Mary Burchell - Nobody Asked Me

Julian turned his head for a moment and gave her a quick, kindly smile.

‘You are a good little philosopher, Alison. But, all the same, I think temperament has a lot to do with your argument. I’m afraid what I remember are the hard, bitter things. The times when I’ve been wildly angry or-’

‘Hurt,’ finished Alison quietly as he hesitated.

‘I wonder why you said that?’ He spoke thoughtfully. ‘I’m not very easily hurt, you know. I’m really rather insensitive!’

‘Oh, no.’ It was Alison who smiled then. ‘You’re not in the least insensitive.’

‘But I don’t think you really know much about me, Alison,’ he said.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘What, for instance?’

She was amused to see that he found himself a not at all disagreeable topic of conversation.

‘Well-that, for one thing. You’re sensitive, very proud, rather on the look-out for slights, extremely determined, easily hurt, and unusually passionate.’

‘Good God!’ said Julian slowly. ‘And I’ve been thinking of you as a nice, unobservant little schoolgirl.’

‘Well, don’t,’ Alison advised him curtly.

‘What makes you think that I’m passionate?’ he asked with sudden stiffness, as though her final words had only just penetrated.

Alison thought unhappily of him with Rosalie in the library and was silent.

‘Anyway, I don’t think you quite know what you’re talking about,’ he told her sharply.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Alison.

And after that they drove on some way in silence. But once she noticed that his colour rose, and she wondered with a little scared amusement which part of her speech he was remembering.

About noon they stopped at a converted farmhouse, where a homely-looking woman gave them lunch, and insisted on waiting on them personally.

She spoke of Alison to Julian as ‘your young lady’, which seemed to amuse him. But Alison couldn’t help thinking it would not have amused Rosalie.

Afterwards, they wandered among the pinewoods that stretched for miles away from the farmhouse. The sparkle had come back to Alison’s eyes and a faint, clear colour to her cheeks. She took off her hat, and the warm, light wind lifted little strands of her hair and stirred the thick fringe on her forehead.

‘What pretty hair you have, Alison,’ he said, pleasantly but quite impersonally.

‘Aunt Lydia says that my fringe is ridiculous,’ Alison remarked non-committally.

‘She’s quite wrong. It’s most attractive.’ She had an odd impression that he enjoyed contradicting something Aunt Lydia had said, and the next moment he added, ‘But then your aunt and I don’t agree on many things.’

‘You don’t like Aunt Lydia, do you?’ Alison said frankly.

‘Not in the least,’ he replied just as frankly.

‘Nor do I.’

And they both laughed.

‘Let’s sit down here.’ Julian cleared some cones from under a group of trees, and they sat down on a carpet of soft pine-needles.

Alison leaned her back against a tree, and he lay on the ground beside her, propped on his elbow.

‘Anyway, you won’t have to bother about Aunt Lydia when you’re married,’ she reminded him. ‘You and Rosalie are going to live in South America, aren’t you?’

He nodded. ‘In Buenos Aires.’

‘Are you glad? To be going back, I mean.’

‘In a way, yes. ‘He moved a little uneasily. ‘I don’t know quite how it will suit Rosalie.’

She wondered if he knew how worried his eyes looked when he said that.

‘Has she said anything about it?’

‘Yes. She’s not at all keen.’ He spoke with obvious reluctance.

Alison wondered dispassionately what on earth was inducing Rosalie to do anything on which she ‘was not at all keen’. She supposed Julian must have a very great deal of money. It never entered her head that any question of affection could be concerned.

‘Will you have to be there long? Couldn’t you perhaps just be engaged until you come back?’ she suggested.

‘No.’ He looked startled and annoyed. ‘It would mean two years at least. And, in any. case, it’s the kind of job where it is essential to be a married man. Socially it’s the most important position on the firm, and there is a great deal of entertaining to be done. An unmarried man couldn’t possibly do what was required. Besides,’ he added starkly, ‘I couldn’t bear to wait for Rosalie all that time.’

Alison stared down at her hands as they lay very still in her lap.

‘You’re terribly in love with her, aren’t you?’ she said simply.

He flushed a little.

‘Yes. Desperately,’ he said, and looked at her almost resentfully.

She was silent, thinking that ‘desperately’ was probably literally correct.

After a minute he spoke again. ‘I know. You’re wondering why, aren’t you? You can’t understand it because you don’t like her yourself?’

She still said nothing. There seemed nothing to say.

‘It isn’t that I’m blind to anything like her-her unkindness to you.’ He spoke slowly and unhappily. Then he rolled over suddenly and dropped his head on his arms with a sort of angry despair. ‘It doesn’t seem to make any difference,’ he said in a muffled voice. ‘I’m just as crazy about her. I don’t expect you could understand.’

‘Yes, I think I do.’ And, just for the moment, Alison put out her hand and touched the tumbled dark head, but so very, very lightly that he couldn’t possibly have known.

He looked up presently and smiled.

‘I’m sorry. It’s ridiculous to tell you all this.’

‘No, it isn’t. One has to tell someone these things sometimes,’ Alison said gravely.

He sighed impatiently. Then he took her hand absently and began to play with her fingers. ‘It’s so easy to tell you, Alison. You keep so still and don’t make idiotic exclamations when one says impossible things.’

She smiled slightly. ‘But I like it when you tell me things about yourself-impossible or otherwise.’

‘You’re very comforting,’ he told her with a little smile.

And she thought, ‘I wish I could put my arms round you and hold you and comfort you properly.’

But she couldn’t, of course. So. she said nothing, and presently, when he spoke again, it was not about himself and Rosalie.

‘What are your uncle and aunt’s plans for your future, Alison?’

Alison shrugged.

‘Uncle doesn’t approve of girls working, and says he is only too happy to give me a home. Aunt Lydia quite approves of my working, so long as I do it for her and don’t expect any sort of payment. It’s rather a vicious circle.’

Julian looked disturbed.

‘Probably your aunt will take you about much more, and treat you more like a daughter, when Rosalie is married.’

‘I dare say.’

Alison thought how pointless all that would be-when Rosalie was married.

‘In which case you’re certain to get married.’ Julian was calmly following out the line of Alison’s future.

‘Perhaps nobody will ask me,’ she said lightly, because it hurt rather to have him say these things.

He laughed a little.

‘That’s the real Victorian Alison speaking,’ he said, and his tone was as light as hers. ‘I imagine half the girls of today do most of the asking themselves. But you’re much too attractive ever to have to resort to that.’

He spoke with sincerity, but so impersonally that Alison gritted her teeth.

‘In a minute he’ll tell me I shall make a marvellous wife for some lucky man,’ she thought grimly.

And’ so that he shouldn’t, she jumped to her feet and said, ‘Don’t you think it is time we were getting back?’

He agreed lazily, and they slowly made their way back to the farm.