you? I mean, I don’t think Rosemary’s counted on . . . on Mrs. Gould’s being such a . . .” He stopped and shook his head a little. “I mean, she’s heard all about her being a swell boatman and swimmer, and all that, but I . . .”
“You mean she’s not prepared to find her beautiful as well.”
George got still redder and hotter.
“Well, you know—she saw her, once. In Shanghai.”
“She did?”
“Well, not officially. It was before Jim married her. And she’s . . . she’s got the wrong idea.”
“I wonder,” I said.
George laughed. “You women are all cats. You’ll stand by, anyway, won’t you?”
I nodded. He crossed the street again.
Somebody spoke behind me: “Hello, Grace.” I turned. Jim’s mother was coming out of Toplady’s with young Andy by the hand.
“Wasn’t that George Barrol?” she asked.
I nodded.
Mrs. Gould’s face is a strange combination of her two children. She looks like Lucy Lee except that her curly hair is white instead of chestnut, and her face is gentler, with more repose, as finely cut and delicate but rather determined in a way that Lucy Lee’s isn’t.
“You know the Bishops are coming today?” I asked. “For a month.”
“Elsie Carter told me. Rosemary’s engaged?”
I nodded.
“Jim doesn’t know yet, does he?”
“Oh yes,” she smiled. “Sandra told him this morning. I don’t think anybody else would dare. Of course he had to know.”
You can’t very well tell a woman her daughter-in-law isn’t telling the truth . . . at least you couldn’t tell Mrs. Gould that. She’s the only person who’s always been unfailingly loyal to Sandra, and if most of us have thought it was just a deeper loyalty to Jim we’ve had no reason for it.
“Somehow I’d got the notion he didn’t know,” I said casually.
“It’s rather difficult to know what Jim knows,” she replied, laughing. “I think I’ll go rescue Sandra. Look—I never knew George Barrol was so resourceful.”
I followed her glance across the street. George was there with Sandra, his hat in his hand. They were laughing merrily, but it was Sandra’s bundles they were picking up, so I doubted how much of the resourcefulness was his. Still, it made it simpler, George knowing her before the others came.
The clock on the church tower at the top of the road struck eleven. Across the street Mrs. Gould was shaking hands with George and presenting him properly to her son’s wife. In a moment a little crowd had gathered, and by the time Julius had brought my car around from Dock Street George had greeted half the town.
Only Jim Gould was still in Mr. Toplady’s general store buying a pack of cigarettes. Poor old Jim, who except for the girl in the dusty pink cartwheel hat across the road would be somewhere on the seas in a white uniform—or so they say—and Rosemary Bishop wouldn’t be coming back to April Harbor engaged to somebody else.
CHAPTER TWO
I ought to explain April Harbor a little, in view of what happened there later, although the papers carried maps of it for days. Most of the things they said about it weren’t true, however. Nobody there is fabulously wealthy, for instance, or ever was, and we don’t have armed guards to protect us from the natives who burn down our garages.
Actually April Harbor Colony is a group of people most of whom have grown up together in the summers there, merely by the accident of their fathers’ and mothers’ having bought part of the old Lloyd estate on the bay, which was called Poplar Hill. My father had been chiefly interested because he wanted me to be some place near Alice Gould during vacations, after Mother died. Rodman Bishop came in later for much the same kind of reason, although it was Elsie Carter’s notion that it wasn’t for Rosemary and Chapin so much as for himself. But that was Elsie, even then.
I don’t think any of us ever spent a summer away from the Harbor until Jim went to Annapolis. I married here when I was twenty-two, and I was here when Dick was killed, Rosemary had gone by then, and the days when I’d chaperoned her to hops in Annapolis were gone too. I remember the two of them so well one afternoon in a walled garden there, young and serious and sure of their own future, asking me if I’d come to China and stay with them. And of course it was in China that Sandra happened. I’ve always been sorry I didn’t go. One of my youngsters was sent home from St. Paul’s with whooping cough, and whooping cough lasts a long time. When he was over it Jim was married to Sandra, and Rosemary and her father and George Barrol were flying across Tibet or something on their way to Paris.
It’s odd how all the houses in our row seem almost doomed. Judge Gould was drowned when his catboat capsized in a sudden squall. Chapin Bishop was drowned too, though not in the same way, and Dick was hurrying home from trying a case in Chicago when he crashed in the Ohio. Only the Carters seemed to flourish till they have an odor of sanctity like the green bay leaf—and they aren’t in our row anyway.
The Colony has a water frontage of something like a mile and a half, including an inlet where the yacht basin and swimming beach are. Overlooking it is the clubhouse, which was the old Poplar Hill mansion, with wide pillared porch and green lawn where the children play. It’s all very rural and lovely—old trees and old gardens, and a couple of peacocks that sit on the marble urns that were brought from Italy before the Civil War. There are a lot of giant magnolias about, with their great white waxen blooms laden with yellow bees, and lilac trees, and tangles of roses and trumpet vine and wisteria.
To get down to the sandy beach and the big float there are stone steps, not elaborate but adequate, and there’s a road too, down behind the clump of dogwood and wild cherry. The children play on one beach, under the watchful eyes of a couple of official nurses and a lifeguard; and out in front is the basin, dotted with gleaming sails and housing a few yachts—not so many as there used to be, but a few, and a new one or two this year.
The white cottages are dotted over the estate, most of them with an acre or so of private ground. Some of them are elaborate, like the Bishops’, with oil furnaces and servants’ quarters. Others are simple. Ours is, so we manage with a colored man and his wife. The Gould place is like ours. Sandra and Jim live in the main house with Mrs. Gould. Lucy Lee and Andy have a separate cottage that used to be a guest house when they were growing up. It happens that my cottage is between the Bishops’, on my left, and the Goulds’, on my right. To get to the Beach Club I drive out my back gate into the road, turn left past the Goulds’ and another cottage that belongs to the Chetwynds, then left again at the Corner and on about a quarter of a mile to the club. When I walk, which most of us still do, I cut through the Goulds’ yard past their garage, through their front yard and past Lucy Lee and Andy’s cottage into a lane that runs along the bank the length of the waterfront.
I can, of course, go directly to that lane from my front garden. So can the Bishops, but normally they’d cut through my yard and through the Goulds’, and into the lane that way. It’s considerably shorter, and then we always went everywhere together, so it worked out most conveniently that way when we were younger.
I can see the Bishops’ chimneys from my upstairs window, out across our tennis court over the hedge of crape myrtle through the tops of the trees. I’d intended running over around five, but I didn’t have a chance to. In the first place, Colonel Primrose, with his alarming bodyguard Sergeant Buck, arrived at the Chetwynds’ where they’d been invited for the week end, and unfortunately all the Chetwynds’ aunts and uncles arrived, uninvited, simultaneously. As I was one of the few people with a room available for the week end, Bill and Louise naturally overflowed into my house. They offered me an octogenarian aunt and uncle, but I have them of my own, so we compromised on Colonel Primrose and his sergeant.
I