Cassandra By Chance. Betty Neels

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СКАЧАТЬ this time and as dark as the ogre, had come round the corner of the cottage. He had his sweater sleeves rolled up and the first thing Cassandra’s sharp eyes saw were the numbers tattooed on his arm, between his wrist and his elbow. She knew what they meant—he had been in a concentration camp. He had the face of an old hawk and looked decidedly surly, but all the same she wished him a good afternoon and he gave a surprised, reluctant reply. Still more surprising, however, was the fact that the man in the dark glasses spoke. ‘This is Jan, my good friend—he can do everything except make cakes.’ He smiled a little. ‘He speaks excellent English and Polish, if you should have a knowledge of that language, but don’t on any account address him in German; he dislikes that, for his own very good reasons.’

      Cassandra said briefly: ‘I can’t speak anything but English and school French.’ She put out her hand. ‘How do you do, Jan?’ and shook his hand, careful not to look at the tattooed numbers. ‘I daresay I shall see you some time in the shop, shan’t I?’ She smiled and saw the faint reflection in his own face. She wished the ogre would smile too—he would look very nice then—if he ever did, but he seemed a bitter man, which was natural enough. She wondered how he had come to lose his sight in the first place and longed to ask him, although she knew that to be impossible. She wished him a pleasant goodbye which he answered with the briefest of nods in her direction, and started back down the path. She was almost home when she remembered that he had never answered her question as to whether he could see at all.

      The next day being Sunday, she took the children to church, a bare whitewashed building, filled to capacity, and after the service, when she paused at the door to wish Mr Campbell a good morning, she was bidden to wait a few moments so that she might meet Miss Campbell, a treat she wasn’t particularly anxious to experience. The lady, when she came, was exactly as Cassandra had pictured her, only more so; she was younger than her brother, with a determined chin and cold blue eyes which examined Cassandra’s London-bought hat with suspicion and then raked her face, looking for signs of the frivolity the owner of such a hat would be sure to possess. But there was nothing frivolous about Cassandra’s face; Miss Campbell sighed with vexation—she had already heard far too much about this young woman from London from her brother, who, at his age, should know better, and now she had seen for herself that there were none of the more regrettable aspects of the modern world visible in the girl—only the hat. She would have her to tea, she decided, and show her up, with her usual skill, before her brother, and Cassandra, while unaware of these thoughts, sensed that she wasn’t liked—well, she didn’t like Miss Campbell either. She murmured noncommittally over the invitation to tea and made a polite escape with the murmured excuse that she had the Sunday dinner to see to.

      Out of hearing, she was immediately attacked by her two small companions.

      ‘But you got the dinner ready before we came out, Aunt Cassandra,’ Andrew pointed out.

      ‘You said…’ began Penny.

      ‘Yes, my dears, I know. I told a fib, didn’t I? I’m very sorry, but you see I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and I didn’t want to go back to the Manse, and I believe Mr Campbell was on the point of asking us.’

      This sensible way out of an awkward situation was immediately sanctioned, although Andrew asked doubtfully, ‘But you don’t usually fib, Aunt Cassandra, do you?’

      And she, in some ways as young as her companions, crossed her fingers as she assured him that no, she did her best not to.

      She thought about the ogre quite a lot during the next few days, and when she met Jan in the village shop and saw the meagre groceries he was buying, she went home, baked a large fruit cake and that same afternoon, after the children had gone back to school, climbed the path behind the house once more.

      Probably she would get the cake thrown at her, but at least she had to try; the thought of the two men living in a kind of exile without enough to eat and with no hope of a home-made cake for their teas touched her heart—and perhaps this time the ogre would be more friendly. She had no wish to pry, she knew how difficult it was for anyone to reconcile themselves to blindness, especially when they were young—and he was still young, she guessed about thirty-five.

      This time she walked boldly up the path and knocked on the door, and was rewarded by the ogre’s voice bidding her to go in and shut the door behind her. It led directly into the sitting-room, small and cosy and extremely untidy, but none the less clean. Cassandra paused just inside the door and before she could speak, the man in the dark glasses said: ‘It’s you again.’

      ‘Oh, you can see—I’m so glad!’ said Cassandra, her plain face illuminated by delight.

      ‘We don’t have so many visitors that I can’t make a shrewd guess as to who it is. Besides, Dioressence isn’t so difficult to recognize—I don’t imagine that there are many women in the village who wear it.’ The dark glasses were turned in her direction. ‘Why have you come? Did I invite you?’

      A bad beginning, she had to admit. ‘No—but I was in the shop this morning and Jan was there and—and…’ She paused, not knowing how to say it without hurting his pride, of which she had no doubt he had far too much. ‘Well, I thought you might like a cake, as you said Jan couldn’t make cakes—it’s only a fruit one, but if you put it into a tin it will keep for days.’

      She was still standing by the door and she couldn’t see his face very well, for he was sitting by the fire in a large armchair, half turned from her. He said quietly: ‘Will you sit down? I’m afraid we aren’t very tidy, but move anything you have to,’ and when she had done so, still clutching the cake, he went on: ‘You’re kind. We don’t encourage visitors, you know—there’s no point. I’m only here for a few weeks and they are almost over.’

      ‘You’ll go home?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘I don’t think you’re English—or Scottish—and you can’t be German because if you were Jan wouldn’t be with you.’

      His smile mocked her. ‘Intelligent as well as beautiful,’ he remarked silkily.

      ‘If you didn’t have to wear those glasses you would see that I am rather a plain girl.’

      ‘Indeed? In which case we must allow my dark glasses to have some advantage after all.’

      She went a painful scarlet. In a voice throbbing with self-restraint, she said: ‘That was really rather rude.’

      The mouth beneath the dark glasses sneered. ‘Yes, but you asked for it, young woman.’

      She got to her feet, laid the cake carefully down on the table and said in a sensible voice: ‘Yes, I did, didn’t I? I shall know better next time, if ever there is a next time. I came because I thought you might be lonely, but I see now that I’ve been officious and I expect you find me a prig as well. I’m sorry.’ She was at the door, she opened it, said goodbye and was through it and away down the path with such speed that she didn’t hear his sharp exclamation.

      She had put the children to bed and was sitting with her gros-point in her lap, thinking about her afternoon visit and its awful failure, when there was a knock on the door. It was Jan, and when she invited him in, he shook his head and said: ‘I’m not to stop, miss. Mr van Manfeld sent me to ask if you would go and see him again—tomorrow, perhaps? He wishes to talk to you.’

      Cassandra felt an instant pleasure, which in the face of her recent reception at the cottage, was ridiculous. She said cautiously, ‘Oh, I can’t possibly come tomorrow, or the day after that—let me see…’ she frowned over СКАЧАТЬ