Dear Intruder Page 8

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ put in Bridget. ‘That had nothing to do with Dion, had it?’

  ‘At the time we believed it must have. She had given no confidences here, and we couldn’t credit that she could have reached such a bridge-burning decision without telling someone, other than the man she followed to London and who couldn’t marry her until he was divorced on account of yet another woman in his life.’

  ‘But would she have told Dion—of all people?’ (Dion, who loved her himself, was Bridget’s silent reservation.)

  ‘We believed it was obvious that she had, and though of course we oughtn’t to have been so sure, we were too wretched, too bewildered, not to try to pin blame when Dion admitted that Brent was an acquaintance of his; he had come over for the salmon fishing at Dion’s suggestion, if not at his invitation, and that it was through him that Tara and Brent had met. But he denied hotly that he had any inkling that they met again as secretly as they must have done afterwards, and now, through Tara, we know how cruelly we wronged him when we accused him of it.’

  Bridget thought, That ‘last meeting’ between himself and Tara’s parents of which Dion had said so laconically that it had not been ‘favourable.’ How painful, each loving Tara as they did, it must really have been! And what bitterness Dion must have carried through the following years!

  Aloud she said quietly, ‘If only you had been disposed to believe him you might have helped each other so much.’

  ‘Yes indeed. And perhaps have helped Tara and him also now. Tara admits that her marriage was unhappy, and now that she is older and has that harsh experience behind her, she might have found anchorage with Dion if we hadn’t set up that barrier of distrust and injustice which his pride may not let him surmount.’

  ‘Do you think that would trouble him at all if—if he and Tara found each other again?’

  ‘Perhaps not.’ Mrs. Steven shook her head and smiled. ‘But I mustn’t load my hopes and dreams and fears on to your young shoulders! Already I’ve confided more in you than I do in anyone except Daniel—’ She broke off quickly as voices sounded in the hall. ‘Ah, there are Tara and Patrick now. No, don’t move, dear. They’ll come in. Tara knows that when I’m not in my room, I always have tea in here.’

  Tara entered, followed by Patrick Byrd. She wore no hat, but her hair had been drawn into a turned-under plait at the nape of her neck and her riding kit was jodhpurs and a high-necked green sweater whose colour was reflected in the green of her eyes. She dragged off string gloves, flicking them across her palm as she glanced from her mother to Bridget.

  She said, ‘I almost know you, don’t I? You are old Mr. Haire’s niece. You were at Mother’s party the night I arrived. Dion Christie told me about you and pointed you out. How have you come over to-day? Did Dion bring you?’

  Her voice carried a lilt that was not unlike Dion’s, and in the way she spoke there was an unusual variation of timing, possibly the result of her stage experience.

  Mrs. Steven answered for Bridget. ‘No. Miss Haire—I’ve been meaning to ask her to let us call her Bridget—walked over for tea with me. We’d have waited tea, dear, only I thought you’d be riding longer. Couldn’t you get suitable mounts, or wasn’t it a very sensible suggestion of mine on so warm an afternoon?’

  Tara flung the ball she had made of her gloves into an angle of the cushioned window-seat and went to sit there. She refused tea and gestured for her mother’s permission to smoke. She did not reply until she had lighted a cigarette with an eagerness which spoke of taut nerves too dependent upon the habit. Then she said indifferently, ‘Oh, they mounted us all right. Patrick enjoyed it, I think. But I don’t know—I suppose I’m terribly out of practice. I couldn’t get the feel of it. Do you ride?’ The odd trick of timing threw the question at Bridget unexpectedly.

  ‘I’m afraid not. My sister Jenny would like to, but her day is already full of all sorts of activities and it would mean she would have to get over to Ardvar for lessons.’

  ‘I could drive her, if she’d ring up and say when she wanted to go.’ But as Mrs. Steven interposed, ‘That’s a good idea ...’ Bridget could see that Tara had already lost interest in her own suggestion.

  Patrick came back and said that, grateful as he was for the tea, he’d have to gulp it and depart, as he had a ‘tea-party’ waiting for him in the gym at that moment.

  In answer to Bridget’s look of enquiry he grinned, ‘There isn’t any tea. And it’s no party. Just a punishment squad. Twenty times round the gym at the double has a wonderfully deterrent effect upon the day’s evildoers, so my colleagues tell me!’

  Upon impulse Bridget included Patrick in her invitation to Tara. They both accepted, Patrick with undisguised enthusiasm, Tara with more reserve.

  ‘As you’re walking, I’ll come down to the gates with you,’ Tara offered, when Bridget rose to go.

  ‘Do,’ agreed Bridget.

  Halfway down the drive Tara asked abruptly, ‘Has Mother been campaigning for me?’

  ‘Campaigning?’

  ‘Yes. Planning for me. Trying to keep one move ahead, arranging my comings and goings in detail. It’s as if she’s afraid to leave me to make any decisions for myself now ... She did ask you to invite me to Tullabor, didn’t she?’

  Again that trick of tying the unexpected question—this time a disconcerting one—to the tail of a statement. Bridget answered guardedly, ‘Mrs. Steven wants us to be friends, I think. But I should have asked you in any case when we got to know each other. Would you rather not come?’

  ‘No, I’d like to. I wanted to know you when Dion pointed you out, and we should have converged sooner or later without being shepherded, don’t you think? That’s what I mean—Mother is intent on filling up my time, like sending me riding with Patrick, and even soliciting invitations for me! I’ve always resented being planned for. Even planning for myself. Life ought to be left to happen to one...’

  Bridget said gently, ‘Do you think you can always afford to let it? Surely we’re meant to make our own decisions—and with our eyes open?’

  Tara’s green eyes slanted. ‘I suppose you’re saying in effect, “Look at the mess you’ve made of things, Tara Brent, through letting them happen to you!”’

  ‘I wasn’t. I was thinking that, like you, I hate to have decisions thrust upon me. But I do want a hand in the ordering of my own life, not to feel that I’m merely to be blown about by Fate.’

  ‘“Captain of my soul,” in fact,’ quoted Tara mockingly. ‘It’s an ideal, I daresay. But not for me. I’m a drifter. I want to meet the unexpected round the corner, even if I hate what I find, as I have done often. For instance, marriage to Tom—quite meaningless after the first six months. Money in the bank yesterday. Being broke to-day. That was always happening to us. I’m only living on Tom’s life insurance now. Abysmal failure in a stage role after a heady success in another. As a widow, being shocked to find myself a mere “extra” woman at parties, even if I were asked at all without a man in tow. Getting an inexplicable craving for home—and now, after a week, beginning to see that it was a ghastly mistake to come. But I’ve still got to believe that there’s another corner ahead ... Why am I telling you all this, do you suppose?’

  ‘It sounds as if you may have needed to tell someone.’

  ‘But why you—when I’m probably embarrassing you horribly? Besides, you’ll have heard all about the worst side of my character from Dion Christie.’

  ‘He has never discussed you with me or with Jenny. Before you came home, he had never mentioned you,’ said Bridget a little stiffly.

  Tara looked incredulous. ‘D’you mean he never told you the rotten thing I did—walking out on everything with his friend, and never a word to him? Because he couldn’t have known that I did it that way because I wouldn’t be having him blamed for helping me.’

  ‘If you didn’t want to involve him, that must have been one decision which you did make for yourself,’ suggested Bridget.

  ‘It was
n’t. It wasn’t. Passion for Tom—infatuation, I suppose—just took me round the throat. I didn’t decide anything—anything at all. Even not telling Dion was only partly not wanting him blamed. Another thing was that, when Tom happened, I hardly saw Dion again before I ran away. The rest was cowardice. And, as it happened, not telling him doesn’t seem to have been much good. When Mother and Father were convinced he must have known, he just dug in his heels in his silly pride and refused to prove that he didn’t. I can’t think why he should have turned so Sir Galahad-ish.’

  ‘Can’t you?’

  The two words seemed to drop into a pool of silence. And when Tara said at last, ‘No, I can’t ...’it was half defiantly, as if she did know or guess.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ said Bridget deliberately, ‘that it could be that he never discussed you, never blamed you, refused to defend himself—because he loved you himself?’ Now it was said. If Tara did not know before, she knew now. Yet how could she not know, if the fragment in the ballad-book had been only one of several such letters from Dion to her?

  But Tara was saying on a breathless note, ‘When you said, “Can’t you?” like that, I knew what you were going to say. But I didn’t know then—before Tom, I mean. I swear I didn’t! Dion in love with me? It’s fantastic. He may have tolerated me, but he never made any secret of the fact that he hadn’t much more use for women than your uncle had.’

  ‘Perhaps he never looked on you as the sort of woman he doesn’t like—the unadaptable ones, the—the self-sufficient. You were very young at the time, weren’t you?’ (Young, vulnerable, untouched—you had a sure appeal to Dion’s heart, was the secret reserve in Bridget’s thoughts).

  ‘Seventeen when we first met. I came upon him bird-watching one day, and when I invited myself into his hide he said I could stay if I didn’t make a noise. I behaved beautifully. I was awfully biddable in those days, just after I’d come back from school in England. And after that we used to meet pretty often. I wasn’t mad about his birds and his bits and pieces of specimens, but he’d let me talk while he listened, and I’ve always liked talking about myself.’

  ‘But don’t you agree that he may have loved you without telling you? You’ve said that not telling him about Tom was partly cowardice. Couldn’t that have been because you knew instinctively that he’d be deeply hurt?’

  ‘No. Only that I knew he’d have tried to persuade me not to throw my cap over the windmill for Tom. He’d have seen that as his duty. People always do. About the other—why should you want to believe that it was true?’

  ‘I think because, if it were true then, it may be still. And if you’re unhappy and Dion still loves you there could be a kind of—anchorage for you in knowing that he does. Besides, if that is what he wants, he is the sort of person who manages to make people want for him what he wants for himself.’

  ‘You’re more concerned for him than for me,’ was Tara’s shrewd comment. ‘But that’s natural, of course. Dion does grow upon one...’ Suddenly, in a graceful gesture of abandonment, she lifted both arms wide, then let them fall limply. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. And again, ‘I don’t know...’

  But a glance at her narrowed eyes told Bridget that she was already seeing the possibility that Dion was in love with her as the unexpected, the unlooked-for thing which might lie around her next corner.

  CHAPTER SIX

  As she walked back to Tullabor Bridget relived that talk with Tara, reeling it back across her memory like a piece of film.

  It was that impulsive ‘Can’t you?’ of her own which had launched her upon persuading Tara that Dion loved her. But had she, she wondered uneasily, the right to reveal her reading of Dion’s secret? That was the kind of intrusion which he despised, and she could almost hear his searing comments upon it. Moreover, when Tara had fastened upon her motive, she had been forced to face and question it herself.

  What was the truth? That it was for Tara’s sake? Or, as she had claimed, for Dion’s? Or was it a kind of public renunciation of her own—a rejection of a vain hope which she had never admitted until that moment?

  ‘I love him myself.’ She allowed her lips to form the words of the simple but hopeless fact. For her knowledge of the letter in the ballad-book and her intuition added up to a different equation—that Dion loved Tara, and telling Tara had been an invoking of her courage, a defiant need to test her defences against that bitter truth.

  She had never felt the stirrings of love before, but she had believed that, when it came, she would recognise its face at once. Yet for Dion Christie her love had cleared only slowly from a blurred outline to the clear-cut certain image it was now, would be for ever.

  How had she contrived a pattern of loving out of the brittle threads of their initial resentments, of their challenges of character? Even their moments of sympathy, though more frequent now, probably had only a quality of contrast with their moments of conflict. Yet it seemed that their every encounter, every trivial clash, as well as the rare gentleness between them, had been leading her step by step towards this agony of caring that in everything she did or thought or was she should have his goodwill—his love.

  Well, she had called out her courage. Now she was going to need it ... At the river bridge below the hotel she paused to take a grip upon herself, leaning upon the broad stone parapet, staring down into the swift-eddying water below.

  She did not hear Dion approach until he dropped his elbows upon the parapet beside her and his shoulder almost touched hers.

  ‘Oh—’ Her cheeks flamed. She had thought she would have recovered her poise before they met again.

  ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you remember me? Where’ve you been, anyway?’ Not for Dion the social convention which forbade enquiry into others’ movements.

  ‘I’ve been to Cion Eigel to tea with Mrs. Steven. I’ve asked Mrs. Brent—Tara—to come over on Saturday. The Brett boys are coming to tea with Pegeen and Minna, and Patrick Byrd is coming too.’

  ‘Good heavens—Tara at a tea-party. That’ll be a novel experience for her, I’d say. She’s always been a rebel against any pattern of life which includes anything so static or so ordered. What made you ask her?’

  ‘I—wanted to know her. Besides, Mrs. Steven told me that you and she had been great friends.’

  Dion glanced at her along the line of his shoulder. ‘If you mean by that,’ he said drily, ‘that there’s a cosy idea afoot that I should pick up old threads over cress sandwiches and seed-cake, thanks very much, but it doesn’t appeal. If Tara is being drawn into the family circle for my sake, you needn’t trouble. I’m capable of making my own opening gambit with her if necessary.’

  Bridget, slightly taken aback by his near-perception of the truth, said stiffly, ‘I’m sorry. Your having been friends with her was only incidental to my asking her. It was really because Mrs. Steven wants friends for her and, when we met, I wanted to know her too.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right. But I wonder why you did? You two have nothing whatsoever in common. You’ve met Tara now. Doesn’t it penetrate that, in anything vital, you’d be for the east and she for the west, so to speak? That nothing about you touches anywhere?’ (Nothing about us touches. No quality in Tara—whom he loves—that I possess too!) Aloud Bridget said, ‘You could hardly expect me to judge that on our short acquaintance.’

  ‘But don’t you feel it? I thought women prided themselves on their intuition?’

  ‘I’m not awfully clever at first impressions of people, I often have to revise them later.’

  ‘Usually for better—or for worse?’

  ‘That depends on the original impression—obviously. Some get graded up, others down.’

  ‘And would it be impertinent to ask how you indicate your change of attitude to your unfortunate victim?’

  ‘You make it sound as if I were in a position to dispense or withhold favours! It’s never as one-sided as that. While I’ll have been revising my opinion of someone, they’ll also have been measur
ing me. Whether we get any further depends on both of us.’

  ‘And what if the result’s an attraction that is one-sided? What then?’

  ‘You mean—supposing I’m attracted and the—the other person dislikes me or is quite indifferent?’

  Dion was scooping loose sandstone into a hillock of powder on the bridge-top on which they were leaning. ‘I meant the other way about—where you are indifferent but still find yourself at the receiving end of the attraction,’ he said.

  Bridget considered the question and answered it in the light of the example of Gordon Trent’s unwelcome overtures to her. She said, ‘Then I think I should try to backpedal from the association altogether.’

  ‘Leaving no doubt of your intentions? Cruel to be kind, in fact?’

  ‘I suppose so...’ Disturbed by the odd look he turned upon her, Bridget added a little shakily, ‘I don’t know why we are saying “I” and “You.” We’re only putting a hypothetical case...’

  With the action of a child impatient of completing a sandcastle Dion swept away his little pile of stone-dust. ‘Hypothetical be blowed,’ he said violently. ‘We were talking about you!’