Circumstance Page 2

  “Where’s that? Africa?”

  Frank shook his head.

  “Malaya.”

  Rose consulted the personal chart of the world she carried in her head and she found … nothing. Malaya was nowhere marked, not even as terra incognita. After a telling beat she giggled in what she hoped was a winningly disarming way.

  “And where’s that?”

  Frank generally found his fellow countrymen’s ignorance of geography irritating, but in Rose’s case he was prepared to be indulgent.

  “I’ll show you on the map.”

  The two of them smiled at each other, each of them imagining their two heads bent over an unrolled map, his finger pointing, hers following. Rose broke the stretching silence.

  “I gather you have been there?”

  “More than that: I live there.”

  Rose flinched. For a split second her face revealed her distress; but then she shifted in her chair, which was scratchy against her legs, and she mastered herself.

  “An Empire builder?”

  “Yes. With the SCS. The Saramantan Civil Service. I go back in September.”

  Rose gave an inner wail. She asked, as calmly as she could, “How long have you lived there?”

  “My entire life. My people were stationed there.”

  “You were born there?”

  Frank nodded.

  “An English son of the Malayan soil. My earliest memories of colour and heat.”

  Oh dear, thought Rose, this was another rotten blow, one just as awful as the distance to Malaya, and the brevity of Frank’s leave. Not that she minded, but Mummy was of the firm opinion that no Englishman born in the colonies was a proper Englishman.

  “Gosh,” she said.

  “Yes. My father was an SCS man before me, served for nearly thirty years.” Frank paused, and then he added, “I’ve never lived in England, apart from school. Hinchford. Soon after my seventh birthday I travelled back in the care of one Mr and Mrs Shields, a missionary couple returning to Scotland, to retire after a lifetime of service.”

  Rose blinked, and then she blinked again. What a pang it gave her to imagine Frank as a boy, small and lost-looking, arriving, solitary, on the shores of what must surely have seemed to him a strange and lonely new life. And though it was necessary, what a sacrifice for his parents, to send him away.

  “Boys need Latin and Greek,” she sighed.

  “Boys need playing fields and bracing games.”

  “Indeed … But when you arrived England must have seemed so foreign?”

  “Yes. And I seemed foreign to the other boys. I spoke Malay better than I spoke English – I certainly wrote it better. I preferred rice to bread, or potatoes … The other fellows thought I had some peculiar ways, they called me jungle boy … It was autumn, coming on for winter, and yet I couldn’t get used to coats, gloves, scarves. I refused to wear Wellingtons – I often went shoeless in Saramantan. And the English too cold-mannered for me.”

  “I say!” Rose chaffed him. “You think I’m cold-mannered?”

  “Frightfully,” nodded Frank, deadpan. They took a moment to enjoy their teasing, and then he continued, “I was used to running wild, climbing trees, roaming the jungle … Did you have a pet as a child?”

  “A beagle.”

  “A beagle! Once, I was allowed to keep a tiger cub, and there were generally a few tame monkeys around the bungalow, a parrot or two, snakes … All that, then school. Prayers in the abbey every morning and Euclid every afternoon.”

  “Were you very unhappy?”

  Frank shrugged.

  “I was sustained by the thought that one day I’d go back.” He paused. “And I did. I returned home as soon as I could, immediately after I left school.”

  Rose wondered whether she could ever think of anywhere abroad as home. But then it occurred to her home was perhaps not a place, but a person. The thought made her blush. Frank smiled at her, and her blush intensified.

  “Your parents must have been delighted to have you back,” she said, in some confusion.

  Frank shook his head.

  “They were dead by then. Mother died soon after I was sent to school. Fever. Three years later Father followed her to the grave. I never saw either of them again, after they passed me into the care of Mr and Mrs Shields.”

  Rose’s swelling heart now seemed almost to burst with pity. She longed to reach out to take Frank’s hand, but it was impossible of course; she’d have to make do with touching him in some other way.

  “My father’s dead too,” she offered. “Thrown from a horse when I was twelve.”

  “What rotten luck.”

  “Yes. Rotten luck.”

  For a long beat they met and held each other’s gazes. Rose looked away first. She was feeling ever more flustered, and she spoke a little wildly.

  “Do you have brothers? Sisters? Were there cousins you could go to in the holidays?”

  Frank shook his head.

  “Oh, no. I’ve got no family. So far as I know I haven’t a relation in the world. I spent holidays at school.”

  Rose felt her eyes grow hot and moist; what a privilege it would be, she thought, to be the woman lucky enough to pierce Frank’s solitude.

  *

  By now, when it came to Rose and Frank, all the women at the Ryton Cove Hotel had their fingers crossed – all apart from Daphne. Notwithstanding her initial eagerness to effect an introduction between Mr Langham and her daughter, she was, contrariwise, becoming steadily more uneasy about their friendship. Oh, she admitted Mr Langham was charming all right, and that was part of the trouble: he was too much of a charmer for her taste. She suspected him of untrustworthiness; she couldn’t quite put her finger on why, except that the things Rose said she admired in him – his artlessness, his candour – she found overdone, and hence suspicious. He was too blatantly candid to be sincere. Or so worried Daphne.

  And then again, there was the matter of Mr Langham’s people. Nobody seemed to know a thing about them. Daphne had been conducting investigations, of course, via letters dispatched to her friends in London, and to her sister, Louise, Beatrice’s mother, now holidaying in Suffolk, but all her enquiries had drawn blanks. She found this terribly worrying. So much of her mental energy was expended on social mapping – who was connected to whom, and was it by birth, or by marriage? – that she was confident if she could plot no co-ordinates at all for a man, then in all likelihood he had no co-ordinates worth plotting.

  Such was her concern, she had decided it would be irresponsible to tolerate the uncertainty any longer; she must tackle the problem of Mr Langham’s people head-on. She and Rose were in the chilly morning room, sitting with Mrs Hamilton-Whitney, a large lady of 50, and the two Misses Templeton, tweedy, ageing, spinsters. Daphne was sitting on one of the sofas, next to the younger Miss Templeton; Rose was sitting on the opposite sofa, between Mrs Hamilton-Whitney and the elder Miss Templeton. For the last twenty minutes, the quartet of older women had been discussing millinery trimmings, and now they were disagreeing on whether or not it was too much for ladies past their prime to have silk violets dangling by their ears: Mrs Hamilton-Whitney rather thought not, although she could persuade neither Daphne nor the Misses Templeton to her jaunty opinion.

  Rose was bored out of her skull. So she was more than ever delighted when Frank walked in with Mr Hamilton-Whitney, both of them dapper in their plus fours.

  Mr Hamilton-Whitney nodded towards the stone-framed window.

  “Raining,” he announced. “No golf.”

  Frank and Rose took the chance of this little distraction to smile at each other unobserved. Or so they thought. In fact, Mr Hamilton-Whitney was the only one in the room unaware of their telltale smile; the women no more missed it than they’d have missed a horse falling out of the sky and landing five feet in front of them.

  Daphne reached up and pretended to pat her hair back into place, as if it had been ruffled by a momentary breeze.

  “Oh, Mr Langham,” she said, with no attempt at guile, “I’ve been meaning to ask: are you by any chance one of the Somerset Langhams?”

  Frank was wary of Mrs Fitzgilbert, whom he regarded as something of a tartar. Nonetheless, he was keen to ingratiate himself with a woman as important in Rose’s life as her mother, so he bestowed upon her what he hoped was his most irresistible smile.

  “No,” he said. “Never been to Somerset.”

  “No? Then perhaps the Lincolnshire Langhams?”

  “Nor Lincolnshire.”

  Daphne knew of no other Langhams but these.

  “Then where are your people?”

  Frank was surprised. He looked at Rose.

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh, you didn’t tell her?”

  Daphne likewise looked at Rose.

  “Tell me what?” she demanded of her daughter.

  Rose blushed. How she wished the ground would open up and swallow her! She was just steeling herself to admit that Frank was one of the Saramantan Langhams, when Frank himself beat her to speech. He had composed his face into a solemn mask and he spoke in his most churchy voice.

  “My people are in heaven. Mother, Father, both dead these twenty years.”

  There was a beat of uncomfortable silence.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Daphne, not a bit sorrowfully. She knew she shouldn’t, but she decided needs must, she’d better pry. “But before that … ?”

  “Before that they were in Saramantan.” Frank paused, “That’s in Malaya.” He added, considerately. “It’s where I’m from.”

  “From?” Asked Daphne, as if the word were new to her.

  “Born there.” Frank clarified.

  Daphne dismissed colonials as black sheep and remittance men – men paid so much each month by their families to
keep them out of the country. Or else they were small-minded suburbanites transplanted to the tropics, where they became far too cocksure for their own good. In any case, they were terribly inferior sorts, the lot of them.

  “I see,” she said, in an icicle voice.

  Frank sensed the chill, and he even understood it, nonetheless he soldiered on.

  “I live there still. I’m on Home leave between postings.”

  Mr Hamilton-Whitney rubbed his hands together, jovially.

  “Langham’s a jungle-wallah. A District Officer deep in the jungle, don’t you know.”

  Daphne looked severe. She couldn’t approve of jungles, and she could only suppose a District Officer must be something akin to a District Nurse, which was an admirable thing to be, but scarcely manly. She raised an accusatory eyebrow to Mrs Hamilton-Whitney: why didn’t you tell me this? Mrs Hamilton-Whitney looked back at her with apologetic innocence: this is news to me. But though Daphne was cross with Mrs Hamilton-Whitney, she was far crosser with Rose. She turned to her daughter: the infernal girl would not meet her eye. Huh! She bestowed upon her a glittering glare, and she said again, in a tone just as wintery as before, “I see.”

  *

  Rose and Daphne continued to stew over, as Daphne saw it, her daughter’s underhand and unjustifiable refusal to share significant information about Mr Langham, and, as Rose saw it, her mother’s snobbish and unjustifiable disdain for all colonials, but especially those named Frank Langham. About a week later they again had words about him.

  For the sake of economy, mother and daughter were sharing a room. It was a big room, well able to accommodate, at one end, two single beds, a wardrobe, a washstand and a dressing table, and, at the other, a stone fireplace, empty in the summer months, with armchairs arranged at right angles to it. A few side tables were dotted about. The heavy, and heavily carved, mahogany furniture harked back to the 1890s, as did the fussily fringed brocade curtains. Though the lighting was electric, the gilded wall lights were old-fashioned homages to curlicues and twiddles.

  For the past hour Daphne had been in the hotel’s library, reading The Times – such terrible events in Asia Minor – but now she had returned to her’s and Rose’s room to change for dinner. When she pushed through the door she found her daughter curled up on one of the armchairs, looking miserable and with a letter unfolded on her lap.

  “Are you moping?” she accused.

  Rose was startled out of her reverie.

  “Moping? No.”

  “Well something’s the matter.”

  “No it’s not.”

  Daphne looked at Rose a long moment, and then she nodded to the letter in her lap.

  “Who’s it from?”

  Rose saw nothing else for it.

  “Beatrice,” she sighed, “I expect there’s one for you from Aunt Louise somewhere in the mail.”

  Daphne flinched as she saw, immediately, the lie of the land. According to Louise’s letters from Suffolk – almost unbearably gloating letters – Beatrice, dratted girl, had quite made one Mr Edmund Marchmorant her victim. Indeed, Louise’s last letter had talked of little but this Edmund, of his house, Raddington Court, of what little dears his sisters were, of how delightful was his mother.

  “Dear Beatrice,” she said, bracing herself, “what news?”

  Mother and daughter exchanged a significant look.

  “Mr Marchmorant has proposed,” confirmed Rose. “Uncle Thomas has given his permission; they’re to be married as soon as can be arranged.”

  Though, when she thought of how Louise would now condescend to her, Daphne felt desperately sorry for herself, she felt sorrier still for her daughter, and she spoke as gently as she was able.

  “You poor old thing.”

  Rose looked shocked.

  “Mummy! I’m very pleased for Beatrice.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “I am!”

  “But still.”

  Rose dropped her gaze to the letter in her lap. She re-read a line of Beatrice’s looping scrawl: My ring is set with three garnets, each as plump as a red currant … For a moment, her whole being flared with fury. It was too bad! It was too bad Beatrice was engaged, and she wasn’t. It was too bad she was pitied and patronised by her mother.

  “You should know something!” she flashed. “I believe Frank is going to propose.”

  Daphne was aghast.

  “What? You can’t mean it, surely?”

  “Yes I can. I do.”

  Daphne berated herself as a fool, an absolute fool: much against her better judgement she’d persuaded herself nothing could come of Rose’s and Mr Langham’s friendship – not when he was going back to Saramantan in another month or so. She wrung her hands and she said, with anguish, “I quite blame myself. I knew it! I should have nipped all this in the bud. I should have bundled you home. I told myself: it’s a flash in the pan, Daphne, a flash in the pan.”

  “But all you’ve ever wanted for me is that I marry.”

  “Marry well.”

  “I know you don’t like colonials, but …”

  Daphne interrupted her daughter.

  “Our family has never had anything to do with those sorts of people.”

  “Such terribly bad form,” said Rose, facetiously.

  Daphne narrowed her eyes.

  “Form has nothing to do with it. You can’t frisk off to Saramantan; you’ve never even been to Scotland.”

  “The great world out there. The vast, wide world all waiting to be discovered.”

  “Don’t be silly! Abroad is bloody!”

  “But you’ve never been there!”

  “I’ve never broken my leg, either, but I know I wouldn’t want to. I mean, to say: Malaya! The distance! How many thousands of miles is it, between England and Malaya?”

  Rose’s anger began to cool. She warned herself: be compassionate; be grateful. She thought how resentful she’d have been if her mother hadn’t been upset at the thought of her removal to Saramantan – or to anywhere distant, for that matter. And she was an only child. Her mother was a widow. She wanted to ask: you worry you’d be lonely, Mummy, if marriage whisked me far away? But her courage failed her, so she asked instead, “You worry I’d be lonely, Mummy?”

  Daphne gave a dismissive toss of her head.

  “Of course you’d be lonely … I worry you wouldn’t cope. Life in the jungle.”

  “I’d be interested to see how I overcame the challenges.”

  “Heat? Malaria? Too many hairy creeping things with too many legs? Nothing but leaves and leaves and trees and trees for miles and miles and miles. No shops. No social life to speak of. What would you do all day? Who would you see? The tedium! And once you were imprisoned by the forest there’d be no turning back.”

  Rose flinched, as it hit her, at last – and oh, God, too late, perhaps? – that she and her mother were horribly tempting fate. She flapped her hands, as if to flap away any loitering god of retribution.

  “We should stop this, Mummy, we’re getting all forward of things. Frank may not propose, after all.”

  “But you said you think he’s going to.”

  “Perhaps I was mistaken.”

  Daphne was scarcely falling for that. She stared a moment at some stone acanthus leaves carved into the fireplace surround. Never mind that Mr Langham could so easily remove Rose to some distant shore, and there trap her in a life of boredom and loneliness, what about her suspicion of his character? Was he kind? Generous? Loyal? How could she know, when he looked at her with such damning guilelessness? Tact was not her forte, and yet she did try to be tactful.

  “Think ahead!” she said. “Once the springtime blossoms of first acquaintance had dropped their pretty pink petals, I fret you’d all too quickly become exasperated by his boyish ways.”

  Rose took umbrage.

  “I doubt it; I do so admire him for them.”

  Unusually for her, Daphne was at something of a loss; she retreated to her habitual directness.

  “Well in any case, he looks me too fully in the eye.”

  “What?” Rose jibbed, “What do you mean?”

  “It makes me think he must be hiding something.”

  “Mummy!”

  “I find him too charming to be trustworthy. Only a fool would trust charm.”

  “Thank you!”

  “It’s too easily switched on and off. It’s so horribly presumptuous.”