“Darling Prue, it’s extremely nice of you to like me too much but it doesn’t get us anywhere: now, does it?”
“It’s not meant to.”
Gideon put his foot to the ground and swung the hammock violently. Prunella’s hair blew across his mouth.
“Don’t,” she said and giggled. “We’ll capsize. Stop.”
“No.”
“I’ll fall off. I’ll be sick.”
“Say you’ll reconsider the matter.”
“Gideon, please.”
“Say it.”
“I’ll reconsider the matter, damn you.”
He checked the hammock but did not release her.
“But I’ll come to the same conclusion,” said Prunella. “No, darling. Not again! Don’t. Honestly, I’ll be sick. I promise you I’ll be sick.”
“You do the most dreadful things to me,” Gideon muttered after an interval. “You beastly girl.”
“I’m going in again before the sun’s off the pool.”
“Prunella, are you really fond of me? Do you think about me when we’re not together?”
“Quite often.”
“Very well, then, would you like — would you care to entertain the idea — I mean, couldn’t we try it out? To see if we suit?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well — in my flat? Together. You like my flat, don’t you? Give it, say, a month and then consider?”
She shook her head.
“I could beat you like a gong,” said Gideon. “Oh, come on, Prunella, for Christ’s sake. Give me a straight answer to a straight question. Are you fond of me?”
“I think you’re fantastic. You know I do. Like I said: I’m too fond of you for a jolly affair. Too fond to face it all turning out to be a dead failure and us going back to square one and wishing we hadn’t tried. We’ve seen it happen among the chums, haven’t we? Everything super to begin with. And then the not-so-hot situation develops.”
“Fair enough. One finds out and no bones broken, which is a damn sight better than having to plough through the divorce court. Well, isn’t it?”
“It’s logical and civilized and liberated but it’s just not on for me. No way. I must be a throw-back or simply plain chicken. I’m sorry. Darling Gideon,” said Prunella, suddenly kissing him. “Like the song said: ‘I do, I do, I do, I do.’”
“What?”
“Love you,” she mumbled in a hurry. “There. I’ve said it.”
“God!” said Gideon with some violence. “It’s not fair. Look here, Prue. Let’s be engaged. Just nicely and chastely and frustratingly engaged to be married and you can break it off whenever you want to. And I’ll swear, if you like, not to pester you with my ungentlemanly attentions. No. Don’t answer. Think it over and in the meantime, like Donne says, ‘for God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love.’ ”
“He didn’t say it to the lady. He said it to some irritating acquaintance.”
“Come here.”
The sun-baked landscape moved into late afternoon. Over at Quintern Place Bruce, having dug a further and deeper asparagus bed, caused the wee lad, whose name was Daft Artie, to fill it up with compost, fertilizer and soil while he himself set to work again with his long-handled shovel. Comprehensive drainage and nutrition were needed if his and his employer’s plans were to be realized.
Twenty miles away at Greengages in the Weald of Kent, Dr. Basil Schramm completed yet another examination of Sybil Foster. She had introduced into her room a sort of overflow of her own surplus femininity: be-ribboned pillows, cushions, a negligée and a bed-cover, both rose-coloured. Photographs, Slippers trimmed with marabou, a large box of petits-fours au massepain from the Marquise de Sevigné in Paris, which she had made but a feeble attempt to hide from the dietetic notice of her doctor. Above all, there was the pervasive scent of almond oil enclosed in a thin glass container that fitted over the light bulb of her table-lamp. Altogether the room, like Sybil herself, went much too far but, again like Sybil, contrived to get away with it.
“Splendid,” said Dr. Schramm, withdrawing his stethoscope. He turned away and gazed out of the window with professional tact while she rearranged herself.
“There!” she said presently.
He returned and gazed down at her with the bossy, possessive air that she found so satisfactory.
“I begin to be pleased with you,” he said.
“Truly?”
“Truly. You’ve quite a long way to go, of course, but your general condition is improving. You’re responding.”
“I feel better.”
“Because you’re not allowed to take it out of yourself. You’re a highly strung instrument, you know, and mustn’t be at the beck and call of people who impose upon you.”
Sybil gave a deep sigh of concealed satisfaction.
“You do so understand,” she said.
“Of course I do. It’s what I’m here for. Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Sybil, luxuriating in it. “Yes, indeed.”
He slid her bracelet up her arm and then laid his fingers on her pulse. She felt sure it was going like a train. When, after a final pressure, he released her she said as airily as she could manage: “I’ve just written a card to an old friend of yours.”
“Really?”
“To ask her to lunch on Saturday. Verity Preston.”
“Oh yes?”
“It must have been fun for you, meeting again after so long.”
“Well, yes. It was,” said Dr. Schramm, “very long ago. We used to run up against each other sometimes in my student days.” He looked at his watch. “Time for your rest,” he said.
“You must come and talk to her on Saturday.”
“That would have been very pleasant.”
But it turned out that he was obliged to go up to London on Saturday to see a fellow medico who had arrived unexpectedly from New York.
Verity, too, was genuinely unable to come to Greengages, having been engaged for luncheon elsewhere. She rang Sybil up and said she hadn’t seen Prue but Mrs. Jim reported she was staying with friends in London.
“Does that mean Gideon Markos?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“I’ll bet it does. What about ghastly C.C.?”
“Not a sign of him as far as I know. I see by the shipping news that the Poseidon came into Southampton the day before yesterday.”
“Keep your fingers crossed. Perhaps we’ll escape after all.”
“I think not,” said Verity.
She was looking through her open window. An unmistakable figure shambled toward her up the avenue of limes.
“Your stepson,” she said, “has arrived.”
iii
Claude Carter was one of those beings whose appearance accurately reflects their character. He looked, and in fact was, damp. He seemed unable to face anything or anybody. He was almost forty but maintained a rich crop of post-adolescent pimples. He had very little chin, furtive eyes behind heavy spectacles, a vestigial beard and mouse-coloured hair that hung damply, of course, halfway down his neck.
Because he was physically so hopeless, Verity entertained a kind of horrified pity for him. This arose from a feeling that he couldn’t be as awful as he looked and that anyway he had been treated unfairly: by his Maker in the first instance and probably in the second, by his masters (he had been sacked from three schools), his peers (he had been bullied at all of them) and life in general. His mother had died in childbirth and he was still a baby when Sybil married his father, who was killed in the blitz six months later and of whom Verity knew little beyond the fact that he collected stamps. Claude was brought up by his grandparents, who didn’t care for him. These circumstances, when she thought of them, induced in Verity a muddled sense of guilt for which she could advance no justification and which was certainly not shared by Claude’s stepmother.