Small Slice of Summer

‘Quite OK,’ he pronounced, and wished her goodbye, because he and Julius would be leaving very early the next morning.

The house, after they had gone, seemed large and empty, a fact to which Georgina agreed, giving it her opinion that it was because they were two such large men; all the same, the two girls contrived to spend a pleasant day together, with Stephens and the gardener to carry Letitia down to the garden and the two babies to play with. Julius telephoned twice, the first time shortly after they had arrived, and the second time a few hours later, just as the girls were going to bed. Letitia wondered what Jason was doing, but she didn’t like to ask Georgina, who, for some reason, didn’t mention him at all, but when Julius telephoned the next morning, she couldn’t refrain from asking at what time the men might be expected back.

‘Well, there’s no telling,’ explained Georgina. ‘They both drive fast and awfully well and I daresay they’ll take it in turns, which means that they’ll do it in about six hours. They can do seventy on the motorway, you see, and that’s almost all the way. They’ll be here for tea.’

And she was right. Letitia was entertaining Polly with a demonstration of ‘Here’s the church, here’s the steeple’ when she heard men’s voices and looked up to see them strolling towards them. Neither looked in the least tired, although they ate an enormous tea.

‘No lunch?’ asked Georgina.

‘Well, my love, I had promised myself that we would be home for tea,’ Julius smiled at his wife, ‘and Jason liked the idea too.’

Letitia watching them, thought how wonderful it would be to be loved as much as that. She sighed, and Jason asked at once: ‘Are you tired? Do you want to go indoors and rest?’

She shook her head. ‘No, oh, no, thank you.’

His voice was kind. ‘One more day and then I should think you might try some gentle exercise. How does the ankle feel?’

She hardly noticed when the others went indoors and Jason started to tell her about Edinburgh and their meeting. She was surprised when Julius came out to ask them if they wanted to go in for drinks before dinner. The day, though pleasant, had been long, now the evening was going far too quickly.

The next few days went quickly too, each one speedier than its predecessor, or so it seemed because she was enjoying herself so much. It was a week after her accident, when she had been hobbling very creditably for a couple of days, that Julius gave her his verdict that she was to all intents and purposes, cured. Jason wasn’t back from hospital, she was sitting with Georgina and him, lingering over tea, watching Polly tumbling around on her short fat legs, and thinking how content she was. But it couldn’t last, of course; she said at once: ‘Oh, that’s good. Do you think that I should go straight back to St Athel’s?’

‘Lord, no, Tishy. A week’s leave—you can stay here if you care to—we love having you.’

She smiled at them both because they were so kind and they must have wished her out of the way on occasion. ‘You’re awfully kind,’ she told them, ‘but I’d love to go home. If I could have a lift up to town I could catch a train. Would you think me very ungrateful if I went tomorrow?’

‘Yes, very,’ said Julius promptly. ‘Make it the day after.’ He smiled as he spoke. ‘Do you want to collect more clothes before you go?’

‘No, thanks, I’ve some things at home—they’re a bit old, but I shan’t be going anywhere, so it won’t matter.’

So it was settled, and when Jason came home nobody thought of mentioning it to him and she didn’t like to say anything herself, although presumably, as Julius was still on holiday, it would be Jason who would have to give her a lift. It wasn’t until the next morning, after he had left the house, that Georgina remarked: ‘Oh, by the way, Jason says he’ll take you all the way, Tishy, if you don’t mind leaving quite early in the morning.’

Letitia buttered a piece of toast and sat looking at it. ‘I couldn’t let him do that,’ she said at length. ‘I mean, it’s miles away, even in that car of his.’

It was Julius who answered her. ‘Well, he’ll be home after tea, why don’t you talk to him about it then? And if you’d really rather go by train, he can still give you a lift up to town.’

So she was forced to contain herself until the early evening, for Jason was late home. By the time he strolled in they were all in the drawing room with the children in bed and dinner but half an hour away. Julius got up to get him a drink. ‘A bit of a rush?’ he wanted to know.

‘The Commando went wrong—he picked up eventually, but it lost us a couple of hours, we didn’t finish until six o’clock.’

Georgina glanced at the carriage clock on its bracket. ‘You made good time.’

He had taken a seat at the other end of the sofa where Letitia was sitting. ‘The car went well.’ He looked at Letitia. ‘How far to Chagford, dear girl?’

She jumped because she hadn’t expected his question. ‘Well…yes, the thing is Georgina told me…it’s very kind of you to offer me a lift, but I really can’t…if you wouldn’t mind dropping me off at Paddington…’ She stopped, aware that she wasn’t making much of a success of it.

‘I think you’ve got it wrong,’ explained Jason, at his most placid. ‘I’m going down to Plymouth tomorrow— I have to. I might just as well take you as not—the car’s empty and I’m not going more than a few miles out of my way. It’s no sacrifice on my part, Letitia.’

She told herself that she was relieved to hear that even while a faint prick of annoyance shot through her; would it have been such a sacrifice if he had been asked to drive her down to Chagford? Probably; he had called her touchy, hadn’t he? And damned sensitive, too—and he had wanted to go to sleep instead of talking to her. That still rankled a little. He must find her incredibly dull after the glamorous young ladies he was doubtless in the habit of escorting. She said in a wooden voice: ‘Well, thank you, I’ll be glad of a lift. When do you want to start tomorrow?’

‘That brings us back to my question. How far to Chagford?’

‘A hundred and eighty-seven miles from London.’

‘A good road?’

She frowned in thought. ‘Well, I don’t know it very well. It’s the M3 and then the A30 for the rest of the way, more or less.’

‘Good enough. We’ll go round the ring road and pick up the motorway on the other side of London. Leave at nine sharp? You’ll be home for tea.’

‘It’s quite a few miles to Plymouth from my home,’ she reminded him.

‘That’s all right, Letitia,’ he told her pleasantly. ‘I enjoy driving, it makes a nice change from theatre, you know.’

‘That’s settled, then,’ said Georgina comfortably. ‘Let’s have dinner, Mrs Stephens has made a special effort by way of a farewell gesture to you, Tishy, so we mustn’t spoil it.’ She turned to Jason. ‘You’ll be back in a day or two, won’t you? Spend a day or two here on your way home.’

‘Thanks, George, but only an hour or so—I can’t expect Bas to do my work and his for ever.’

‘You do his when he goes on holiday, but I know what you mean. Still, we’ll see you when we come over on holiday.’

‘Of course. Julius and I might even get in some sailing.’ A remark which triggered off a conversation about boats which lasted through dinner, and although the talk became general afterwards, Letitia, on her way up to bed an hour or so later, discovered that beyond casual remarks which she could count on the fingers of one hand, Jason hadn’t talked to her at all. She went to bed a little worried, for it augured ill for their journey the next day. Would they travel in silence, she wondered, or should she attempt to entertain him with lighthearted remarks about this and that? It was a great pity that she knew nothing about sailing and not much about fast cars. And it would bore him to talk about his work. She was still worrying away at her problem like a dog at a bone when she at last fell asleep.

CHAPTER THREE

IT WAS A glorious morning and bade fair to be a hot day; the tan jersey suit was going to be far too warm before very long. Letitia wished she had something thinner to wear, until she saw that Jason intended travelling with the BMW’s hood down. She prudently tied a scarf over her hair, assured him that she liked fresh air, bade her friends good-bye and got into the seat beside him, eyeing the restrained elegance of his cotton sweater and slacks; he was a man who looked elegant in anything he wore, she considered, blissfully unaware of the price he paid for such elegance.

‘Warm enough?’ he wanted to know, and when she said yes, nodded carelessly and with a last wave took the car down the drive, past the little lodge and into the lane. ‘Nice day for a run,’ he observed, then lapsed into silence. Now would be the time, thought Letitia, when she should embark on a sparkling conversation which would hold him enthralled, but there wasn’t an idea in her head, and the harder she thought, the emptier it became.

‘Ankle all right?’ asked her companion, and she embarked with relief on its recovery, her gratitude to Julius and Georgina and himself, and how much she had enjoyed her stay at Dalmers Place. But even repeating herself once or twice couldn’t spin her colloquy out for ever; she lapsed into silence once more, looking at the scenery with almost feverish interest in case Jason should imagine that he might be forced to entertain her.

They were slowing down to go through Epping when he said blandly: ‘This erstwhile young man of yours—did he train you to speak only when spoken to?’

She was instantly affronted. ‘What a perfectly beastly thing to say! Of course not. I—I can’t think of anything to talk about, if you must know.’

‘Dear girl, I’m in the mood to be entertained by the lightest of chat, and surely you’re used to me by now— Big Brother Jason, and all that.’

She laughed then and he said at once: ‘That’s better. I thought we might stop for coffee before we get on to the motorway—Windsor, perhaps, with luck we should be able to lunch in Ilminster, unless there is anywhere else you would prefer?’

She shook her head. She didn’t know of any restaurants as far-flung as that; when she had gone out with Mike he had taken her to unpretentious places where he always made a point of assuring her that the food was good however humble the establishment appeared to be. She suspected that his ideas of good food weren’t quite in the same category as Jason’s; certainly the hotel where he chose to stop for coffee was a four-star establishment, the kind of place Mike would have considered a great waste of money. She savoured the luxury of their pleasant surroundings and began to enjoy herself. Jason was a charming companion and amusing and not in the least anxious to impress her. They went on their way presently, nicely embarked on the kind of casual talk which demanded very little effort and allowed for the maximum of laughter. Letitia hardly noticed the miles as they slipped by under the BMW’s wheels, and when they stopped in Ilminster, she said regretfully: ‘How quickly the time has gone!’

The doctor smiled gently, remarking merely that he was hungry and hoped that she was too as he ushered her into the George Hotel. ‘See you in five minutes in the bar,’ he suggested, and left her to tidy her wildly untidy hair and re-do her face. The freckles were worse than ever, she noted with disquiet, and then decided to ignore them; Jason had said he liked them.

The hotel was a pleasant place. They had their drinks and then ate their lunch with healthy appetites; cold roast beef, cut paper-thin, with a salad so fresh that it looked as though it had just been picked from the garden, and a rhubarb pie which melted in the mouth to follow, accompanied by enough clotted cream to feed a family of six. They washed down this splendid meal with a red Bordeaux and rounded everything off with coffee before taking to the road once more, making short work of the miles to Exeter, and once through that city and out on to the Moretonhampstead road, with the hills of Dartmoor ahead of them, they slowed down so that they might miss nothing of the scenery around them.

Somehow it didn’t surprise her to learn that the doctor had been that way before, she suspected that he was a man who got around quite a bit without boasting about it—all the same, she was able to point out some of the local sights as they went along, and when they had gone through Moretonhampstead and slowed down still more to go through Chagford, she told him about the Grey Wethers stone circle close by before directing him to turn off the road and take a winding lane leading off towards the heart of the moor.

‘It’s such a small village that it isn’t on all the maps,’ she explained, ‘and the road isn’t very good, although a few people use it when they want to see Yes Tor, but most of them go from the Okehampton road, it’s easier.’

Her companion grunted and dropped to a crawl; the lane had become narrow and winding, sometimes passing through open wild country with enormous views, and then dipping into small, densely wooded valleys which defied anyone passing through them to see anything at all.

‘We’re almost there,’ offered Letitia placatingly as Jason swung the car round a right-angled bend, ‘and you won’t need to come out this way; there’s a good road over the moor that will get you on to the Tavistock road.’ She pointed down into the valley running away to their left. ‘There’s the church.’

The lane became the village street with a scattering of cottages on either side before it widened into a circle with an old-fashioned drinking trough for horses in its centre. The church lay ahead with the rectory alongside, a wicket gate separating its garden from the churchyard, past which the road wandered off again, up the hill on the other side. Jason, still crawling, afforded Mrs Lovelace, who ran the village shop and post office, and was the natural fount of all local gossip, an excellent opportunity of taking a good look at both him and his beautiful motor-car as he turned into the rectory gateway, slid up its short drive and stopped soundlessly before its porch.

The garden had appeared to be empty, but all at once it was full of people; her father coming round the side of the house to meet them—a middle-aged, rather portly man, of medium height and with a cheerful face, and her mother, who rose, trowel in hand, from the middle of a clump of lupins ornamenting the herbaceous border, and four girls, all pretty, who came tearing out of the door to cluster round the car.

Letitia cast a lightning glance at her companion and found him to be as placid as usual, only his brows were raised a little and a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

The introductions took quite a few minutes and the doctor bore up under them with equanimity. They were out of the car by now and Letitia, having made Jason known to her parents, started on her sisters.

‘Margo,’ she began, ‘back from Scotland, I daresay you’ve seen her at St Athel’s, and Hester, she’s married to a doctor in Chagford, and Miriam who’s married to a vet in Moretonhampstead, and this is Paula, who’s still at school.’

He shook their proffered hands and submitted to a battery of eyes without appearing to mind.

‘A little overpowering,’ murmured the Rector as Letitia was drawn, with a lot of talking and laughter, into the family circle. ‘So many women—of course, I’m used to them, bless their hearts, but they might possibly strike terror into a stranger’s heart.’

The doctor laughed: ‘Hardly that.’ He turned round to look at them, gathered in a charming bunch round Letitia. ‘You must be delighted to have them all home together,’ he observed to Mrs Marsden.

She smiled at him, a small, still pretty woman. ‘Yes, it’s wonderful, and it happens so seldom. How kind of you to bring Letitia home—such an unfortunate accident…’

‘I was the cause of it, Mrs Marsden.’

She shook her head. ‘But not to blame; Letitia wrote and told me exactly how it happened; it was hardly your fault that she was pushed into the road.’ She looked with interest at the BMW. ‘It’s a beautiful car, Doctor…’ she wrinkled her nose, ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’

‘Jason.’

She smiled at him. ‘Such a nice name. You’ll stay to tea?’

‘I’d like to very much.’

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