Sixty Days to Live Read Free Page A

the help of a woman in the kitchen and a farm hand who laid the fires, cleaned the shoes and did the other heavy work each morning. She made an unnecessary parade of busying herself and mildly sarcastic remarks about Lavina’s proverbial laziness.
    But Lavina, lolling in a big armchair, refused to be drawn and watched her sister with a faintly cynical smile as the older girl went off to lay the table for supper.
    To his own surprise, Sam found himself offering to help and he could cheerfully have smacked Lavina for the openly derisive grin with which she favoured him; but Gervaise Stapleton would not hear of his guest lifting a finger and had just produced some remarkably fine Madeira in a dust-encrusted bottle.
    ‘We have unfortunately used up all our old sherry,’ he explained, ‘but I trust you will find this a passable substitute.Luckily, I still have a few bins of it. My grandfather laid it down.’
    Sam made a rapid calculation. The dark golden nectar had been bottled in the 1840’s or early ‘50’s at the latest, then. He sipped it and found it marvellous.
    A newcomer entered at that moment; a good-looking, fair man aged about thirty, in well worn tweeds; whom Gervaise introduced as ‘our neighbour, Derek Burroughs’.
    With a quick nod to Sam, Burroughs walked straight over to Lavina, took both her hands and smiled down into her face.
    ‘So you’re back at last,’ he murmured. ‘I was beginning to think you’d completely forgotten us.’
    ‘I could never do that, Derek,’ she smiled up at him.
    Sam Curry’s mouth tightened. The fellow was in love with her. That was as clear as if he had said so, and it looked as if she had tender memories of him. For the first time that evening Sam felt himself as Sir Samuel,
and his age—getting on for fifty. He didn’t like the thought of this solid, good-looking ghost that had suddenly arisen out of Lavina’s past but he comforted himself quickly. Burroughs was evidently a gentleman-farmer—a country bumpkin with little brain and probably less money. What if he had had an affair with Lavina in the past? Surely he could not hope to attract the sophisticated woman she had now become. Still, Sam admitted to himself, he would have given a good few of his thousands to be Derek Burroughs’s age again or even to have his figure.
    ‘Do you think I’ve changed much, Derek?’ Lavina was asking.
    ‘You’re still the same Lavina underneath,’ he replied slowly, ‘but on the surface—well, you’re a bit startling, aren’t you?’
    ‘D’you mean my make-up?’
    ‘Yes. All that black stuff round your eyes makes them look smaller and somehow it doesn’t seem to go with your fair complexion. I suppose it’s all right in a film star but the simple folk round here would take you for—for …’
    Oliver Stapleton had been quietly working at a desk in a corner of the room. He turned, and raising his horn-rimmed spectacles, looked across at Lavina under them. ‘Go on, say it, Derek,’ he urged with a dry chuckle. ‘A scarlet woman. That’s the classic expression, isn’t it? She’s remained quite a nice girl really, but she’s still very young.’
    Lavina sat up with a jerk. ‘Uncle Oliver, you’re a beast!’ she laughed. ‘Perhaps I have got a bit much on for the country but I’m so used to it.’
    Sam Curry cut into the conversation with smooth tact and was rewarded by a little look of gratitude from Lavina which made his heart beat faster.
    At dinner they waited upon themselves. The meal was simple but good, and over it the Stapletons and Derek Burroughs talked mainly of old times and friends whom Sam did not know, which left him rather out of it, although Gervaise Stapleton took pains to draw him into the conversation at every opportunity.
    Afterwards they sat in the library again and Lavina told her family something of the joys and pitfalls that she had met with during her three years in the studios.
    At half-past eleven Derek Burroughs reluctantly