‘A deuced pretty girl, too,’ the Colonel said. ‘At your age my boy I’d have been knocking on her door long ago with a bottle of fizz and a bouquet!’
Mike knew they were right about calling. The visit could no longer be delayed, and Albert was sent over with a note suggesting the following afternoon, to which Miss Leopold had replied, in a bold sprawling hand, on Mrs Cutler’s best pink notepaper, that she would be delighted to see him and hoped he would come to tea.
It is one thing to make a calm and reasonable decision overnight – quite another to implement it in the light of day. With dragging footsteps Michael approached the Lodge. What the devil was he going to talk about to a strange girl? Mrs Cutler was beaming in the porch. ‘I have Miss Irma in the garden so she can get a bit of fresh air, poor lamb.’ In a little trellised arbour there was a tea table set out with a white crochet cloth and a deck chair with a heart-shaped red velvet cushion for the visitor. The lamb was sitting up in a froth of muslin and lace and scarlet ribbons under a canopy of crimson rambler roses, which somehow reminded the young man of his sisters’ Valentines.
Although Mike had been told often enough that Irma Leopold was a ‘raving beauty’ he found himself unprepared for the exquisite reality of the sweet serious face turned towards his own. She appeared younger than he had expected – almost childlike – until she smiled, and with an easy adult grace held out a hand adorned with a breathtaking bracelet of emeralds. ‘It’s so nice of you to come and see me. I do hope you don’t mind tea out here in the garden? Do you like marrons glacés – the real French ones – I adore them. Deck chairs usually collapse but Mrs Cutler says this one is all right.’ Delighted at not being obliged to take an active part in the conversation – in his limited experience raving beauties were alarmingly dumb – Mike lowered himself into the sagging canvas chair and said truthfully that there was nothing he liked better than tea in the garden. It reminded him of home. Irma smiled again and this time the dimple, soon to become internationally famous, came out. ‘My Papa is a darling but he refuses to eat out of doors. Calls it “barbarous”.’ Michael grinned back, ‘So does mine,’ wriggled into a more comfortable position and helped himself unasked to another marron glacé. ‘My sisters love anything in the way of a picnic. . . . Oh, Heavens . . . what a tactless idiot I am . . . the last thing I meant to talk about was a picnic – oh, confound it, there I go again.’
‘Oh, please – don’t look so unhappy. Whether we talk of it or not, that awful thing is always in my mind . . . always and always.’
‘And in mine,’ Mike said very low, as the Hanging Rock in its dark glittering beauty rose between them. ‘I’m glad, really,’ Irma said at last, ‘that you mentioned the picnic just now. It makes it easier to say thank you for what you did on the Rock . . .’
‘It was nothing, nothing at all,’ the young man mumbled into his faultless English boots. ‘Besides, it was really my friend Albert, you know.’
‘But Michael, I don’t know – Doctor McKenzie wouldn’t let me see the newspapers . . . who is this Albert?’ Michael launched into a description of the rescue on the Rock, in which Albert figured as the hero, the master mind, ending with : ‘My Uncle’s coachman. Wonderful chap!’
‘When can I meet him? He must think me a monster of ingratitude.’ Michael laughed. ‘Not Albert.’ Albert was so modest, so brave, so clever . . . ‘Ah, but you must get to know him . . .’ Irma, however, was aware of nothing but the face of the young man opposite, flushed and charmingly earnest in praise of his friend. She was becoming a little tired of the unknown Albert when Mrs Cutler came out of the Lodge with the tea tray and the conversation turned to chocolate cake. ‘When I was six years old,’ Michael said, ‘I ate the whole of my little sister’s birthday cake at one go.’ ‘You hear that Mrs Cutler? You had better cut me a slice before Mr Michael gobbles it ill up.’ A good laugh, that’s what they needed, the poor young things . . .
As soon as he could escape from his Aunt’s dinner table that evening, Michael went out to the stables with a kerosene lantern and two cold bottles of beer. The coachman was lying naked on his bed reading the racing tips in the Hawklet by the light of a candle whose wavering flame sent ripples of light across his powerful chest, tufted with coarse black hair. Dragons and mermaids writhed and wriggled with every movement of the muscular arm pointing to a broken rocking chair under the tiny window.
‘It’s bloody hot in here even after dark but I’m used to it. Take your coat off. There’s a coupla mugs on that shelf.’ The mugs were filled and at once provided swimming pools for sundry insects attracted by the candle. ‘It’s real good to see you on your pins again, Mike.’ The old comfortable silence took over, broken presently by Albert. ‘I seen you out on the lawn today with Miss Thingummy-bob.’
‘By Jove! That reminds me! She wants me to take her out in the punt tomorrow.’
‘I’ll tie her up in front of the boathouse and leave the pole on the table. And mind out for them lily roots at the shallow end.’
‘I’ll be careful. I don’t want to tip the poor girl into the mud.’ Albert grinned. ‘Now if it was Miss Bottle-legs, I reckon a ducking wouldn’t do her no harm. Them quiet ones, Mike, is the worst. . . .’ He winked and took a pull at his beer. ‘By the way,’ Mike said laughing, ‘Irma Leopold particularly wants to meet you.’
‘Oh, she does, does she? Cripes, this cold beer hits the spot.’
‘Until I told her about you today she had no idea who found her on the Rock. How about coming down to the boathouse tomorrow afternoon?’
‘Not on your life!’ and after taking another pull at his mug he began to whistle ‘Two Little Girls in Blue’. As soon as he paused for breath, Mike said, ‘Well what day can you make it?’ But Albert, having changed into a more convenient key, had started again at the beginning with exasperating flourishes of his own invention. When at last he stopped, deflated, Mike repeated, ‘Well? What day?’
‘Never. You can count me out on that one, Mike.’
‘Then what the devil am I to say to the girl?’
‘That’s your business.’ He began whistling again, and Mike, now really annoyed, left his beer unfinished, opened the trap door in the floorboards and descended the ladder into the darkness of the feed room below. Confound Albert! What the blazes has got under his skin?
On the following day Irma was waiting for Mike on the rustic seat in the boathouse when she heard the scrape of wheels on gravel and looking up saw a broad-shouldered youth in a faded blue shirt trundling a barrow along the path skirting the lake He was moving so quickly that when she stood up and called from the boathouse door he was already half way to the shrubbery and out of earshot. Or might have been. She called again, this time so loudly that he stopped, turned round and slowly retraced his steps. At last he stood facing her, near enough for her to see the square brick red peasant face under a thatch of tumbled hair, the deep set eyes apparently focussed on some invisible object of interest above her head. ‘Was you calling me, Miss?’
‘I was shouting at you, Albert! You are Albert Crundall?’
‘That’s me,’ he said, not looking at her.
‘You know who I am, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know who you are all right. Was you wanting me for anything, like?’ The sunburned arms lay along the barrow handles, the indigo mermaids crinkled ready for flight.