Mary Burchell - Nobody Asked Me

Or perhaps, as he was without Rosalie for the week-end, he didn’t mind making up to her.

That thought hurt even more.

She sought for a careless conversational opening, but none presented itself.

‘Alison.’ He put down his cup. ‘Are your duties as a hostess weighing very heavily upon you-or is it that I have offended you over something?’

‘No,’ she said, not very lucidly.

‘Which question are you answering?’ he asked, smiling a little.

‘Both,’ replied Alison desperately.

‘I see.’ He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘So that you are perfectly at your ease, both as a hostess and as a friend?’

‘I-I don’t think you’re a friend,’ Alison was horrified to hear herself stammer.

‘Don’t you?’ He was completely serious now. ‘What have I done to forfeit your friendship-or did I never have it?’

Dead silence.

‘I wish you would answer me, Alison. I’m really rather disturbed about this. Didn’t you look on me as a friend that first evening?’

‘I didn’t understand then,’ Alison got out at last in a very low voice.

‘What didn’t you understand?’

She was aware of faint surprise at the back of her mind for the extreme patience of anyone who was usually so arrogantly impatient.

‘I didn’t understand why you did it. I do now.’

There was silence again for a moment, and then he said with an odd little note in his voice, ‘Why do you suppose I did it?’

If she could have thought of any lie in the world, she would have told it then. But she couldn’t. She could only think of the literal truth. And she said it.

‘You’d quarrelled with Rosalie, and you wanted to make her jealous by paying attention to another girl.’

This time the silence was a long one-and Alison found herself wishing wildly that she could faint.

Then he spoke at last, gravely and quietly.

‘Alison, I do most earnestly beg your pardon, because I think there was a little of that feeing at the back of my mind. But do please believe that my chief thought was something quite different.’

She couldn’t quite have said why, but she felt most exquisite relief at the way he put it. Somehow, his owning to having felt like that was better than a million protestations that no such thought had entered his mind.

‘What-what was your chief thought, then?’ she asked rather timidly.

‘I was so terribly sorry that you had been made to feel lonely and humiliated and-No, don’t look like that,’ he said, as Alison winced angrily.

‘I don’t want to be pitied as a sort of oddity,’ muttered Alison. She knew that must sound terribly ungracious, but she couldn’t help it.

He smiled-that extraordinarily sweet smile which had so astonished her before.

‘That wasn’t in my mind at all,’ he told her. ‘What really moved me was the fact that I knew exactly how you were feeling, because very much the same thing happened to me when I first came to England.’

‘To you! But it couldn’t! You’re so-so much one of them,’ Alison stammered.

‘My dear child, do you really suppose these people consider I’m "one of them"?’ He laughed a little, but, from his heightened colour and the slight quiver of his nostrils, Alison guessed that he hadn’t really liked saying that.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘No? Hasn’t Rosalie ever said anything about me?’ He spoke abruptly.

Alison shook her head.

‘I’ve never heard her speak about you at all.’

He didn’t say anything to that, but Alison suddenly knew she had hurt him a little by that clumsy admission.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ He sighed impatiently. ‘Only-It’s just that there is nothing of the British public school and university about me, you know. I spent the first twenty years of my life hundreds of miles from anywhere, in the wilds of Argentina.’

‘Did you?’ Alison opened her eyes very wide.

He nodded.

‘My father was a cattle drover,’ he added calmly.;A farmer in a small way, too. And I suppose that for most of my youth I never thought of being anything else either.’

Alison stared unbelievingly at him. She tried, without any success, to imagine the cool, perfectly groomed Julian Tyndrum, attired in riding-breeches and an open-necked shirt, riding across miles of prairies in pursuit of wandering cattle-or whatever cattle drovers were expected to do. She decided she was extremely vague about their duties in any case-and looked up to find him watching her with some amusement.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘Nothing-I was only thinking-there’s nothing at all about you to suggest that sort of life.’

‘Oh, yes, there is, Alison.’ He laughed a little. ‘There’s my disposition, my whole outlook on life-and my hands.’ He held them out calmly for her inspection.

Alison looked at them. Her first thought was that they were not hands which would hold anything very lightly, and then-’But I should never mind being held by them.’

‘I think they’re very nice hands,’ she said gravely, and touched one of them lightly.

He gave that slight laugh again, but she knew he was extremely pleased.

‘Tell me why you didn’t become a cattle drover or whatever it was, too,’ she said.

‘Because, the year that I was twenty, one of the big oil-prospecting companies made their way into our district- and their richest find was on the tiny piece of land owned by my father. They tried to persuade him to sell out for a large sum, but he insisted on an interest in the company instead.

‘Actually, his gamble was a fortunate one. In the end he made a great deal more than the original price he had been offered. Besides that, he sent me off to Buenos Aires to put a little polish on me, and then used his influence to get me into the company.’

‘It must have been a terrible break from your old life.’ Alison was touched and flattered at his telling her so much about himself.

Julian smiled. ‘Yes. I didn’t like it much at first. Not when I had to start right at the bottom, with all the routine stuff. But I expect the discipline did no harm. Besides, I soon began to find my feet and to go ahead.’

‘Uncle Theodore once said you have a wonderful business sense,’ Alison remarked rather solemnly.

He shrugged.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, quite calmly. ‘I have a certain flair for big effects which carries me a good way; and at the same time I don’t easily lose my head.’

‘No, I should think not.’ Alison spoke so earnestly that he looked amused again.

‘Anyway, I did very well in Buenos Aires for about five years. Then my father died, and of course I inherited his interest in the company. I was offered what amounted to a directorship at the London headquarters, and so for the first time in my life I came to England. And how I hated it!’

‘Oh-why?’ Alison was shocked and slightly put out.

‘Because I was not in the least "one of them", as you put it. I found myself a complete outsider in the social world to which my money and position admitted me. And-quite naturally, I suppose-I Was made to feel it.’

Alison made a little sound of sympathy. She touched his hand again in that small, friendly gesture, and this time his fingers closed round hers. There was no special significance in the clasp-nothing like the devastating time she had watched him grip Rosalie’s hand-but, all the same, it comforted and warmed her.

‘I can’t pretend I was anything but utterly impossible,’. Julian added thoughtfully. ‘I suppose any polish I had acquired-and it must have been little enough-was definitely un-English. In fact, I heard someone who disliked me describe me as "an objectionable mixture of dago and rough diamond".’

‘Whatever did you do?’ Alison asked curiously.