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“Richard-darling! Where did you spring from?”

He was pleasant without enthusiasm.

“My dear Helen-what a surprise!”

She linked her arm in his.

“Is that all you’ve got to say? Where on earth have you been?”

“In the States.”

“You never wrote me a line! You’re not going in, are you? Come along down to the beach! I’ve got a million things to say to you. This is Felix Brand, my accompanist. I’m staying with his people. And-I suppose you know Marian-”

Felix looked murder at him.

Richard said, “Marian and I are very old friends. You’ll find it lovely on the beach. We’ve just been there. Now we’re going in. If you’re staying here, I expect I shall be seeing you.”

He went into the house with Marian.

Helen Adrian looked after them for a moment before she turned to Felix with a laugh.

Eliza brought tea to the study and said no, Mrs. Felton hadn’t come in, and she didn’t know where Penny was either. She retreated in a vaguely offended manner which Marian guessed might be put down to Miss Adrian’s account. It came over her that here was a beautiful woman with a beautiful voice, and nearly everyone in both houses disliked her cordially. Felix was in love with her, but she had a conviction that he didn’t like her the better for that, or any more than the rest of them.

With this in her mind, she looked up from the tea she was pouring and said,

“Do you know Helen Adrian well?”

It was very pleasant in the study. A light air came through three open windows and brought the scent of flowers. A bumble bee zoomed in, and out again. It was all quite extraordinarily peaceful. He looked at Marian in the old blue and white cotton dress which she had worn for three summers, and which had never pretended to anything but utility, and thought what a restful woman she was to be with, and how she made any place she was in feel like home. Even if he hadn’t fallen in love with her he would have liked her more than anyone he had ever met. It was just as if her thought about Felix had touched him, because he remembered that he had once been in love with Helen Adrian without liking her at all. Without thought or effort he found himself saying,

“I was once in love with her-for a week.”

She said gravely, “Were you?” and gave him his tea.

“I heard her sing. Have you?”

“Just practising with Felix. It’s a lovely voice.”

“The correct expression is that she sings like an angel. People were saying so all round me the first time I heard her, but even that didn’t stop me thinking it was true. And she looked like an angel too-white satin and lilies, and the light shining down on her hair. I went right in off the deep end.”

“What happened?”

He laughed.

“I came to the surface again and discovered that we bored each other stiff.”

Marian lifted her cup to her lips and drank. When she had put it down again she said,

“Do you often do that kind of thing?”

“What kind of thing?”

“Falling suddenly in love, and then out again.”

Well, he had asked for it. He laughed again and said,

“No. And anyhow ‘in love’ is the wrong word. It was more like going under ether. I wouldn’t be talking about it if it had been serious-would I?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice took a note of surprise. “I don’t really know-you-at all.”

“I wonder. I think I know you very well.”

She began to smile, but couldn’t trust her lips. She said in a quiet voice,

“There isn’t much to know. You would soon come to the end of it. Then it would bore you.”

“Would it? If you take most of the things that really matter, they may be profound, but they are fundamentally simple. You don’t get tired of the sun, and the sky, and fresh air, and water, and bread. There is nothing complicated about them. They are always there. If they weren’t, we should die. You don’t get tired of what you need.”

It came out slowly, a bit at a time, more as if he was thinking aloud than speaking.

Before she could say anything there was a step on the flagged path outside. Penny came up the two shallow steps and into the room. She looked as if she had been crying her eyes out. She had tried to wash away the marks with cold water, the bright brown curls on her forehead were damp. She hadn’t bothered with powder or lipstick. She held Mactavish in her arms, and he wasn’t liking it. She said in a small, flat voice,

“Eliza said you wanted me.”

And then she saw Richard Cunningham, and wanted to run away. Only, of course, when you’ve been nicely brought up you can’t, so she came and shook hands instead. Mactavish, whom no amount of bringing up had ever been able to deflect from doing exactly what he wanted to, gave Penny a fierce rabbit kick and jumped down. After which he arranged himself in Marian’s lap, refused a saucer of milk, and remained for some time with his eyes mere orange slits and the extreme tip of his tail flicking to and fro.

Penny drank two cups of tea, said a very few things in that little exhausted voice, and presently slipped away again through the open door.

When she had gone Richard looked at Marian.

“What’s the matter with that nice child?”

There was a spark of anger in her eyes.

“She loves Felix a great deal better than he deserves. Helen Adrian is tormenting them both.”

“Does Helen want him?”

“I shouldn’t think so. He doesn’t even think so himself. She might have taken him if he had come for Uncle Martin’s money, so I’m afraid that goes down to my account.”

“He ought to thank Heaven fasting. He would probably get to the point of murdering her in less than six months. He doesn’t look far off it now.”

“That’s what worries Penny.”

“Is the child engaged to him?”

“No-just brought up with him. She’s some kind of distant cousin. I don’t see how anyone could love Mrs. Brand and Miss Remington, so it’s all gone to Felix.”

They went on talking.

Chapter 13

Miss Silver came up from the beach where she had left her niece Ethel Burkett sitting comfortably in the lee of a breakwater with little Josephine digging in the sand beside her. Farne has a very good beach though not a large one. Later on in the year there would not be room to move, but on this May morning Miss Silver considered it very pleasant-very pleasant indeed. She had enjoyed the delightful air and Josephine’s infant prattle. She had recalled with pleasure Lord Tennyson’s poem about the “fisherman’s boy” who “shouts with his sister at play,” and the “sailor lad” who “sings in his boat on the bay,” together with the much less well-known lines about the eagle:

“Ring’d with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.”

Not that Farne Bay could at the moment exhibit a fisherman’s boy sporting with his sister, or even a sailor lad on its at present empty sea, and there was no tradition of its having ever attracted an eagle. But you do not, of course, expect poetry to be literal.

After a couple of hours of the beach and Lord Tennyson, Miss Silver considered that a little movement would be agreeable. Ethel and Josephine could remain on the beach whilst she herself did some shopping. She did not care for the book they had given her at the library yesterday, and she thought she would change it. She would prefer a novel in which the characters had at least heard of the ten commandments and did not begin drinking at ten in the morning after having kept it up for most of the night. Their behaviour under this alcoholic stimulus she considered to be totally lacking in interest.

She came up from the beach and made her way along the front until she came to Cross Street. Up here in the wind she was really very glad of her coat. It did not trouble her in the least that it was now ten years old, and that its black cloth surface had a dingy look in the bright spring sunshine. As the breeze caught it, a breadth of olive-green cashmere came into view beneath. She had found her ribbed woollen stockings a little heavy on the sunny beach, but it was not her practice to change them for lisle thread until May had not only come but gone, and she was really quite glad of them now. On the same principle, she was wearing a winter hat- not the felt which she had bought two years ago, but the one which had been her best until then. For seaside wear she had removed an elderly bunch composed of two pansies in a circle of mignonette, leaving it simply trimmed with loops of black and purple ribbon, rather limp after four years of faithful service. Instead of her usual chintz knitting-bag she carried, as more suitable to the seaside, a bag of black cloth stoutly lined with the shiny black Italian that she had used to make her windows light-proof during the war. The bag had neat cord handles unpicked from an elderly cushion and was both strong and capacious. It contained at the moment one made and one half-made stocking for Derek Burkett, a ball and three two-ounce skeins of grey wool, four steel needles, a purse, a handkerchief, a black and purple neck-scarf, some oddments, and her own and Ethel’s library books.