The Tender Glory by Jean S. Macleod Page B

man by her side.
    They went out to stand in the darkness and Jim put his arm about her, drawing her against him while the fierce wind tugged at them both.
    “Don’t fret, Alison,” he said, with heartbreaking gentleness. “It’s all going to work out for the best. You’ll see.”
    His words were awkward, but his kiss, firm on her mouth, underlined his sincerity.
    “I’ll take care of you, never fear,” he assured her.
    The revelation of his affection was almost more than Alison could bear in the circumstances. Jim wasn’t the demonstrative type and he had gone out of his way to look after her, but his kiss had been disturbing.
    Gently she disengaged herself from his encircling arm, staring out at the stormy Firth. It wasn’t quite eight o’clock and an eternity of waiting stretched between her and the morning. She wondered if Huntley had reached home and supposed he might be already at the Lodge.
    “I’ve been making friends with the Searles,” she confessed as they made their way to the dining-room. “Tessa’s rather a strange sort of girl. She seemed almost antagonistic when we met, but now I believe we’re getting to understand one another. She’s lonely, I think, shut up there in the Lodge all the time, and I think she’s sensitive about her limp.”
    “She changed completely after her accident.” Jim pulled out a chair for her. “She was the gay, friendly type before it happened. Everybody liked Tessa. She came up here a lot, generally with Robin. They sailed his Snipe together at Scrabster, but after her hip was injured she wouldn’t come. I believe Daviot tried to persuade her once or twice, but it didn’t work. If she wasn’t able to handle a dinghy properly she wouldn’t want to be an onlooker.”
    “I think she feels her position very keenly,” Alison agreed, “but it could right itself, I suppose.”
    “Given time, perhaps.” He studied the menu. “There’s a rumour going round that she’ll marry Daviot.”
    Alison drew in a quick breath.
    “I’ve heard so.” She couldn’t tell him that it was Tessa herself who had given her the impression. “Maybe she wants to wait till she’s absolutely fit.”
    “Or he’s forgotten her sister! Two accidents inside a month,” Jim mused. “It was enough for any man! No wonder he flung himself into work like a fanatic and shut himself up in that lighthouse of his. He was responsible for Tessa’s injuries, of course, but the American plane crash could hardly be laid at his door. We knew Leone Searle quite well up here,” he added when he had given their order to the waiter. “She never turned down a request to sing for charity—a reasonable one, anyway—though she came in the first place because she had been ill. She had a breakdown or something, after a European tour and a change of scene was evidently the answer.”
    “I read about it at the time,” Alison said, toying with her fish. “She was helping with the lunchtime concerts at the Wigmore Hall when she collapsed. It was a great disappointment to everybody concerned.”
    “We wondered why she stayed on at Calders,” Jim remarked, “but when she came back the following year I suppose we knew. Daviot was the obvious attraction.”
    “I wonder—do you think she would ever have settled down here, even at Calders?”
    “That we’ll never know,” Jim decided. “How do you feel about settling down?”
    “I don’t know.” She gazed out through the wide, plate-glass window to the towering headlands etched greyly in the moonlight against the darkness of the Firth. “I haven’t had time to think properly. Sometimes I feel as if part of me has been torn out, as if I’ll never really be a whole person again, and then I wonder if there might not be something else. Some sort of compensation for loss.”
    “One door opening where another has closed? Well, maybe. It has happened before, and you belong here, Alison.”
    Was that the answer? The fact that she had come home. But