Ill Met by Moonlight

CHAPTER ONE-2

“Not unless we all insist on it. They’ve never actually admitted their not coming back had anything to do with Rosemary and Jim.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s always been because Chapin was drowned here.”

We were standing on the steps of Mr. Toplady’s general store in the shade of what the telephone company had left of the big sycamore near the old slave block. Both of us were quite unconsciously watching Jim Gould, bareheaded, sun-bronzed and healthy, there in the middle of the street blocking the road.

“It’s been five years since they busted him out of the Navy,” Dr. Potter said after a moment. “Pretty hard medicine.—She’s not the same girl now, of course.”

“They didn’t bust him out,” I said. “He resigned.”

He shrugged his thin shoulders.

“Worse. He doesn’t get any retired pay.”

I followed his tired eyes up and across the sidewalk in front of the tea store. I remembered later how they’d lighted up a little, involuntarily. Sandra was coming out, barelegged in white sandals, moving lithe and sinuous, different, somehow, from the other women, so that you noticed the difference instantly.

“Why, Jeem! Andy!” she cried in mock consternation. “Lucy Lee, make them stop! Please, Lucy Lee!”

Lucy Lee is Andy Thorp’s wife and Jim Gould’s sister; hence, consequently, Sandra’s sister-in-law. More important at the moment, she is young Andy’s mother, and young Andy had just at that moment fallen off his tricycle at the curb and was yelling as if he had been killed. Lucy Lee was trying frantically to pick him up with one hand and hang onto the baby and her bundles with the other.

One of the nice things about both Sandra and Andy is that it wouldn’t ever occur to either of them to help her. Lilies of the field both of them, each in his own fashion; Sandra the tiger, and Andy a lily only in that he toiled very little and did nothing so practical as spinning. The trouble with Andy is that he was brought up with too much money and never counted on his father’s marrying again.

“Oh, do make them stop, Lucy Lee!” Sandra cried prettily. Lucy Lee threw her a look over her shoulder that was understandable, certainly, but that surprised me nevertheless.

Most of us thought of Lucy Lee’s face as pretty without much in it except tired lines, these days. Nothing like the sudden pent-up anger—almost hate—that I saw there now, before Lucy Lee remembered herself and smiled.

“Sorry, darling; you manage them,” she called, and went back into the little group of her own friends who’d come to her rescue.

I glanced at Dr. Potter, expecting him to say what everybody at April Harbor had been saying all summer—“I wonder how long Lucy Lee and Andy will last.” But he wasn’t paying any attention to Lucy Lee. He was still watching Sandra and Jim and Andy. Lucy Lee’s problem, I suppose, was the kind of thing he sees every day, without the glamour of the girl with the dusty pink cartwheel hat and dusky eyes. I was annoyed. I suppose it was sort of an instinctive defending of my own kind against something from the outside, although it was absurd of me to identify it with Rosemary Bishop rather than Lucy Lee and little Andy. At that, our instincts are wiser than we are.

“You know, Dr. Potter,” I said, “I think we’re all being pretty objectionable.”

He looked a little surprised, and flushed almost as if I’d caught him being personally indiscreet. Which is quite unthinkable.

“I mean, Jim doesn’t seem to be taking this very hard, and Rosemary’s been having a pretty exciting life in Washington and Europe all these years. I haven’t seen her, but I’ve seen pictures of her. She seems to be bearing up pretty well. After all, twenty-seven isn’t an appallingly great age. I mean, it isn’t as if she’d not married and was fifty, is it? It’s quite conceivable that she just never met anyone she wanted to marry—until now.”

“Now?”

“She’s bringing her fiancé down. Didn’t you know?”

Dr. Potter shook his head, definitely relieved, I thought.

“So it seems to me that if we just act as if Sandra and Jim are well and truly married, and Jim’s forgot Rosemary, and Rosemary’s forgot Jim—except as sort of childhood sweethearts—and everybody’s forgot Chapin, and if we’d quit standing around like a lot of ghouls just out of the churchyard—well, it’d be a lot better.”

He nodded. “You’re right,” he said soberly. “At least, I hope you are.—Well, I’ll be getting along. Drop in and see Maggie. She’ll want all the news.”

I watched him cross the street, a lean stooped figure in a wrinkled seersucker suit, his bag of groceries in his hand, walking rather slower than he used to, as if he were tired too, like Lucy Lee. I wondered with a little shock just how long it had been since I’d dropped even the formality of inquiring about Maggie Potter’s health. It’s curious how callous one gets about people who are always sick with nothing much the matter with them. Maggie Potter hadn’t been out of the old red brick house on Church Circle for years—just moving from her chair by the front window to her bed and back again. Chapin Bishop’s funeral was her last public appearance. Not that anybody missed her. And Elsie Carter was the only person I ever heard suggest that the poor man kept her an invalid for purposes of his own. Just what they might be, besides the privilege of doing the marketing, not even Elsie could guess.

I suppose I stood there grinning, because somebody behind my left shoulder said, “What’s so funny? I’d like a good laugh.”

I started and turned to find Jim Gould beside me on Mr. Toplady’s steps, a bright new monkey wrench in one hand and a can of turpentine in the other. I had a horrible guilty feeling that he’d been there for some time, so that he must have heard what I’d said about him and Rosemary.

I smiled, but he didn’t. In fact, he looked pretty sober—and when he does his face gets extremely hard, and it’s difficult to remember that he’s just thirty-two, not a lot older, and that he’s a grand person, not somebody you’d rather not cross. That’s the way he looked just then. I found myself a bit surprised to feel glad, all of a sudden, that he wasn’t taking Rosemary’s return simply in his grinning stride, as it were.

He was looking past me at Dr. Potter’s old car. Then he did grin, and shrugged as if something amusing and sardonic had occurred to him. He put down his can of turpentine and pulled a blue bandanna out of his pocket to mop his brow.

“Lord, it’s hot.”

He squinted his light blue eyes up at the sky through the sycamore leaves.

“Hope it holds off till after the race. Then it can rain a week and suit me down to the ground.”

“I’d like it to rain now,” I said. But Jim wasn’t paying any attention to me. He had the bandanna still in his poised hand, staring across the street, two puzzled lines between his brows.

“Who’s that guy over there in front of the post office—in the linen suit?”

“Some city slicker probably,” I said. “Though it’s not one of the ground rules here that all the men have to look like unemployed painters all the time.”

I looked anyway, and had a sudden hollow feeling in my stomach.

“It looks like George Barrol, Grace,” Jim said incredulously.

“Maybe it is George Barrol,” I said. I knew from Rosemary’s letter that he was coming down early, to open up the house before the rest of them came. George Barrol is Rosemary’s cousin and Mr. Bishop’s bailiff, steward, estate manager and general handy man.

Jim was still staring oddly at him. “What’s he doing here?” he said. Then he turned to me abruptly. “Grace, have they sold the house?”

I looked at him blankly, and caught myself just in time. Or was it? I’m not so sure now. I was sure then, because I saw the pallor that whitened the corners of Jim Gould’s mouth as suddenly as if he’d been struck. His hands trembled as he pulled a flattened pack of cigarettes out of his pocket.

I knew instantly, of course, that Sandra had lied to us—that Jim didn’t know Rosemary Bishop was coming to April Harbor that very day. I held my lighter to his cigarette. It wasn’t very steady, but neither was the cigarette.

“That must be it,” he said.

I should have said then that that wasn’t it, that the Bishops were coming back to spend August at the old stand. But I didn’t. I’ve wondered a lot what difference it would have made. I should have told him. Not doing it was nothing but the ghastliest sort of passing the buck. I thought then—or so I like to think—that I was really just passing it to George Barrol, who spends his life doing other people’s dirty work. He had spotted me and was coming across the street. But even then, there’s something about Jim Gould, even when you’ve known him since he was three and you were nine, as I have, that makes it hard to go barging into his private life. And anything connected with Rosemary, in spite of what I’d said to Dr. Potter, was intensely that.

George Barrol could do it better, I thought, watching him wait there in the middle of the street for a car to pass.

“I guess I’ll get some cigarettes,” Jim said abruptly. “I’ll be seeing you.”

The bell over Mr. Toplady’s door jingled before I could say “Wait, Jim.” He was gone. I wondered who’d tell him now.

“Hello, Grace! How’s everybody?”

George Barrol and I shook hands. George hadn’t changed in the seven years since I’d seen him, except that his light hair was a little thinner, with a touch of gray here and there. Perhaps he was a little more rotund, in a dapper way, and a little more perennially bachelorish. He was as precise and immaculate as ever, with the same slightly worried air as if things mightn’t get done in time.

“It’s nice to see you back,” I said.

“It’s nice to be back. Rosemary’s dying to see you. They’re getting here about four.”

He looked about.

“There’s a lot of new people.”

He laughed, shaking his head. “Just think—seven years! A lot of water’s flowed out of the Harbor.”

“An awful lot,” I said.

He laughed again and patted his moist forehead with his neatly folded white handkerchief.

“Wasn’t that Jim Gould you were talking to?”

I nodded.

“Guess he didn’t recognize me,” he said cheerfully. “I say, Grace—who’s that child in the pink hat?”

“Do you mean Nancy Thorp?” I inquired, seeing Lucy Lee’s daughter, aged three and in a pink sunbonnet and practically nothing else. But of course I knew whom he meant. “Or possibly you mean Sandra Gould. Jim’s wife.”

He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “Really. Not bad, eh? Foreign, isn’t she? Brazilian, or something?”

“Something, anyway,” I said.

George Barrol looked at Sandra again. She was standing on the opposite curb, looking about for Jim.

“She’s got Rosemary beat,” he remarked. I was annoyed. I don’t know whether it was with him for saying that or with Sandra for her definitely breath-taking effect on men of all ages.

“What’s Rosemary’s young man like?” I asked.

“Paul’s a good sort. Loads of money—oil concessions sort of thing—and darned attractive. Georgian, but he was educated in England. He’s completely cosmopolitan, you know, the way those chaps get. Even Uncle Rod’s sold on him. You’ll like him. Well, I’ve got to be getting to work.—Ah…I say, Grace.”

He hesitated, reddening just a shade, and patted his brow again.

“I mean…you’ll lend us a hand, and all that, won’t you? I mean, I don’t think Rosemary’s counted on…on Mrs. Gould’s being such a…” He stopped and shook his head a little. “I mean, she’s heard all about her being a swell boatman and swimmer, and all that, but I…”

“You mean she’s not prepared to find her beautiful as well.”

George got still redder and hotter.

“Well, you know—she saw her, once. In Shanghai.”

“She did?”

“Well, not officially. It was before Jim married her. And she’s…she’s got the wrong idea.”

“I wonder,” I said.

George laughed. “You women are all cats. You’ll stand by, anyway, won’t you?”

I nodded. He crossed the street again.

Somebody spoke behind me: “Hello, Grace.” I turned. Jim’s mother was coming out of Toplady’s with young Andy by the hand.

“Wasn’t that George Barrol?” she asked.

I nodded.

Mrs. Gould’s face is a strange combination of her two children. She looks like Lucy Lee except that her curly hair is white instead of chestnut, and her face is gentler, with more repose, as finely cut and delicate but rather determined in a way that Lucy Lee’s isn’t.

“You know the Bishops are coming today?” I asked. “For a month.”

“Elsie Carter told me. Rosemary’s engaged?”

I nodded.

“Jim doesn’t know yet, does he?”

“Oh yes,” she smiled. “Sandra told him this morning. I don’t think anybody else would dare. Of course he had to know.”

You can’t very well tell a woman her daughter-in-law isn’t telling the truth…at least you couldn’t tell Mrs. Gould that. She’s the only person who’s always been unfailingly loyal to Sandra, and if most of us have thought it was just a deeper loyalty to Jim we’ve had no reason for it.

“Somehow I’d got the notion he didn’t know,” I said casually.

“It’s rather difficult to know what Jim knows,” she replied, laughing. “I think I’ll go rescue Sandra. Look—I never knew George Barrol was so resourceful.”

I followed her glance across the street. George was there with Sandra, his hat in his hand. They were laughing merrily, but it was Sandra’s bundles they were picking up, so I doubted how much of the resourcefulness was his. Still, it made it simpler, George knowing her before the others came.

The clock on the church tower at the top of the road struck eleven. Across the street Mrs. Gould was shaking hands with George and presenting him properly to her son’s wife. In a moment a little crowd had gathered, and by the time Julius had brought my car around from Dock Street George had greeted half the town.

Only Jim Gould was still in Mr. Toplady’s general store buying a pack of cigarettes. Poor old Jim, who except for the girl in the dusty pink cartwheel hat across the road would be somewhere on the seas in a white uniform—or so they say—and Rosemary Bishop wouldn’t be coming back to April Harbor engaged to somebody else.