The White Marriage Page 11

  Leandra waited for John to walk halfway down the room, and then she stood up and went towards him with hands outstretched.

  ‘It is so good of you to come, so good. In what must be such a busy life, to spare the time to come and see me, and to have luncheon with me, I cannot tell you how flattered I am.’

  Even as she finished speaking, Leandra saw at once, not just from the expression on his face, but from the sort of man that he was, that she was going to have her work cut out with Mr Chantry.

  To begin with, the room, which was always so critical of everyone – being eighteenth-century, and perfect in both its proportions and its decoration, it tended to find out the least pretensions – was now telling Leandra that here was not a shabby genteel man standing in its midst, but a man of strength. He was wearing an impeccably cut, if old-fashioned suit, which showed off an athletic figure. He was tall, and good-looking. His signet ring was small, and gold, and made no pretensions to grandeur; his shirt collar perfectly ironed. His shoes, although old, must have been handmade since they were still elegant to a degree, and highly polished, and his handshake firm, without being a knuckle breaker. In short, to Leandra’s astonishment she was finding that Mr Chantry was an extremely attractive man, and not even she, or the Blue Room, could fault him.

  ‘How do you do?’

  John Chantry’s formal delivery of the customary greeting acted as a reproof to this Society woman, as it was indeed meant to do. He then cleared his throat a little too loudly.

  Leandra smiled.

  ‘Do sit down, Mr Chantry. I am sure you will feel like a nice glass of something after your journey.’

  Rule was hovering, a look of expectancy on his face.

  ‘Thank you.’ He turned to the butler. ‘I will have a gin and Schweppes.’

  ‘My usual, please, Rule.’

  Rule disappeared behind a Chinese screen where he kept various alcoholic beverages at the ready, and promptly reappeared with perfectly prepared drinks on a silver tray.

  John did not say ‘cheers’ as he would have done in the village pub, he merely raised his glass, a few seconds after Leandra had raised hers, and they both drank.

  ‘It is such a beautiful day, I trust your drive was enjoyable?’

  ‘Of course.’

  John had resolved that he was not going to give an inch to this famously beautiful woman. He might be a man, and as vulnerable as any man to the wonders of woman’s wiles, but now primarily he was the father of a daughter. He was Sunny’s father, and he was not going to stand by and have her life ruined by the rich set, who believed that whatever they wanted they could get; and much as he could not help admiring the fit of Leandra Fortescue’s tightly waisted jacket, and the marvellous spread of her skirt when she sat down, not to mention the drift of sophisticated French scent that was reminding him of weekends in Paris before the war, nevertheless he knew he was there on a mission, and that was all there was to it.

  Leandra turned and gave her brilliant smile to the butler. ‘You may leave us for the moment, Rule.’

  Rule bowed and absented himself from the room, although not from the corridor outside.

  In the silence that followed, John Chantry gazed round the room, and once again cleared his throat.

  ‘And shall Trelawny die?’ he murmured. It was a phrase that he always used to fill in gaps, to cover moments of hesitation, before some idiot could chip in with, ‘It must be either twenty past or twenty to.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  Leandra tried not to look as she felt, which was momentarily wrong-footed, if not startled. She began again, determined to get down to business before it was too late.

  ‘Now, Mr Chantry, I think we must come straight to the point, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ John said again.

  ‘We have a strange situation here. My husband and I have an old friend, as you doubtless know, a Mr Gray Wyndham, and he has fallen in love with your daughter, and wants to marry her – very much. The problem, from your point of view, is that your daughter is far too young to know her own mind and might well live to regret it. However, the fact is that at the present time she does seem to think that she wants to marry Gray Wyndham, and he does want to marry her, so we have an impasse here, which cannot, it seems, be resolved easily.’

  Leandra had long ago learned that by sympathetically laying back before your adversary their own case, you could very quickly make them come to realise that there could be another way. If, on the other hand, you were foolish enough to contest their point of view, you would only be met with intransigency and obstinacy, not to say aggression, most particularly if your opposition happened to be of the opposite sex.

  ‘Frankly, Mrs Fortescue, I think the whole situation is faintly ludicrous. Mr Wyndham has not met my daughter more than three or four times – a meeting when his Bentley broke down, a dance or two at the Norells’ ball, a luncheon, and that about makes up the length of their relationship. How can he possibly know he wants to marry her? Equally, how can she, a mere eighteen-year-old, know her own mind? She hardly has one yet; she is certainly no bluestocking, that I can tell you. Education has passed over her like the French over the gin in a gin martini.’

  Leandra smiled again, stifling any sense of shock that Mr Chantry’s words might have caused, and waited for a second or two to pass.

  ‘Well, I am sure, Miss Chantry does have a mind, Mr Chantry, but we are not really here to discuss her scholastic abilities or otherwise. We are here to talk about emotion, and while you say you find this situation ludicrous, I myself find it enchanting. Two people who could, when all is said and done, be perfect for each other – what could be sweeter?’

  John took a large gulp of his gin and tonic, thinking that he rather hated anyone describing something as silly as this particular situation in which they were finding themselves as ‘sweet’, but he said nothing.

  ‘I myself,’ Leandra continued, realising that she had not provoked him into a reply, ‘am a firm believer in love at first sight, probably because it happened to me when I was just your daughter’s age. I went to a ball, aged seventeen, my future husband saw me, I saw him, and frankly that was it.’

  ‘I am sure I am very happy for you and your husband, and your marriage has obviously lasted a long time, and made you both very happy, but one ice cream doesn’t make a sundae, does it?’

  ‘It was not my present husband, Mr Chantry. No, this was my first husband, who alas was gathered only a year after our wedding, almost to the day, but it was a year during which I knew happiness of a very rare kind.’

  Leandra’s gaze drifted from the man sitting on the sofa opposite her and fixed itself on the view beyond the windows. They had lived in heaven, Tom and she – in heaven! And after he had been taken from her, so suddenly, so horribly, she had not hoped to be so happy again, in fact she had given up any hope of so being long before she met Dilke. Happily, Dilke and she had been sensible enough to know not even to attempt a romantic marriage, and had quickly settled for a loving friendship, getting along amicably, living their separate lives, until Gray Wyndham came into hers. Then things had changed overnight, as she realised happiness once again, for despite Dilke’s interest lying very much elsewhere, Leandra had to take care to be as discreet as any wife pursuing an affair behind her husband’s back. Dilke might not want Leandra, but neither did he want her finding happiness with someone else. It was an awkward situation, but manageable.

  All had been well, with Leandra taking care not to upset Dilke, until the last year, when things had begun to look a little shaky. It was not that Dilke was running out of money, it was just that however fast the money came into their account, it was having a very hard time catching up with Dilke. Deauville, Trouville, Paris, gold trinkets, junkets to Venice – he could deny his present love nothing, which meant that Leandra, ever practical, soon realised that something had to be done before it was too late and they all went under.

  It was not long before she decided that the
solution could lie in Gray’s father’s fortune, which, according to the family trustees, should pass to his only son while the father still lived, to avoid death duties, but only providing that Gray was married. It was a simple situation that could be easily resolved to the satisfaction of everyone concerned, if only the immovable old goat sitting opposite her could be persuaded to give his consent to young Miss Chantry marrying Gray.

  She turned her attention back to John Chantry. It seemed he was apologising for being tactless about Tom. Well, that at least was a start. She resolved to play on his embarrassment ruthlessly.

  ‘I suppose it is because I have known great love, Mr Chantry, I believe in it so ardently,’ she said softly.

  John looked away from Leandra. He did not come from a background that mentioned emotion, most particularly not one’s own emotions. Everything in his upbringing and education, his wartime experiences, everything was repelled by such feminine frankness on such a delicate subject.

  ‘I am perfectly sure that Sunny is not experiencing the kind of emotion to which you refer, Mrs Fortescue. To be frank, I think Sunny is going along with the whole situation to annoy her mother and myself, and to get out of secretarial college, just as young women in the war married and became—’ He stopped and, reluctant to mention pregnancy or babies, altered what he had been about to say. ‘Just as young women,’ he began again, ‘just as they married and had children to get out of being in the WRNS or the ATS, or something similar that they were not enjoying. Young women do this all the time. It is not reprehensible, but it can be foolish and impulsive.’

  He had used the right words, and he knew it. For a second he saw Leandra’s eyes drop. It would be useless for her to deny that Sunny and Mr Wyndham were being, at best, impulsive, and at worst, foolish.

  ‘Let us go into luncheon.’

  They moved, as Sunny and Leandra had done, into the conservatory, where they were waited on by two maids and Rule, and where the food and the wine proved to be so good that, much against his better judgement, John started to mellow, as he was meant to do. He had not eaten food, or drunk wine as good as this since before the war. It took him back to his honeymoon with Mary, to all the jaunts they had enjoyed in France before the great catastrophe of surely the worst world war mankind had ever fought.

  Now John found he was fighting his emotions. He tried not to be impressed with the flowers and the food, with the maids and the butler, but after all the deprivations that he had suffered both as a prisoner of war, and now during the post-war austerity years, it all proved too much for him. He started to become animated, he started to enjoy Leandra’s company, to laugh quietly at her charming jokes, to enjoy her stylish clothes, her beauty. It was impossible not to. He felt as if he had been terribly cold, really frozen to the marrow, and was now being immersed in a warm bath. At first every part of his being tried to fight these feelings. The lightness of the food, the perfection of the wines, their choice, even the glitter of the Waterford glasses, and the solid-silver knives and forks, all combined to seduce him, until, as they moved back into the Blue Room, he found he had not stopped enjoying himself for almost two hours. Worse than that, he had laughed and talked as he had not done for years and years. All the grind of the war, all the disappointment of returning to a country that could not organise itself into any kind of workforce, the sheer weight of it all had dropped away from him.

  ‘So, Mr Chantry, what decision do you think you should come to about this little matter of Mr Wyndham and your daughter?’

  John tried valiantly to sober up and look as stern as he had when he first arrived at Maydown, but once again his emotions failed him.

  ‘I have to tell you, I have not changed my mind,’ he said eventually, after two or three sips of strong coffee. ‘And the reason I have not changed my mind is that Sunny is so very silly.’ As Leandra stared at him intently, he continued, ‘She is just such a typical eighteen-year-old, doesn’t really know her own mind, doesn’t really care to know it either. She is just like the foal in the field opposite our back gate, loves life, wants to keep kicking up her heels just for the sheer joy of living, but doesn’t really know anything.’

  Leandra picked up her elegant silver coffee pot and carefully poured herself another cup of coffee, quite purposefully ignoring John Chantry’s now empty cup.

  ‘Oh, I think you will find that Sunny has a mind, all right, Mr Chantry. But really, once again, I find I have to remind you, it is not Sunny’s mind of which we are speaking, but her heart.’ She then took John’s cup and placed it on the tray, before saying, looking him straight in the eye, ‘I believe she is rather unhappy at the moment.’

  John moved uncomfortably on the sumptuously upholstered sofa, and looked away. Mary had murmured that she thought that Sunny was determined to be ill, that she might starve herself to death rather than give in over her determination to become associated with this Gray Wyndham character. It was absurd – the whole notion was absurd – but nevertheless he knew enough about female hysteria to know that damsels in the nineteenth century when thwarted in their infatuations were always throwing themselves off cliffs or into lakes.

  ‘As I just said, Sunny is being awkward, sitting about like a wet Wednesday in Worthing. Really, that is all.’

  ‘Mr Chantry?’ Leandra leaned forward and smiled her justly famous brilliant smile, and her blue eyes seemed to grow even larger in her beautiful heart-shaped face. ‘Mr Chantry,’ she repeated softly as the subtle aroma of her scent wafted towards John, ‘why do we not arrive at a truly British compromise? Why don’t we give Mr Wyndham and your daughter six months in which to prove to you that they are sincere and suitable for each other?’

  ‘Not six months, no – twelve months, and then they can marry. That is my last offer, and if they contravene the agreement I shall go after Mr Wyndham in a way he would not like. I am not a man to cross, Mrs Fortescue.’

  The look in John’s eyes returned to its original expression, so that Leandra was able to observe with some interest that the set of his mouth once more resembled a line drawn not in flesh, but in stone.

  ‘No, I am sure you are not, Mr Chantry. I am quite sure you are, as you say, a man of your word.’

  ‘I will give them a year, and then I will reconsider.’

  ‘Very well, just as you wish, Mr Chantry. We will give them an agreed twelve months. Twelve months in which, with your blessing, they can go about as an unofficially engaged couple, and prove to you and your wife that they are truly devoted to each other, and deserving of your blessing.’

  John nodded briefly. He did finally believe in good old British compromise rather than conflict. It would be best for all if he gave a little. To do otherwise might seem ungracious. He stood up.

  ‘Thank you for a most entertaining lunch, Mrs Fortescue, and for your wise counsel. Mary and I would hate to cause unnecessary suffering, but on the other hand, given that Sunny is so young, it is only understandable that we are feeling cautious, in the extreme, over this matter.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’

  Leandra walked John to the door of the Blue Room behind which, as always, Rule was lurking.

  ‘Ah, Rule,’ she said smoothly, giving him the secretly significant look that she always exchanged with him when they had succeeded with a particularly awkward guest, ‘Mr Chantry is leaving.’

  Rule produced John’s hat and perfectly rolled silk umbrella as from nowhere, and walked him to the front doors, where he waited until he had driven away.

  Leandra, meanwhile, closed the Blue Room door and went straight to her perfectly white telephone, picked it up, and dialled Gray’s number.

  ‘Darling, it’s me,’ she said, even though they both knew that it was. She waited a few seconds as Gray was obviously waking from a post-lunch-at-the-club sleep, and then she said, ‘Congratulations, Gray, you are, as of now, unofficially engaged to Sunny. You can take her to meet your sainted father, and tell him the good news that you will be marrying a nice girl, in
twelve months’ time.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘So what happens now?’ Gray asked.

  ‘Well, it might be a good idea to telephone to your fiancée and tell her!’

  They both laughed.

  ‘Do you know, I think I shall do just that.’

  Leandra replaced the telephone, and stared at it for a few seconds. It was all working out so well, it was almost too good to be true. Pretty soon she would have everything just as she wanted it, which only went to show that if you approached matters pleasantly, things went your way.

  In the pantry off the kitchen Rule went about his routine tasks in his usual manner, doggedly and efficiently, while Cook and the maids chatted and laughed in the kitchen. He breathed on the cocktail shaker, which he was polishing up for the evening. He now knew, if only from Mrs Fortescue’s expression, that she was moving towards a situation that would suit all and sundry very well indeed. He knew this, because not only did he know his mistress, but he knew his social history, as he should do since his father too had been a butler.

  ‘Study your history, my son,’ he would say, when they took a turn around his garden of an evening, Rule Senior puffing on a large Havana (taken from his master’s thermidor, naturally). ‘Study your social history and you will see mistress and maid, lord and lover, things have changed very little over the centuries, but always beware the domestic situation that appeals as being perfect. Unlike Icarus, who flew too near the sun and burned himself, people who think they have everything burn not just themselves, but everyone around them.’

  Rule blew once more on the cocktail shaker and gave it yet another brisk rub with his duster. He would have to keep an eye on the situation upstairs. It might start to get too complicated and affect his position.