“As far as I am concerned,” he said, “it doesn’t work at all, and I want you to release me.”
“Oh no,” she protested.
“Yes. You haven’t played fair, Lydia, but I am not here to reproach you about that. I am here to end this engagement that was never a real engagement.”
“I will not release you.”
“Lydia, your words to me—on that evening when the others had gone to Venice and we were done
—
were that if, after a few months, I did not feel differently, you would let me go.”
“But I can’t.”
“You must. You deliberately misrepresented to me the state of affairs between Douglas and Alison
...”
“What difference does that make?”
“You asked Alison not to go to Italy; so apparently you thought it made a good deal of difference.”
“How do you know that? Have you found Alison?”
“Yes, I have found her, and at last I am also finding out the truth. There is nothing between her and Douglas
...”
“But anybody might have thought so.”
“With your help, Lydia, I thought so; but I was wrong. With your help, I thought of them as about to marry; and as I had no desire to cut out Douglas, who had had plenty to bear in the last few years—even if I could have cut him out, which was by no means certain—I did not allow myself to think of Alison as anything but my ward.”
“I will not let you go,” repeated Lydia, understanding Peter’s words only too well.
“You have no choice, Lydia.”
“I shall sue you for breach of promise.”
He looked at her steadily for a few moments.
“Only you can decide about that,” he said calmly. “But I should have thought you would suffer from that more than I.”
She saw that she was defeated.
“She has been clever,” she said bitterly. “I’ll give her that. Her last move was the cleverest.”
“I’m very sorry about all this, Lydia.”
“You needn’t make speeches. But believe me, you won’t come out of this very well; everybody shall know how you have treated me.”
Peter rose to his feet.
“It won’t help you, Lydia, to take it this way. Why not shake hands, and make the best of it? It wouldn’t have been a happy marriage for you in any case; there may be better to come.”
She tinned her back on him.
“I told you you needn’t make speeches,” she said.
He waited a moment in silence. Then he turned and went to the door. Lydia turned swiftly.
“And I hope,” she said viciously, “that she makes a fool of you in the future, as she has all this summer. Nothing between her and Douglas! That makes me laugh. Nobody but a fool could be so blind; they’ve been lovers all the time.”
That made it easy for Peter to go. The sympathy he felt for her died at this last attempt to make trouble. He closed the door behind him and walked down the stairs of the flats to the street. It could never have worked, he told himself, and of course, I never would have thought so, but that Alison seemed to be fated for Douglas, and I couldn’t have stood in his way.
Alison stepped off the train, and Peter was beside her in a few long strides. He took her small suitcase, tucked her arm in his, and marched her along the platform.
“The car is here,” he said, “and we shall be home in a few minutes.”
Thomas was waiting behind the wheel of the car. He got out as he saw them coming, greeting Alison with a smile of pleasure, tucking the rug round her as she sat in the back with Peter, in a fatherly manner. The car made its way to the Mayfair house, and Peter led her into the hall. Somebody came down the stairs to greet her, and she saw that it was Douglas.
“Alison,” he said. “Well met.” He opened his arms, gathered her into a warm hug and kissed her cheek. “My, you’re looking well,” he said. “Being a working girl agrees with you.”
“You’re looking well, too,” she said. “Unbelievably well. Do you really feel as good as you look?”
“I feel wonderful,” said Douglas.
They went upstairs to the drawing room.
“I know,” said Douglas, “it’s most remiss of me to go out on your first evening home, but I’ve got a date, Alison dear, and I know you’ll forgive me.”
“Yes, of course. May
I
ask who the date is with?”
“A girl I met on the plane from Brussels to Paris. She was due to return to London this afternoon, and she is meeting me for dinner this evening.”
“Have a good time, Doug.”
“I will. Do you remember, Alison, that girl to kiss?”
“I remember very well.”
“Such a lot of leeway to make up,” he said, smiling in an irresistible way that made Alison feel rather sorry for the girls who would help him make it up.
“Don’t break too many hearts,” she said. “Where is Priscilla, by the way? Is she home?”
“No,” said Peter. “She went down to see a cott
a
ge at Chiddingfold to-day, and she rang up in a state of great excitement this afternoon, because she thinks it is the right one for her. But she wants my advice on it; so she is staying there overnight, and I said I would go down to-morrow and have a look at it. I thought you might like to come with me, Alison.”
“Yes, I’d love to,” she said, thinking that this weekend was going to be even better than the one with Guy and George; and thinking too, that with Douglas out, she was going to have dinner alone with Peter.
At dinner time, Nora waited on them, and her frequent comings and goings disturbed any settled, private conversation, so that Peter left what he wanted to say until he was upstairs in the drawing room with Alison, and Nora had taken away the coffee cups, and there was nobody to break into the privacy of their evening.
The fire gave out a heartening warmth. The room was sof
tl
y lit by the table lamps, and the centre chandelier was not switched on. After the bareness of the accommodation at school, it struck Alison as extremely luxurious, and she looked round it with a sigh of content.
“Lovely to be here again, even for so short a time,” she said.
“We have very rarely been alone here, Alison.”
“I don’t remember a time when we were. There was always either Priscilla or Douglas, somewhere in the house.”
“It’s been an empty house without you. I’ve often pictured you here, just like this—without either Priscilla or Douglas.”
Alison looked doubtfully at him. She did not think any purpose could be usefully served by following this line of talk—in view of his engagement to Lydia. He said:
“Come here, Alison.”
He was sitting in a settee at right angles to the fireplace. Alison sat opposite, and she continued to look at him doubtfully after he had spoken.
“Come here,” he repeated.
She went slowly across to him, and stood looking down at his upturned face. He took her hand and pulled her down to sit by his side. He smiled at her.
“Don’t look so serious,” he said. “I’m only going to kiss you.” And before she could frame a suitable refusal, his arms were round her and his lips were on hers; and Alison, who had dreamed of this so often, had not the courage to pull away from him. She threw discretion momentarily to the winds, and rested in his arms in a state of blissful content. His arms held her so surely, so strongly. His hand in the short curls on the back of her neck, was a caress she had needed for a long time. It was seventh heaven to be kissed by him
—
and there was time for protest later.
“Oh Alison,” said Peter at last. “I’d have done that a long time ago, little love, if I hadn’t been so sure you were in love with Douglas.”
She drew away from him slowly; remembering, then, the unwelcome fact of the engagement.
“What a pity you didn’t,” she said.
“You would have liked it?”
“Oh yes, I would have liked it. And I would certainly have come to Italy then, and you, perhaps, wouldn’t have come back from that holiday engaged to be married.”
He smiled lovingly at her.
“We can make up for lost time,” he said, drawing her again into his arms; but this time, Alison was not acquiescent.
“We cannot,” she said, pulling away from him. “It is too late now. You are engaged to Lydia, and if you are prepared to forget it, I am not.”
“Darling,” he said, “I am not engaged to Lydia. I never was properly engaged to her. Let me tell you about it.” He told her what had happened. “I wanted you all the time—almost, I think, since I brought you back here from Portugal. But you did seem to be fond of Douglas; and Douglas had had precious little to make him happy in the last few years. It seemed I was always finding you in some sort of devoted incident with him: I came into this room to find
him
kissing your hands and telling you how lovely you were: when you came home the day he first walked, you hugged each other in a frenzy of delight; you often kissed him; I came upon you both on the beach, sunbathing together, and you stroking and caressing him
...”
“I wasn’t,” said Alison. “I was massaging
him
because he had backache.”
“But you see how it appeared to me. And you had other young friends who seemed to absorb you. I felt an old fogey, left out in the cold.”
“Oh Peter, how silly of you. Do you know what I felt?”
“No.”
“I often felt that they were all too young for me. When you were in Italy, and the five of us were in the cottage, I used to pine for you and the sort of conversation I could have with you. I thought of the places you would visit, and longed to visit them with you. I used to think: There is Peter wandering about my Europe, and I not there to share it with him.” She flung her arms round his neck, looking into his eyes. “Do you mean you love me, Peter?”
“I suppose that is what it comes to,” he said, smiling.
“Oh darling, how wonderful. Because I love you unutterably, and I was always so sorry that you would have such a cold sort of wife if you married Lydia. And
we
can have such a lovely life together, Peter.”
They waited up for Douglas (although they had to wait a long time), to tell him their good news. He came in jaunty and pleased with himself, and was even more pleased when he heard what had happened. Next day, Peter and Alison drove down to Chiddingfold, and thoroughly approved Priscilla’s choice of a cottage: “Although,” said Alison, “as Peter isn’t going to marry Lydia after all, you could stay in the London house
if
you wanted to.”
Priscilla looked so unhappy at this prospect that they both laughed at her, assuring her that the cottage was hers; and Alison, although she had suggested the cottage to save Priscilla from Lydia, was glad that she and Peter would begin their married life with no members of the family living with them. Priscilla was quite delighted to hear their news, feeling that this absolved her from all responsibilities in the housekeeping of the London house.
“Now you won’t go back to that school any more, will you?” she asked Alison.
“Oh yes, I have to. I must finish this term, and work next term.”
“I
think
we could get you out of the Easter term,” said Peter. “That is, if you want to get out of it. Then we could be married at Christmas.”
“Oh Peter, darling, that’s
much
too soon.”
“Why?”
“I couldn’t get ready in so short a time. And I must first find out if I can leave at Christmas.”
“I’ll come and see your Miss Gilton,” he said. “I think perhaps we can manage it.”
At dusk, they drove away from the cottage, and Priscilla sat in the back of the car so that Alison could be with Peter. From time to time, as they sped Londonwards, Peter’s hand left the driving wheel and closed over Alison’s, as it lay in her lap. Once, she bent her head and lifted his hand a little to kiss it; once, she drew the ring off his little finger, and put it on one of her own; these little intimacies pleasing her, because, with Priscilla behind them, she could do no more. Soon, however, Priscilla would be moving into her cottage, and the school would be a thing of the past, and she would be free to take up her life with Peter.
Only a year ago, she had been living in Portugal with her mother, becoming daily more anxious about her mother’s health. Less than a year ago, Peter, from the goodness of his heart, had come to her help. If he had not responded so generously to her mother’s appeal, this happiness could never have been. She felt an immense gratitude to him, and overflowing of her love, a resolve that she would always do her best to make him happy.
The car came to a stop. She realised that they were on the main London road and had come to traffic fights. She turned to look at Peter, at the moment when he turned to look at her. His dark eyes shone in the red light. They smiled slowly, understandingly, at each other; lost in their delight in each other.
“The light is green,” said Priscilla’s voice, gently behind them. “You can go ahead.”