'You think I let Celia seduce me . . . here, in this house, after the party?'
'If not here, at her house perhaps.'
For some moments he didn't speak. Finally, his voice very soft, he said, 'You don't trust me even half an inch, do you?'
'In certain respects. Not that one.'
'Would you believe me if I denied it?'
'You haven't denied it.'
'No, I'm damned if I will.' He stood up and moved round the bed. As Christie edged backwards, alarmed by the glint in his eyes, he said,
'Words prove nothing. But there's one certain way to convince you I'm not having it off with anyone else.'
'W-what do you mean?'
'We shall have to make love more often—as often as it takes to assure you. Starting now.'
'No!' she backed away.
'Yes.' He was closing in on her, forcing her into a corner from which her only escape was across the bed.
Usually careful with other people's property, but just now oblivious to everything but the punitive light in Ash's eyes, Christie made a wild leap on the bed, only to measure her length as he Rugby-tackled her legs and made her sprawl helplessly forward.
Then he flung himself bodily on top of her, and she felt his warm lips pressed against the top of her spine, and his hands sliding underneath her in search of her breasts, and his hard, desirous male body pinning her, breathless, beneath him.
Christie writhed and squirmed, to no avail. As her futile efforts subsided, Ash rolled off and turned her over, the front of her robe falling open above and below the loose sash.
As she tried to clutch it and cover herself, he sprang ,on her again, face to face, for a moment kneeling between her thighs, his arms braced, preparing to swoop.
For the first time, he did not delay but took her with fierce immediacy.
Afterwards, calmed and relaxed, he made gentle, patient love to her until her slim body arched in the final voluptuous paroxysm. With a long shuddering sigh she lay still and, exhausted, let sleep overcome her.
Her idea that a few hours' rest would have not been enough to restore his depleted virility after making love to Celia was conclusively proved to be an error when Ash awoke her with kisses.
After making love to her again, he said, 'Perhaps that will relieve your mind for the rest of today.'
She flinched from his sardonic tone.
'I think it's time we got up,' was his next remark.
As he rose from the bed, she saw that it was nearly noon.
He was dressed before her, but he waited until she was ready. In silence they left the bedroom. Christie could not help feeling embarrassed by their belated appearance. She hoped very much that Emily had gone to church with the others, and that none of them would have returned yet. If so, they need never know how late she and Ash had stayed in bed.
Neither Hugo's wife nor his mother was in the family room, but he was there, drinking black coffee.
Having said good morning, he went on, 'I hope you're feeling as fragile as I am, Ash. You should be. You drank a hell of a lot more of that ruinous gutrot than I did. Why didn't I stick to whisky?'
'Gutrot! It was a particularly fine old rum which has been maturing in the cask for the better part of twenty years,' Ash returned equably.
'I have to admit it slid down very smoothly last night, but this morning—oh, God! What a headache. I suppose lack of sleep doesn't help. Did Christiana give you hell when you finally tottered to bed, reeking of rum and raw onions?'
'I didn't have onions—you did. I had only cheese in my sandwich.'
'And I suppose your wife's still too new to raise Cain when you misbehave,' said Hugo, with a rueful grin. 'Mine's not. To say that Emmy was cross is an understatement. I think it was mainly the onions. Being pregnant, she's temporarily rather intolerant for my weakness for them.'
'I heard that, you drunken beast,' said Emily, wheeling her mother-in-law's chair into the room. 'Good morning, Christiana. Was your beloved as revoltingly smelly as mine was when these two reprobates finally staggered to bed? Rum and raw onions! Ugh, what a nauseating combination! And what sacrilege, too, after feasting like kings earlier on.'
'Yes, but darling, that was seven hours earlier. One gets a bit peckish at half past three in the morning,' Hugo pointed out.
'I've forgiven you, actually. You can even kiss me—on the cheek, please, to be on the safe side,' she added, with an affectionate twinkle.
He gave her a light kiss, and left his arm on her shoulders. Catching sight of Christie's expression, he said, 'Christiana looks shocked.
Maybe Ash managed to -slip into bed without waking her, and she thinks we really were tight. I can assure you we weren't'—smiling at her, 'merely genial. Isn't that so, Ash?'
'Quite right. If I did wake her up, she didn't let me know. But as you pointed out, Hugo, a bride is inclined to overlook her husband's shortcomings, and to think—for a few months at least—that he can do no wrong.'
Ash looked at his friends, not at her, as he made this remark, but she knew it was directed at her, for being so ready to mistrust him.
Even so, she could not quite dismiss the possibility that the two men were in collusion. It was not unusual for friends to tolerate each other's peccadilloes even though, in a general sense, they did not approve of such behaviour. To betray Emily's trust might be unthinkable to Hugo. He might deplore Ash's conduct. But simply to spare her feelings, he might be prepared to cover for him.
'I went to bed early,' she said. 'What time did the party break up?'
'About half past one,' said Emily. 'The last to leave was our local
femme fatale,
Celia. She's always a stayer, especially now that she's on her own for a while. I suppose it's catty to say so, but I think she's going to have problems finding eligible lovers from now on. At twenty-five she was spectacularly good- looking, but now she's nearer to thirty-five the gloss is beginning to wear off. Anyway, having listened to her problems, I pushed her off home, made tea, and left these two chaps to gossip. Goodness knows what they found to talk about all that time.'
'The future, mainly,' said Hugo. 'Now that Ash has a house and a family, he's equally concerned about the future. Although you've always been interested in making money, haven't you, old chap? I suppose it's the blood of your Greek shipping forebears coming out.
My lot, all basically farmers, have been mainly concerned to conserve what they already had. But that isn't enough in the modern world.'
The talk turned to world inflation, and remained on that topic until lunchtime.
When the car came to fetch Ash and Christie the following morning, Emily left Peacocks with them. She owned, as a
pied-a-terre,
a tiny mews cottage in Chelsea. It had been a wedding present from her father whose ancestors had once owned half Bel- gravia, the area which had succeeded Mayfair as London's most fashionable residential area.
When Christie asked Ash the origin of the word mews, he said that originally it had meant the place where the king's falcons were kept.
Later it had come to refer to the stables behind the great mansions. As cars had succeeded carriages, the stables had become garages for the Rolls-Royces, Bentleys and Lagondas of the Twenties and Thirties.
After the Second World War, in which many great houses had been reduced to rubble by bombing, people had begun to realise that the garages could be converted into attractive little houses, perfect as a first home for a young married couple. Since then the demand for them had steadily increased until now cottages in the most desirable mews were fetching prices far beyond the pockets of all but the most affluent newly weds.
'Hugo tells me that the place next to yours was sold for a hundred and fifteen thousand pounds—for a thirty-year lease,' Ash remarked to Emily, who was seated between them.
'Yes, and it isn't as nice as ours. But the price I find most incredible is two million one hundred thousand, which is what is being asked for a penthouse in St James's Place. I suppose two million is a fleabite to an oil millionaire. But they say that most of the sheiks have left London now, and moved on to America. I suppose they can't stand our climate.' Emily turned to look at Christie. 'It was amazing what an influence they exerted on the things in the shops, wasn't it? Not so much in my favourite places, but certainly on stores like Harrods. The change in their window displays was quite dramatic.'
'Was it? I hardly ever shopped in central London. Partly for lack of time, but largely for lack of money,' Christie said candidly.
She knew Emily would think no less of her for admitting to having been hard up. People like the Ffaringtons were not impressed by wealth
per se.
Even if rich themselves, which was not always the case, they had an outlook quite different from that of the newly rich.
Emily and Hugo used the cottage about once a month for shopping and going to the theatre, and more often during the season for events such as the Chelsea Flower Show and London weddings. Emily took Ash to task for not borrowing the cottage for his honeymoon.
For the rest of that day and all the next one, she and Christie went shopping together. As she had said, Christie had never had the time or the money to shop in the West End, but Emily knew all the best hunting grounds around Sloane Street, Walton Street and Ebury Street.
She was an invaluable guide to the shops frequented by the owners of England's "listed" country houses, large and small; and Christie knew it was these people's style she must emulate to achieve the right atmosphere at Heron's Sound. Fortunately her own taste already inclined in that direction. She doubted if Ash would have married her had it not. He was far too much of a realist to marry someone whose taste differed drastically from his.
Because she and her husband did not stay there long enough to get tired of it, Emily had chosen the strawberry as her theme for the decorations at the cottage. Her bedroom was papered with tiny wild strawberries, and the sitting-room had berry red linen on the walls, a soft leaf green carpet overlaid with a red and white Portuguese rug, and white glazed chintz curtains. The effect was very fresh and pretty, and it gave Christie a brainwave for a similar if less concentrated theme at Heron's Sound.
'Do you think it would be a good plan to use the Antigua Black pineapple as a recurring motif in our house?' she asked the other girl.
'We've a lovely bed with pineapples carved on the posts.'
'I think it's a splendid idea, and a practical one, too, because it's no use settling on a motif which is almost impossibly hard to find,' was Emily's reaction. 'But the pineapple is something one sees on fabrics and braids, and the ends of curtain poles and those big stone finials for gateposts. Which reminds me, a place I must take you to is Beardmore's. They're the best architectural ironmongers in London, with a tremendous range of reproduction antique drawer handles, period door furniture and all that sort of thing. I shouldn't mind betting they'll be able to produce some pineapples for you, perhaps in the form of curtain hold-backs.'
While the girls were busy shopping, Ash had his own things to do.
These included having a look at the facilities offered by London's newest club, the St James', which had film stars Roger Moore, Michael Caine and Liza Minnelli on its committee under the chairmanship of actor Sir John Mills.
Ash thought the club, conveniently situated in Park Place, a quiet cul-de-sac off St James's Street, would be even more suitable for them than the block of flats they were staying in.
On Emily's second day in London, he arranged for them to lunch with him there, and afterwards they were shown one of the air-conditioned suites, and one of the fifteen studios which had fabric-tented ceilings and stylish Italian furnishings.
When Emily had returned to the country, and Christie was shopping alone, there were intervals during the day when a coffee break or light lunch at the General Trading Company—one of her friend's favourite haunts both for its merchandise and restaurant—gave her time to think about her husband and her marriage.
She had not forgotten the satisfaction in his eyes when he said,
You
must have grown fond of me if Celia's antics made you jealous.
Nor had she forgotten Emily's remarks:
She's like Ash himself used to be.
Celia adores a challenge. If a man appears indifferent, she can't rest
till she's made a conquest. I should think that's what attracted him
about Christie. She's rather reserved, isn't she?
The more she thought about it, the stronger became her conviction that the only way to hold her husband was to respond with enthusiasm to his lovemaking, but always be a little cool, a little withdrawn at all other times.
One day, together, they went out of London to a place near Syon House, a great mansion with a magnificent Adam interior which they both would have liked to see, had it not been closed in the winter.
However, the object of the expedition was the eight- acre showgrounds of a firm specialising in antique garden furniture. Ash wanted to choose two or three choice ornaments to have shipped to Antigua in time for the opening of his house the following December.
After some seasonably cold weather, the forecast the night before had been for a fine, milder day, and he had ordered a hamper from Fortnum & Mason which Ellis, their driver, had collected before coming to pick them up. He would have his own lunch in a pub.
Christie had never dreamed that there was a place where one could choose from hundreds of pillars and arches, fountains, lead cisterns, statues, sundials and ancient stone benches. There were urns, balustrading and porticos, the piers and finials of gates, pedestals, obelisks and temples, all set out in a haphazard way among shrubberies and groups of trees. Everything came from the grounds of an old house and had, like old family furniture, the lovely, inimitable patina of genuine age.
With few other people about, and the forecast proving to be correct for once, it was an enchanted place in which to ramble for an hour or two.