Murmuring an excuse to Henry, Laura left the room and went into the study where the telephone was. She rang up the vicarage.
The vicar’s wife answered.
“Shirley? Oh yes, Laura, she’s here. She’s playing clock golf with Robin. I’ll get her.”
There was a pause, and then Shirley’s voice, gay, alive.
“Laura?”
Laura said dryly:
“You’ve got a follower.”
“A follower? Who?”
“His name’s Glyn-Edwards. He blew in an hour and a half ago, and he’s still here. I don’t think he means to leave without seeing you. Both his conversation and mine are wearing rather thin!”
“Glyn-Edwards? I’ve never heard of him. Oh dear – I suppose I’d better come home and cope. Pity. I’m well on the way to beating Robin’s record.”
“He was at the tennis yesterday, I gather.”
“Not Henry?”
Shirley’s voice sounded breathless, slightly incredulous. The note in it surprised Laura.
“It could be Henry,” she said dryly. “He’s staying with an aunt over at-”
Shirley, breathless, interrupted:
“It is Henry. I’ll come at once.”
Laura put down the receiver with a slight sense of shock. She went back slowly into the drawing-room.
“Shirley will be back soon,” she said, and added that she hoped Henry would stay to supper.
3
Laura leaned back in her chair at the head of the dinner-table and watched the other two. It was still only dusk, not dark, and the windows were uncurtained. The evening light was kind to the two young faces that bent towards each other so easily.
Watching them dispassionately, Laura tried to understand her own mounting feeling of uneasiness. Was it simply that she had taken a dislike to Henry? No, it could hardly be that. She acknowledged Henry’s charm, his likeability, his good manners. Since, as yet, she knew nothing about him, she could hardly form a considered judgment. He was perhaps a little too casual, too off-hand, too detached? Yes, that explained it best-detached.
Surely the core of her feeling was rooted in Shirley. She was experiencing the sharp sense of shock which comes when you discover an unknown facet in someone about whom you axe assured you know everything. Laura and Shirley were not unduly demonstrative to each other, but stretching back over the years was the figure of Shirley, pouring out to Laura her hates, her loves, her desires, her frustrations.
But yesterday; when Laura had asked casually: “Anybody exciting? Or just Bellbury?” Shirley had replied non-chalantly: “Oh, mostly Bellbury.”
Laura wondered why Shirley hadn’t mentioned Henry. She remembered the sudden breathlessness just now in Shirley’s voice as she had said, over the telephone “Henry?”
Her mind came back to the conversation going on so close to her.
Henry was just concluding a sentence….
“-if you liked. I’d pick you up in Carswell.”
“Oh, I’d love it. I’ve never been much to race meetings….”
“Marldon’s a tin-pot one, but a friend of mine’s got a horse running. We might…”
Laura reflected calmly and dispassionately that this was a courtship. Henry’s unexplained appearance, the wangled petrol, the inadequate excuse-he was sharply attracted by Shirley. She did not tell herself that this all might come to nothing. She believed, on the contrary, that she saw events casting their shadows before them.
Henry and Shirley would marry. She knew it, she was sure of it. And Henry was a stranger…. She would never really know Henry any better than she knew him now.
Would Shirley ever know him?
CHAPTER three
1
“I wonder,” said Henry, “if you ought to come and meet my aunt.”
He looked at Shirley doubtfully.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “that it will be an awful bore for you.”
They were leaning over the rail of the paddock, gazing unseeingly at the only horse, Number Nineteen, which was being led monotonously round and round.
This was the third race meeting Shirley had attended in Henry’s company. Where other young men’s ideas ran to the pictures, Henry’s seemed to be concerned with sport. It was all on a par with the exciting difference between Henry and other young men.
“I’m sure I shouldn’t be bored,” said Shirley politely.
“I don’t really see how you could help it,” said Henry. “She does horoscopes and has queer ideas about the Pyramids.”