No Fond Return of Love Read Free Page A

which the pears were now ripe; she could almost see them in a Pre-Raphaelite perfection of colour and detail, leaves and fruit. September was her favourite month – the garden full of dahlias and zinnias, Victoria plums to be bottled, pears and apples to be ‘dealt with’, windfalls to be collected and sorted. It had been a good year for fruit and there would be a lot to do. The house was big, almost ‘rambling’, but very soon her niece Laurel – her sister’s child – was coming to London to take a secretarial course and would be living there. Dulcie looked forward to planning her room. She would have liked the house to be full of people; it might even be possible to let rooms. There were so many lonely people in the world. Here Dulcie’s thoughts took another turn and she began to think about the things that worried her in life – beggars, distressed gentlefolk, lonely African students having doors shut in their faces, people being wrongfully detained in mental homes …
    It must have been much later – for she was conscious of having been woken – that there was a tap on her door.
    ‘Who is it?’ she called out, curious rather than alarmed.
    A figure appeared in the doorway – like Lady Macbeth, Dulcie thought incongruously. It was Viola, her dark hair hanging loose on her shoulders, wearing a dressing-gown of some material that gleamed palely in the dim light. Dulcie saw that it was lilac satin.
    ‘I’m so sorry, I must have woken you up,’ Viola said. ‘But I couldn’t sleep. The dreadful thing is that I seem to have forgotten my sleeping pills. I can’t think how it can have happened. I never go anywhere without them …’ She sounded desperate, on the edge of tears.
    ‘I’ve got some Rennies,’ said Dulcie, sitting up in bed.
    ‘Oh, I haven’t got indigestion,’ said Viola impatiently, irritated at Dulcie’s assumption that it was a stomach upset that had prevented her from sleeping.
    ‘I always find that if I read a nice soothing book it sends me off to sleep,’ said Dulcie, meaning to be helpful. ‘But is there something worrying you? I think there must be. Is it Aylwin Forbes?’ she asked kindly,
    ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Viola sat down on the bed.
    ‘You love him or something like that?’ Dulcie was not perhaps choosing her words very skilfully, but it was, after all, the middle of the night.
    ‘I don’t know, really. You see, his wife has left him, gone back to her mother, and I should have thought – all things considered – that he’d have – well, turned to me.’
    ‘Turned to you? For comfort, yes, I see.’
    ‘We did this work together – we were such friends, so of course I thought…’
    ‘Perhaps he thinks it’s rather soon – I mean, to turn to anybody.’
    ‘But comfort – surely one could do so much. I should be so glad to do what I could.’
    ‘Yes, of course one does like to, perhaps women enjoy that most of all – to feel that they’re needed and doing good.’
    ‘It isn’t a question of my enjoying anything,’ said Viola sharply. ‘I want to do what I can for him .’
    Dulcie wanted to ask more about the wife’s leaving – had she been driven to it by something he had done? – but she did not feel she could do so yet. From the way Viola was talking it seemed that Aylwin Forbes was the injured one.
    ‘Perhaps his grief has gone too deep,’ she suggested.
    ‘But he has come to this conference.’
    ‘Yes, to take his mind off things. It might well do that.’
    ‘But I feel he’s avoiding me,’ Viola went on. ‘He was very awkward when we met before dinner, didn’t you notice?’
    ‘Well, the gong rang almost immediately and everybody started to push forward – it would have been awkward for anybody.’
    ‘Then afterwards, when I was sitting by myself in the conservatory’ – Viola seemed to be speaking her thoughts aloud – ‘I think he looked in through the glass doors and didn’t come in because he saw me there.’
    ‘He