Windfallen

  Guy took her hand as they walked down the gravel drive. Lottie, his touch burning all the way to the top of Woodbridge Avenue, forgot the sound of raised voices, the rosebuds still lingering in her hair.

  "What on earth have you done to yourself, Lottie?" said Mrs. Holden. "You look like you've been divebombed by seagulls!"

  But Lottie didn't care. As he had let go of her hand, he had reached up to touch a bud. "A force of nature," he'd murmured.

  THERE WERE CERTAIN WAYS OF DOING THINGS; CERTAIN standards that should be met. And Adeline's response to the ladies of the Merham salon had, it appeared, fallen a long way short.

  "She is sorry that at present she is unable to attend? Why, is she busy? Is she looking after children? Applying for the job of prime minister perhaps?" Mrs. Chilton had taken it particularly badly.

  "But she hopes we will find the time to drop in to her someday," said Mrs. Colquhoun, reading from the piece of ivory notepaper. "That someday is not very specific, is it?"

  "I'll say it's not," said Mrs. Chilton, waving away a piece of melon. "No thank you, Susan dear. That fruit played havoc with my insides last week. No, I find her whole response very inadequate. Very inadequate indeed."

  "She has invited you to drop in on her," said Celia, who, her legs tucked under her on the sofa, was flicking through a magazine.

  "That's not the point, dear. It wasn't her place. We invited her; therefore she should have accepted. You can't just turn it around and invite us back."

  "Why?" said Celia.

  Mrs. Chilton looked at Mrs. Holden. "Well, it's not done, is it?"

  "But she's hardly being rude, is she? Not if she's inviting you?"

  The women looked exasperated. Lottie, sitting on the floor doing a jigsaw puzzle with Sylvia, thought privately that Adeline had been rather clever. She had not wanted to visit the "salon" on their terms, but she understood that individually the ladies would not feel sufficiently confident to visit Arcadia. She had escaped, while also putting the onus on them.

  "I can't see that she's been as rude as you think," said Celia carelessly. "Can't see why you're bothered about having her visit you anyway. You spend half your time trying to get everyone to stay away from her."

  "But that's the point," said Mrs. Holden, exasperated.

  "Yes," said Mrs. Colquhoun. She looked down for a moment. "I think."

  Mrs. Chilton was studying the rest of the letter, squinting at it through half-rimmed glasses. "She wishes us well in our artistic endeavors. And hopes that a quote from that great poet Rainer Maria Rilke will provide some inspiration: 'Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it, in everything real one is closer to it. . . . '" She lowered the letter and looked around the room. "What on earth is that supposed to mean?"

  He had been rather down for days, Mrs. Holden had thought. A bit preoccupied and serious. So she didn't know whether to be relieved or discomfited when she saw that Guy, sitting over by the gas fire on Mr. Holden's good chair, had begun to laugh silently behind his newspaper.

  THE FIRST OF THE WINTER STORMS HAD HIT WALTON, pulling all the unsecured window boxes on the Promenade off their sills and dumping them and their remaining flowers in the road in small terra-cotta heaps. It would hit Merham within the hour, said Mrs. Holden, coming off the telephone. "Best secure the shutters. Virginia!"

  "I'll run Mr. Beans up the road now, before it starts raining," said Lottie, and Mrs. Holden had given her a sharp look, confused as ever by the girl's polar swings between moodiness and helpfulness. (Peculiarly, she felt more assured with moodiness.) Celia had been upstairs in the bath, and Guy offered to go with Lottie, being apparently in need of some fresh air. But now they had been out for almost ten minutes, and Lottie realized he had said not a word to her. He had said barely a thing to anyone all day, and Lottie, conscious that it was their last walk before the arrival of his parents, felt desperate to have some thread drawn between them, some fine channel of communication secured.

  The rain began to fall in thick, unwieldy blobs as they got to the far end of the municipal park, and Lottie, the wind in her ears, began to run toward the beach huts, their vibrant, random colors still bright under a smudged charcoal sky, motioning to Guy to do the same. She skipped along to those numbered eighty to ninety, remembering that there were a couple of deserted huts where the locks had rusted away from the wood and, wrenching a door open, ducked inside just as the deluge proper began. Guy ducked in behind her, making half-gasping, half-laughing noises, pulling at his wet shirt, and Lottie, suddenly conscious of his proximity in the enclosed space, began to make a great fuss of drying an indifferent Mr. Beans with an old rag.

  The hut had been unloved for a long time; speeding clouds could be glimpsed through slivers in the roof, while, apart from a cracked cup and a rickety wooden bench, there was little to suggest that it had ever sheltered happy holidaymakers. Most of the other huts also had names--Kennora (or other unbeautiful hybrids of their owners' names), Seabreeze, Wind Ho!--and damp cushions and deck chairs that sat outside for seemingly the whole summer, while gritty vacationers passed around pots of tea. During the war all the huts had been commandeered and buried, to form part of the coastal defenses; when they were resurrected in their brightly colored row, Lottie, who had never seen a beach hut, had fallen in love with them and spent many hours walking backward and forward reading the names to herself and imagining herself to be part of some family.

  Mr. Beans was undoubtedly dry. Lottie perched on the bench, pushing back wet whispers of dark hair from her face.

  "Some storm," Guy said, peering through the open doorway as the blackened clouds raced across the horizon, darkening distant fathoms out at sea. Above them gulls rode the winds, screeching and calling to each other above the noise of the rain. Lottie, looking up at him, suddenly thought of Joe. Joe's first comment would have been that they should have brought an umbrella.

  "You know, the storms in the tropics are seriously wild. One minute you're sitting there in the sun, the next you can see this thing moving across the sky like a train." He moved his hand along in the air, his eyes trained upon it. "And then pow! Rain like you wouldn't believe--the kind that comes right over your feet and runs down the roads like rivers. And the lightning! Forked lightning that lights up the whole sky."

  Lottie, who only wanted to hear him speak, nodded dumbly.

  "I saw a donkey killed by lightning once. When the storm came, they simply left it out in the field. No one thought to bring it in. I was just getting to our house. And I turned around, because there was this huge crack, and the lightning hit, and the donkey didn't even move! It only jumped a bit, like something had blown it off its feet, and then landed on its side with its legs all stiff. Still had its little cart attached. I don't think it knew what hit it."

  She wasn't sure if it was anything to do with the donkey, but Lottie realized she was close to tears again. She rubbed at Mr. Beans's fur with her hand, blinking furiously. When she sat up, Guy was still staring out at the sea. Far over to his left, she could see a patch of blue, the edge of the storm.

  They sat in silence for a while. Guy, she noted, didn't look at his watch once.

  "What will happen when you have to do your National Service?"

  Guy kicked at the floor. "Not doing it."

  Lottie frowned. "I didn't think anyone got out of it. Not you being an only child and all."

  "Health reasons."

  "You're not ill, are you?" She had failed to keep the anxiety from her voice.

  It was just possible that he blushed slightly. "No . . . I . . . I've got flat feet. My mother says it's from running around with no shoes on all my life."

  Lottie found herself gazing at his feet, feeling perversely glad that he had some physical imperfection. It made him more human somehow, more accessible.

  "Not quite as glamorous as 'old shrapnel injury,' is it?" He grinned ruefully, kicking at the sandy wooden floor, his restless leg testament to
his discomfort.

  Lottie didn't know what to say. The only person she knew to have done National Service was Joe, and his two-year posting to the tepid confines of the Payroll Corps had been such an embarrassment to his family that no one in the town ever talked about it. Not in front of them anyway. She watched the sheets of rain fall in front of them, the frothing sea rising up to threaten the seawall.

  "You're not laughing," he said, grinning at her.

  "I'm sorry," she said solemnly. "I don't think I have much of a sense of humor."

  He raised an eyebrow, and she found herself smiling despite herself. "What else don't you have?"

  "What?"

  "What else don't you have? What are you missing, Lottie?"

  She paused. Looked up at him. "Flat feet?"

  They both laughed nervously. Lottie felt she might burst into hysterical giggles. Except that they would ride too close to the surface, too close to something else entirely.

  "A family? Do you have one?"

  "Not one that you'd recognize. I've got a mother. Although I suppose she might dispute that description of herself."

  He was looking at her quite steadily. "Poor you."

  "'Poor you' nothing. I've been very lucky living with the Holdens." She had said it so often.

  "The perfect family." He was smiling slyly.

  "The perfect mother."

  "God. I don't know how you survived that for ten years."

  "You haven't met mine."

  For some reason they both found this hysterically funny.

  "We should be very understanding. She has many crosses to bear."

  He was watching an oil tanker. It traversed the horizon at the exact point where sea and sky met. He let out a long breath and lifted his legs onto the bench. Stretched out, they reached all the way to the door. She could just see a glimpse of his ankle; it was brown, the exact same shade as the inside of his wrists.

  "How did you meet her?" she said eventually. She wasn't entirely sure where it had come from.

  "Celia?"

  She nodded.

  He shuffled his feet. Reached down to rub at some wet spray marks on his pale trousers. "By chance, I suppose.

  We have this apartment in London, and I'd been staying there with my mother while my father went to the Caribbean to look at some farms. She likes to stay in London sometimes, catch up with my aunt, go shopping. You know the stuff."

  Lottie nodded, as if she did. Under her feet Mr. Beans strained gently at his leash, keen to continue his walk.

  "I'm not a great one for towns, so I went to my cousin's place in Sussex for a few days. My uncle's got this farm, and I've stayed there ever since I was a child because my cousin and I, well, we're nearly the same age and he's probably the closest friend I've got. Anyway, so I'm meant to be back in London, but me and Rob, we go to the local pub, and one thing leads to another, and it's a little later than I intended. So I'm sitting at the station waiting, because there's only one train left into London, and I see this girl walk past."

  Lottie felt her chest tighten. She wasn't convinced she wanted to hear this any longer. But there seemed no safe way of stopping him. "And you thought she was beautiful."

  Guy looked down at his feet and half laughed. "Beautiful. Yes, I thought she looked beautiful. Mostly I thought she looked drunk."

  Lottie's head shot up.

  Guy raised a finger to his lips. "I promised I wouldn't tell. . . . You've got to promise, Lottie . . . She was absolutely rotten. I saw her weave past the ticket office, where I was standing, and she was giggling to herself. I could see she'd been to some kind of party, because she was all dressed up. But she had lost a shoe, and she was holding the other one in her hand with her little bag or whatever it was."

  Above them the rain beat thunderously on the roof. Where it hit the ground in front of them, it splashed up into the hut, making Mr. Beans jump.

  "So I thought maybe I should just keep an eye on her. But then she went into the station waiting room, and there were these guys there in uniform, and she sits down with them and starts chatting away, and they're obviously loving it, so I thought maybe she knew them. They all seemed like they knew each other. I thought maybe they'd all been to the dance together."

  Lottie's mind was reeling with the thought of what Mrs. Holden would say at the picture of her daughter drunkenly engaging servicemen in conversation. It also explained why she hadn't brought her satin slingbacks home; she had told Mrs. Holden that a girl from secretarial school had stolen them.

  "And at one point she sits on this guy's lap, and she's laughing and laughing, so I figured she must know him, and I walked away, back to the ticket office. And then--it must have been about five minutes later--I hear this shouting, and then a woman's voice shouting, and after a few minutes I think I should probably take a look, and--"

  "They were attacking her," said Lottie, for whom this story was beginning to ring some bells.

  "Attacking her?" Guy looked puzzled. "No, they weren't attacking her. They had her shoe."

  "What?"

  "Her shoe. They had this pale pink shoe of hers, and they were dancing around holding it up so that she couldn't get it."

  "Her shoe?"

  "Yes. And she was so rotten that she kept bumping into things and falling over. And I watched for a minute, but then I thought it was pretty unfair, as she obviously didn't know what she was doing. So I stepped in and asked them to give her her shoe back."

  Lottie stared at him. "And what did they do?"

  "Oh, they were pretty sarky to begin with. One of them was asking me if I fancied my chances. Ironic, really, given the result. And to be honest, Lottie, I was pretty polite with them, because I didn't fancy my chances against three of them. But they were okay guys, really. Eventually they just threw the shoe at her and went off up the platform."

  "So they didn't try to grab her at all?"

  "Grab her? No. I mean they may have grabbed her a little when she sat on the guy's lap. But not so as she got upset or anything."

  "And what happened?"

  "Well, I just thought someone really needed to take her home. I thought she'd probably got off quite lightly, to be honest. But she was in such a state that she could easily have fallen asleep on the train, and I didn't think it was a good idea for her to be alone . . . looking like that."

  "No . . ."

  He shrugged. "So I took her back to her aunt's place, and her aunt was pretty suspicious of me to begin with, but I left her my name and number so that she could call my mother and check that I was . . . well, you know. And then Celia rang me the next day to apologize and say thank you, and we went for a cup of coffee . . . and . . . well . . ."

  Lottie was still too stunned by this version of events to absorb the implications of his last words. She shook her head.

  "She was drunk? You looked after her because she was drunk?"

  "Ah. But she told me the truth about that. She had thought she was only drinking ginger ale, but someone at this dance had evidently been slipping vodka or something in there, so before she knew it she was all over the place. Pretty bad behavior, really."

  "She told you that."

  Guy frowned. "Yes. I felt pretty sorry for her, to be honest."

  There was a long silence. The sky outside was now neatly bisected into blue and black, the sun already reflected in the wet road.

  It was Lottie who finally broke the silence. She stood, so that Mr. Beans leaped happily out onto the path, ears pricked at the departing storm.

  "I think I'd better go back," she said briskly. And began to walk.

  "She's a nice girl." His voice caught on the wind behind her.

  Lottie turned briefly, her face tense and furious. "You don't have to tell me that."

  THE OTHER LADIES HAD DEFINITELY DEVELOPED SOMETHING of an air when she mentioned her morning walks. So Deirdre Colquhoun felt rather disinclined to tell them about her latest discovery, compelling as it had been.

  No, Sarah Chilton ha
d been rather curt when she'd mentioned Mr. Armand on Tuesday, so there was no reason at all she should tell them that for two mornings running now she had seen something she considered just as dramatic. The men didn't seem to come anymore, so it had been rather a shock to see her, and Deirdre Colquhoun had had to pull her little opera glasses from her handbag to make sure it was actually the same woman. Wading into the waves, she had been, not seeming to notice the cold or anything, in that tight black swimsuit of hers, her hair all scraped back into an unfashionable bun. And even as she waded in, in a manner that Deirdre Colquhoun frankly found a little mannish, you could see she was sobbing. Yes, sobbing, loudly in broad daylight, as if her heart would break.

  SIX

  It was not the welcome Mrs. Holden had planned. That welcome had involved her standing pristine in her good wool dress with the matching belt, her two youngest children in front of her, as she opened the doors to welcome their visitors, the wealthy, cosmopolitan family to whom they were now going to be linked by marriage. That version had the Bancrofts pulling up in their gleaming Rover 90 four-door sedan (she knew it to be this model, as Mrs. Ansty had heard it from Jim Farrelly, who worked the desk of the Riviera Hotel) and her skipping out past an immaculate front lawn and greeting them both like long-lost friends--perhaps even as Sarah Chilton and one or another of the ladies just happened to be passing by.

  In that version, the preferred version, her husband emerged behind her, perhaps placed a proprietary hand on her shoulder, the kind of simple gesture that spoke volumes about a marriage. The children, meanwhile, smiled sweetly, kept their good clothes clean, and held up their hands to shake those of the Bancrofts in a rather charming manner before offering to show them indoors.

  They did not wait until two minutes before guests were due to arrive to reveal that not only had they found a dead fox in the road down by the Methodist church but they had scraped it up into a seaside bucket, laid it out on the floor in the living room, and, with the help of Mrs. Holden's best sewing scissors, planned to make a fox fur from it.

  Neither, in the preferred version, did Dr. Holden announce that he had been called out to a sick patient and didn't expect to be back before teatime, despite its being a Saturday and despite almost the whole of Merham's being quite aware of the fact that his secretary, that redheaded girl who always managed to put a superior tone in her voice when she answered the telephone to Dr. Holden's wife, was leaving town the following day to take up a position in Colchester. Mrs. Holden closed her eyes briefly and summoned up an image of her rose garden. It was what she did when she didn't want to think too hard about that woman. It was important to think about nice things.