Cap Flamingo Read online

  CAP FLAMINGO

  by

  VIOLET WINSPEAR

  MILLS & BOON LIMITED GRAFTON WAY, FITZROY SQUARE, LONDON, W.1

  All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the Author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the Author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

  VIOLET WINSPEAR 1964

  First published 1964 This edition 1964

  For copyright reasons, this book may not be issued on loan or otherwise except in its original soft cover

  MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE GARDEN CITY PRESS LIMITED LETCHWORTH, HERTFORDSHIRE

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE Californian sun was shining with a semi-tropical brilliance, and Fern Heatherly liked the deep emerald shade cast by the palm and eucalyptus trees bordering this steep road winding up from Cap Flamingo's picturesque bay.

  Here among bosomy hills were the handsome houses of the town's wealthiest residents, and the Kingdom house, with its columned portico, white walls gleaming under trails of paint-bright bougainvillea, and long green-shaded veranda, made her heart skip with excitement as she stepped from her cab and paid off the driver. Fern was out of her nurse's uniform this morning and wearing a sleeveless cream-coloured dress with a lavender belt encircling her slim waist and matching lavender sandals upon her small feet. The cab driver stared at her, then eagerly offered to carry her suitcase up the front steps of the house.

  "Thanks all the same, but I can manage." She spoke in a clear English voice and smiled at him. The cabby pushed his cap to the back of his head and watched her walk up the steps, a gleam of frank admiration in his eyes.

  The front door of the house was opened by a smartly uniformed maid whom Fern followed across a tiled entrance hall to an elegant stairway. This they mounted to the bedroom of the woman she had come to nurse. "Enter!" an imperious voice ordered, after the maid had tapped upon the door. Fern obeyed the order and found herself up to her ankles in deep carpeting, gazing at a big woman in a magnificent bed whose cyclamen-coloured drapings rose to the ceiling.

  So this was Edwina Kingdom, who had been for many

  years a famous stage actress. An autocratic, handsome woman with auburn hair that still retained much of its rich colour, and imperious brown eyes sweeping Fern from head to foot and taking in every aspect of her fresh, slender beauty.

  "You're Nurse Heatherly, eh?" That imperious voice might have been ringing from a stage. "From the look of you, you'll never manage my weight."

  "I'm a lot tougher than I look, Miss Kingdom." Fern smiled, revealing a dimple almost the size of a farthing at the left side of her shapely, softly rouged mouth. "In any case, Dr. Lands said you weren't helpless."

  "Indeed?" Edwina's eyes flashed with quick indignation. "That fool doctor orders me to bed, sends me a nurse and then says I'm not helpless. What the devil am I, then?"

  A stubborn, fiery-tempered old glutton with far too much money, had been the doctor's words, and though Fern could now see for herself that her patient was a rather bombastic person, she wasn't intimidated. Also attendance upon a peptic ulcer case was fairly light duty, and Fern blessed kindly Dr. Lands for thinking of her.

  "Owen Lands was telling me you've only been in California about three months," Edwina said. "You've been nursing that wild kid of the Deluths', haven't you? Over in Santa Barbara?"

  "Yes, Miss Kingdom." Fern's smile was ruefully expressive. The boy, presented with a car on his seventeenth birthday, had managed to wrap it around a telegraph pole. He had luckily escaped with just a few fractures, but Fern, installed in the Deluth house to nurse him, was still suffering from shattered nerves at having a sickroom continually filled with blaring hi-fi music and a pack of precocious teenagers who fed her patient with indigestible goodies and made impertinent passes at herself.

  Fern certainly wasn't worried about nursing this autocratic actress after a month of the Deluth boy.

  Edwina read this thought in the girl's eyes, a smoky-lavender colour, set most attractively in a heart-shaped

  face framed by silvery blonde hair. That glinting hair was probably quite long, Edwina decided, when it was let down out of the thick, coiled knot in which Fern wore it at the nape of her creamy neck. Edwina's lips twitched amusedly, for she had warned Owen Lands not to send her a disinfected, starched-up madam who would be bustling around her at all hours with thermometers and pill bottles. This pretty creature didn't look the bustling sort, thank heaven.

  Her patient's frank stare brought a slight flush to Fern's cheeks. "I hope we're going to get along together, Miss Kingdom," she ventured.

  "You're a remarkably good-looking girl, aren't you?" Edwina said in her deep, rather abrupt voice. "I should have thought some handsome young man would have snapped you up ages ago."

  Fern's flush deepened, then she grew strangely pale. "I—I have my nursing career. I don't suppose I shall marry," she replied.

  "Hogwash!" Edwina inelegantly returned. "D'you think I've lived sixty-eight years without learning something about human nature? I was never a pretty, placable creature myself and I'd have made a mess-up of marriage if I'd taken it on, but you're a different kettle of peaches. Did a bust-up with some man send you running out here to California? Come on, you can tell me. I'm interested in young people and I don't like to see them unhappy. Yes, unhappy! You smile with your mouth but not with your eyes, Fern Heatherly, and that's how I know."

  "I—I'm not unhappy, Miss Kingdom," Fern denied, with her gloved hands closing tensely on her envelope bag and revealing the fact that she wasn't telling the exact truth. "I accompanied a private case out here to California; an American businessman who had a heart attack while he was in England. He was extremely anxious to return home and as his anxiety was doing his heart trouble more harm than good his doctor agreed to him making the return journey in the care of a nurse. I found I liked it here, so I decided to stay for a while."

  "Don't you miss your people?" Edwina asked.

  Fern nodded. Yes, she missed her two married sisters and their children. Her parents were dead, she added.

  A few minutes later Edwina rang for a servant to show Fern her room. A dusky, turbaned negress appeared and Edwina boomed at her : "Delilah, doesn't this child look exactly like Mama used to look in her magnolia print?"

  "Why, she sure enough does, Miss Winna, now you comes to mention it." Delilah smiled broadly, showing off a fine set of flashing white teeth.

  "My father," the actress told Fern, "was a bronze-haired Irishman, but Mama was as fair as you. She always wore enormous picture hats smothered in flowers, and Pa was almighty jealous of other men's admiring glances. He handed on that streak of jealousy to my two brothers. Frank was a regular wretch with a roving eye, but he near enough kept my sister-in-law in Eastern seclusion."

  "Mist' Frank sure was a devil." Delilah's laughter was warm and brown as molasses gurgling from a jar.

  "Handsome as the devil, too, wasn't he?" His sister spoke nostalgically. "Arthur was the better actor, but when Frank walked on to a stage I guess most female hearts in the audience flipped over like pancakes." Then a sudden deep frown creased the actress's forehead. "Darn that son of his for running off to God-forsaken places, getting involved in political ran-dans just so he can be on the spot to write about them. He'll get himself killed one of these days!"

  Edwina invariably spoke of her nephew Ross in a disgruntled tone of voice. He was every bit as outrageously good-looking as his father had been, and she considered he had let the family down by choosing to become a journalist instead of putting his looks and his large share of the Kingdom personality to the services of the theatre. There was only
his sister Jenifer left to carry on the tradition, and she preferred the more modern world of the cinema and television. Jenifer, a year older than Ross, lived here in her aunt's whitestoned house

  above the bay, driving daily to and from Hollywood in a racy Fiat 1500.

  Fern's room was situated quite close to her patient's and most attractively furnished in bird's eye maple, with gracefully looped curtains of sheer net over Venetian blinds that could be let down at night for privacy or during the day for coolness. The wide windows overlooked the patio and the warm, caressing air carried the scents of mimosa trees, roses and camellias to Fern as she changed into her uniform. She carefully pinned on a crisp white cap and reflected that her new patient had sharp eyes. She had noticed that a shadow lay over this new life Fern was attempting to fashion for herself in California, far from the man who should have made a reality of her dreams and hopes and who instead had so injured her sensitive heart that she really felt in this moment that she was empty of all desire to marry and fulfil herself as a woman.

  A cold tremor ran through her slender body, and though she tried to thrust away a growing mental picture of Ken McVicar, there he suddenly was in her mind. She saw his thin, rather intense face in clear detail, so serious until he broke into that infrequent smile of his, which so warmed his steel-blue eyes.

  Fern had met him while working as industrial nurse at Bramley's fruit and jam factory in Maidenhead, her home town. Ken McVicar managed that particular branch and they had fallen in love so quickly so breathlessly that she hadn't fully realized in the beginning how ambitious he was. She knew he went to occasional dinner parties at Henry Bramley's house; several times he jokingly referred to the crush which Bramley's daughter seemed to have on him, then, after having joked in this way, he would hug Fern to him, and it was only now that the strange intensity of those embraces had significance. Ken had known that he was going to put Rose Bramley first; all along he had known.

  "I adore you, Fern," he had said to her at last. "You're so sweet, so pretty, but I can't let several million

  pounds slip through my fingers. I'd be stark crazy if I did that."

  And Fern, deeply hurt, shattered almost by Ken's cool grabbing at the Bramley millions without regard for her feelings or Rose Bramley's, had been only too glad to agree to accompany a sick businessman back to America on the Liberie. He was in Maidenhead as it happened, to negotiate the amalgamation of Bramley's with a big fruit canning business in California, and that was how Fern had known that his doctor was desirous of acquiring a nurse for the trip.

  In the beginning she had planned to return to England, telling herself she would find nursing work in London, but quite suddenly the newness of the American scene had gripped her imagination, along with the realization that an extended break from England would help her to recover from the heartbreak which Ken had inflicted. So she applied for permission to work in California and was now in the register as a special duty nurse, which meant that she could be called on to attend hospital cases as well as private ones.

  She stood at a window, here in the Kingdom house, and saw sunlit orange and lemon trees below her in the patio. Yellow and pink roses clambered over every piece of stonework, smothering pergolas and wall-seats in colour and fragrance, and Fern's response to all this beauty was quick and warm. She was going to like this place; there was also something in the atmosphere which made her feel strangely expectant.

  Fern was soon acquainted with other members of the family. Jenifer Kingdom, whom she had seen and admired in several of those sophisticated comedies at which America excels, was a restless, temperamental woman in her early thirties, rather too decisively boned for real beauty but the owner of richly waving auburn hair. She had been married when she was quite young to a much older man. He was now dead and his daughter by a previous marriage lived with Jenifer. Fern couldn't

  help liking the exuberant Diana and the two of them made friends very quickly.

  There was just one snag. Diana was a flirt, and their trips into town or to the beach invariably landed them with a couple of bronzed young men and eager invitations to go sailing, dancing or motoring. But Fern had grown wary of getting involved in another emotional entanglement and she soon began to acquire a reputation for being sweet to look at but icy to know. Nineteen-year old Diana finally remonstrated with her. "Why do you act so cool?" she asked. "Most of the Cap Flamingo boys think you're a dreamboat, and they're not such a bad lot themselves. Curtis Wayne is awfully attractive, and rich, but you treat him as though he's just a bell-hop."

  Fern laughed. She was on her way to Edwina's room with a tray and she had just turned down Diana's invitation to go dancing at the Club Matador with Curtis Wayne and a young doctor, on the staff of a local hospital, whom Diana was keen on. "You've dozens of girl friends," Fern said. "Ask one of them to make up your party."

  "It wouldn't work." Diana pouted and thrust a hand through her nut-brown hair, cut in an elfin style. "Curtis wants to dine and dance with you and Jeff Lane is too shy to ask me out on his own. Curtis and he used to share a bungalow before Curtis ever came into his money and they're still good friends, which goes to prove that you're wrong about Curtis being just a playboy with no real depth to him."

  "He might be gold all the way through," Fern replied, "but I don't want him."

  "Well, couldn't you just pretend for this one evening?" Diana pleaded. "This might be my one chance of getting to know Jeff really well... unless I get sick and have to go into hospital, and that wouldn't be much fun."

  After three weeks at the Kingdom house Fern was fully aware that Diana developed these sudden crushes on attractive young men at fairly frequent intervals, but she was off duty this evening, the Club Matador was a glamorous place and it seemed ungracious to keep saying

  no to Diana, whom she found both likeable and amusing. "Very well," she conceded, "I'll make up this famous foursome, but only to please you, Diana, not because I've the remotest interest in Curtis Wayne, his dollars or his yacht."

  "Whoop-di-doo!" The exultant Diana danced Fern round on the circular stairway, almost upsetting the tray holding Edwina's gently grilled plaice and mashed potatoes. "I'll phone Curtis right away, you pearl of a girl!" She planted an uninhibited kiss on Fern's cheek, then she added rather wonderingly : "I used to think it corny of romantic novelists to write about girls having skin like petals, but that's just how your skin feels, Fern. You sure are sweet and pretty."

  Sweet and pretty! Fern bit her lip as she proceeded up the stairway to Edwina's bedroom. It was funny how a combination of words could make you ache again, like a nostalgic tune or a certain memory-stirring scent. Ken had used those words during the last evening they had spent together. He had said she was sweet and pretty, but Rose Bramley was something far more important. She was an heiress !

  Fern walked into Edwina's bedroom, bracing herself for her patient's usual acid outburst when she uncovered her luncheon plate. It would have been an understatement to say that Edwina called her diet some strong names... they were positively blasphemous at times. And she made such a fuss about taking her medicine that Fern was often tempted to empty the tumbler over her head. Today her reception of her luncheon was more hurt than indignant. Edwina liked fish, it was true, but not gently grilled in milk and served up with softly mashed potatoes. Steaming bouillabaisse was more Edwina's idea of a meal, with delectable pieces of octopus, lobster and giant shrimp swimming in the rich depths of tomato-flavoured, soup.

  "You've got your nerve, young Fern, bringing this kind of pap up to a woman of my build and temperament," she grumbled, stirring her mashed potatoes with a reluctant fork. "I'll soon be so darn weak from eating

  pap that when Owen Lands finally says I can climb out of this bed I shall collapse like a doll, with all the sand let out of me."

  Fern was straightening toilet articles on the big dressing-table, the midday sunshine splashing bright on her crisp uniform and silvery hair. "That peptic ulcer of yours is clearing up nicely
now, Miss Kingdom," she smiled, "and just think of the much trimmer figure you'll have when you leave your bed."

  "I spent years keeping my figure trim, young miss, and now I'm at the age when I'm entitled to let it flop about a bit." Edwina chewed her plaice without enthusiasm, but there was an unmistakable glint of affection in her brown eyes as they rested on Fern, who was now glancing at the row of framed photographs on the mantelpiece. They were of various members of the Kingdom family, and Fern's glance lingered on that of a strongly-built young man in tennis flannels and a white shirt. Edwina said to her : "Well, what do you think of my nephew? Rather good-looking, eh?"

  "He's very good-looking," Fern agreed, but there was no real interest in her voice, and Edwina frowned and thought again that it was certainly a broken romance which had chased her young nurse out of her home country. Some uncaring young devil had hurt her, and she was the deep, sensitive sort who took a time getting over that kind of pain.

  "As a matter of fact," Edwina said, "Jenny's had a letter from her brother announcing that he's coming home. He's been out of America close on six years and he'll be stopping here until he finds himself an apartment. It's about time he remembered he has a sister. There's only a year between them and they were pretty close at one time, till he developed wanderer's fever... and then again his engagement to Laraine Davies was broken off."

  Laraine Davies was a friend of Jenifer's whom Fern had seen at the house a couple of times. She worked as a model at Celestine's, one of the most exclusive dressmaking establishments in Los Angeles, and Fern, visual-

  izing her dark striking looks and soignee way of dressing, could well imagine the appeal she might have for a man as spectacularly handsome as Ross Kingdom. She could also believe that their engagement had been a stormy one. Laraine's industrialist father had gone bankrupt a few years previously, and though she was now obliged to work for her living there was still a 'pampered princess' air about her. She liked being waited on and she wasn't above regarding Fern as an obliging servant when she came to the house.