Somewhere in England by Carola Oman

Author:Carola Oman
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2019-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

III

Pamela Taylor was distressingly talkative on the subject. She arrived in high dudgeon on a windy mid-April day, to say that Granny Merle had told her that Rex and Valerie were parting, but had then shut up like an oyster.

“So I thought I had better come straight to see you. What on earth has happened? I can as soon imagine Went without the cathedral. I mean, no such thing has ever happened to a Merle.”

Mary repeated the little that she knew, and Pamela, who had been one of the last people in the landscape to hear anything, was clearly disappointed.

“Granny seemed to be taking it fairly flatly, too,” she commented. “She reminded me quite snappishly that Rex was descended from Charles II. When I said that it was just countenancing Sin on her part not to nip such an idea in the bud, she told me not to talk nonsense. Nothing will persuade me that Rex wants it. I mean, having stuck Valerie for nearly twenty-five years, no man in his senses could want to put his head in that noose again. And I’m reasonably sure that he’s not been drawing other coverts. And it can’t be anything else, because he’s been practically Pussyfoot since he rejoined his regiment. He’s been much better in every way, if you ask me, since he’s been away from Valerie.”

“Perhaps that’s what he thought himself,” suggested Mary. “No,” said Pamela decisively, “Rex hasn’t the brain to realize that, or the guts to put it through. Granny has had him over, and slated him, I hear. She got him on the telephone the evening before he left Highbridge, and he spent the night at the Dower House. John met him next morning, just leaving, with his luggage being put on the car at the front door. John says that Rex came downstairs from saying good-bye to Granny in her bedroom, holding himself very straight and blowing his nose in a trumpetty way. I’m glad to hear that he seemed ashamed to meet John’s eye. But John has such high ideals, he may easily have imagined that Rex was ashamed, when he was merely burying his face in his handkerchief because he had a roaring cold. In Rex’s position, as I said to Granny, he ought to set an example, and especially in war-time. Now, as a family, we shall be no better off than those awful people who took Nettlerash two years before the war, and she put her head in the gas-oven, and turned out to have had fourteen lovers.”

“Oh, no, dear, surely we shall be a little better off than that,” sighed Mary.

“It’s some idea of Valerie’s,” said Pamela darkly. “Well, I suppose we shall just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, it’s going to be very unpleasant for John and me. I never had such a shock in my life. Aren’t you surprised, too, at Granny? I mean, if you had sprung this on her last winter, I should have said that it would have killed her.

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