The Kissing Garden Read online

  ‘It really is the most enchanting place, Amelia. Don’t you find it so? There’s something about that little garden that as soon as you find yourself in it . . .’ Hermione stopped, smiled and gave a little shiver of delight.

  ‘Go on,’ Amelia said, as coolly as she could.

  ‘I think Ralph was as taken with it as I was, from the look on his face. He went awfully quiet, which as you’ve probably gathered by now is quite unusual for Ralph Grace – then he took me by the hands, both hands, and looked me right in the eyes in – well, all I can say is in a very powerful way. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Yes. Go on.’

  ‘So there we were, both sort of hypnotized if you like, and I heard him saying something about finding me terribly attractive and that he knew we shouldn’t but he just had to make love to me. Which was when I thought he was going to kiss me – which was when I hoped he was going to kiss me – so I shut my eyes – and the next thing I knew I heard this cry. And when I opened my eyes Ralph was clutching his head and groaning.’

  ‘Good lord! Whatever was the matter?’

  ‘Don’t ask me! He said when he tried to kiss me it was as if someone had hit him around the head.’

  ‘Really?’ Amelia frowned, waiting for her friend to continue. ‘So?’

  ‘So – so it happened every time he tried to kiss me! So he said. Every time he touched me he said he got this terrible pain in his head. I mean really. I mean really, Amelia! He said it was like the kind of electric shock you can get from car handles and so on.’

  ‘You think—’

  ‘You bet I do. I felt such a fool! He was obviously just getting a rise out of me. Teasing me. I mean the man is totally deranged!’

  ‘I see.’ Amelia bit her bottom lip and frowned in an effort not to smile. ‘So then . . .’

  ‘So then I told him what I thought of him and where to go, and he went. Still holding his head.’

  ‘Hm,’ Amelia said. ‘So. He banged his head and went to bed and didn’t get up until the morning. Literally.’

  ‘And if so, Amelia darling,’ Hermione concluded, ‘I could not care less.’

  ‘He’s such a tease. I should put the whole matter out of your head.’

  Hermione looked at Amelia. ‘You can say that again, and again and again, Mrs Dashwood.’

  Amelia laughed, trying not to look what she felt, which was for no reason she could think, oddly relieved.

  Once Hermione had returned to Yorkshire and Ralph back to London and thence to do business on the Continent, The Priory settled back more or less into its old rhythm, with both George and Amelia getting up early to do an hour’s work, George in his study and Amelia in the garden, planning the day’s tasks with Jethro and Robbie, before meeting again over breakfast. After they had eaten George would return to his work and Amelia to hers, not seeing each other until half past one when they took lunch together and discussed their joint efforts. In the afternoon they would either walk or take the horses up for a hack on White Sheet Downs before returning to The Priory in time for tea, after which they would both put in another two hours’ work, stopping in time for a long hot bath and a well-earned drink before dinner.

  This then was the shape of their days, a pattern which left them both tired but happy by nightfall when they would retire to bed to read, listen to the wireless or more often than not, make love.

  Being completely happy with each other’s company, when George was writing they hardly ever entertained or accepted invitations. Amelia was always glad to use George’s writing as an excuse to stay at home because home was where she loved to be. They had both long come to the conclusion that a day away from their beloved priory was a day wasted.

  So it was with some surprise that less than three weeks after the departure of their last guests Amelia heard that George had asked Jack and Miranda Cornwall down for the following weekend. Not that she minded, she was merely surprised, for when George was working at full steam he confessed he simply did not have the necessary spare energy to deal with visitors, least of all his publisher and his overactive, restless if delightful wife.

  In deference to Miranda, therefore, Amelia suggested that she would have to throw at least one dinner party, if not a Sunday luncheon as well, since Jack’s wife was hardly the sort of woman who would be quite happy sitting around with no-one to talk to other than her hostess. George merely said they could play tennis and go riding, which exasperated Amelia since, as she further explained, his publisher’s wife was a social creature, who quite rightly considered herself important enough to be awarded the courtesy of at least one formal occasion. But having just finished a long summer of entertaining Amelia had, quite literally, run out of guests.

  In the end, having rung around the neighbourhood, she contented herself with arranging a simple family dinner for the Saturday night, while encouraging Archie and Mae Hanley to bring their own house guests to lunch the following day, should they be back in time from their latest tour. George had seemed happy enough with this plan, only to surprise Amelia by suddenly announcing two days before the Cornwalls were due to arrive that he himself had invited half a dozen people for the Saturday night.

  ‘Who, George?’ Amelia asked in open astonishment. ‘You don’t know half a dozen people round here, so who on earth are you thinking of asking?’

  ‘Look, if it’s awkward—’

  ‘It’s not awkward, George. I’m simply curious. First of all I’m curious as to why you suddenly decided to ask Jack and Miranda down when you’ve just started a new book, and now I’m curious to know who these six people you’ve suddenly met and want to ask to dinner might be.’

  ‘I haven’t met them, Amelia,’ George confessed finally. ‘They’re acquaintances of Jack’s.’

  ‘They’re friends of Jack’s? You mean we are turning into some sort of catering service for people your publisher wishes to entertain in the country? A novel arrangement, surely?’

  ‘It isn’t that,’ George said, stopping her in mid-flow. ‘These are people Jack thinks I should meet. People who could help me in – help me with this book I’m writing.’

  ‘Do we have to ask them to dinner here?’ Amelia continued in dismay. ‘This just isn’t us, George. We never have people here to dinner whom we don’t know. Why can’t Jack take you and these people out to dinner in London, if it’s that important?’

  George shook his head. ‘It’ll be all right, really.’

  But it was far from being all right. In fact the evening was as difficult and as uncomfortable as Amelia had dreaded. Not only did neither she nor George know any of the people whom Jack had invited, but it seemed that they were strangers to Miranda as well, with the consequence that Miranda, who as Amelia soon discovered bored easily, proceeded to get aggressively drunk before they had even sat down to dinner and pick arguments with whoever happened to be nearest. Just before Amelia was about to call everyone to table, she saw Jack take his wife aside and speak to her slowly and very seriously. Miranda listened to him with obvious impatience, tapping her expensively shod foot and only half attending to her husband until he, leaning even closer to her, whispered something effective enough to gain his errant wife’s full attention, and after that she behaved herself, if sitting in a sullen silence throughout a four-course dinner can be construed as good behaviour.

  As for Jack Cornwall’s friends, Amelia had never met a collection of more flint-hearted people. From the moment they arrived she knew just from their aura that they were all extremely rich. Yet far from being patronizing, which seemed to Amelia to be a habit of the very rich, they all but ignored Amelia, as if her home was a restaurant where they had been invited to gather, and she was the cook, albeit a cook who sat down at table with them.

  Over dinner the menfolk made the sort of coded and exclusive small talk such men so often do, bewildering Amelia even more, since if this was all they had come to talk about she could not imagine what the point of the party could be at all. Their wives meanwhile talked lig
htly and fancifully to the men on either side of them, men they already seemed to know intimately, to judge from the conversational shorthand they employed and the private jokes they exchanged. Meanwhile Amelia was completely ignored by the man seated on her right, whose only conversation with her consisted of his briefly expressed surprise that she could live all the time in such a barbaric place as Somerset.

  Fortunately she had placed Jack Cornwall on her left, but Jack was not the most fluent of conversationalists. Amelia, however, could talk small with the best, so she kept up a stream of chatter with Jack in an attempt to instil some life into the group at her end. But it was an uphill struggle, with Jack – as it appeared to Amelia – considerably more anxious to stop any conversation from getting established than the opposite. George on the other hand was being ardently besieged by the two women placed either side of him, both very blonde, and dressed in expensive black dinner dresses, discreetly bedecked with old and quite beautiful jewellery. In such company Amelia suddenly felt dowdy and rustic, and even more so when, the ladies having withdrawn leaving the men to their port, she found herself without support among the still silent Miranda and her other unknown female dinner guests.

  It was soon all too obvious that the women were as bored as Amelia was uncomfortable, none of them making the faintest effort to talk to their hostess, apart from an initial brief exchange about the number of children they all had or had not, and how many houses and yachts they all owned. However, once they were on to gossip, their conversation became more animated. It became positively excited as names that Amelia knew only from reading the social columns flew about her drawing room and she and Clara dispensed coffee and ashtrays, feeling very much the staff. Miranda, on the other hand, was made of sterner stuff. She was also, once more, quite drunk.

  ‘What a bunch of Fascist bores,’ she announced, smiling, to Amelia. ‘You poor darling, having to ask them here, what a martyrdom.’

  Amelia was at once plunged into a dilemma, not knowing whether to ask Miranda to leave the room, or to leave it herself. In the end she opted for neither course since, as she very soon realized, Miranda was unstoppable. By the time the gentlemen finally joined their ladies, after one of the longest after dinner separations Amelia had been forced to endure, Miranda had won a complete victory. The women sat smoking, in silence, and she sat smiling at Amelia.

  ‘Somerset and Sussex three, the rest naught!’ she announced, as the gentlemen rejoined them from the dining room, and Amelia went hastily to the piano to provide a diversion by singing one of Noël Coward’s latest songs.

  ‘So what was all that about, George Dashwood?’ Amelia asked wearily as they prepared for bed. ‘I have never been so bored in my own house, nor, I have to tell you, so insulted.’

  ‘All I can say is that I am terribly sorry,’ George said, sitting her on his knee on the edge of the bed. ‘It won’t happen again.’

  ‘You look as though you’ve run into a wall.’

  ‘I feel as though I have. I really am sorry.’

  ‘What was it all in aid of? And what on earth did you find to talk about with those awful men after dinner? You were closeted away with them for hours.’

  George looked at her, sighed, then hugged her tightly to him before getting up and starting to undress.

  ‘I don’t want to bore you with it,’ he said with his back turned to her. ‘It’s all to do with this book I’m writing. Jack knew I needed some firsthand material, and thought this was doing me a favour.’

  ‘All I can say is that I hope it did,’ Amelia said, yawning and stretching. ‘I have never met such a group of appalling people.’

  ‘They weren’t a lot of laughs, were they?’ George agreed. ‘But I did learn an awful lot of things I hadn’t known before.’

  ‘Such as?’ Amelia asked, sitting on the bed and carefully unrolling her silk stockings.

  ‘You really do have the most fantastic legs,’ George told her dreamily. ‘In fact you really do have the most fantastic body.’

  ‘Such as, George? I want to know what you learned. Such as?’

  ‘Such as?’ George said, sitting beside her and kissing the side of her neck. ‘I learned that you have – the most beautiful body.’

  ‘George?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t ever do that to me again.’

  ‘Kiss you on the neck?’

  ‘Ask people like that to our home.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘And George?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Kiss me again. Just where you did.’

  ‘Yes, Amelia.’

  ‘Oh, and George—’

  ‘Yes, Amelia?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  The next day George shut away himself up in his study with Jack Cornwall while Miranda nursed her hangover in her bedroom. This had meant that Amelia could spend a sunny morning in the garden. She was also happy that Archie and Mae had returned home, but declining Amelia’s original invitation had instead asked them all to luncheon, because one more social event at The Priory might, as she said to Clara, ‘drive her dotty’.

  As always the hospitality at the Hanley household was first class, as was the invited company, so that the rest of Sunday was spent most enjoyably. The Cornwalls drove directly back to London from Archie and Mae’s so that on their return to The Priory Amelia and George could take an early bath and collapse happily and privately in front of the fire in their dressing gowns.

  At one point during the evening, while George had gone to fetch a bottle of white wine from the cellars, Amelia padded into his study to look for a book on old and medieval plants which she had lent George for his research and, she now remembered, she needed to help identify what appeared to be some strange herbs and flowers she and Jethro had discovered growing at the back of one of the borders. The room was in the usual ordered state of chaos George created whenever he was working, so Amelia took great care not to disturb anything as she searched carefully for her precious volume.

  At first she could see no sign of it anywhere among all the piles of books which stood on top of the large partner’s desk at which George always spread himself out to work, but then, just as she was about to give up and go and ask George in person where the book might be, she spied it at the bottom of a pile of books right at the back of his desk.

  Normally she would not have paid any attention to the books George was reading for his research, but, of a sudden, as she unpiled the books, this collection struck her as odd since it was still all bundled up in a loosely tied cradle of string. When she lifted the bundle up to reach her own book the string slipped off one corner and the pile came apart, spilling several volumes.

  With a sigh of irritation Amelia began to collect them together, noticing their titles as she did so. Among them was a copy of Mein Kampf which someone had bookmarked in several places as well as underlining a great many passages in pencil. There were two books by Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher whom as Amelia knew from her conversations with George many considered to be the father of Fascism, as well as works by several political philosophers who were unknown to Amelia. Yet as soon as she started leafing through their various works it became very apparent that they shared much the same extreme right wing views as Hitler, for most of the underlined passages she read as she stood at George’s desk extolled the need for action and the control of power. More than a little frightened by the potency of the expressed philosophies, Amelia read on, bent over the desk with the books open in front of her and concentrating so hard on their content that she did not hear George come into the room.

  ‘Ah ha,’ he said, putting both his hands on her waist and startling her. ‘I see we have a spy in our midst.’

  ‘I thought you were writing a murder story, George,’ she said, trying to wriggle free.

  ‘What’s to say I’m not, Mata Hari?’

  ‘All these books on how to rule the world.’

  ‘Jack lent them to me. I told you, he was helpin
g me with my research.’

  ‘What’s the thriller about? I thought it was about a murder at a village fête?’

  ‘Then if that’s what you know, Little Miss Nosey,’ George said, beginning to shepherd her out of the door, ‘you don’t need to know anything more.’

  ‘Oo-er!’ Amelia exclaimed theatrically as George continued to ease her out of his study. ‘The vicar’s a crypto-Fascist!’

  ‘Every possibility, Mrs Dashwood,’ George replied. ‘Still waters and all that stuff. In this country you never know who is quite who.’

  ‘Seriously, George,’ Amelia continued, once they were settled back in front of the drawing room fire with a bottle of Chablis and a plate of delicious ham and cucumber sandwiches Amelia had prepared earlier. ‘All those books Jack left you. Aren’t they a bit on the heavy side for what you’re writing?’

  ‘It isn’t really for the book,’ George confessed, pouring the wine. ‘It’s sort of general background stuff. For a series of articles I’ve been asked to write.’

  ‘What – on Fascism?’

  ‘The point is,’ George continued, not answering her question, ‘the point is a lot of people think there’s some sense in what all these people have to say. Particularly in the present economic climate.’

  ‘Are you attracted by what they have to say, George?’

  ‘Of course not. So saying, I don’t know that much about it, hence all the homework.’

  ‘Why should Jack be the one who supplied it? Jack doesn’t publish this sort of stuff.’

  ‘He knows what everyone else is publishing. Jack’s not just what he seems, Amelia. Jack’s . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ Amelia prompted as George fell silent. ‘What is Jack then, if he’s not what he seems?’

  ‘Nothing.’ George half smiled and shook his head. ‘I was merely going to state the obvious: that Jack is much more than the dogged old plodder he appears to be. But then I realized someone like you would have worked that out ages ago. Are there any more of these incredible sandwiches?’

  ‘There would be if I made some more,’ Amelia sighed, getting up. ‘You’re not telling me the truth, are you, George Dashwood?’