Swing of Youth

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

Robina Frayne has a lot to learn about life. Living a boring, stultifying existence in the country, she falls prey to the first man who offers to `take her away from all this?. All the experience of her eighteen years is no match for smooth-talking philanderer Aubrey Mauldron. After an unpleasant experience in Mauldron?s Paris flat, she escapes back to England a wiser girl. Now less starry-eyed about men in general, she is soon to meet a particular man will will be everything that Mauldron is not: unselfish, generous, and very much in love with her. But ahead lies tragedy?

Release date: February 27, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

Robina Frayne—known to all and sundry as Robin—sat on the window-seat in the sitting-room of a little, newly built house and flattened her nose against a window pane, rather like a small child.

She was small and thin and perhaps her very bright eyes, which were a beautiful warm hazel, and the swift movements of her charming dark head and pretty hands had rightly earned for her the contraction of her real name. She was eighteen and looked even younger.

Robin felt frankly fed up with everything today. To begin with it was a beastly day. It was pouring with rain. She was supposed to be looking at a garden. But there were only oblongs and circles of mud with one or two green blobs, meant to be plants. Frank, Robin’s brother-in-law, had planted them. Everybody hoped that flowers would appear in the fullness of time.

To Robin—whose one dream in life was a cottage in the country—real country like Sussex—the wretched little garden which Frank and Enid cherished wasn’t a garden at all. She hated it. She hated ‘The Rosary’, this semi-detached house which Enid and Frank thought the last word in modern comfort. She thought it hideous. That was because there were hundreds of others exactly like it and with names like ‘The Rosary’ in this new estate in Shelbury, on the outskirts of London.

Enid was always telling Robin that she ought to be glad to have a roof over her head, and Frank—a pompous little man—put in his spoke when there was an argument and said,

‘There are thousands worse off than you, my dear.’

Robin could not tolerate the idea of such a marriage as Enid had contracted with Frank Latimer. She wanted a thrilling lover who would be a friend.

Of course it would have been so much better if Robin had been allowed to earn her own living. She did not want to be dependent on Frank and Enid. But, unfortunately, a year ago—two years after Enid’s marriage and just as Robin had left school—Enid fell ill. An operation left her delicate. Both she and Frank considered it Robin’s duty to come and help her in the house and look after her. They might have paid someone to come in and help. But they didn’t think of that. That was a year ago. Enid was much better but Robin was still here and whenever she tried to get away, Enid begged her to stay and said that it would be ungrateful of her to go off now after all she and Frank had done for her.

On this cold February afternoon Robin flattened her small nose against the window pane and looked desolately at a desolate sky, and told herself that she was a little idiot. Too chicken-hearted. Of course she ought to get away from Enid and Frank and make her own life. But as soon as Enid started appealing to her or producing a sudden new pain, Robin stifled her own ambitions and promised to stay on.

It was getting darker every minute. The end of a dreary afternoon. Enid had gone to the West End to meet her husband ‘for a cup of tea at Lyons and a bit of shopping’.

They were due back at half-past six. Supper was ready.

So Robin had nothing to do and she was bored, oh, how bored!

She felt that she could not sit here alone and brood a couple of hours until Frank and Enid came home. There wasn’t even a dog here for a companion. She wanted badly to buy a Cairn terrier of her own. She loved Cairns. But Enid wouldn’t have a dog in the place because ‘they messed up the place and made work with their muddy paws’ and disturbed the peace of her orderly, well-run home. So like Enid!

Robin felt that she must go out. She was in a rebellious mood today. So she put on a beret which fitted closely over her small, dark head; a green nylon mac, and her thickest shoes. Despising an umbrella she walked out into the rain.

She left the residential area behind her and came to Shelbury High Street. Crowded, dark, dismal in the February rain, more dismal than usual, since it was early closing day and most of the shops were shut.

‘I ought,’ thought Robin, ‘to remember Frank’s wonderful words that there are thousands worse off than I am, but I’m beginning to wonder what could be worse? I suppose I might be crippled, or always ill, or blind or something. But thinking that way doesn’t seem to help much. I’m a coward, that’s what I am. I want the excitement of being on a battlefield where one can be noticed and perhaps get a V. C. And really, it’s much braver to drudge along in this sort of way and help Enid and save money for Frank, than to be a heroine in the public eye!’

With these noble thoughts, Robin—quite aware that she wouldn’t feel noble for long—raised her face to the grey skies and stepped off the curb to cross the road. A foolish thing to do. A long, blue and silver car being driven, certainly, at unpardonable speed for Shelbury High Street, was upon her before she was aware of it. The very latest and most efficient four wheel brakes pulled the car up magnificently. Robin sprawled in the gutter, her purse flying into space. Ignominiously she lay there, more dazed and shaken than hurt, though her left arm hurt acutely.

The next thing was that she was being helped on to her feet by the man who had been driving the blue and silver car. A rather curt voice said,

‘You should look where you’re going!’

Robin put a hand to her cheek. It was smeared with mud, but not blood, she noticed thankfully. Half in tears she answered,

‘I’m sorry—but you were driving awfully fast.’

‘Are you hurt?’ asked the man. He still held her right arm. She was trembling all over. A crowd—the usual inquisitive kind—gathered. It seemed to annoy him. ‘You’d better jump in and let me drive you back,’ he added.

‘No, I’m all right,’ said Robin faintly. ‘You hit my arm—but I don’t think it’s broken.’

He looked down at her. They were standing underneath a street lamp and he suddenly noticed that his victim was a young and extremely pretty girl. Aubrey Mauldron was a connoisseur of pretty women. He saw in the face of this one, two things rarer than beauty. Innocence and a hint of sensuality. She was trying to smile, which exhibited the two fascinating clefts in her cheeks.

When he spoke to her again, his voice had lost its brusqueness. His manner was at once tender and charming. Nobody could be more charming than Aubrey when he chose.

‘You poor little thing, it was criminal of me to drive so fast. I insist upon taking you home. You’re shaken up—and no wonder. Jump in and tell me where to go.’

Robin was dazed and embarrassed.

She made a feeble protest but nevertheless allowed herself to be helped into the car. She knew she was glad when she found herself in that warm, luxurious limousine. She leaned back and sighed, and closed her eyes.

‘I feel a bit sick,’ she said.

Aubrey Mauldron gave her a startled look.

‘My dear little girl, you won’t be sick in my brand new Alfa Romeo, will you?’ he asked laughing.

She found herself echoing the laugh, feebly.

‘No, I promise I won’t, but I do feel awful.’

‘The shock’s upset you. Just sit still. Where do you live?’

‘Shelbury, on the new estate,’ said Robin. ‘If you go straight on and take the first turning to the right it will get us there. The house is called “The Rosary”. I’ll show you. It’s awfully kind of you …’

‘Not in the least,’ he said. ‘Considering that I did my best to kill you.’

‘You haven’t succeeded in doing that.’

‘Thank God,’ said Aubrey warmly.

He turned the car off the High Street and down the road as she directed, and so they came to ‘The Rosary’. Scarcely half an hour had elapsed since Robin left home, bored and wretched. Now she returned in a glorious car having narrowly escaped death. She still felt dazed.

The house was in darkness. Enid and Frank had not yet returned. Robin hesitated to invite a complete stranger into her brother-in-law’s house, yet she felt that it would be rude of her not to do so, since he had taken the trouble to drive her home.

‘Won’t you come in for a moment,’ she said as he helped her out of the car.

‘If you’re sure I shan’t be a bore, I’d like to come and satisfy myself that you’re all right,’ he said.

‘I am—it’s only my arm—but I’m sure it isn’t broken,’ she said.

She led the way up the garden path, past the flower beds which were now all pools and puddles and sodden, dejected plants. She opened the door with her latch key, switched on the lights in the hall and the sitting-room and then faced the man who had run her down.

She saw a very good-looking man who might be any age between thirty and forty. He had dark hair with just the touch of grey at the temples which a woman finds attractive; regular features and very blue eyes. Irish eyes, Robin decided at once, and later discovered that she was quite right. Aubrey’s mother had been Irish.

He was well-groomed, just a little too debonair and smart, perhaps. But he was definitely handsome, a gentleman, and had delightful manners. Only those who knew Aubrey Mauldron well, and particularly the women who knew him too well, were aware that there was sheer cruelty behind the charming mask. The hot Irish blood which ran in Aubrey’s veins could make of him a fiend at times. It was a fiend nearly always conjured up by women. He controlled himself amongst men.

He was his most delightful and sympathetic to Robin this afternoon.

‘You look pale, poor poppet,’ he said, putting his coat and hat on a chair. ‘Do let me have a look at the arm.’

Robin allowed him to help her off with the mac. She rolled up the sleeve of her pullover. There was a big, ugly bruise near the shoulder, rapidly swelling and assuming a purple, mottled hue. The skin was bruised. Robin grimaced.

‘Beastly, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘It’s horrible—I’m most fearfully sorry,’ said Aubrey fervently. He held her hand and looked not at the bruise but at the ivory whiteness of the slender arm below that bruise.

‘Can’t we bathe the arm or something?’ he asked.

‘No, not now—my sister will be home in a moment—she’ll see to it for me,’ said Robin, feeling not quite truthful because Enid couldn’t bear the sight of a bruise or a cut and said it made her turn faint.

‘The only good point about this accident,’ he said, smiling at her, ‘is that it gives me the pleasure of meeting you, Miss—’

‘Frayne,’ she finished for him, ‘Robin Frayne.’

‘Robin?’ he repeated, raising his brows.

‘Well, it’s really Robina, but the family have always called me Robin,’ she explained.

‘I think it’s. . .