Bride's Dilemma Read online

  At Boucheron’s in Bond Street he bought a slim jewelled bangle, delicate as a chain of dewdrops, and asked for it to be inscribed with three simple words. My dear daughter.

  As the assistant made a note of the inscription, John Trecarrel stepped to an adjacent counter where there was a display of jewelled compacts, chunky costume rings, personality charms, etc. He picked up a butterfly brooch, a pretty blue thing, the wings a pair of aquamarines joined by a silver body. “I’ll take this as well,” he said to the assistant, and casually and easily he pinned the brooch to the collar of Tina’s suit.

  “Mr. Trecarrel,” she gasped, “I can’t—”

  “Miss Manson,” he mockingly imitated her wide-eyed alarm, “you must.”

  “M—must I?”

  He nodded, amused and obviously quite determined.

  They had tea at Harrods, where his eyes teased her unmercifully. Then all too soon they were driving along the Kensington High Street, straight into the rose and gold of the sunset. His dark face was gilded to a medieval quality, and she saw below her left eye the blink of the brooch he had given her. In a few more minutes he would be saying goodbye to her, and as daylight trailed out of the sky so did joy trail out of Tina. Goodbye— blue and melancholy as the twilight creeping over London’s rooftops.

  The car drew in before the hostel and he turned to look at her. “Do you think you’d enjoy an exhibition of watercolors and woodcuts?” he enquired casually.

  The jewelled sunset colors had faded. Out of the shadows his eyes alone were discernible, blue as the aquamarine wings over which her fingers closed.

  “Well, Tina?”

  “Yes,” she said, her heart pounding.

  “Then I’ll call for you at noon tomorrow. We’ll lunch together, go to the exhibition—or anywhere else you fancy.”

  “No, the exhibition sounds lovely, Mr. Trecarrel. Thank you for asking me.”

  “What a polite, quaint young thing you are.” He put a hand over hers, and it was lost, gone under, as she was. Powerless to fight the fascination he had for her. “Thank you for this afternoon. You have a natural quality of detachment, Tina, which allows a man his thoughts.”

  He swung out of the car and came round to open the door beside her. She stepped out, his hand on her arm, slipping down until his fingers found hers. “I’ll see you tomorrow, child.”

  She gave a low, happy laugh and he echoed it. That very male sound was warming and delightful—she could never have believed that anything could give her so much pleasure. She ran up the steps of the hostel, looking back as the sleek saxe-blue car slid away into the twilight, gemmed with London lights.

  A lyrical interval had begun for Tina, and as each day came, she didn’t look beyond it. There was the exhibition and afterwards Holland Park Gardens where peacocks flaunted their jewelled tails, and the lake mirrored the golden grace of the willows. One evening the haunting throb of gipsy violins and the flickering candlelight of a Hungarian restaurant tucked away in Chelsea. They drank Tokay Aszu, as fiery gold as the slender chain of danger Tina was walking, ever nearer to the chasm into which she must fall when they parted.

  He discovered she liked music and took her to a concert. The final moments of a Beethoven Symphony left her enclosed in a core of silent wonder, and so she sat, the chords of the music echoing in her mind, while the car sped out of London on to the straight stretch of the Hog’s Back. The countryside rolled away at either side of them, mysteriously tinged with the glow of a crescent moon, looking not unlike a small boat poised in the act of descending a dark river. Tina turned dreaming eyes to John’s profile, a hard, dark silhouette against that milky glow shed by the moon. John, at once charming and aloof, responsive to gaiety, but haunted by a lovely ghost.

  She had been lovely. Quite casually, in fact, had it slipped out. Attending an art auction at Christie’s with him, Tina had commented on the beauty of an eighteenth-century model who had sat for a series of miniatures. “Faultless profiles are quite common,” he had replied. “The test is to see the owners full face. Joanna—my wife, you know— was beautiful at every angle.”

  He had gone on to talk about something else, but Tina could not forget his words. They had been spoken without sentimentality, for only in stories and films did people violate the secrecy of their love by saying things like: “She was the most beautiful creature I ever saw, and when she died much of my heart died with her.”

  The car sighed to a standstill at this point in her reflections and she saw that he had parked on a grass verge near a small stone bridge. Now the engine was quiet the peacefulness was complete. The babbling of water under the bridge did not intrude on it, while the night air was drenched with the scent of the wild roses that clung in sleeping clusters to the hedges. The dim woods behind them hid the birds nesting among the young leaves sprouting on the trees.

  John faced her, stretching an arm along the seat. She felt the tips of his fingers against her shoulder, and light though his touch was, it sent tiny currents thrilling through her. She had an impulse to lean back and feel his arm about her, enclosing her in an arc of warmth and protection. They sat like that for several minutes, content to listen to the country sounds, then all at once John’s fingers were gripping her shoulder.

  “Tina,” he spoke rather tensely, “do you like me?”

  Her breath caught in her throat. Her hands found each other in her lap and clung together. The world was whirling and she could feel it. “Yes—I like you,” she replied huskily.

  Like? This captivation she felt whenever a smile lit his eyes and lines crinkled beside their vivid blue. This fire that ran through her veins at his nearness. She didn’t just like him—she loved him!

  And then he said: “Do you like me enough to marry me?”

  The words hung in the air, like the big bat that flitted by the car lights, an etching that pulsated for moments on end, then winged out of sight.

  “Tina,” his voice and his grip had roughened, “say something, even if it’s only to tell me to go to the devil. What is it, has my proposal shocked you ? Do you feel it’s presumptuous of me because I’m so much older than you?”

  She stared at him. In the moonglow his face was angular, the well-defined bones jutting hard under his skin, and everything in her cried out against separation from him. He had become so very dear to her, with his face that could look so moody, his smile that could warm the moodiness away, his voice with its deep tones. But she didn’t think he loved her.

  “We’re strangers,” she heard herself say at last. “Strangers don’t marry.”

  There was a long silence and she could hear something ticking—his watch! “Some people, Tina,” he spoke almost harshly, “are never strangers because from the first words they speak they’re friends. I thought you understood that. I thought your intelligence a cut above that of some of today’s self-obsessed youngsters.”

  “Friends don’t marry, either,” she said faintly.

  “You’re too young to know that there can be a hundred reasons why people get married.” His voice, now, was faintly weary, as though she disappointed him. “Marriage with me, in this instance, is surely a better proposition than a humdrum office job, and I can throw in a couple of bonuses—Ste. Monique and a home of your own.”

  “Don’t!” The appeal broke from her. “I thought you kind, but you’re like everyone else, you think my shyness gives you a licence to enjoy a spot of bullying. Y—you wouldn’t do it with someone older, lovelier, smarter—”

  “If you were those three things, my child, I shouldn’t be proposing to you.” He pulled her to him until her cold young face was pressing his. “I’ve grown boorish in my loneliness, you see. I need a wife.”

  It was his use of the word loneliness that weakened her resistance, his nearness that breached it. Never in her wildest dreams had she envisaged a moment such as this, when John Trecarrel would hold her and talk of marriage. She felt his hand on her hair ... no one had ever stroked her hair . . . no one
had ever really wanted her until this moment.. .

  “I thought you liked me,” he murmured. “I like you, Tina. Isn’t it enough?”

  It was heaven, when she had only ever hoped for a few more days with him. Now, if she chose, she could be with him on his island . . . never again be lonely herself.

  “Are you dozing down there?” he queried.

  She gave a sobbing little laugh at the note of humor in his voice. “You can’t be serious, John,” she said. “I have no beauty, no wit, no experience to give to a man like you.”

  “You only have amenity, sensitivity, and a lack of selfishness, my dear.” His fingertips travelled over the delicate bones of her face. He brought her closer to him and her lips waited, soft and innocently untried. She trembled, as though struck through by pain or lightning, as she felt the first kiss of her life. She hadn’t known what she was capable of feeling. She drowned in her awakening which was also a kind of death—the death of immaturity and girlhood.

  Gone was all logical thinking. She was caught too strongly now by the magic of this moment to care what might lie beyond it.

  “So the answer's yes?” She heard the smile in his voice, her cheek was locked against his and she couldn’t see his eyes.

  “If you want me, John,” she whispered.

  Please, have no regrets, she prayed. Be glad, not sorry, that you asked me to marry you and I accepted

  He held her away from him. “We’ll be married next week,” he spoke matter-of-factly. “I’ll apply for a special licence.”

  “Will Liza mind, do you think?” she asked shyly.

  “A little, perhaps, at the beginning. But once she gets to know you—” he brushed at a strand of her flaxen hair. “You must have a trousseau, Tina, but don’t go torturing your hair into waves and curls. Leave it as it is. It’s part of your charm, what I noticed first that afternoon on the cliff, blowing in the wind, the only part of you that was free. Poor Tina, little girl lost. Are you still lost, I wonder?”

  He put a kiss against her left eyebrow, then turned to start the car. On the way back to London he talked about Blue Water House, bringing its loveliness alive for her. She saw the bougainvillea that clouded mellowed walls with vivid, entrancing color. The blossoms that slumbered in the sun like richly clad beauties, the feathery palms that dusted the aquamarine sky, the giant bushes of luscious hibiscus, poking scarlet tongues from big peach bells. Their rich, heavy scents were in her nostrils.

  Blue Water House was of the Colonial era, John said, when there had been rich sugar plantations on the island, worked by dusky African slaves. The house was so named because it stood on a hill that commanded a wide view of the blue sea.

  “You mustn't feel nervous about being its chatelaine.” John gave her a quick look. “I employ an efficient staff of colored servants, and though they’ll expect to take their orders from the new ‘missus,’ you’ll find them pleasant enough to deal with. I've a feeling they’ll like the idea of Massa John having a young, pretty wife.”

  Tina knew she wasn’t pretty, but it was nice that John should say so. “To love is a greater thing than to be loved.” She must have read that in a book at some time and she could only hope that it was true. I love him, she thought. I'm going to marry him. I’m going to be the second Mrs. Trecarrel. She watched his profile and her love for him was a joy and a pain in her—for he had said: “I like you, Tina. Isn't it enough?”

  The car drew into the curb in front of the hostel and, taking her cold hands into his, he gave them a rub to warm them and told her that he had a friend in London, a Mrs. Gaye Lanning, who would be happy to help her shop for her trousseau. Then there was her engagement and wedding rings to buy.

  He felt the half apprehensive, half excited tremor that shook her and, laughing low in his throat, he drew her into his arms. “You aren’t afraid of me, are you ?” he mocked.

  Yes, she wanted to admit. His was a subtle, complex, brooding personality. She never really knew what he was thinking or planning. She guessed, too, that he had a temper, an icy one that could lock her out in the cold.

  “Marriage, Tina, is a sublime madness and a gamble for a man as well as a woman,” he said.

  “Hasn’t it occurred to you that in my own way I’m a trifle nervous of you?”

  “Of me?” she echoed incredulously.

  “You’re many years younger than I, Tina. But, dammit, a man gets lonely, and you don’t chatter and intrude—” His hands tightened on her. “You’re certain you want to marry me?”

  She was certain of nothing—she only knew that from the moment on the headland at Chorley, when she had turned and looked into his eyes, she had started on a journey that would lead her to heaven or agony.

  “Yes, I want to marry you, John,” she replied quietly.

  He kissed her, and she no longer cared what might be lying in wait for her over the horizon, in the house that had been Joanna’s.

  Mrs. Lanning turned out to be a pleasant person in her late thirties. Her husband, a publicity executive, had served in the Royal Navy with John during the Korean war and they had been friends ever since. Tina guessed that Gaye must have known Joanna, but if it surprised her that John had chosen to marry someone so different from his lovely first wife, she concealed the fact and was kindness itself to Tina during the next few days.

  Aware that as Mrs. John Trecarrel she would have a position to uphold, Tina didn’t argue when he told Gaye to take her to a really good couture house for her trousseau. “Have fun and don’t count the cost, Gaye,” he laughed.

  “Bliss!” Gaye laughed back. “A lovely shopping spree without Chuck yelling at me to watch the bills. Why is it you men indulge your brides and deny your wives?”

  “Something to do with the gilt shaking off the gingerbread,” Chuck Lanning put in from behind a widespread newspaper.

  “That, Tina, is what you’ll have to put up with after a few years,” Gaye warned. “The fussing and cooing doesn’t last.”

  John quirked a dark eyebrow at Tina. “Well, do you want to run out on me now these two have shown you the darker side of the picture?” he enquired amusedly.

  She smilingly shook her head, for Gaye and Chuck Lanning bore all the signs of a tried and comfortable happiness. At the dining table he had casually complimented his wife on the apple-marshmallow pie she had made for dessert, and Tina had seen the quick leap of pleasure in Gaye’s grey eyes. Only a wife who cared still baked pies for a husband who had provided her with a cook and a maid.

  The following day, looking very smart in a caballero hat and a sleek black suit, Gaye took Tina to a fashion house in Knightsbridge. The place had a rather drab frontage, but once they stepped inside, a sea of silvery carpet stretched ahead of them, with coral velour seats glowing here and there. A girl at the reception desk rang for the Directrice, who had received a phone call from Gaye and was expecting them. She appeared, thin, elegant, greeting Gaye as a known customer. They mounted a flight of stairs to a showroom and there the Directrice appraised Tina from top to toe.

  She must have guessed directly that never in her life before had Tina been in a place like this, and it was obvious she correctly assessed the price of Tina’s Chorley bought suit, but her manner didn’t change a fraction. She wasn’t effusive, nor too businesslike, but she exuded the fact that first and foremost she was interested in selling beautiful clothes, whether to a duchess or a typist, and Tina suddenly found herself relaxing and enjoying the novelty of all this.

  “Please to be seated, Miss Manson.” Elegant fingers waved at a chair. “We will show you a selection of our younger models.”

  The colors of the polished cottons, the pleated nylons, the afternoon silks, were wonderful and outlandish. Tina could never have envisaged herself in pale orange silk with a design of creamy yucca blossoms on it, but neither Gaye nor the Directrice were in any doubt that the dress would suit her. Then there was another they said she must have, two deep crisp layers of snowy lace banded by a sash of topaz-pink,
so simple to look at—until Tina tried it on.

  The eyes of the Directrice lit up behind her jewelled spectacles. “Perfection!” she smiled, her thumb and forefinger in a circle, her fingers upraised. “The gown was made for you, mademoiselle.”

  Tina gazed wide-eyed at herself in the long, three-angled mirror. The lace dress left her shoulders bare; below the skirt, which ended just under her knees, her legs were very slender and her ankles had a breakable look in high-heeled topaz pink sandals.

  “John is going to like that,” Gaye said mischievously. “It has what is known as man appeal.” Tina’s smile was shy, quick, abstracted. She hardly recognized herself and wondered what Aunt Maud would have said, confronted by this brand new Tina. For a moment a sensation of panic overwhelmed her. She was plunging head first into a marriage that held dangerous undercurrents, and there was no one she could confide in. Gaye seemed not to have the slightest suspicion that John was marrying merely to escape loneliness; the fact that he was spending money so lavishly on Tina obviously indicated to her uncomplicated mind that he was indulgently in love with his prospective bride.

  Gaye was thoroughly enjoying herself, well in tune with the exaggerated language of fashion and determined to take John at his word over the matter of not counting the cost of a sumptuous, Whispering thing in honey-gold faille; an afternoon dress with a big Quaker girl collar in chalk-white pique; play outfits for the beaches at Ste. Monique; lingerie in water-lily tones; and a honeymoon negligee with a lace-over-silk bodice.

  The suit that she and the Directrice chose between them for Tina to be married in was a smoky blue color, with piecrust trimming on the neat collar and cuffs. Like most garments that fit perfectly and seem subdued, it gave Tina an innocent allure that made her heart skip a beat. Her bag and shoes were a smoky grey, her hat a fragile white silk rose meshed in tulle.