The White Marriage Page 32

  ‘Miss Chantry? Oh, Miss Chantry – yes, yes, yes, of course she may call. Tell her to come here at four o’clock. We can take tea in the Small Dining Room, Rule.’

  Rule bowed and, returning to the telephone, he relayed the message.

  A few hours later he showed Sunny into the Small Dining Room with its Chinese wallpaper and elaborate Chinese vases, with its oriental lacquered chest, and its black lacquer chairs.

  Leandra leaned forward to kiss Sunny on the cheek, but Sunny did not kiss her.

  They sat down. The maid poured tea, and then left the two of them, black clothed, silent, both wondering who would begin.

  ‘I am here because I have made the most awful mess of things, Mrs Fortescue.’

  Sunny had decided to take the initiative. It was only fair since she was the one who had requested the interview, which was what, in truth, it was.

  ‘I hardly think that, Sunny.’

  Leandra felt her heartbeat quicken, and because of that was careful to keep her expression blank.

  ‘Yes, I have, Mrs Fortescue. I have made the most awful mess of things. You see, I thought I loved Mr Wyndham – I mean, I thought I loved Gray – but I am awfully afraid that I don’t love him as I should, but because of how he is – because of what you told me – I can’t find it in me to tell him.’

  Sunny’s eyes were large, dark-lashed, and made to look even larger by the tension in her face.

  ‘I should never have become engaged to him, I know that now, but all I can think is that at the time, I truly thought I was in love with him, but I’m not, I’m in love with someone else, someone I met at the lodging house, actually. He works in an auction house and plays jazz at night – well, you won’t want to hear all about that – but you must see that I can’t go through with going on being with Gray, as his fiancée, which is terrible, because this means that everything you told me – his trust and his father – well, it’s all going to collapse, and he won’t have what he should have, and all because of me.’ Sunny sipped her tea, and then replaced the cup. ‘I’m sure you will be going to be terribly angry with me, and I know that I should go to him myself, but I just can’t face it.’

  Leandra put her head on one side. ‘It is going to be very difficult to tell him, I do agree,’ she agreed. ‘But I also think that you may be right. It may be better if you let me do it, let me tell him, because I have known him so long, and because I put you two together in the first place. You seemed ideal, quite ideal, but now, as you say, you have found someone else.’ She gave a little sad sigh. ‘There is only one way to go, and that is to face the facts.’ She put out a hand and patted Sunny’s hand. ‘Gray will be heartbroken,’ she said sadly. ‘But he will get over it, in time.’

  ‘Will he, do you think? Will he be able to go back to his old life, having fun and being terribly popular, and all those things you said, in spite of everything? He is such an attractive man, so handsome—’

  Leandra stopped her there. She had no need to be convinced of Gray’s attractions.

  ‘Of course, of course. We will all, all his friends, look after him, as we have always done. Now, my dear, you must go. I have so much to which to see.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’

  As Sunny left Leandra watched her from the hall, walking back down the steps to the inevitable waiting taxi, with mixed feelings. On the one hand she had been relieved that the Little Puppy had been the one to call a halt to the now unnecessary engagement; on the other hand Leandra did not like the idea that it was she, Leandra, who would have to tell Gray. She did not want to see the look in his eyes.

  She went back to the fire and sat staring into its comforting colours, watching the sparks occasionally fly up the chimney, wondering whether to wait until after the funeral, or to tell him before.

  In the end, since it meant delaying for only a day or two, she waited until after the funeral when she and Gray had been left alone, when there were only the two of them in the twelve-bedroomed house, only the two of them with five servants, and four gardeners, only the two of them at last alone, how they had always thought they would want to be, alone at Maydown.

  ‘She came to tell you that?’

  To his amazement Gray heard that his voice was trembling slightly.

  ‘Yes, Gray. She couldn’t bear to tell you herself, she felt so bad. Because, well, she felt bad. She still believes she has let you down terribly, and that to tell you will wound your feelings beyond belief.’

  Gray turned away. He had never felt worse. Like a man who has had an affair and wants only to confess to his wife and put it behind him, he found himself wishing that he had at least told Sunny that he had lied to her, but now, now there was no reason to tell her.

  ‘So there was a complication after all?’

  ‘Perhaps …’

  ‘At any rate, if there wasn’t, there is now.’ Gray cleared his throat, and then taking out a gold cigarette case he lit a cigarette. ‘I’m glad she’s found someone her own age,’ he said at last. ‘I am glad, because she is such a sweet little thing, she deserves something better than us.’

  Leandra went to him. ‘Darling, I know it’s all been rather a shock, but we can now be together, you realise that? We can now get married, and have all the security in the world. We can stay at Maydown, have all our comforts, Rule, the servants, the garden, everything that we love. We can have everything that we have ever wanted.’

  Gray nodded, but he walked off down the length of the room towards the French windows, right away from her, still smoking.

  How could he explain to Leandra what he was feeling? How could he tell her that in being with Sunny Chantry he had glimpsed a life that he knew now he could never have, a life of innocent love, of being and feeling young, of all the things that, as he had told her days before, the war had taken from his generation. How could he tell her that however beautifully she dressed, however magnificent her jewellery, she would never compare to the sight of a young girl in a simple dress trotting down the street with a straw hat on the back of her head?

  Sunny was dawn breaking. Sunny was the first magnolia blossom. Sunny was summer sunshine, moonlight on snow, a trumpet solo. If he even tried to explain Leandra would never understand, not if she lived to be a thousand. She thought Sunny young and stupid. She called Sunny the Little Puppy, because she did not understand an inch of her.

  Soon Leandra would be recovered from her mourning, and they would doubtless get married abroad, and travel for a while, after which they would return to Maydown, and everything would be the same, and more of the same would be just the same, and it would be fine, but there would be no tilt to the day, no feelings of intense excitement such as he had experienced, however briefly, for the first time, with Sunny. Comfort was not excitement, security was not joy, but that was what he had settled for, and perhaps after all he deserved it?

  Sunny did not want to return to the lodging house immediately, and her mother seemed to understand this, but they both knew that she had to, that she was too old to live at home again. Besides, she had to earn her living, and while Mr Wyndham Senior had given it as his opinion that sewing was bad for ladies, Sunny could not put upon her parents to keep her, nor, she realised, should she interrupt their new-found freedom, and that being so, she returned to London.

  This time she was not left sitting on her suitcase, waiting for someone to let her in; this time she returned home at precisely the same time as Hart was returning from his job.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ he said coolly. ‘I wondered where you had got to.’

  Sunny nodded, not looking at him. She knew how he must have been hurt by her not punching Gray in the jaw when he kissed her, what now seemed like years ago. She knew from Arietta that he had been shocked, wounded, and probably, she half hoped, furious, but what she did not know was how he felt now.

  He picked up her suitcase, which was she felt a good sign, and carried it up the steps into the hall of the house where he left it and prepared to proceed do
wn to the basement, which was a bad sign.

  ‘Any music tonight?’ she asked, preparing to pick the case up herself.

  ‘Sure.’

  She picked up her suitcase for herself and started to struggle up the stairs with it. This was more than Hart could take, and he immediately leaped back up after her, and took it from her.

  ‘Enough of the pathetic display,’ he said, taking the suitcase and, proceeding in front of her, he climbed effortlessly to the top of the house, and placed it outside her door.

  ‘There you are,’ he said, and turned to go back down again.

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ Sunny asked, desperate to ask him anything rather than have him return downstairs.

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I wouldn’t mind, I wouldn’t mind at all.’

  Hart followed her into her room, and Sunny went straight to put the kettle on, after which she stood looking at Hart as if she had never seen him before, because in a way, she hadn’t, not like that, not looking half despairing and half adoring.

  ‘I’d forgotten how beautiful you are, Sunny.’

  ‘And I’d forgotten how handsome you are.’

  ‘I’m not handsome—’

  ‘And I’m not beautiful—’

  ‘So, “Let’s call the whole thing off.”?’

  Sunny shook her head. ‘I don’t think so, Hart. In fact, I think we should stay very cool, as you would say, and call the whole thing on.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as calling something on, Sunny.’

  ‘Well, there should be,’ she protested against the sound of the kettle whistling. ‘And as far as I am concerned there is now,’ she went on, going to make the coffee.

  They sat down opposite each other, coffee cups in hand. Hart stared at her. Sunny stared at him.

  ‘I have unmuddled my muddle, Hart,’ she said, finally fracturing the silence, which was not a silence at all, but only a break in the music of their looks.

  ‘Was it a very big muddle?’ Hart asked.

  ‘Rather. Huge, actually.’

  Sunny looked past Hart to the view of the rooftops opposite. They were a very London set of rooftops, but comfortingly aged, as if the many faded colours had decided, over the centuries, to give in and become part of the gathering sky, and so their colours melted into it in a most gratifying manner, the whole making up a view that was neither city nor country, but vaguely both.

  ‘The thing I never realised before was that you could stray into a situation that would then become something as big as anything you ever thought of, and that you could become so entangled that you might never, ever get out, that you would feel like a trapped animal who had walked into a net, or been caught in a snare, slowly suffocating, or bleeding to death, and no way out, no way out at all, and all you can think of is getting out, but you don’t know how to get out, but then something happens that makes you realise how you were trapped, and you do get out, and you stop bleeding, and you go home, and everything is just as it always was, except probably better, and you know that you will never, ever let that happen to you again—’

  ‘I love you terribly, Sunny.’

  ‘And I love you terribly, Hart.’

  ‘Let’s hope we will improve with practice,’ Hart joked as he took her in his arms.

  ‘I thought I would never find you again,’ Sunny confessed after they finished kissing and kissing.

  ‘You thought you would never find me again. How did you think I felt seeing you—’

  ‘No, no, we won’t go into that. We can’t go into that. It will be like unravelling a ball of wool; we’ll never ever ravel it up the same again. It will always be too tight or too loose. Suffice it to say, we love each other. Shall we agree to let that suffice?’

  ‘I think we should agree to let that suffice.’

  They moved slowly towards the bed.

  ‘Just a little bit more kissing.’

  ‘Yes, just a little bit, only a very little, because—’

  ‘Because I’m feeling quite hungry.’

  Hart burst into laughter. ‘Very well, just a little bit more kissing, and then—’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then we shall be married in your village church, and we will live in an old rectory that has benign spirits from the golden past, and they will smile down on us all our days, and we will have many joys, and only a few sorrows, and once we are gone everyone will say, “They were made for each other.”’

  That was such a delightful prediction that they found they went on kissing for rather longer than they perhaps should.

  Epilogue

  As Gray had foreseen, a few months after Dilke Fortescue’s funeral he and Leandra were married abroad, in Venice, by an aged priest who seemed only to speak Latin. After that they had lunch with their witnesses at the Gritti Palace, and everyone appreciated how beautiful the bride looked in her decorous hat, and perfectly matching coat and dress.

  Life became very smooth for both of them, as they knew it had to, and since time is a great healer, Gray’s heart mended, and he recovered from the pain that his passing engagement to Sunny Chantry had brought him. Only occasionally, over the years, if he saw a young girl walking down a side street, a straw hat on the back of her head, did the pain return, but it was only a fleeting pain that lasted a few seconds, after which, with a light sigh, he would turn away and make for his club, and the kind of congenial life to which he knew he was condemned.

  Hart and Sunny, as Hart had hoped, were married in the little church at Rushington. The bride wore a magnificent tiara, belonging to Hart’s great-aunt. It was very heavy, but she bore up wonderfully well, knowing that there would be very few other occasions when she would have the privilege of having so many diamonds on her head.

  As dutifully reported in the local country newspaper and in the county magazine, the bride’s dress was made of poult-de-soie, with a slight edging of pale pink organza sweeping through the waist, and it fell to the ground behind her in a large impressive sweep. Her veil was made of silk netting, and that too fell behind her in a large sweep. There were many pageboys – the Dorlings seeming to have a large number of male relatives from whom to select attendants – but only one bridesmaid, Arietta Staunton.

  The reception was a joyful occasion, with many elegant speeches. After which, the happy couple left for their honeymoon in the old Vauxhall, Clem Arkwright having tuned her up so that she whizzed along to their honeymoon hotel in Brighton, only breaking down once they arrived.

  Arietta and Sam did not marry until the following spring, Sam having determined that he would put together enough work to mount an exhibition, to impress Arietta’s Uncle Bob. Arietta equally had determined not to leave Mr Beauchamp until he had found a proper replacement for her, which he now deemed impossible. The subject did not come up very often, but when it did Sam noticed that Uncle Randy looked more than forlorn at the idea of losing his little assistant; he looked bereft.

  A solution had therefore to be found, and it was. Beetle’s would move with them back to Rushington. This would mean that Uncle Randy would be able to ditch the dirty mac brigade and the serially unfaithful, and Arietta could go on helping him.

  The wedding went off splendidly, particularly given that Audrey was the bride’s mother. Uncle Bob gave Arietta away, managing to put out his pipe for the whole service, and giving a wonderfully warm and witty speech at the wedding breakfast.

  The happy couple drove off in Sam’s new purchase, an old racing-green Riley, which, much to Audrey’s disappointment, gave them no trouble at all for the whole of their Cornish honeymoon.

  On their return they helped Randy move into his new shop plumb in the middle of Rushington High Street. Business became so brisk that it was not long before his shop was joined by others of the same ilk, so that the people of Rushington were hard put to be able to find a grocery store that sold a bag of sugar among all the second-hand books and furniture shops.

  Randy might have been able to ditch the dir
ty mac brigade, but not his habit of handing out advice to the lovelorn, and although he no longer allowed letters to be passed between hardcovers, he did allow for confessions, admissions, and outpourings of emotion over cups of strong coffee, because that, as he often remarked, was what a bookseller was all about – getting to know his customers.

  The cottage that Hart and Sunny eventually bought was within driving distance of Rushington, but not so near that they would feel tempted to visit friends and families too often. Hart commuted to London while Sunny painted the cottage white. White walls, white windows, white front door, white back door, nothing that she could paint that could be white was not white.

  As she painted she sometimes thought of her few days spent sewing at Madame Charles’s salon, wondering how many new babies would have come along, or new marriages made, remembering the singsong chatter in heavily foreign-accented English, the gossip meandering its way through the long hours, and how much she had learned by listening – not least about the private life of the famous Mrs Leandra Fortescue, and her long-time love, Mr Gray Wyndham.

  In the light of her love for Hart it had not been difficult to forgive Gray and Leandra for deceiving her, and yet, understandably perhaps, she thought she must never forget the lesson that she had learned so early on in her young life, although what it was, she could never quite work out – Hart always seeming to come home earlier than expected, which naturally led to much happiness and lovemaking.