, flushed and laughing.

  “You have a twin named Andrew, and a younger sister named Jane.”

  Logie was completely mystified. “Who are you? How do you know all this?”

  He grinned back at her quizzically, as though he knew a good deal more about her if he cared to tell it. “Does the name Sherry ring a bell?”

  Sherry—Andrew’s friend! “Why, of course! You’re Sherry MacAirlie!” Her eyes, puzzled no more, were bright with pleasure. “But how did you—well, how did you know that I was me?”

  They both laughed at her turn of phrase. “It would be pretty stupid of me if I didn’t, considering that I saw your face most days for the better part of eighteen months and in all manner of places—dak bungalows and army huts and tents.”

  “Oh, I see. But that snapshot was taken when I was only about fifteen.”

  “You haven’t aged too drastically,” he assured her, thinking that she looked no more than fifteen at this moment, with her ruffled hair and shining eyes and cheeks flushed with excitement.

  “You will come back with me to Fantails, won’t you? Alison and Jane would love to see you.”

  “Why else do you suppose I’ve come to Market Blyburgh?”

  She laughed again. “People do occasionally come here for other reasons than to
visit us, you know!”

  “I can’t believe it!” Sherry teased her, as though he had known her a long while. Logie smiled back at him uncertainly. Her eyes dropped, after a minute before his amused gaze. Unused to meeting strangers, she felt suddenly at a loss for what to say next.

  Sherry opened the door beside him. “Hop in!” he invited her.

  “We can’t drive there. At least it’s miles round, but only a minute if we walk. If you’ll leave the car there in the shade, beside that Standard, I’ll show you the way.”

  When he had parked the car he stood a moment, looking about him at the market-place and its surroundings. The picture built up in the mind from a description is often far from the reality, but the old pump in the centre, the shops with their bow-fronted windows and tiled roofs, the houses with their bricks weathered to a faded rose, their twelve-paned windows and wide white doors beneath delicately carved fanlights—these were all he had expected. Andrew had chosen his words well when they had talked together far into many a wakeful night, lying on charpoys in dak bungalows or tents that smelt of oil-lamps and crushed grass, or side by side beneath indigo star-spangled skies, the distant crying of hunting jackals making a background for their voices.

  Between the high walls of the garden of Swan House and that of its next door neighbour ran a narrow lane. Here Logie led the way. The sunlight, filtering through lime-trees, patterned the way with dappled light and shadow. Sherry, looking down sidelong at his companion, thought that where she was concerned her brother’s powers of description had somewhat failed. He had expected her to be the tomboy type—possibly to a degree that would to him be unattractive—indifferent to her appearance, aggressively efficient, given to wearing shorts and bare legs and to using hearty slang. A jolly good sort. That was perhaps how Andrew saw her—even how he liked to see her from his fraternal point of view. From his own angle Sherry was relieved to find her easy on the eyes, though not at all his type. He liked a girl to be exotic. Sophistication, Chanel 5, high heels and nylons, hair by Antoine, nails by Peggy Sage, and a technique for guessing—these were what attracted him. Whereas this girl in the crisp white overall probably washed those silky bubbles of hair herself in rain water, smelt of lavender, and said exactly what she meant. Still, she was infinitely more appealing than the hoyden he had more than half expected.

  Logie, without success, was trying to accommodate her shorter steps to his long stride. Not looking at him, she was acutely conscious of his scrutiny, his height and breadth of shoulder, and that he smelt of shaving soap and Harris tweed and Turkish cigarettes. Funny, she thought, how Turkish cigarettes smelt so much more expensive and sophisticated than Virginian! Desperately she hoped that lunch was something that could be eked out into four helpings—not three definitely individual dishes, such as they often had, like salads arranged on individual plates or three grilled dabs.

  “Here we are,” she told him, opening a door in the high wall, and they were in the stable yard. She called up to the open window of their living-room: “Alison—I’ve brought a visitor for lunch!”

  The window opened wider. Sherry, looking up, met a pair of friendly though surprised brown eyes.

  “It’s Sherry MacAirlie,” Logie explained. “I met him in the market-place.” To Sherry she added, “This is Alison—I expect Andrew’s told you about her?”

  “About you all,” Sherry assured her.

  “Good! Bring him up!”

  Alison snatched up the pair of knickers she had been cutting out for Jane from an old nightdress and thrust them with a pile of mending into a cupboard. Sensible of Logie to give her a second’s warning instead of bringing him straight up ... She met them at the door. “How nice to see you! We used to hope perhaps you’d come when Andrew told us you had left the army and come back to England—”

  Sherry held her welcoming hand a moment in a light strong clasp.

  “I’d hoped to come and see you long before now, but you know how it is. Time dashes past—there’s no accounting for the way it vanishes!”

  He wasn’t going to tell her that he had only come now driven by a sudden impulse, out of his desperate need of flight from his own world, his own thoughts, his disillusion and unhappiness.

  Alison said of course she knew just how it was. Had he come far? From London? Then he’d like to wash. Lunch would be ready in a moment.

  In Sherry’s world an unexpected guest for lunch, or half a dozen of them for that matter, presented no difficulty whatever. One’s friends had farms or relatives with farms and gardens whence came hampers packed with butter, chickens, eggs, rabbits, game, and vegetables—even an occasional jar of thick cream. Then there were parcels from sympathetic acquaintances in South Africa, America, Canada, Portugal, bringing cheeses such as most of us have long ago forgotten, dried fruits, sweets, and precious cooking fat, and a variety of tinned luxuries. Nor did he know from personal experience of domestic difficulties. His own home had been staffed by servants past the age of national service throughout the war. Some of these had now retired, but there had been no trouble in replacing them. He would have been amazed and horrified to know of agitated consultations in the kitchen while he was washing.

  “Jane, could you lay another place? Be sure you give me the odd tumbler and see he doesn’t have a chipped plate. Find the tin-opener, will you, Logie? We’ll have to open Spam to eke out the egg salad. Such a mercy we have a tin, but even so it’ll have to be a case of holding hard ourselves till we see how it goes. He’s certain to be ravenous after that long drive.”

  “What’s the pudding?” Logie asked, busy with the tin-opener.

  “Black cap. Plenty of that. I think we’d better open that tinned cheese we’ve been treasuring, though, don’t you?”

  “Yes. He’s large. Probably takes a lot of filling.”

  “Oh, my goodness—what do you suppose he likes to drink? There isn’t anything at all!”

  “There never is. Jane had better go to the Painted Anchor for a bottle of lager,” Logie suggested.

  “He mayn’t like lager,” Jane pointed out.

  “Well, if he doesn’t, at any rate we shan’t have wasted much money,” said Logie.

  Odd, being here, thought Sherry, returning to the room where lunch was laid on a round table near the window. Odd, seeing this place, meeting these girls one knew so well from hearsay. Like stepping between the covers of Hans Anderson or Grimm.

  “Good heavens—you mustn’t wait on me!” he protested, starting up as Logie handed him egg mayonnaise in a large pottery bowl. The only house of his acquaintance where one wasn’t waited on by servants save on Sunday evenings was the vicarage at home, and one expected vicarages to be different. Until now he hadn’t realised how different was this world of Andrew’s from his own. Firmly Alison told him to sit down. “We always do it this way. You mustn’t upset our drill!”

  Jane came in, flushed and breathless, holding one hand behind her as she passed him to join Logie for a moment where she stood helping herself at the side-table, then came to shake hands with him, shyly, like a polite child—which was, he realised, precisely what she was. Going through the awkward age at present, but going to be lovely one of these days.

  Logie, at his elbow, asked, “Will you have lager?”

  “Thank you. The perfect drink for a hot day!” Uncomfortable at being waited on by his hostess, he did not see the secret glance of satisfaction they exchanged.

  He spoke of Andrew, of experiences they had shared in India and Palestine during the eighteen months they had served together—shooting trips, sightseeing, fishing expeditions. He took care that they should know how often Andrew talked of family and home, and saw that they were pleased. Presently he engaged Logie in gay argument concerning the respective merits of Suffolk and his own county, Yorkshire. Jane joined her sister in the attack. Though neither had been to Yorkshire, they were positive its moors and dales and stone-built cottages could not possess half the subtle appeal of Suffolk’s rosy villages, the
ir tiled roofs crowned with stonecrop; marshes with their flashing lanes of water cutting channels through the whispering reeds; Suffolk punches knee-deep in fields of buttercups; windmills, and sleepy rivers, and ancient churches built of flints.

  Alison sat in smiling silence, listening to their quick retorts and laughter. She was trying to remember all that Andrew had written from time to time of Sherry. Gradually fragments from letters fitted themselves together into her mind until they made a pattern. His father had been killed in an air raid in London early in the war, and from him Sherry had inherited a considerable fortune together with property in Yorkshire. He had been going to make the army his career, but now, instead, was going to manage his estate and home farm instead of employing an agent. Whether his mother were alive or dead she did not know, only that he had been an only child. That unconscious air he had, of poised assurance, one met with only in those who all their lives had never lacked for money. Odd that he and Andrew, rooted in such different soil, should have become friends ... Andrew and Logie thought alike in many ways, as twins so often do ... Supposing Sherry were the solution to the problem of Logie’s future!

  Alison reflected that the things one wanted most to happen seldom did so of their own accord. One had to make one’s opportunities. So when a chance remark of Jane’s gave her the opening she wanted, she took it.

  Jane had lost her shyness. “Did you come here specially to see us? Or are you on your way somewhere else?” she asked him.

  “A bit of both. I’m heading for Scotland, so I came a bit out of my way to look you up.”