Near Neighbours Page 5
“You can have him, and welcome!” said Rowan to herself, gliding into the allemande. “I don’t want him—once the dance is over.”
But it was a delight to have a partner as tall as this, and he did dance beautifully. When they had made their bows and curtsies to one another and were standing about trying to get cool, Rowan was surprised to find him still at her side. And still looking sulky.
“Well,” he said abruptly. “It’s going to be you and me, is it?”
“But—they haven’t picked us yet, have they?”
“If you’re dancing with me, you’re in the team,” he said impatiently.
Rowan was amused. “You seem very sure of it.”
“Sure? Of course I’m sure. I know I’m in the team, so if they’ve put you to dance with me, you’re in too.”
“What a conceited creature he is!” thought Rowan. “How Murray would hate him! I wonder if he’s right, though, about me being in the team? Do I want to be, if I’ve got to dance with him?” And then: “Yes, of course I want to be in the team—and he does dance most beautifully . . .”
Aloud she said nothing, but stood quietly, her hands clasped in front of her waist.
The selection committee, two women and a man, now stopped their consultation. The man adjusted his spectacles, cleared his throat, and said:
“Er—ladies and gentlemen. The team is as follows—” Here he fumbled with a slip of paper, and Rowan clasped her hands so tightly that they hurt. Would he never start to read it out?
“Er—first couple. Miss Lenox and Mr. Angus Todd.”
Rowan heard no more. First couple, she thought. Then the conceited creature had been right. . . . She caught his glance, the little superior smile which seemed to say “What did I tell you!” Suddenly, brilliantly, she smiled back at him, and Angus Todd, taken by surprise, could only blink.
* * *
“Oh, let’s go home, Archie! This is terribly drab, don’t you think?”
Willow had seemed perfectly content throughout the excellent—and expensive—dinner at which she had only nibbled while Archie ate everything with appetite. Now, as he still sat peacefully sipping his brandy, she pushed her empty coffee cup away from her, and spoke petulantly.
“Half a minute, darling!” he protested. “Don’t make me gulp my brandy!”
“Well, leave the horrible stuff, then! I’m bored with this.”
“I thought you wanted to see that picture—?”
“I’ve changed my mind, and it’s too late to get decent seats now,” said Willow. “Do hurry up, Archie—”
“All right, I’m coming,” he said. “Must pay the bill, though—”
It was extraordinary how restless Willow was, he thought ruefully, laying notes on the discreetly folded bill brought by the waiter. Everything seemed to bore her after a few minutes.
When they were walking slowly back towards Kirkaldy Crescent, Willow’s mood changed again. Crossing the Dean Bridge she tucked her hand into his arm, and said, “Much nicer to be out, by ourselves, than sitting in that stuffy restaurant, isn’t it?”
“You know I don’t care a damn where we are as long as we’re together,” said Archie, rather shakily.
Willow could still make his heart thump and race as it had done at their first meeting.
“Darling Archie!” she cooed now. “I feel just the same—”
CHAPTER 5
For the second time in her life Rowan stood on the newly scrubbed top step of Number Four. Her hand was on the knob of the shining brass bell, but instead of pulling it she waited, repeating to herself in varying forms the message which she was to deliver from her mother.
“Oh, bother!” thought Rowan, and gave the bell a tug which set the echoes jangling through the house. “I’ll have to leave it until I see her.”
Edna opened the door in her reluctant fashion, but when she saw Rowan, a wavering smile flitted over her face.
Yes, Miss Balfour was in, and would be pleased to see Miss Lenox, she said, and led Rowan upstairs to the drawing-room, where she announced:
“It’s the young lady from next-door again, Miss Dottie.”
“Miss Dottie! How perfectly ghastly to be called that!” thought Rowan, so shaken by the name that she was able to greet Miss Balfour and add quite naturally, “I’ve brought a message from Mummy. She would like to come and see you, if she may.”
“I should be very pleased,” said Miss Balfour, prim with shyness, but smiling and turning faintly pink.
“Miss Balfour,” Rowan burst out. “Why do you let her call you ‘Miss Dottie’? It’s so ugly—”
“I know,” answered Miss Balfour. “But you see, I have always been called Dottie. My sister—”
“Oh, I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have asked! It was frightful of me!” cried Rowan in distress. “Of course, if your sister called you that, and you like it.”
“But I don’t like it at all. I never have, no, and I am intending to ask Edna to call me ‘Miss Dorothea’ or ‘Miss Balfour’, when I find a suitable opportunity.”
Rowan, at once full of sympathetic interest, said, “I daresay it won’t be easy for her at first, but I’m sure she would come round to ‘Miss Dorothea’ fairly quickly. Besides, it is such a pretty name, and dignified, too. It suits you.”
“Do you really think so?” Miss Balfour, unused to having anyone to take an interest in her affairs, was pleased. “I am glad. But it does seem a pity that now I am able to use it there should be no one left to call me by it except Edna.”
She sounded so wistful that Rowan said: “I would love to call you ‘Miss Dorothea’ if you didn’t think it cheek.”
This was such rapid progress towards intimacy that Miss Balfour was startled. Then, reminding herself that everything moved more quickly nowadays, and feeling delightfully daring and up-to-date, she replied: “Do, my dear. I shall like it very much.”
Mrs. Lenox, in spite of being much more used to the manners and customs of the young than Miss Balfour, raised her eye-brows when Rowan announced: “Miss Dorothea would be very pleased if you’d go and see her, Mummy.”
“You seem to have got to know Miss Balfour very well in a very short time, Rowan,” she said mildly. “Perhaps you should come with me when I call.”
“She’s seen me twice now,” Rowan said. “I expect it would be more fun for her if one of the others went.”
A dissentient muttering rose from all round the table. The evening meal was in progress, so the whole family was present.
“This is Rowan’s pidgin. The old lady is her protégée,” said Murray. “Not that I imagine even Rowan thinks that I should be the one to go with Mummy.”
“I don’t see why not. Old ladies usually fall for you,” Willow chipped in.
“I propose to go on Saturday afternoon,” said Mrs. Lenox, raising her voice slightly. “So you will all be free. You had better make up your minds between now and then which of you is going.”
“I’ll come with you, if you like. I don’t mind,” Holly said, in a negligent tone which did not conceal her passionate curiosity to see the inside of Number Four.
“No, Holly dear. Not you,” said Mrs. Lenox firmly. “I’m sorry, but you are altogether too overwhelming. You must wait until Miss Balfour has had time to get accustomed to the family.”
“Breaking the poor old thing in gently?” murmured Hazel. “It really had better be Rowan.”
And in the end it was Rowan who accompanied her mother.
“Well, how did you get on? What’s the house like? What’s she like? Was it very heavy going?” This chorus greeted the two deafeningly when they returned from their call.
“Children! Children!” cried Mrs. Lenox, putting her hands over her ears and knocking her neat little straw hat sideways. “What a dreadful noise! Is tea ready? Because I’m not going to tell you anything until I have had some.”
On Saturdays and Sundays the Lenoxes had what Holly called “low tea” at half-past four, with supper later, so th
ey hurried their mother into the dining-room, where Hazel had just set the big blue tea-pot on its stand at one end of the table.
Murray pushed Mrs. Lenox into a chair, Willow poured her out a cup of tea, Holly offered her scones.
“Now tell us all about it!” said Willow. Mrs. Lenox drank some tea and obligingly embarked on a detailed account of Miss Balfour and the house next door.
Mrs. Lenox said at last: “That’s all. I’ve told you every single thing I can remember. Why don’t you ask Rowan?”
“It’s no use asking Rowan,” Murray said. “She’s a very nice girl, but her habit of turning all sorts of fowl—not even geese, very often—into swans makes her an inaccurate reporter.”
“Miss Balfour was the one whose geese were all swans this afternoon,” Rowan said. “You should have heard her about Mrs. Lenox’s beautiful, talented, charming children!”
“Didn’t it make you squirm?”
“No, because the poor pet obviously doesn’t know the first thing about people of our age. What did make me blush,” said Rowan candidly, “was Mummy being all maternal!”
“Never!”
“Gospel truth. I expected to hear her talk about her chicks at any minute.”
Mrs. Lenox’s other daughters moaned loudly, but Murray said, “Just wait until you find yourself the mother of a bouncing grown-up daughter when you still feel quite young and lively, and see how you like it!”
“Dear Murray. Always so understanding,” murmured Hazel, with a mocking lift of her eyebrows.
Mrs. Lenox looked bewildered. “I don’t know what you are all talking about,” she said, “but Murray is perfectly right—”
(“He always is,” said Holly, in a stage aside.)
“And as I have asked Miss Balfour to come to tea to-morrow,” Mrs. Lenox continued, with a quelling glance at Holly, “you—and she—will be able to judge at first hand for yourselves.”
And having dropped this bomb, she got up, smiled at her family, and went away to take off her best hat.
Like so many other things that are looked forward to with dread, the tea-party for Miss Balfour was a great success.
The young Lenoxes assured their mother that she had made them so self-conscious beforehand that they were certain to be at their worst, either completely tongue-tied or far too talkative. But as soon as they realized that Miss Balfour was much more nervous than they were, they threw themselves whole-heartedly Into the business of putting her at ease.
Dorothea Balfour sat between Mrs. Lenox and Hazel, rather silent, rather dazed by the noise made by so many cheerful voices, but enjoying the friendly warmth of the atmosphere. She smiled and nodded, and thought how much better everything tasted when it was accompanied by laughter and talk. But she realized, with a guilty pang, that she found her recent meals, eaten in solitude with a book propped against the water-jug, infinitely preferable to those partaken of when Belle had sat munching at the head of the table, and nothing had broken the silence except the sound of chewing, or an occasional diatribe from Belle on Edna’s general unsatisfactoriness. It was dreadfully sad to remember one’s sister only as a fault-finder, and it made Dorothea feel wicked, yet all her memories of Belle were like that.
Belle had never changed; the last words she spoke, just before she had her stroke, had been characteristic: “Don’t be a fool, Dottie.”
These same words, uttered in a clear voice, brought Dorothea back, blinking, to her place at Mrs. Lenox’s table.
“Oh, don’t be a fool, Hazel!”
It was Willow, leaning across from her place opposite, who spoke, and Hazel only laughed.
“They aren’t my best ones,” she said.
“I should think not!” said Willow. “But if you lend any nylons to Holly, you will be a fool, Hazel! She’ll bring them back in ribbons!”
“Children!” cried Mrs. Lenox. “Will you stop calling one another fools, please? What do you suppose Miss Balfour can be thinking of you?”
“Oh—but—” said Dorothea in her gentle, deprecating manner. “They don’t really mean it, do they? And that is what matters, I think.”
“There, you see, Mummy. It’s all right, Miss Balfour understands,” said Holly, giving Dorothea a look of such ardent approval that Dorothea blushed.
“It is lucky that she does,” retorted Mrs. Lenox. “Miss Balfour, if you really won’t have another cup of tea, shall we go upstairs and sit in the drawing-room, or would you rather go out to the garden?”
“The garden, please,” said Dorothea, and Holly, as they all went down to the basement, took her arm confidingly.
“You do understand,” she said, into Miss Balfour’s ear. “Nobody with any sense would want to sit inside on a lovely day like this, now would they?”
Dorothea, gratified, but finding progress on the dark stair difficult because of Holly’s bear-like clasp, murmured, “No, no!” rather breathlessly.
“Of course, the garden’s very small, but it’s quite decent—for a town garden,” Holly went on. “Do you know, when the people in Linden Terrace don’t have their wireless on too loud, and we’re lying on the grass beside the rose-trellis, Miss Balfour, you can almost believe you’re at Kersland.”
“Kersland!” In her amazement Dorothea tripped on the door-step and was only saved from falling by Holly, but she hardly noticed it. “Did you say Kersland?”
“Yes. Do you know it, too? It’s the dearest little Border village and we go there in the summer. Before the War, when the others were quite young, we used to have a house there—of course, I wasn’t born then,” Holly explained, guiding her dazed captive towards the far end of the garden. “But even since the War we used to stay at Kersland all summer. Now we can’t go for more than a fortnight because of the older ones having jobs. I’d like to stay there all the time. Did you say you knew Kersland, Miss Balfour?”
“Long, long ago, when I was very young,” said Dorothea.
She sounded regretful, and Holly, interpreting her tone as sorrow for her lost youth, gave her arm a comforting but very painful squeeze.
“Never mind, you aren’t really so terribly old!” she said consolingly. Then a thought suddenly struck her. “Oooh! Do you remember Queen Victoria?” she asked.
Dorothea said, “Well, I was fifteen when she died, you know, and I can remember quite well how upset everyone was. People all wore black . . . and I remember the Diamond Jubilee, and being allowed to sit up late to see the bonfires across the Forth, on the Lomonds in Fife. And the volunteers singing ‘Good-bye. Dolly, I must leave you’, on their way to fight in Africa, Dear me, how long ago it is—”
“Fifty years in history is nothing,” began Holly, in a lecturing tone all too familiar to her family. “When you begin to think in centuries, you—”
“That will do, Holly,” said Mrs. Lenox. “It’s all very interesting, I’m sure, but we have heard it before.”
Holly looked sulky. “Miss Balfour hasn’t,” she said.
“Perhaps you would come and see me one day by yourself,” Miss Balfour suggested. “And then you could tell me all about it.”
“You don’t know what you’ve let yourself in for, Miss Balfour,” said Murray, from the grass where he was sprawling in careless ease, a daisy held between his teeth by its stem. He spoke with feeling though rather indistinctly.
“Holly on History is apt to be pretty long drawn-out.”
Holly turned her back on him with a haughty flounce of her skirt. “Mummy,” she said, “Miss Balfour knows Kersland, too! Isn’t it super?”
“Really? That’s interesting—and strange, too, when one remembers what a small place Kersland is,” said Mrs. Lenox, adding, as she glanced at their visitor’s face, suddenly very pinched and small: “We must have a talk about it, Miss Balfour, but not now. My noisy family has tired you, I think—”
“No, no indeed!” Dorothea said hastily. “It has been delightful, and it was so good of you to ask me. But I think perhaps I should be going home now.”
Kersland: Dorothea had been sent there to stay with her mother’s relatives while she was recovering from a bad attack of measles. She had been four years old, and she had never forgotten the smallest detail of that visit. The people, as well as the place, remained diamond-bright in her memory.
The village straggled down a gentle slope along a ridge, with a tiny school at its upper end, and the smithy at its lower. The cottages faced each other across a dusty road and grandfather’s was just beyond the smithy. It was the last house in the village, a little apart from the others, and had a bigger garden. There was no longer a church in Kersland. All that remained of it was a crumbling gable-end smothered in ivy, standing among the grave-stones of the old church-yard. Of course, people still went to church, but they had to walk down the side of the ridge by a grassy track between high thorn hedges until they came, down in the hollow, to a bigger village with a large parish church. Dorothea had been too small to walk so far, and she had always stayed with grandfather in the sunny garden, while Aunt Elsie, wearing a black costume and hat, had gone to the morning service. The sound of the bell used to come floating up the hill when the wind blew from the north, telling people it was time for church.
How it all came back to her on this Sunday evening in summer, while other bells, those of the many Edinburgh churches, rang for evening service! Dorothea, looking about, half-expecting to see the blooming cottage gardens, the dusty hedges, the red-tiled roofs, found that she had walked up to the far end of Kirkaldy Crescent without noticing it.