Читать книгу Royal Regiment - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 33

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The drive to Hawk Wethered’s house was in course of repair. After three hundred yards it forked between high ragged rhododendrons. Braking dubiously, Rockingham swung to his left, and soon found himself confronted with an old notice board, on which he could hardly read the “Tradesmen Only”.

Anxious for somewhere to turn—driving in reverse always fidgeted him—he went on another fifty yards, and stopped, deciding, “Have to back her after all. Can’t get through this way”.

At that moment, he heard the first ping, the first thud of what imagination said must be a tennis ball. The two noises repeated, and continued to repeat themselves. They came from his immediate right, where a narrow path, newly gravelled, led between high shrubs.

After some fifteen seconds, the noises ceased. After some five more, they went on again. The sheer regularity of them fascinated him. Drawn from his seat, he dismounted and took the gravel path. A few paces—and he caught the glimpse of a white skirt, the flash of a racket. Another pace—and he could see the background of wooden wall with the black line net-high across it.

Manners demanded a return to the car. But curiosity, and his knowledge of the game—only a firstclass player could sustain that speed, that certainty of stroke—took him on another step.

The woman, or rather the girl, was absorbed in her practice. Oblivious to his presence, she had no eyes, no thoughts except for the rally she was sustaining.

He realised her a little below the average height, but extraordinarily graceful. Legs and arms were bare. Above the skirt, which tossed just short of her knees, she wore a sleeveless pullover of brightest scarlet. Although this gravelled half-court was completely in shadow, her cropped hair seemed to reflect the sun every time she stooped to sweep those perfect backhanders just above the black line.

Rockingham counted twenty of those backhanders, each hit exactly in the centre of a flat racket, before that exquisitely timed dropshot which ended the lone rally; before she turned—suddenly aware of him, but not in the least perturbed.

The face matched the figure—and the performance. It made an instant impression of youth, of health, of self-certainty. He noticed how proudly the head was carried; the faint flush that exercise had brought to the cheeks; the controlled breath of the athlete in training.

“You must be Major Rockingham”, she said. “Of course you missed your way to the house. Most people do. I ought to have put that in my letter. But I expected the new board would be up by today. It was promised.”

“I’m afraid I’m too early, Lady Wethered.”

“Oh, no. I said ‘three’.”

Her voice held no trace of any accent he recognised for American, only the faintest hint of a drawl. Taking the hand she offered—small, very beautifully shaped, yet almost as powerful as his own and with no varnish on the nails—he could not help asking himself, “How on earth did she come to marry the Hawk?”

Aloud he said, “Please don’t stop practising”.

“I must have had three quarters of an hour.” She smiled, a little gravely, hardly opening very red, slightly full lips which owed nothing to artifice. “That’s quite enough.

“I didn’t go out to lunch after all”, she added; and it was then he realised that her eyes were almost the same colour as his brother Geoffrey’s, hazel under the high dark arches of the unplucked brows.

Simultaneously, he observed the “collier de Venus”—the sunk line of beauty which circled the base of the strong throat.

This, also, struck him as curiously familiar. For the split of a second, he wondered why.

“You don’t seem exactly in need of practice”, he hazarded. “Unless you’re already training for Wimbledon.”

Her lips smiled again, but the hazel eyes clouded.

“I used to be fairly adequate”, she admitted. “But that’s a long time ago. Let’s be getting up to the house, shall we?”

Over the back of a little iron chair at the edge of the half-court hung a shaggy snuff-coloured coat. Anticipating her movements, he held this up.

“Thank you”, she said, resting her racket against the chair, and turning her back to him.

“Haven’t you a muffler?” he asked.

“I never use them. I simply can’t bear anything round my neck.”

She tucked the racket under her right arm; dropped the one ball she had been using to join the other five in the string bag. Characteristically, she did not ask where he had left his car, merely led the way to it, and climbed in before he could assist her.

“Why—you left your engine running”, she chided. “And with petrol so expensive, too.”

Gail, he remembered—and that was the moment when he ceased to wonder, since Gail’s throat had been similarly circled, why the collier de Venus should strike him as familiar—would have used the word “gasoline”.