The White Marriage Read online

  Chapter Four

  The house in which Gray’s father, Mr Jocelyn Wyndham, lived was Edwardian, built by a pupil of Edwin Lutyens and surrounded by a garden designed by Gertrude Jekyll. It should have been most appealing. In fact it was most appealing, from the outside, so that Sunny, dressed to the nines in clothes chosen and paid for by Leandra, had every reason to feel in high good humour as she stepped out of Gray’s pristine Bentley into the summer sunshine of a midday morning.

  Gray too, as he glanced sideways at Sunny, had every reason to be in high good humour. Leandra’s melting of John Chantry had been masterly, or – in her case, and rather more accurately – mistressly. Not only that but she had taken Sunny shopping, and transformed her into something so chic and adorable that she was a feast for the eye. Indeed, if Gray’s heart had not already been taken long ago, he felt sure that he might have been quite vulnerable to Sunny in her sprigged muslin dress, her straw hat decorated with matching muslin, and short white gloves and flower-decorated handbag. The truth was that she looked not just young and beautiful, she looked innocent as the flowers that were chasing each other all over the faded brickwork of Chelston Manor.

  Gray paused for a moment before beckoning Sunny to accompany him up the shallow stone steps to the oak front door. It was all very well bringing Sunny to Derbyshire to see his notoriously bad-tempered, cold-hearted father, but what in the name of all that was unholy would the old man make of her?

  They were shown through the hall, with its charming tiled floor, to the drawing room, with its wide French windows that opened on to trim lawns, brick paths, old trees, and wide herbaceous borders whose scent immediately seemed to be beckoning them to step outside and enjoy their colourful beauty.

  The aged manservant whom Gray addressed as ‘Jones’, whose bent frame precluded them from seeing his expression, nodded towards the Knole sofas and muttered, ‘He’ll be down in a minute,’ and shuffled out.

  ‘Jones is not exactly Rule,’ Gray murmured to Sunny, who smiled, but instead of seating herself she moved about the room examining the paintings.

  ‘Your father has very good taste in paintings,’ she told Gray, appreciatively.

  ‘No, not my father, my late mother,’ Gray corrected her, at which point the drawing-room door opened.

  Sunny turned and her eyes widened, as they would do, because framed in the doorway, tall, white-haired, and immaculately dressed, was a much older replica of Gray.

  ‘You’ve arrived,’ the newcomer stated in a cold voice, seeming for a moment content to stay framed in the doorway.

  Gray glanced at Sunny, prepared to be protective of her, but to his astonishment she was staring at his father as if she was looking at someone she already knew.

  ‘Yes,’ she piped up cheerfully, after a short silence. ‘We have arrived, and we had a wonderful journey. How do you do?’ she went on, going straight up to the still unmoving Jocelyn Wyndham as if he too was smiling, not scowling. She waited for him to extend a reluctant hand, and then shook it gently. ‘It was so kind of you to ask me to come and meet you, Mr Wyndham,’ she continued. ‘I have heard so much about you from Gray.’

  ‘I doubt that very much,’ came the reply.

  ‘How are you, Father?’ Gray asked quickly, before his father could continue in his usual unpleasant way.

  Gray went up to the still unmoving figure, and he also shook the reluctant hand, but his father did not look at him. He was determinedly looking everywhere except at his guests.

  ‘How long are you staying?’

  He walked past them towards the terrace, as if he could not wait for them to leave, and was hoping that they would not follow him out to the garden, but turn and go back to the Bentley and drive off.

  ‘We are here for the night, Father. Jones and Mrs Jones do know this.’

  ‘Not staying until Sunday? Well, that’s something, at any rate.’

  ‘No, not staying until Sunday, Father. No, we are going on to stay with Aunt Bessie, as a matter of fact, near Bakewell.’

  ‘Aunt Bessie? She still alive, is she?’

  ‘At this minute, yes, I believe so.’

  They were out on the terrace now, followed by Jones carrying a butler’s tray held at a more than dangerous angle. Sunny, who had sat down on one of the large wooden benches with high backs and sloping designs, immediately stood up and went to him.

  ‘Let me help you,’ she offered in a lowered voice, removing two of the more perilous items.

  Jones turned his head and smiled, and with good reason, Gray imagined, since it was probably a hundred years since anyone in the house had made the slightest attempt to help him.

  ‘Thank you, miss.’

  Jocelyn watched as Sunny busied herself on Jones’s behalf.

  ‘Isn’t she used to servants?’ he asked Gray in a rather too loud voice.

  ‘Servants she is used to,’ Gray lied. ‘Bad manners she is not.’

  He threw his father a look that Jocelyn Wyndham would probably have liked to have thrown straight back at him, but it seemed he was too astonished at being answered back by Gray to do anything except redden and look away.

  ‘How beautiful everything is looking. You must love your garden very much,’ Sunny stated, when, having finished helping Jones, she sat down beside Jocelyn, who was staring furiously into the far distance.

  ‘I keep three gardeners. If you want to compliment them, please go ahead.’

  Sunny smiled. ‘I should love to,’ she said, and turning to Jones, she added, ‘Where may I find a gardener to compliment him, Mr Jones?’

  Jones, who had not been addressed as ‘Mr’ in public life before, almost straightened up from the shock.

  ‘I believe Mr Cradock is working in the Italian Garden this morning,’ he said in a properly sepulchral tone.

  ‘I shall go there at once, and since the morning is so hot, I will take him a glass of this perfectly delicious lemonade.’ Sunny poured a glass of lemonade from the tray. ‘I dare say you will prefer to stay with your darling father,’ she said to Gray, nodding happily at Jocelyn, who was currently exhibiting an expression more akin to a gargoyle on the side of a cathedral than a doting parent. ‘I can see the Italian Garden from here, down those steps, so no one need disturb themselves. So formal always, aren’t they? My grandmother had one, but it was only small, in Surbiton, but she used to charge visitors sixpence each and give the money to the local hospital to buy toys for children. It was in thanksgiving for her son having been saved by them – the hospital not the children. So you see,’ she added, nodding around to three already amazed males, ‘such good comes out of Italian gardens as we never even think about, or of which we have never dreamed.’

  She tripped off down the steps to the formal garden beyond that in which the Wyndhams were seated, and found Mr Cradock, who was only too grateful both for the lemonade and a repetition of the story of Mrs Chantry Senior.

  ‘She resembles nothing more than a parakeet. You are engaged to a parakeet,’ Jocelyn muttered.

  ‘Sunny by name, sunny by nature, Father.’

  ‘Your mother never stopped chattering. Got on my nerves so. Morning, noon and night, didn’t matter where you went there was always the sound of chatter, natter, chatter.’

  ‘And laughter, Father, and laughter.’

  Gray fell silent, staring around him. If his mother had been alive they would all be sitting on the terrace laughing and talking. Alas, his mother had been killed in the war as she was driving to help the victims of one of the now notorious flying bombs, or ‘fly bombs’ as they were then known. The effect on his father was that he locked himself away and became bitter. And God, was he bitter!

  ‘Glad to see you’re still driving the same car, not throwing your money about, so that at least is something,’ Jocelyn remarked.

  Gray was just about to say that far from being his old car, he was actually driving a brand-new Bentley, when he remembered that his father suffered from what could only be described as �
�car blindness’ and, Gray’s last car being dark blue, his father was obviously under the impression that he was still driving the same one. The necessity to form some sort of reply to Jocelyn’s remark was removed from him by the happy return of Sunny.

  ‘I have just been talking to Mr Cradock,’ she said, sitting down opposite Jocelyn with the artless grace of a young filly settling comfortably into lush summer grass. ‘He thinks the world of you, Mr Wyndham, as you know. He says there’s not a single flower or tree in the place that you don’t know and love.’

  Jocelyn Wyndham’s thick eyebrows, already low over his steel-grey eyes, now lowered themselves further, not frowning, but hiding the expression in them, an expression at which Gray could only guess.

  ‘Cradock,’ he stated eventually, ‘is an old fool, and I am an even older one.’

  ‘I wish you would teach me the names of all your flowers. It would be so interesting to try to learn them,’ Sunny said, staring around her. ‘As a matter of fact, you could begin on the terrace with this rose. It is so extraordinarily pretty, more like a blossom on a tree than a rose, and yet it is a rose, isn’t it?’

  Jocelyn nodded, standing up and going to the rose in question.

  ‘This,’ he said, the timbre of his voice changing suddenly. ‘is a banksia.’

  Sunny jumped up, and went to his side, and the timbre of her voice changed too, and took on the tone of someone in a church.

  ‘It must make you very proud to see such a rose blooming against your house, Mr Wyndham. I know if it was me I should feel ever so, ever so proud, because it means that you are a nice person. Banksia roses, my grandmother always said, hid from you if they didn’t like you, but then they came back again, if you were kind.’

  ‘My wife planted this – Rosa banksia “Lutea”,’ Jocelyn conceded. ‘Although why it should keep on going for my sake, I wouldn’t know, because she was a genius with flowers. I could only look on when she was around, but after – after – well, I had to learn, for the sake of the flowers, you know. For their sake perhaps more than anything I had to learn their little ways. I expect your grandmother knew that too?’

  ‘Oh, yes, she certainly did. She had a theory that so many flowers died of heartbreak if their loved ones didn’t return.’

  Jocelyn was walking along the side of the terrace now, and it was just the two of them, himself and Sunny, and he was talking to her as he probably talked to the flowers, or to Cradock and the other gardeners, more in a murmur than in his usual cross voice, but he didn’t realise it, because Sunny having fallen in love with his favourite rose, he was being swept along with his own love for it.

  ‘Your grandmother was obviously a very wise woman, Miss Chantry. I have known healthy, hardy shrubs go to the wall once the gardener they loved went.’

  Gray, who had been left alone on the terrace, turned as he saw Jones coming towards him with yet another perilously balanced tray.

  ‘Ah, Jones—’

  ‘Yes, Mr Jocelyn?’

  ‘I am the younger one, Jones. I am Mr Gray.’

  ‘Yes, of course, sir. Sorry, sir. May I fetch you another drink?’

  ‘You can fetch me at least another two, Jones,’ Gray told him in a low voice. ‘It seems that my father is determined to take Miss Chantry on a tour of the whole garden.’

  Jones straightened up slightly, and a slow smile formed on his thin lips.

  ‘Do you know, Mr Gray, it is years since I saw Mr Jocelyn going round the garden with a visitor. They normally have no interest you see, sir. No interest at all.’

  He turned and shuffled off back to the drinks tray, leaving Gray to stare after him.

  Audrey stared at Arietta.

  ‘You want what?’ she asked, having heard the first time and knowing very well what it was that Arietta wanted.

  ‘I did warn you, Mummy, I might need some money towards my journey to London.’

  ‘You will need the money for where?’

  Arietta felt her throat tightening. ‘I just need the money for a third-class ticket to London,’ she said, after a pause during which she cleared her throat. ‘I told you yesterday, I need the money for a ticket. This friend of Sunny, Mrs Fortescue, has obtained an interview for me with this Mrs Ashcombe-Stogumber. The interview is at four o’clock today.’

  ‘Well, this Mrs Hoojit will just have to wait, won’t she? I hardly think she can’t wait. She is only a human being, after all, even if she is rich.’

  Such was her panic Arietta found herself pulling off one of her precious new gloves, and then pulling it on again.

  ‘And where you found the money for your suit, and the gloves and the handbag, and the shoes, I wouldn’t like to know and hate to ask.’ Audrey sniffed.

  Arietta knew that she must not tell her mother that Mrs Chantry had made her the suit and given her the material for it. To do so might risk being made to take it back. A feint, a verbal distraction, anything, was suddenly necessary, most particularly something that would irritate Audrey, take her mind off the coat and skirt. Arietta alighted on the very thing – a mention of poor old Uncle Bob always did the trick.

  ‘Uncle Bob sent me a postal order.’

  She did not say that she had telephoned Uncle Bob and he, guessing what her situation might be, had come up trumps.

  Audrey stared at her daughter, a look of growing fury in her eyes.

  ‘Bob should have sent the money to me, not you. I need it more than you. My need is far greater than yours; he should have known that.’

  ‘And then you gave me my Post Office book – because of being eighteen.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do such a thing.’

  ‘It was when you came back from the Gorsleys’ cocktail party.’

  It had been Arietta’s eighteenth birthday. There was no celebration, but she had been asked to the Chantrys for supper, which was jolly, while her mother went out. However, earlier in the day her mother had taken considerable pleasure in clearing everything to do with her daughter into a suitcase and presenting it to Arietta with an old-fashioned birthday card. That had been her birthday present, not much to boast about, but happily it had included the Post Office book.

  ‘Your Post Office account, of course. I should have taken eighteen years’ rent from you. After all you have cost me, all these years, what you have cost me, a poor widow, I don’t like to think. I should have taken a cut from you.’

  Arietta nodded, and then, saddened beyond measure, she turned towards the front door.

  ‘Where are you going now?’ Audrey called.

  ‘I am going to catch the train.’

  ‘How can you catch a train without money?’

  ‘I think I have just enough money for the ticket.’

  Arietta closed the front door behind her and began the long walk to the station. She would have liked to have stopped off and asked Sunny if she could lend her a few shillings, but Sunny was away with Mr Wyndham, visiting Mr Wyndham’s terribly cross father, so that would be a waste of time. And Mrs Chantry had been so kind to her already, she really could not ask her for even one more favour.

  As Arietta turned into the main road that led to the village station, thankful that her new shoes fitted properly, she thought about how her mother had been with her all the time she was growing up, and how much she resented her daughter, and it seemed to her that it might have been quite different if she had been a boy, until she remembered that her mother was the same to everyone, and so she quickly rejected the idea that her life might have been different, and concentrated instead on trying to keep her hat straight.

  Arietta had not lied when she told her mother that she had enough money for a third-class ticket. She did have enough money, but what she had not told her mother was that it was only enough for one way.

  As the train pulled out of the station she stared around her at the other passengers. They were all dressed for travel, their well-worn, belted coats or mackintoshes done up to the neck, some of their outer wear probably covering no more than
their vests, such was the poverty that she could read in their faces.

  The war had made everyone very thin. As far as train travel was concerned, this was a most happy side effect of a most unhappy six years, for it meant that there was plenty of room for everyone, and as each new passenger climbed on board at each new station no one thought too much of squeezing up to each other and making room for some new angular arrival. This was done with abundant good nature as precious oranges and bananas and knitting were taken in and out of much-worn brown paper bags and faded holdalls, and their owners silently peeled fruit, or pursued their knitting with a fervour that made Arietta imagine that they must be knitting for dozens of shivering children or siblings at home, for the day had become overcast and cold, despite its being June.

  From her window seat Arietta could see the gardens of the houses that backed on to the railway lines. They sported washing that she imagined could not stay clean for very long, and vegetables and flowers arranged in straight lines. Bean canes and rounded potato beds gave a feeling that the future might be brightening up, as did marigolds planted among the vegetables. As she stared out of the window, Arietta appreciated that she had never known the kind of poverty that the occupants of those houses backing on to the railway must still be enduring, but she had known what it was to be without. She had known what it was to be hungry, all right, and still did. Audrey was very figure-conscious, caring little for food or cooking, so Arietta knew what it was to be sent to school in clothes that were too short, and shoes that were too small, while her mother saved whatever money they had to buy herself a new cocktail frock for some dim and distant social event to which she always seemed to be looking forward.

  ‘Like a piece of orange, dear?’ The lady opposite her held out a segment.

  Arietta shook her head, looking with longing at the proffered piece. She would have loved a piece of orange, but it would never do to turn up for her interview smelling of fruit.

  ‘I would love it, but orange doesn’t like me,’ she said diplomatically.