had pushed his white-blond hair right off his face, taken off his glasses and was grinning at her.
May hesitated, feeling the beginnings of a blush just beneath the collar of her shirt. “Oh well, you know, I’d do anything for some people. Well certainly for Florence.”
Vera Borchby must have left her door open by mistake. She had certainly not been expecting visitors and did not notice May and Florence standing in her sitting room. Her uninvited callers could tell that one of the two figures on the sofa was definitely Vera by the laced-up gardening boots that were sticking up in the air. The jaunty chords of an Irving Berlin song floated from the wireless in a corner of the room but they failed to drown out the grunting noises coming directly from the sofa. May had grabbed Florence’s hand and pulled her outside.
There had been loud protests followed by hundreds of questions. And finally, after buying an ice cream from the man who travelled round villages with an icy box attached to the front of his bicycle, Florence promised she would not say a word about Lady Myrtle hugging Miss Borchby upside down and about the two women being what May described rather desperately as “convivial.” As Florence had assured May so many times before, Florence was good at keeping secrets.
“And what happened to Myrtle afterwards?” Julian asked, eager to hear the conclusion.
“She left the next day. None of us saw her again, except Mr. Hooch, who took her to the station. But I am afraid we could not help discussing it. Cooky was impressively knowledgeable about ‘them that swing the other way.’ She told us about a woman called Hall-something, I think, who wrote a book about it not long ago.”
“Quite a disappointing book in that way,” Cooky had remarked with rare knowledge of the printed word. “A friend of mine even asked the bookshop for her money back. I expect there are dozens of women at it behind closed doors,” she surmised with a pronounced pout of her lips and a quick whip round their overdry surfaces with her tongue.
Mr. Hooch had been less outraged although equally captivated by speculation over the goings-on in the gardener’s cottage.
“Whoever would have guessed it?” he said to May, with the jolly twinkle he reserved exclusively for her. “Nothing more than a couple of girl pansies, aren’t they? Right in the middle of our village! I say! But no harm done, eh?” he chuckled. “It’s the aftereffects of that bloody war again, excuse my language. Not enough of us decent men left to go round are there? Does funny things to women, war does.”
May was coming to the end of her story. “When Sir Philip came back from Chequers he gathered us all (except Vera, of course) in the drawing room and asked us to keep the incident to ourselves, and to realise what a blessing it was that Lady Joan knew nothing about it. He asked me privately to mark ‘return to sender’ on all the envelopes that came addressed to him in green ink and give them back to the postman. He had a word with Vera too. The beauty of the garden is what persuaded him not to sack her, although he was very keen to stress to all of us that she had not done anything wrong. She even offered to find a good home for that poor canary. And Mr. Hooch is more pleased than anyone that Vera is staying because he says she grows the best lettuces in Sussex.”
May was reluctant to finish her account of the recent weeks at Cuckmere. As long as she kept talking, she told herself, there would be no chance for Julian to tell her how happy he had been with Lottie in Berlin. She watched his tweedy back as he waited at the bar for Danny to refill their beer glasses.
“I’ve got some good news to tell you,” he said at last, putting his glass down on the table with a flourish. “I have decided to train for the law and become a barrister. An excellent crammer has offered me a place to study for the Bar exams starting in September. And, even better, I have been accepted as a student at the Middle Temple. And the best thing of all is that now that I have escaped from the manicured clutches of Lottie I will have all the time in the world to concentrate on the bar exams.”
“I