Arrow in the Heart

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

When a girl is in love with a man and her love is not returned life can be very miserable. When that man loves another the pressures on the girl can be well-nigh unbearable.

This is the unfortunate position of Lucie Reed young Matron at a boy's private school. She is passionately in love with one of the masters whilst he is apparently in love with the headmaster's daughter.

A delightful tale of heart-ache and humour.

Release date: January 1, 1979

Publisher: Magna Print Books

Print pages: 192

Sample

WHEN the telephone bell rang during breakfast on that fateful morning in April, and Lucie sprang to her feet, blushing hotly, Margaret, her half-sister, knew for the first time that ‘something was up’.

The two of them were sitting in the kitchen with the children, going through the usual routine of trying to make two small people eat properly, behave properly and stop making a din.

Up till then, Margaret—affectionately called ‘Maggie’—had thought that Lucie looked a trifle pale and depressed. She had, of course, noticed lately that Lucie had been growing restless. It wasn’t like her. She was usually a calm, contented sort of girl.

“Why,” asked Maggie sharply, “should you suppose the phone to be for you?”

“I–I just think it is,” stammered Lucie, and rushed out of the kitchen.

Maggie shrugged her shoulders and attended to her children: Timothy, aged seven, and Angela, still a baby of three. She adored them both, just as completely as she loved Dick, her husband, who was in the Navy, now in his ship somewhere in the Mediterranean.

Like all young women these days with small means and a family, Margaret Callow was kept busy. She wondered, sometimes, what she would have done without her half-sister’s help. She also felt badly from time to time about Lucie being here, because she had given up a promising career to remain in this house in Hove and look after the family.

Dick had mentioned in his last letter that it was time Lucie was, so to speak, set free. Not that she had in any way been forced to stay an unhappy prisoner. She had volunteered to throw up her nursing profession when Margaret had had that serious operation a year ago. The situation had been so hopeless then. Margaret had had complications. Lucie just had to return home and stay. It was the only home she had known since their parents died, soon after Margaret’s marriage.

At one time Lucie had been convinced that her heart lay in a nursing career. She had gone away to train in a big London hospital. At the end of her second year, the catastrophe of Margaret’s serious illness had put an end to Lucie’s prospects of becoming a nurse. It was now nearly eleven months since she had left the hospital. Dick knew that his wife was well and strong again and could cope with the family. Margaret knew it, too. But she was not quite prepared for the blow which descended on her this morning when Lucie came back from that telephone call.

Margaret, who knew her so well, was instantly aware of a trace of guilt—as well as excitement—on Lucie’s face.

“What’s up with you?” Margaret asked, eyeing her.

Then Lucie blurted out:

“Oh, Maggie, that call was for me. I think I’ve landed a job!”

The elder girl, who had been dipping baby Angela’s finger of toast into a boiled egg, dropped the spoon with a clatter. Angela immediately grabbed it and put it in her mouth and sucked it happily.

Lucie added:

“I didn’t tell you until I knew I was going for the interview, but now I am.”

“Well!” exclaimed Margaret, a trifle huffily, “I must say you’ve kept this very quiet.”

But she could not help giving Lucie a smile. The child (she always thought of Lucie as that, because she was ten years younger than Margaret who had now reached what she considered the great age of thirty-two) looked so pretty this morning with that flush on her heart-shaped face. Usually she was without colour. She never tanned much and had an exceptionally pale skin. Being short-sighted, she wore horn-rimmed glasses, behind which there shone two very beautiful eyes, more green than blue, under those long heavy lashes so often found in short-sighted people. Lucie Reed was what the French call petite. Her movements were quick and graceful. She had an exceptionally slender waist which was her chief beauty. But she had missed being really beautiful because of that tip-tilted nose and rather wide mouth. She had fair, brown, silky hair which she wore in a little bun. It gave her an old-fashioned air. Without her glasses she looked a mere schoolgirl compared with her half-sister who was as plump as Lucie was thin, and already ‘matronly’.

Lucie spoke in a rather guilty voice:

“I hardly dare tell you, but I shall have to leave you on the first of May, Maggie darling; if all goes well at my interview, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t.”

Breakfast over, Margaret turned the children out into the small garden at the back of the villa and smoked a cigarette while Lucie had made her confession.

She had not meant to go off until the end of that year, she said, but lately she had felt that she was no longer really needed here and she did so want a job and life of her own. She could not bear to be dependent on Maggie and Dick any longer, even though she was working for them. But she had decided that she could not face returning to hospital. Perhaps she had never really had a true vocation, but after a year’s absence she had found that the nurses who had been probationers with her had gone on ahead and that it would really mean starting all over again, with strangers. Then she had seen the advertisment. Keynwood Hall School wanted a matron with some hospital experience, to work under supervision, starting the beginning of the summer term.

Now Margaret pricked up her ears and looked attentively at Lucie.

“Keynwood Hall! But that’s where Nat Randall was a master!”

Now Lucie coloured violently.

“That’s right. Still is there, presumably. He was on the resident staff.”

“But you must be cracked!” exclaimed Maggie. “I thought that the last person you’d want to see was Nat.”

Lucie stared at the teacup which she was holding. She poured herself out yet another. She felt thirsty and madly excited.

How wrong Maggie was! Nat wasn’t the last person whom she wanted to see, but the only one. From the time that she had noticed the advertisement, she had felt a little light-headed, she told herself wryly. The very name of Nat’s school had aroused such bitter-sweet memories.

“I presume you must have got over that affair or you wouldn’t be applying for the job,” she heard her half-sister observe.

Lucie gulped. That wasn’t true either. She hadn’t got over it; for since writing her letter to the Headmaster applying for the job, she had continually thought how wonderful it would be to live under the same roof as Nat … to see him again … breathe the same air … hear his voice. She realised how very much she wanted him back in her life. She had done her duty by Margaret and Dick and the children, but it was monotonous here and she was wasted, too, because she had that two years’ nursing experience which she could offer to the little boys at Keynwood and earn some money as well. Her small nephew attended day-school. Maggie could manage Angela alone.

Lucie knew that she had always suffered from having too much heart. The thought of Nat and that ‘affair’, as Maggie called it, of last summer crowded back into her mind. Why had she of all people to fall in love with him? With a young man who was hard as iron. Charming … oh, dear life! how charming Nat Randall used to be! … in an indescribable way. He seemed to get under one’s skin immediately he took one’s hands and said ‘Hello’. Good-looking, clever, he taught English and History at school. He had a way of making a woman feel that she was important to him. Whether she was or not didn’t matter. His charm, Lucie thought, was like a magnet drawing one to him irresistibly against one’s will. Not that it was against hers.

She had met him at a dance in Brighton. After a second glance at Nat and their first dance, she had known that she was like the girl in My Fair Lady; she could have ‘danced all night’ … with Nat.

But at times during their association, even when things seemed to be going with a swing and life was one big thrill for Lucie, he used to draw away—remove himself completely from her orbit. She would feel then as though she had been flung outside in the cold void and left by him there to shiver.

She hadn’t seen or heard of Nat for about nine months now. But sitting here in Maggie’s kitchen she could almost hear his familiar rich, rather lazy voice, saying:

“Ring me up some time, Santa Lucia, and when I can get away I’ll come and take you out. You dance very prettily, and its such an agreeable change to dance instead of looking after a lot of horrid noisy little boys.”

He had given her that lovely and rather foolish nickname Santa Lucia which nobody else had ever thought of (or would again). Saint Lucie … it suited her, he used to laugh. She was such a good little girl! Rather too good and prim to be amusing for long to Nat, perhaps. Yet she had wanted to be all things to him.

There had never been anything definite between Nat and Lucie. He had taken her out from time to time. They seemed to have grown close. She, who had never been in love before, had learned what it was to tremble when she heard that he was coming to take her out; to feel, with ridiculous exaggeration, ready to die when he kissed her hand at parting or told her that she was the ‘sweetest small person in the world’.

Just that sort of thing and nothing more—then suddenly he had gone away. Perhaps he had never guessed what an effect he had on her, she thought bitterly.

Margaret was flinging questions at her. She tried to stop thinking about Nat and tried to answer her half-sister, explain her side of it.

She was twenty-two, nearly twenty-three, she said. She felt that Keynwood wanted a matron with nursing experience under supervision, she could qualify for the job. One of her girlfriends had become a matron in a boys’ preparatory school, starting with four pounds a week and her keep, and was now getting five pounds. That wasn’t bad, and there were the lovely long holidays, and, Lucie added with a rather ingratiating smile at her half-sister, “I can come home then and help you with Tim and Angela. You’ll really need me in the summer when Dick’s on leave.”

“Will you tell the Head that you’re a friend of Nat?”

Lucie bit her lip.

“I’ll see.”

She had gone to Keynwood once, for a Sports’ Day, last summer, as Nat’s guest. She had met and liked Hugh Friern enormously, just from the little she had seen of him. Nat always said that he was a ‘great chap’; but she could not at the moment decide whether or not she would mention to anyone about her previous association with the History and English master.

Now Maggie stared at Lucie’s small pink face. She recognised that firm tilt to the pointed chin, that determined way in which Lucie compressed her lips. She had a strong will behind her shy façade and all her gentleness. She was really full of character. Like their father used to be, Margaret reflected.

“It still seems odd to me that you want to get mixed up with Nat Randall again,” at length Margaret observed aloud.

That brought a torrent of words from Lucie. She had never been ‘mixed up with Nat’. They had only been great friends. He had only kissed her once after a dance. Maggie didn’t know, etc., etc.

“But you were in love with him and you lost a whole stone after he stopped seeing you. Don’t I know it!” exclaimed Margaret.

Lucie took off her spectacles and wiped them. She blinked her long lashes and admitted that she had cared more for Nat than she ought to have done.

“Well I thought he was a cad—although, I admit, absolutely charming!” said Margaret.

Nothing would induce Lucie to agree that Nat was a cad.

“It would be absurd,” she said, loyally, “if a man had to propose marriage to every girl he took out. Besides, perhaps I played my cards badly.”

And she reminded Maggie of Marta, an old school-friend of Lucie’s, who was as glamorous and as go-ahead as Lucie always wished herself to be. Marta always said that one must have courage and not hang about in the background. One should go out and get one’s man. Well—now Lucie was going to Keynwood Hall, and if she finally got the job there she would make certain this time that Nat didn’t escape.

Then Margaret roared with laughter.

“You are priceless, Lucie darling. Such a demure mouse at times. But Dick always said he believed you were the sort who would one day get what she wanted.”

Lucie joined in the laughter. Then she grew serious. She hadn’t got what she wanted yet, she thought sadly.

After Nat had faded out of her life she had wished passionately that she could behave like Marta who had fallen in love with a rich young man in the Foreign Office, Guy Traill by name. Guy had been posted to the Sudan and Marta had got herself invited out to Khartoum—deliberately pursuing the man she wanted. Yes, and she had come back with his ring on her finger.

For an instant Lucie shut her eyes and instead of Maggie’s sunny little kitchen with all the unwashed dishes and the disorder the children had left, and Maggie’s plump face and figure, she saw Nat. That amazingly sculptured handsome face of his; that lithe graceful body. She recalled one especial night outside this very house, in his car, when he had kissed her.

“I’m really growing too fond of you,” he had whispered against her lips. Too fond? Was it because he cared for her but didn’t want to get married that he had walked out of her life? She didn’t know. But she was quite sure that life beckoned her down the road that led back to Nat. She must make him fall in love with her … feel those lips burning against hers again … and be made to forget the days and nights when she had broken her heart because the phone never rang, and Nat never wrote. It was an obsession with her now.

She went up to her bedroom—reproaching herself for the untidiness. She must pull herself together and learn to be neater—more orderly. She remembered, grimacing, how one Sister in hospital had criticised her in this respect. Down on her knees she dropped, on the carpet, pulled out the bottom drawer and found a box. In that box, carefully treasured, were so many souvenirs of that long lovely summer in Sussex when she had seen so much of Nat. A snapshot, showing him sitting in a boat on a lake which they had visited. Nat in shorts, and sports shirt. She had been so deliriously happy that afternoon; he had been trying to teach her to row and laughed at her puny efforts. Later, under the shade of a beech-tree, they had sat together, eating cherries which she had bought for the picnic. She remembered how he had leaned toward her, touching her lips with the tip of a finger and whispering:

“Cherry-ripe … sweet, generous mouth. You look like a child, stained with the fruit-juice. It is enchanting.”

Those murmured words had thrilled her. And she had lived as though under a warm, passionate spell. Yet never sure, once he left her, that it had not all been a dream.

She sifted through her treasures; found a china cat he had bought her on the Brighton front because she admired it. A bunch of violets, long since faded and dried—kept because he had given them to her. A menu. A theatre programme. ‘Just like a Victorian,’ Lucie thought emotionally, ‘I have kept everything connected with Nat. And now I am going to be with him again. Oh, Nat, Nat, love me this time and never let me go!’

KEYNWOOD HALL had at one time been what the estate agents call ‘a desirable Georgian residence’, but when it became a school it had been considerably built on to and, perhaps, spoiled. But it was still a fine building.

On that April afternoon, standing on the portico—the taxi from Horsham station had just dropped her—Lucie tried to concentrate on the fact that she had applied for the job of matron and been granted an interview.

This was it.

Now to face the Headmaster, Mr. Friern. But Lucie kept thinking about Nat and the day she had spent with him here ten months ago. It was wildly exciting to think that this was where he worked (or so she hoped). It really would be a blow if she found that he had moved to another school.

The place had a deserted air today. All was quiet. No little boys rushing around; all were home for the ‘hols’.

A gardener was cutting the lawn in front of the Headmaster’s study. There were some beautiful flowers in the herbaceous border. To the right lay the starkness of the playing fields, and one could just see the sun glistening on the swimming pool.

Keynwood wasn’t a very well-known prep school, but it was ‘coming on’, and fast gaining distinction.

Lucie rang the bell and stood with her heart fluttering, hoping that she looked all right; that Mr. Friern would like her. She had had a battle with Margaret about her clothes. Because it was a warm day, Margaret had suggested that Lucie put on a summery floral dress with loose jacket, but she had chosen a well-worn grey flannel suit with a white shirt, and bought herself a grey felt hat. She hoped it would make her look ‘schooly’ and that her glasses would encourage Mr. Friern to believe that she really was ‘matronly’.

The bell was not answered for a long time, because, Lucie supposed, of a depleted staff during holiday time. Finally, Lucie was admitted by a tall willowy girl who was rather a startling sight for any school. She wore slacks with an emerald green, boat-necked jersey showing a fine throat. She had reddish waving hair brushed to one side, and heavily-lidded, light blue eyes. She would have been beautiful but for her thin mouth and a narrow jaw which gave her what Shakespeare would have called ‘a lean and hungry look’. Lucie didn’t find her voice very pleasant; it was too high-pitched.

“Yes?” queried the girl, staring at the caller.

Immediately she made Lucie nervous. She stammered that her name was Miss Reed and that she had an appointment with the Headmaster.

The light, cold eyes gave a flicker of interest. The tall girl then shrugged as though to dismiss Lucie and the whole affair from her mind.

“I don’t know anything about you, but I expect my father does. I’m Barbara Friern.”

Now Lucie remembered … she had seen Miss Friern on that Sports’ Day last summer. Nat had pointed her out and told Lucie that everyone called her ‘Barbie’. Lucie remembered something else Nat had said … that Barbie Friern was extremely self-centred but quite dangerously attractive to men. He admitted, however, that he did not find her so. But Lucie felt that Nat would never admit to being attracted by any girl other than the one he was with at the moment. That was his ‘gambit’.

He had also told Lucie that Barbie was twenty-four, and all out to find a husband. So far she hadn’t achieved it, which made her a ‘menace’ (one of Nat’s favourite words). Barbie apparently used to leave Keynwood from time to time to take odd secretarial jobs abroad, and several times had worked in Geneva. But since the school had been so enlarged, she had been persuaded to stay at home and help her parents.

Miss Friern certainly had a way of making one feel insignificant, thought Lucie, as she walked meekly after Barbara into the Headmaster’s study.

“Wait here, I’ll go and find my father,” said Miss Friern languidly, and left Lucie alone.

Lucie began to feel—as she imagined many little boys must feel when they were summoned to this inner sanctum—horribly nervous. Blankly she stared at the big desk, the important revolving chair, a pile of exercise books. The walls were lined with shelves of scholastic literature; there were endless photographs: of boys, little and big, past and present, football groups, cricket-elevens—weddings! (Weddings of ‘old boys’, Lucie presumed.)

In particular, her attention was attracted to two photographs in a double leather frame which stood on the Head’s desk. One in colour,. . .