Matters between the Clement Kanes were certainly becoming uncomfortably strained. In the drawing room, before dinner, Rosemary had sat a little withdrawn from the rest of the company, preoccupied and ungracious, while Clement, trying to appear unconcerned, all the time watched her. Like two characters out of a problem play, thought Miss Allison, who preferred drama to be confined to the stage. And really it made things rather awkward and unreal when two members of a very ordinary family behaved in this neurotic manner. Even Clive Pemble, who was not sensitive to atmosphere, seemed to be aware of tension.
He had made several hearty efforts to engage Rosemary in conversation, but though her lips smiled mechanically, her replies were monosyllabic and discouraging.
Miss Allison had a fleeting suspicion that the beautiful Mrs. Clement Kane was seeing herself in a tragic role and banished it nobly. "Cat!" said Miss Allison to herself.
On the opposite side of the table Betty Pemble was chattering to Jim Kane, from time to time appealing to Clive to corroborate her statements. There was no trace of her mother's majesty in Betty. She had enjoyed a certain measure of success as a girl through a natural ingenuousness which was pretty in a debutante but slightly tedious in a woman of thirty-five. She had a vivacious way of talking, pleasing manners, and a good heart, but her habit of telling interminable and incoherent stories about her own experiences made her a wearisome person to be with for more than an hour or two together. Fortunately Clive Pemble profoundly mistrusted clever women, and if he sometimes was bored by his wife's conversation, this boredom was more than compensated for by her blind faith in his omniscience. She was often heard to say that Clive was a Rock, and Clive, who knew that he was no Rock but a man like other men, and hated the knowledge, found this faith in him a comfort and a stay. So when Betty told Jim Kane that if there was the least hint of thunder in the air she simply couldn't sleep a wink and demanded inevitably: "Can I, Clive?" he smiled placidly and replied with perfect good humour: "No, rather not!" Other men, thought Miss Allison, would have brained the silly wench.
Between Betty Pemble and her mother the last member of the party was seated, taking a polite interest in an anecdote about Betty's children. Knowing his attention to be fully engaged, Miss Allison allowed herself to steal a look at Mr. James Kane's admirable profile.
The Kane family tree was a spreading one, and while Silas was the last representative of the senior line, Jim was the last of the junior. Nor could any two people have been more dissimilar.
The original founder of the family's fortune had left four sons. From the eldest son's marriage to Emily Fricker had sprung Silas. Clement was the grandson of the second. The third, emigrating to Australia, had drifted out of the Kane circle, his only surviving descendant being a granddaughter, of whose existence the English Kanes were no more than vaguely aware. The fourth son had left one daughter, who died a spinster, and one son, who was killed in Gallipoli. To this son and his wife Norma had been born Jim, the last of the Kanes.
The last of the Kanes bore very little resemblance to the rest of the family and was not a member of the firm of Kane and Mansell. He was a large fair young man with a frank smile and a pair of direct grey eyes which had a habit of gazing in Miss Allison's direction.
He worked at the Treasury, and although this was a very respectable occupation his cousins Silas and Clement could never feel that he was a really serious or responsible person. He professed no interest in the manufacture of netting, and he spent a great proportion of his spare time engaged in sports which held no lure for his cousins at all. At Cambridge he had got his Blue for Rugger, a circumstance which seemed right and commendable (though strangely un-Kane-like) to Silas and Clement. But when he continued to play Rugger on Saturday afternoons, after he had come down from Cambridge, the cousins shook their heads and were afraid that he would never settle down. They thought it a great pity, for they were fond of Jim. Clement said he had a very sound brain if only he could be brought to take life seriously; and Silas, watching in astonishment Jim's handling of a speedboat, feared that the poor boy had taken after his mother. He disapproved of the speedboat as profoundly as he disapproved of the flighty-looking sports car, but, all the same, he let Jim keep it in his boathouse at the bottom of the cliff and, little as he understood the lure of such sports, derived a queer pleasure from recounting his young cousin's exploits to such people as Joe Mansell, whose nephews and cousins achieved no speed records and broke no limbs at Twickenham.
Since young Mr. Harte, upon her right, was fully occupied with the consumption of ice pudding, and Clive Pemble, on her left, had become involved in the intricacies of his wife's anecdote, Miss Allison had leisure to observe the last of the Kanes. Having decided some months previously that it was no part of a companion-secretary's duties to fall in love with any member of her employer's family, she had assured herself that she was wholly impervious to Mr. James Kane's charm of manner and made up her mind to demonstrate clearly to him her utter unconcern. Unfortunately he seemed to be insensitive to snubs, and, in spite of having received from her a very cold greeting upon his arrival at Cliff House, he had had the audacity to try to catch her eye three times during the course of dinner. She was happy to think that upon each occasion she had managed to avoid his gaze.
At this moment the object of her reflective scrutiny turned his head. Miss Allison demonstrated her indifference by blushing hotly and thereafter devoted her attention to his stepbrother.
It seemed a very long time before old Mrs. Kane rose from the table. Jim Kane held open the door for the ladies to pass out of the room, and Miss Allison's kind heart overcame her judgment. He was looking rather worried and certainly puzzled. She was afraid all at once that her studied disregard of him had hurt his feelings, and, instead of going out of the room without paying any heed to him, she raised her eyes to his face and gave him a faint smile. His brow cleared; he smiled back at her so warmly that she almost repented of her humane impulse.
In the drawing room it was her first duty to see Mrs. Kane comfortably ensconced in her favourite chair, a footstool under her feet and her ebony cane within her reach. In the performance of these offices she was slightly hindered by Betty Pemble, who said: "Oh, do let me!" and brought up too high a footstool and tried to insert a cushion behind her hostess. As Mrs. Kane came of a stiff-backed generation and despised women who could not sit up without such soft support, this piece of thoughtfulness was not well received. Nor did Mrs. Pemble's next utterance tend to make her more popular. "I think Mr. Kane is simply marvellous!" she said.
Emily's faded blue eyes stared glassily at her. "In what way?" she asked.
Mrs. Pemble, forgetting that she was addressing a lady over eighty years old, said: "I mean, when you think of this being his sixtieth birthday, it just doesn't seem possible, somehow."
Emily looked at her with contempt and confined her response to one blighting dissyllable. "Indeed!" she said and, turning to Miss Allison, requested her to close one of the windows. "There is a nasty fog creeping up," she announced. "I can feel it in my bones."
"No more than a sea mist, I believe," said Mrs. Mansell.
"You may believe what you choose, Agatha," said Emily, "but I call it a nasty fog."
"Yes, I think it's a kind of a fog," said Betty.
Emily looked at her with renewed dislike. Betty plumped herself down upon the rejected footstool and said: "I simply must tell you what Peter said to me when I told him I was going to Uncle Silas' birthday-party! You know the children always call him Uncle. They absolutely worship him. But of course he's simply marvellous with children, isn't he? I mean, he has a kind of way with them. I suppose it's a sort of magnetism. I always notice how they go to him. I mean, even a shy mite like my Jennifer. It's as though she just can't help herself."