Near Neighbours Read online

  Apart from their looks, they were good girls; not perfect, naturally, but as far as she could judge, a great deal more agreeable than most of their contemporaries. At least they did not treat her as if she were feeble-minded. Holly was a little inclined lately to attempt to be crushing, but the others promptly sat on her if she showed any symptoms of overstepping the line which they drew so rigidly. And then, poor pet, one had to remember that it must be very difficult to keep one’s end up with four older ones!

  Holly made heavy weather of her school work, moaning over her “prep” every evening, but she was certain to do well in Highers, or so her head-mistress at St. Gregory’s said. When that was over, there was trouble ahead, for if Holly imagined that she was going to hang about at home until she was old enough to be taken on as a nurse at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital, she was mistaken. No, thought her mother, vigorously loosening the soil round the roses, she would take a course of advanced classes in French and literature, and acquire a little of the polish she needed.

  It was a pity that Rowan had never shown any leanings towards a profession. She had done well while at St. Gregory’s, carrying off more prizes than the other three put together, dancing at school concerts, playing Rosalind in the school’s inevitable production of As You Like It. After she left Greg’s she appeared to have no further ambition and now she was looking after three obstreperous children and perfectly happy, doing country dancing in the evenings, quite unconcerned about the lack of prospects in her present post. She was not even well paid, her mother thought resignedly; if she had had a little of Hazel’s doggedness and Hazel some of Rowan’s brains, both might do better.

  Not that Hazel was not doing well, bless her. By sheer determination and hard work she had made up for being less clever than the others, and now on the secretarial staff of the Empress Hospital she held a responsible position without rousing envy. Everyone liked Hazel, and wished her well. In many ways she seemed more like the eldest of the family than Willow.

  Mrs. Lenox frowned at a weed which she had just pulled up. She was beginning to be afraid that Willow would never realize the responsibilities of marriage as long as she (and Archie, when he was not at sea) continued to live at Number Six. Willow ought to be making her own mistakes and learning from them instead of helping a mother whose housekeeping had been brought to a fine art. Besides, the house was not large enough for them all. It looked enormous, but there were not very many rooms, unless you counted those areas in the basement, which were really only fit for growing mushrooms, in Mrs. Lenox’s opinion. There was Holly, still sharing Rowan’s room, and Murray sleeping on a divan in the study. And though Holly could and should, as soon as her mother could get it papered and painted and the odd bits of old furniture cleared out of it, be moved into that little place on the top floor between Hazel and Rowan, there was still Murray to be considered.

  Actually, thought Mrs. Lenox, it would be fairer to put Murray in the little place, since the study was more or less sacred to him, give Rowan the room now occupied by Willow and Archie, because it was bigger and better than her own, and leave Holly in sole possession of the room she slept in now. But, of course, none of this could be accomplished while Willow and Archie were there. If only Archie, dear fellow, would assert himself more. Willow responded to firm handling, but Archie either could not or would not see that. Because Willow preferred to live with her family, he had given up trying to find a place of their own, and made feeble excuses which would not have deceived a six-months-old infant for doing so.

  “Really, Archie is as spineless as a jelly-fish!” Mrs. Lenox exclaimed angrily to her son. “I cannot imagine how he ever manages to give an order on board that boat of his!”

  “Be fair, my pet. After all, he doesn’t have to give orders to Willow on board,” Murray said. “It’s only with her that he is entirely invertebrate. And Willow—well, she can reduce any man, except a mere brother, to pulp with one of those big-eyed looks of hers.”

  Murray was quite right. Her whole family had watched with weary resignation the devastating effect of Willow’s impact on men young, old and middle-aged. Nor could one blame Willow for being Willow. She meant no harm, and then, she was so very pretty.

  As usual, Mrs. Lenox’s musings had brought her back in a circle to their starting-point; as usual she had reviewed her four daughters and hardly glanced at her only son. When it came to Murray, however, Mrs. Lenox was quite unable to consider him with the same cool, unbiased attention. Being an honest woman, she admitted this to herself. Murray was too much like his father for her ever to see him clearly as she saw the girls.

  He was not faultless, of course. For one thing his temper was quicker, his tongue more biting, than his sisters’, but he looked at her out of John’s grey eyes, he spoke with John’s voice, he was a constant living reminder to Edith Lenox of the husband she had adored. And so, where Murray was concerned, she was the same as any other mother of a beloved only son.

  “Anyhow,” said Mrs. Lenox to herself, rather defiantly, as she gathered up her basket and fork and turned to go into the house. “Anyhow, he is a good son and a good brother, too! And he is working so hard to pass his finals—and he is so good-looking. No one could deny that!”

  Then, for she had spoken aloud, she looked round her guiltily in case she could have been overheard. There was no one within hearing, but at one of the top windows of Number Four she saw a slight movement as if somebody had been looking out and drawn back hurriedly.

  “Dear me!” thought Mrs. Lenox. “That must be Miss Balfour, poor soul!”

  Across her mind flashed the remembrance of a remark flung at her by Willow as she left the house with Archie several hours earlier. Something about Rowan’s having gone next door to see Miss Balfour.

  “Really, Rowan is much too impulsive!” thought her mother. “I do hope she didn’t horrify the poor old thing—”

  But she had her own impulsive moments, and before she had given herself time to think, she had waved towards that top window.

  There was a shadowy response from above, as if Miss Balfour were half afraid of what she was doing.

  “I must find out from Rowan about this call of hers, and then I think I shall call myself,” thought Mrs. Lenox. “After all, we are her nearest neighbours, and I’ve always had a feeling that she would like to be friends. Perhaps now that her sister is dead, she will be able to know us at last.”

  And she went in, to drag Holly away from her lessons and send her to bed.

  CHAPTER 4

  While their mother gardened and thought about them, and Holly reluctantly dealt with her home-work, the rest of the Lenox family enjoyed their evening in different ways.

  Murray’s was quite simple and always the same. He walked straight up the hill to the courts belonging to his tennis club, and played until it was too dark to see the ball.

  He usually played with Hazel as partner or opponent, for she played a good game and had a really strong forehand drive. But this evening he walked up the Street alone, for Hazel had some mysterious date about which she would say nothing except that she was going to the movies. The movies, thought Murray disgustedly. After being indoors all day, to go and frowst in a picture-house all evening! It was just like a girl, but no doubt some boy-friend had asked her, and they would sit holding hands in the warm darkness.

  “If ever I take a girl out,” thought Murray, pushing open the creaking door in the high wall and finding himself in his favourite surroundings, “we’ll go for a long walk over the Pentlands, or play tennis or do something sensible.”

  He waved his racquet cheerfully in answer to a shout of welcome from the pavilion verandah, where a group of white-clad figures were seated, waiting for their turn to play. Murray walked along the path outside the high wire mesh, keenly noticing the games in progress on all four courts.

  Good Lord! There was a girl who should never be allowed to play except on a moss-grown grass lawn at a country tea-party! If she succeeded in hitting th
e ball she spooned it up as if she were putting sugar in coffee, and with just about as much strength. It would be funny except that the possibility of having to play with her made it enraging.

  “I’ll go home early,” he thought. “I’ll just have one or two sets and then I’ll leave.”

  He joined the others on the pavilion steps, and sat down beside his friend John Drummond.

  “Any chance of a game?” he asked. “Or are you all fixed up?”

  “Well, not exactly,” said John. “But I think it would be asking a bit much to expect you to join in our four.” He leaned towards Murray and lowered his voice. “Did you happen to notice a girl on Number Three court as you passed? A stranger, I mean—”

  “Not the little one who can’t play for toffee?” said Murray, staring at his friend in horror. “But why do you have to—”

  “Because she’s a school friend of Pam’s, and she’s staying with us. She’s a nice kid, really. It’s only her tennis that’s so ghastly. Her name’s Susan Rattray.”

  “Will she want to play again as soon as she comes off?” Murray sounded hopeful, but John shook his head.

  “She may not want to, but she’ll play, all right,” he said gloomily.

  “The thing is,” he went on, “her mother was first-class, or very nearly. Played at Wimbledon and did pretty well there. Ruby Vincent—”

  “Good Lord! And that rabbit is her daughter? What rotten luck!” exclaimed Murray.

  “Yes, it’s rotten luck,” agreed John, rather drily. “On Susan. You mean on her mother, I suppose. But nobody can help it if they aren’t any good at games, can they? And Mrs. Rattray has made Susan’s life absolute hell ever since the girl was thirteen. Extra tennis at school, coaching all through the holidays, and when the coaches threw in their hands and said it was a waste of time and money to go on, Mrs. Rattray did the coaching herself. The result is Susan’s got such an inferiority complex that she’s almost afraid to speak. I think her mother must be a proper bitch.”

  It was unusual for John to talk at such length and so hotly, and Murray was surprised. Could John be keen on this girl, he wondered. That also was not like John, who had never shown any interest in girls except as partners on the tennis court. It was obviously his cue to say he would make up their four, he thought, and he said, “It’s queer how one-idea’d women get on anything they’re good at, isn’t it? I daresay Ruby Vincent—I mean Mrs. Rattray—is a pretty difficult parent. I’ll make one of your four, John, of course.”

  “Thanks, Murray. That’s decent of you. It’ll mean that you’ll have to play with Susan,” John said anxiously. “You are much stronger than I am, so Pam and I—”

  “Yes, that’s all right by me,” said Murray, now feeling an agreeable glow of magnanimity.

  It still warmed him while he was being introduced to the small dark girl, and tinged his voice with a hint of patronage which made Susan Rattray think resignedly: “This is another of them! Playing with me to please John and Pam. Oh, well—it won’t last so very long!”

  As she walked on to the court the resigned feeling, to which she was only too well accustomed, suddenly yielded to rebellious rage. She could not have said why the pitying look in the tall fair young man’s grey eyes had seemed the last straw, but it was so; and something deep down inside her was boiling up into a resolution never to hold a tennis racquet again, no matter how angry her mother might be.

  Murray, noting with careless approval that she was perfectly turned out, and thinking that it was something in her favour, was startled to find her slamming the balls back at their opponents like a fury.

  “Look here,” said Murray, when they were leaving the court after beating the Drummonds six-two. “You’re a fraud, Susan Rattray. I saw you playing pat-ball like a rabbit when I came in, yet just now you were a tigress. What’s the meaning of it?”

  Susan looked up at him with a confidence she had never felt before in her dealing with young men. “The meaning of it is that I was in a rage,” she replied.

  “Then you must always play in a rage!” Murray said, laughing.

  Susan shook her head. “I’ve made up my mind never to play again—and you’ve no idea what a relief it is!”

  “What do you like to do, then?” he asked.

  “Oh, so many things!” Susan’s pale face grew delicately pink, her eyes shone. “Sailing and riding, and walking—”

  To his own intense astonishment Murray Lenox heard himself say: “I can’t do anything about sailing or riding, but we might go for a good tramp one evening, if you liked?”

  “But then you would miss your tennis.”

  “I don’t think it would do me any harm to miss it now and then,” said Murray.

  * * *

  As Murray had supposed, Hazel was sitting quietly in the dim warmth of the picture-house on Adam Ferrier’s left, but he was not holding her hand. She was acutely conscious of his nearness. If she moved at all her sleeve brushed against his, so she sat absolutely still. He was so close to her in body, so far away in mind. Adam liked her because she was sensible. He had said so; and that was why he had asked her out with him this evening. It was terrible to be liked because you were sensible, but better that than not to be liked—by Adam.

  All the younger members of the clerical staff at the Hospital, and some of the nurses too, were interested in Adam Ferrier. They showed it in different ways: some by pretending to ignore him, some by saying they couldn’t stand him because he was so pleased with himself, some by dog-like devotion. Hazel had tried to behave to him as she did to the other doctors, with cool impersonal politeness.

  And Adam went on his way absorbed in his work, and never noticed any of the feminine attitudes struck for his benefit. Nobody knew anything about his private life.

  “It’s my belief,” said Christine Rennie solemnly to Hazel, “that he just doesn’t exist outside the Hospital. He materializes as he walks in at the gates, and dissolves into thin air when he goes out.”

  Christine, a green-eyed red-head with a milky skin, whose hair flamed like a torch under the lights of the Out-Patients’ Department and attracted every male glance, had so many young men that she could go out with a different one every night for weeks on end. Therefore, if she insisted that her interest in Adam Ferrier was purely a naturalist’s in some strange new specimen, she must be supposed to be speaking the truth.

  She had a shrewd common sense oddly at variance with her romantic appearance, and this remark of hers about Adam’s having no existence beyond the Hospital had a grain of truth in it which Hazel, though she had laughed at Christine, had thought over and found bitter.

  They all knew how the other young doctors and surgeons liked to spend their free time: Doctor Lister played Rugby football, “Ginger” Smith played the flute, Montford played the fool and was popularly expected to be booted out in the near future if he didn’t lay off whisky and women; Pincher Martin was crazy about amateur dramatics . . . but Adam Ferrier never gave anyone the slightest hint as to his tastes and activities.

  She knew that he thought her sensible because Ginger Smith had told her so.

  “The Mystery Man approves of you, Hazel,” he had said, grinning until his sandy moustache quivered. “He said just now, ‘for God’s sake get that Lenox girl to do those notes. She’s the only sensible one of the whole bunch!’ I hope you feel honoured!”

  Hazel had only smiled and edged past Ginger, whom she did not like very much.

  “Well, he knows you, and he knows your name, which is more than can be said about the rest of us!” This was Christine’s comment. She had been standing near enough to hear what Ginger Smith said.

  It was no use trying to edge past Christine with a smile.

  Hazel said: “If it’s true and not just one of Ginger’s fairy-tales, it’s only because Doctor Ferrier is so particular about his case-notes. You know he gets into a frenzy if they aren’t perfect.”

  And the day after that, Adam Ferrier asked her to go to the pictu
res with him.

  Even now it was almost incredible to Hazel that she should be sitting beside him, that she should be with him at all, and in surroundings so utterly unlike the Hospital.

  “Why can’t I just enjoy the outing and the picture?” she thought miserably. “Why do I have to bother so much about him? I wish I were more like Rowan—”

  For a moment her mind flew to the sister with whom she was most in sympathy. Rowan, called after a fairy tree, born in the fairy’s month of October, who sometimes seemed not altogether mortal in her happy detachment from the sentimental troubles that afflicted her sisters periodically. Lucky Rowan!

  * * *

  Rowan, her slender feet in ballet flats moving through the intricacies of a strathspey, was calling herself lucky too.

  The big hall, in spite of open windows, was stiflingly hot, and the dancers were wilting, but not one of them would have changed places with their friends enjoying the summer evening outside.

  All their hours of practising had reached the culminating point when, out of their number, a team was to be picked to perform in one of the Festival productions. All of them who were left, eight girls and eight young men, were good. It would be difficult to choose among them. Rowan was glad that she was dancing and not selecting. She wondered if she would be picked; she was a little on the tall side—(why were the good men dancers almost all so very short ?)—but since she had been taken away from her usual partner in the practices and told to dance with this taller man, she was beginning to think that she would be one of the reserves.

  Her new partner was looking sulky. Perhaps he resented having to dance with her? Certainly his former young woman, now dancing at the bottom of the second set, a hideous girl, Rowan thought, with a great big ugly mouth, but beautiful feet, was resenting it—and Rowan—bitterly.