Out of the Past

CHAPTER 1

Carmona Hardwick came up the zigzag path from the beach. The afternoon was hot and she took her time. She wore a sleeveless linen frock and a big shady hat. Her legs were bare and she had green sandals on her feet. The whole effect was cool and pleasing. She was thinking that Pippa would arrive in the middle of a blazing afternoon. All very well to say, “Don’t bother to be in, or meet me or anything,” because of course you had to. She hadn’t seen Pippa Maybury for three years, and there was a time when they had been very fond of each other. These school friendships didn’t last…

Pippa was always a bit of a goose…Three years was quite a long time…They had both married…A slight shade came over her face.

She reached the top of the cliff, and took the path which led along it to the house which James had inherited from his great-uncle Octavius Hardwick. Much too big for them and it would have to be sold, but meanwhile they could spread themselves, have all their friends to stay, and enjoy James’ leave.

In spite of being called Cliff Edge the house stood a little way back. There was a stone wall between it and the cliff path, and a private gate into a bare formal garden where old figureheads of ships stared out to where the horizon met the rim of the sea.

The house was hideous-very flat and bare outside and the rooms full of plush curtains and frightful Victorian furniture.

There was a driving-road on the far side and an approach featuring a good deal of stone work. The six urns which flanked the entrance had blazed with scarlet geraniums in great-uncle Octavius’ time. They were empty now, and two of them were cracked. Carmona looked at them and thought they had better sell the place as soon as they could, because it really did look very shabby and it would cost the earth to do it up. They would certainly never want to live here.

She had her foot on the bottom step of the half flight leading from the front door, when a sports car whizzed in at the gate and came to an abrupt stop beside her. Pippa, in scarlet slacks and a sleeveless jersey, sprang out and embraced her. When last seen her hair had been a fair brown. It was now platinum. She wore dark glasses with scarlet rims which she took off and snapped away in a startling red and white bag as she brushed Carmona’s cheek with her own. Her eyes at least had not changed. They were as bright, as blue, and very nearly as dazzling as the sea.

“Darling!” she said. “What a frightful house! But how nice to see you! You’re not going to live in it are you? You really couldn’t! I’m sure it’s got black beetles, and a basement, and the sort of old-fashioned range that simply eats up coal! You must tell me everything! But I’d better put the Tick away first-it belongs to George Robertson, and he’s rather mean about his things! He was quite frightfully peeved when I ran into a lamp-post and smashed the windscreen of the car he had before this one-and it was more or less dropping to pieces anyhow and well overdue for the scrap heap!”

The three years since they had last met were gone. Pippa was just the same. The current young man’s name had been Jocko then, it now appeared to be George. That was all. Whatever it was, he would be considered as a provider of cars, flowers and other unconsidered trifles, and more or less treated like dirt whilst kind, stodgy Bill Maybury looked on with a tolerant smile. Carmona had a moment’s faint wonder as to what James would do or say if she were to start borrowing cars and being continually here, there and everywhere with one infatuated young man after another. All at once she shivered and felt cold. Too silly-because the sun was really hot today.

The garage was a converted stable balancing the large Victorian conservatory on the other side of the house, denuded now of its palms, its climbing heliotrope, its plumbago, its begonias and pelargoniums. When the Tick had been put away with the narrowest escape of a grazed mudguard, Carmona led the way up a flight of steps into the tessellated hall.

Pippa’s comment was frank.

“Darling, how fierce! Too, too like the kind of hotel one’s grandmother might have stayed at!”

Carmona laughed.

“Well, we really are rather like a family hotel at the moment. We’ve got the Trevors here. You remember Maisie and Tom?”

“Of course-he was your guardian. Rather a lamb.”

“And Adela Castleton-”

Pippa made a face.

“Darling-not the Lady Castleton! Because I don’t know if I can bear it! I’ve a sort of idea I met her once, and she looked at me as if I must have got there by mistake! That kind of nose, if you know what I mean!”

Carmona knew quite well. It was the kind which lent itself to disapproving of the young. She passed hurriedly to Esther Field.

Pippa burst out laughing.

“Aunt Esther! Is she here too? Still dropping stitches and calling everyone ‘My dear’? Well, I must say you are doing the relations proud!”

“She’s the only real one. The rest are just because of being guardians and things, but Esther was my mother’s sister.”

“And Alan Field’s stepmother. Carmona-where is Alan?”

“I don’t know.”

They had passed out of the hall into what Octavius Hardwick had called the morning-room, an apartment which looked north and never got the sun, its natural gloom being further intensified by a carved overmantel of some black oriental wood and curtains of indigo plush.

Carmona shut the door. It wasn’t the slightest use hoping that Pippa would drop the subject.

“You don’t know? But, darling!” Pippa’s eyes were alive with interest. “Surely Aunt Esther-”

“She hasn’t the slightest idea.”

“You mean he just broke it all off and disappeared?”

“Something like that.”

She wouldn’t turn away. It didn’t really make things any worse to speak of them. Sometimes it made them better, and-it was only Pippa.

“But Carmona! Darling, you’ve simply got to tell me all about it! When I had your wire to say it was all off I wanted to rush to you! But Bill put his foot down-you know, he does sometimes. He said I couldn’t do any good, and he was sure you’d rather not, and it wasn’t reasonable to expect him to put up about a hundred pounds for me to fly home just to hold your hand. I could see his point, you know, and when he is like that I do find it’s better to do what he says. Darling, you did understand, didn’t you?”

“Of course.”

“You must tell me all about it now. What did you quarrel over?”

“We didn’t.”

Pippa’s voice rose a third of an octave.

“Didn’t quarrel? But, darling!”

Better get on with it.

“He just didn’t turn up.”

“On your wedding day!”

“Yes.”

“Darling, how perfectly frightful! You don’t mean to say you were there waiting at the church!”

“Yes.”

It was hurting horribly. Much more than she had thought it would. It was hurting like hell. The grey church, cold and dark, with that odd smell which empty places have. Empty- at least thank God for that! Only Tom, and Maisie, and kind Esther there to look on whilst she waited for Alan who didn’t come. A parson and a verger too, but they didn’t count. Grey old men quite alien from what was happening to her, their own days of quick anguish and hot tears all past and gone. She looked vaguely at Pippa, but she did not see her. She saw the empty church.

“Darling, how frightful! But what on earth made him do a thing like that? If he wanted to break it off, why didn’t he do it properly? I just can’t imagine Alan-Alan getting cold feet at the last minute and not being able to come up to the scratch! Carmona, he must have written! Something must have happened to the letter-or to him!”

Carmona moved her head. It was the slightest of movements. It said, “No.”

Pippa Maybury repeated what she had said before.

“Something must have happened to him!”

This time it was Carmona’s lips that moved.

“No-he wrote afterwards. The letter came next day. He said he couldn’t go through with it-he wasn’t cut out for marriage, and he was going to join a friend on a horse-breeding ranch in South America.”

“And that was all?” Pippa stared. “Well, darling, I really do think you were well rid of him! He was a charmer and all that, and marvellous to go about with, but when it comes to husbands-” she shrugged and laughed-“well, you know, there’s something to be said for having them solid. After all, they’ve got to run the show, and pay the bills, and do all the unpleasant sort of things like income tax, and washers on taps, and spiders in the bath, and I don’t really see Alan making much of a show of it. Speaking quite frankly, you know.”

Carmona didn’t see it either. She never had. She had always known that if there was anything unpleasant to be done, she would have to do it herself. The thing that had been broken in her was the conviction that Alan needed her. It was a conviction that went right back into her childhood. He was selfish, he could be cruel, he had a fatal knowledge of his own charm and of other people’s weaknesses, but-he needed her. And then when she found out that he didn’t, that he could push her aside and put the width of the world between them, something broke. She said,

“No-”

Pippa gave her a light pinch.

“Wake up, darling! You said that as if you were about a hundred miles away, and the one thing one ought never to let oneself do is to go dreaming back into the past. Fatal! And it isn’t as if you had got left on the shelf, or anything like that. Why, it was no time at all before you married James. To tell you the truth, I didn’t think you’d have had the spirit.”

“Thank you, Pippa.”

“Well, you know, you were always one of the quiet ones, and you might have taken up good works, or gone into a mouldering melancholy-like the girl in Shakespeare who sat on a monument and smiled at grief, which I always thought a particularly stupid thing to do, because young men aren’t really interested in monuments and they wouldn’t bother to climb one. And now tell me all about you and James! He isn’t nearly as good-looking as Alan of course.”

“Not nearly.”

Pippa nodded vivaciously.

“Husbands don’t need to be. And I always thought Alan overdid it. After all, looks are more in the woman’s line, don’t you think? Anyhow I’m dying to see him again.”

“He’s away,” said Carmona.

“Away!”

“He’ll be coming any day now. He has been doing a job under U.N.O.-something to do with tracing people who have disappeared. He speaks a lot of languages, so they find him useful.”

“Doesn’t it take him away a lot? It sounds as if it might.”

“It does rather.” After a pause she said, “Sometimes I go with him. I went over to the States with him in the spring.”

Pippa stared.

“It sounds a bit detached. I hope he turns up in time for me to see him. And where is everyone else? You say you’ve got the house packed with relations. Where are they?”

“Down on the beach. I hope you won’t find it dull here. There’s nobody young.”

Pippa looked through her eyelashes.

“Too, too reposeful. Not all the time, you know, but every now and then-relations, I mean-the nice quiet elderly sort who have never had anything happen to them.”

“Do you suppose anyone is really like that?”

Pippa burst out laughing.

“Marvellous if they all had buried secrets! But, no, I’d really rather be soothed. Where are they?”

“Down on the beach-and we should just have time for a swim before tea.”