‘It’s perfectly suitable. This is the dress I got for Daddy’s funeral.’
‘Looks like the next funeral it goes to should be its own,’ Elsa sniffed. ‘But please yourself, though I can’t see no sense going round looking like something the cat dragged in. You’m not a bad-looking maid when you try.’
‘I’d better go before you turn my head completely,’ Morgana said lightly as she picked up the tray.
‘No danger of that, I reckon.’ Elsa’s fierce gaze softened as they swept over the girl’s slim figure. ‘You don’t fancy yourself like some I could mention.’
Morgana hid a smile as she carried the tray out of the kitchen. Elsa was not usually so forbearing, and Morgana could only attribute her unusual delicacy this time to the fact that up to the time of the funeral she herself had been seeing a great deal of Robert Donleven, and might react with hostility to any overt criticism of his sister—because she was well aware that Elaine Donleven was the subject of Elsa’s veiled remark.
Yet if she was honest, she had to admit that Elaine wasn’t one of her favourite people either, though she would have been hard put to it to say why. Ever since Elaine had come to live at Home Farm and help Robert run the riding stables there, relations between the two girls had been perfectly civil, but no more.
Perhaps it was inevitable it should be so, she thought as she went along the passage. After all, the Donlevens had bought the Home Farm, as Robert’s mother had made smilingly clear on more than one occasion, as an interest for her husband when he retired from being ‘something’ in the City of London. In the meantime it was run by an efficient manager, and Robert and his sister had started the riding stables there, again as a hobby rather than a living. Morgana felt sometimes that Elaine mentioned this rather more than was strictly necessary, as if to emphasise the gulf between those who had to work, and those for whom the world was a playground.
Apart from exchange trips to France and Germany when she was at school, Morgana’s holidays had been spent in and around Polzion, and she sometimes could not contain a little surge of envy when she heard Elaine talk so carelessly of skiing at Klosters, and beach parties in the Bahamas. Nor did it help to feel, as she often did, that Elaine intended her to feel envious.
Robert, on the other hand, was very different. For one thing his hair was inexorably sandy, instead of being deep auburn like Elaine’s, but his temperament was far more unassuming than his sister’s, and he took the day-to-day running of the stables far more seriously than she did, although ironically, Elaine was a spectacularly better rider. But then, Morgana thought, she did not have his patience with beginners.
For herself, she enjoyed Robert’s company. She liked him, and suspected that given time her feelings could become much warmer. Ever since the funeral, he had been assiduous in his attentions, sending her flowers, and phoning nearly every day. She was grateful for this, and a little relieved too, if she was honest. The Donlevens had always been charming to her, but she had been aware all the time in little ways that they felt Robert could do better for himself than the daughter of a country hotelier. Now that it was public knowledge in the area that, since her father’s death, the long-forgotten entail had come into force and that soon she and her mother would probably be not only penniless but probably homeless as well, she had wondered whether any kind of pressure would be exerted to persuade Robert to let their relationship slide.
If so, it clearly hadn’t worked, or had had the opposite effect, she thought, smiling a little as the image of Robert’s pleasant regular features and clear blue eyes rose in her mind. And of course he was the fair man Elsa had seen in the cards and he was going to propose to her and take her away from all this.
She was grinning to herself as she carried the tray into the drawing room, but the grin faded a little as she encountered the gaze of Miss Meakins, sitting bolt upright on the edge of her usual chair, clutching her knitting bag as a drowning person might clutch a lifebelt. Miss Meakins was elderly, and harmless, and Morgana felt sympathy for anyone whose life was a succession of cheap hotels, but she found Miss Meakins passion for attempting to be unobtrusive a trial. ‘Without wishing to be a nuisance …’ and ‘I wonder if I might …’ preceded even the most normal of requests and she seemed to spend most mealtimes in a state of permanent agitation.
A hotelier’s lot is not a happy one, Morgana thought grimly as she set down the tea tray.
‘Have you any idea where the others are, Miss Meakins?’
‘Major Lawson usually goes for a walk before tea,’ Miss Meakins said primly.
Major Lawson, Morgana thought, wasn’t daft. She and her mother sometimes wondered about him. They usually had two or three permanent guests each winter at Polzion House, but Major Lawson wasn’t in the usual mould at all. When his booking had originally been received, her father had been inclined to pooh-pooh his rank, saying he had probably been a clerk in the stores who had decided to promote himself after discharge. ‘Or a con man,’ he added cynically. But Martin Pentreath had been wrong.
Major Lawson was a tall, quietly spoken man, but there was an indefinable air of command about him. His clothes were not new, but their cut was impeccable, and the suitcases he’d brought them in were leather, and had been expensive. But in many ways he was an enigma. When pressed, he would talk about Army life, but he spoke in generalities with a certain diffidence. And he was a loner. Miss Meakins’ flutterings had not the slightest effect on him. He enjoyed walking, and he spent a good deal of time in his room, working on a small portable typewriter. He was very tidy about his work, whatever it was. They’d only found out about it by chance, through Miss Meakins—‘Not wishing to be any trouble, dear Mrs Pentreath, but the constant tapping … comes so plainly through the wall.’
Her eyes had gleamed with curiosity as she spoke, but it was doomed to be unsatisfied. Major Lawson had never volunteered why he spent several hours each day typing, and none of the Pentreaths were prepared to ask him. In the end Major Lawson was moved to another room, well out of earshot—to Miss Meakins’ secret chagrin, Morgana suspected.
Quite suddenly she knew she had to get out of the house for a while. It was ridiculous, because it was almost dark, and almost certainly raining, but she needed to breathe fresh air and be completely alone for a while. Since her father’s death, she had been rarely alone. Her mother had needed her and there were always things to be done, and at first she had welcomed this because it meant there was less time to think, and to worry and ask herself what she was going to do. But now, when there was so little time left for thinking and planning, she had to get away on her own for a while. It had been building up inside her all day, this need to be alone, to escape. That was why she had felt so restless earlier.
She flashed a brief smile at her mother as she passed her in the doorway. ‘I’m going out for a little while.’
‘Just as you please, dear,’ Mrs Pentreath responded.
Morgana went into the hall and on into the small cloakroom which opened off it. Her old school cape was there, and she swung it round her shoulders, pulling the hood up over her cloud of dark hair. As she re-emerged into the hall, the telephone rang, and she crossed to the reception desk to answer it.
‘Polzion House,’ she said crisply.
It was a relief to hear Robert’s quiet ‘Hello, darling. Just ringing to find out how everything went today. What’s he like?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. He didn’t show up.’
‘Well, that’s pretty cavalier,’ Robert was plainly taken aback. ‘Hasn’t there even been a message?’
