Just a Nice Girl, page 1
CHAPTER I
I,
'-. **It isn't even," Aunt Katherine was saying, "as though Nicola were exceptionally pretty. She could be as stupid as my Diana, for instance, without it mattering, so long as she looked Uke Diana. But she doesn't."
Aunt Katherine was not vexed about it. She was not even plaintive, because that was not her way. She-was simply voicing a regrettable truth with absolute finality. And Nicola felt correspondingly depressed by it.
She knew she had not been meant to hear the remark —that she was, in fact, only demonstrating once mojc^ the truth of the saying that eavesdroppers must hot expect to hear anything good of themselves. But then she had not intended to eavesdrop. It was only that Aunt Katherine's clear, positive tones were apt to carry a little farther than she meant them to. ^ As it was, Nicola had to listen very <^refully (which she shamelessly did) in order to catch old Miss Potting-ton's reply.
"Dear Mrs. Round"—Miss Pottington often prefaced whatever she was going to say in this manner, giving one the impression that she was reading a letter aloud—"Dear Mrs.'Round, you must remember that having four such exceptional daughters yourself, you probably expect a very high standard."
"Yes, I dare say," agreed Aunt Katherine. "But then that makes it all the more marked. She's so extremely mediocre when she is measured up against my girls."
"Dear Mrs. Round"—Miss Pottington laughed pro testingly—*'the geese can't all be swans. After all, there is nothing wrong with Nicola. She is what you might call just a nice, ordinary girl."
"Oh, she is a nice girl, poor child," agreed Aunt Katherine, in a tone that would have deterred anyone from wishing to know any more about her.
And at that point Nicola slipped away, taking with her the vague impression that even to be a homicidal lunatic would at any rate be more interesting and remarkable than to be just what she was—a nice girl, poor child.
She went out of the house by the side-door, into the long kitchen garden that stretched down to the woodsheds at the boundary of her aunt's ground. Usually these were deserted in the middle of the afternoon, and they seemed very attractive in prospect to Nicola for that very reason.
But as she neared the larger shed—empty, as yet, of the piles of clean-smelling logs that would accumulate there during the late summer and early autumn—she heard sounds of unmistakable activity within, and the slightly hoarse, entirely unmusical humming which accompanied the sounds told her that the youngest cousin, Edward, was there on some mysterious business of his own.
Nicola pushed open the top half of the door, and leant her arms on the lower half, to look into the cool, pleasant interior of the big wood shed, where a stocky little boy of twelve sawed away earnestly at some pieces of wood.
"Hallo, Edward. What are you doing?"
"Working."
"Yes, I know. But what are you working atV*
"Making a toy car for the Fraser kid."
"Are you really? That's pretty difficult, isn't it? May I come in and watch you?"
"If you won't get m the way."
"I won't," Nicola promised. And, opening the other half of the door, she came into the shed.
She really liked Edward much the best of her five cousins, perhaps because he was neither brilUant nor beautiful. Certainly not beautiful. Rather short for his age, thick-set, with straw-coloured hair and sUghtly prominent blue eyes with thick, fair lashes, Edward might have been a beautiful baby or might later develop into a striking-looking man, but as a little boy he was entirely unremarkable.
As Nicola watched him now, absorbed once more in his work, she thought how nice it must be to be so supremely independent of outside considerations. On impulse, she asked him:
"Edward, do you think I'm a very ordinary person?"
"Yes," Edward said, without looking up.
"Oh, dear!"
He did look up then, in some surprise.
"What's the matter? Don't you want to be ord'nary?"
"No. Of course not. Do you?"
"Uh-huh. I think extraord'nary people are silly."
"Well—not extraordinary, exactly. But it must be nice to be unusual."
"Why?" Edward hammered in a nail with care and accuracy.
"I suppose," Nicola admitted, "because it's nice to be admired and noticed."
"I don't think it's specially nice to be noticed," Edward said. "It usually means people want you to do something for them."
Nicola laughed.
"Well, your sisters are all unusual, Edward."
"Yes," he agreed without enthusiasm, and went on with his work.
Nicola leaned her head back against the wooden side of the shed and thoughtfully passed Edward's "unusual" sisters in mental review.
Yes, there were no two ways about it. Her four cousins—Anne, Bridget, Caroline and Diana—were quite, quite unusual. They were known in the district as "The Round Alphabet" since Aunt Katherine—by what she herself considered a charming conceit—had given them names which followed each other in strict alphabetical order.
If anyone could be said to enjoy being left a widow with five children and a host of responsibilities, then Aunt Katherine had enjoyed it. She managed her family, her house and her small but well-kept grounds almost with one hand. The other was free to manage anything or anyone else that came within the orbit of her good-tempered and efficient personality.
Naturally she was the mainstay of the local church, the women's institute, and the young people's guild. And she was the kind of woman who really enjoyed making apple jelly in the morning, decorating the church for Harvest Festival in the afternoon, and lecturing to the Women's Institute on "Social Conditions in the Fiji Islands" in the evening. ("Though really, my dear, I only began to read up my subject properly about midnight last night.")
You couldn't possibly help liking Aunt Katherine. Or rather, you could possibly dislike her. She was genuinely kind-hearted, and it was literally true of her that she never sent away anyone in trouble without help. Why should she?—since solving other people's problems was her hobby.
It went without saying that when her niece Nicola had been left an orphan two years ago. Aunt Katherine fell upon the problem as a dog might fall upon a juicy bone; worried it amiably and contentedly, picked it clean of all extraneous matter, shaped it to her own satisfaction, and tinally buried it, because (having been solved) it no longer required attention.
Aunt Katherine's late husband and Nicola's father had been brothers. Sometimes Nicola thought that if Uncle Ralph had been of the same dreamy, easy-going temperament as her father. Aunt Katherine must surely have contributed something to his early decease. But she invariably dismissed the thought again as unkind and unworthy.
Nicola could hardly remember her mother, but she had lived a delightful, aimless, haphazard existence with her father, in a little cottage on the Cornish coast. From the time she left school until her father died, three years later, Nicola had been his constant companion. In her last year at school she had even learnt shorthand and typewriting so that she might help him in his work, for in the last years of his life his eyesight failed rapidly.
"My late brother-in-law wrote books," Aunt Katherine sometimes used to explain to people. "No, no, my dear—it's no good asking me the titles. They weren't books that people read exactly. Philosophical works,
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you know. The kind that are reviewed lengthily but unhelpfully in The Times Literary Supplement. Quite a genius," she would add absently. And then, still more absently: ''So was my dear husband, of course."
Anthony Round might have been an unpractical genius (or might not), but he had certainly contrived to make his daughter happy for the first nineteen years of her life. The only mistake he ever made in his handling of her had been his last move of all, when he consigned her to the care of her only relation. Aunt Katherine. And even thai seemed all right in theory, of course.
Aunt Katherine had not seen her young niece since she was a child, but at one word of summons she was naturally only too delighted to swoop from one end of England to the other, for the sole purpose of putting her affairs in order.
Financially, alas, there were very few affairs to put in order, for the philosophical books had indeed brought in very little money. But to Nicola's timid suggestion that there was no reason why she should not earn her own living. Aunt Katherine returned a firm, kindly and absolutely inescapable "No".
'^Of course, dear child, there is no reason why you should not do so later. But at the present moment your place is with your only relations. I should not have a moment's peace if I thought I had left you homeless and without any sort of responsible guidance at a time like this."
Nicola said it was very nice of Aunt Katherine. And Aunt Katherine said it was the only possible course, and could Nicola contrive to be ready the next day, because she had promised to distribute the prizes at the
local school the day following that, and unless the second batch of strawberry jam was cleared off before the end of the week, the berries would be past their best?
And so, without the slightest chance of regretful lingering over the past, Nicola came to live at Long-heedon with Aunt Katherine, the four unusual daughters, and the unremarkable but rather lovable Edward.
Nicola cupped her chin on her hand and gazed thoughtfully at Edward now, as he hammered and sawed and chopped with great gusto. He never made much fuss of her, but she had the very definite impression that he liked her, whereas, with his sisters, she always felt that they were much too deeply absorbed in their own important affairs to accord her more than a fleeting, though well-intentioned, moment of attention.
This was particularly so with Anne, perhaps. Anne had taken a double first at Oxford; and though she never, never did anything so crude as boast about the fact, Nicola sometimes used to wish there were such a thing as a single third, and that Anne had taken that. She was private secretary now to the local M.P., and Nicola often wondered whether she contrived to make him feel as ill-educated as she made her feel.
Bridget was the sporis and social genius of the family. She had already won her bronze medal for skating, and none of the Rounds saw v/hy she should not be a gold medallist one day. She had played tennis at Wimbledon, and was a ballroom dancer of exhibition standard, and Nicola had never seen her make an ungraceful movement in all the two years she had lived in Aunt Katherine's house.
Carohne was "our buddins^ artist", as Aunt Kather-
n
ine said. But, to tell the truth, she had not only budded, she had flowered. Her strangely beautiful water-colours had figured at no fewer than three London exhibitions, although she was only twenty-two. And on each occasion her work had been sold.
And then there was Diana. Diana was, quite frankly, what the Americans call "dumb", but she was so engagingly aware of the fact, and so absolutely beautiful that it hardly mattered at all.
'1 suppose by the time Mother came to me she'd worked out all the brains of the family," Diana used to say with a contentment that exasperated her sisters. "And by the time she came to Edward, the brains and the beauty had been used up."
She had almost sapphire-blue eyes, ash-blonde hair which owed nothing whatever to "rinses", and a complexion of the kind often described in advertisements but seldom found in real life. She danced well (though nothing like so well as Bridget), could listen with an entirely spurious air of intelligence while a man talked to her, and could sit and look beautiful with a completeness that was almost an art in itself. Of the four sisters, Nicola definitely liked Diana best.
It had been hard indeed to take one's place in a circle of such charm and talent when one was nothing but a brown-haired, brown-skinned young nobody, with long, hazel eyes and a boyish figure that was slim to the point of skinniness. And even now, after two years, Nicola still felt oddly like a stranger in a strange land.
' Of course the plan for earning her own living had never materialized. There was so much to do, helping Aunt Katherine to manage everything and everyone.
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Nicola wrote letters, ran messages, helped in the house, weeded in the garden, picked the fruit for Aunt Katherine's enthusiastic and interminable jam-making and, in fact, did all the unspectacular jobs which everyone else was much too clever to do.
"Really, I don't know what I should do without Nicola," Aunt Katherine used to say with characteristic generosity. But Nicola knew quite well what she would do. She would manage splendidly. Aunt Katherine always did.
*'What's the matter?" Edward asked suddenly. "Aren't you happy?"
"Yes, of course," she said hastily.
"Why?"
"What do you mean—Vhy'?"
"Well, why are you happy? You don't seeni to have much reason to be."
"Of course I have, Edward." Nicola spoke with guilty vehemence. "I don't know what you mean."
"Well, there's Anne, giving herself the airs of a Cabinet Minister, and Bridget getting her name in the Sports News, and Carrie painting those awful pictures of hers and selling them, and Di smirking around like an advertisement for toothpaste. But you don't do anything, and you've just been saying you want to be unusual. It must be fierce watching the others do what you want to do yourself. You'd better get married. That's what people usually do when they aren't much good at anything else."
Nicola couldn't help laughing at these refreshing views on matrimony.
"There isn't anyone to play the part of the bridegroom, though," she pointed out.
"Huh, girls can always get a husband if they try hard enough/' declared Edward.
"I expect I'd better go in and do those notices for the Hospital Fete," Nicola said lazily, but she still lingered a few minutes longer.
"Why doesn't Carrie do them?" Edward asked sui denly. "It's an artist's work, isn't it?" .
"Oh, not exactly." Nicola felt Caroline would have been affronted at the suggestion. "I can do them quite well enough, I think. Besides, Caroline will be busy enough for the day. She's going to do silhouettes, you know."
"I don't think they'll make much money," Edward said suddenly. "They do too many ordinary things. Who wants ord'nary lucky dips and stalls with tea-cosies and dolls being raffled? I told Mother a very good idea—something quite out of the ord'nary, but she wouldn't hear of it."
"What was it?" Nicola inquired with some curiosity.
"A competition to see who knew the most swearwords. Fivepence entry fee, and tenpence for anyone who wanted to be audience. I bet you'd have got a lot. But Mother seemed to think the Vicar wouldn't like it. I don't know why, because he must know'a good many himself. Lots of the best ones are in the Bible."
Nicola laughed again as she stood up and stretched herself.
"Edward, you'd cheer anyone up," she declared, ruffling his already untidy hair.
"I thought you said you didn't need cheering up," Edward said, but she saw he was gratified.
The two days before the Hospital Fete slipped away
in a fever of planning and confusion, reduced miraculously at the last moment to complete order by an almost entirely unruffled Aunt Katherine.
"There now! Look what beautiful sunshine," she exclaimed, as though personally responsible for it, just as the whole family were about to set forth. "The reward of virtue, one might say. After all, it is a noble cause.** Aunt Katherine overlooked the fact that the same noble cause had been known to be rewarded with a deluge in other years.
Longheedon Hospital had originally been a big manor house, standing in its own grounds, and it would have been difficult to imagine a more dehghtful place for a fete. Everybody, of course, knew nearly everybody else, and it was all very much in the nature of a huge family party.
Perhaps, Nicola thought a little guiltily, that was why she felt somehow out of it all. Or perhaps it was just her ridiculous shy and reserved disposition which was responsible for that. She felt nervous and overwhelmed, as she always did at this kind of gathering. The fact that her cousins moved so easily among people, gathering praise and compliments as they went, somehow made her feel terribly inadequate and dull.
"It isn't that I want so much notice or even a great deal of admiration," thought Nicola. "But I wish someone would look at me as though I were something a bit out of the ordinary, instead of as though I were a not very ornamental gate-post.**
"Dear Mrs. Round**—("Miss Pottington, of course," thought Nicola, without even turning round from the plants she was carefully unpacking for her aunt's gar-
dening stall)—"how nice to see all your girls here.'*
"Yes, my dear. I don't know what we should do without them." (That was the Vicar's wife, perfectly sincere and delighted to be giving praise where praise was due.)
"Oh, not at all. Not at all." Aunt Katherine laughed pleasantly, in a protest which was not intended to be taken seriously by anyone, because she didn't know what the fete would have done without them, either. "Of course it was very fortunate that Anne was able to persuade Sir Charles to open proceedings. But then she works very hard for him."
"And then Caroline doing those clever silhouettes—"
"And, dear Mrs. Round, the idea of exhibition tennis matches. So original "
"—Diana looking enchanting. She looks almost good enough to eat—like the strawberries and cream. Ha, ha!"
"Ha, ha, indeed!!" thought Nicola without mirth. "I wish I were not a nasty, mean, envious "
"I say," drawled a pleasant, rather lazy voice beside her. "Can you tell me where to spend the requisite amount of money at this show, with the minimum amount of embarrassment and waste of time?"
Aware that she was a good deal flushed with her exertions, Nicola straightened up from bending over a wooden box of plants. In front of her stood an extremely good-looking and extremely amused young man in a light-grey suit. The sun glinted on his thick, fair hair, which was in curious contrast to his darkly tanned skin. His smiling brown eyes took in the scene with obvious appreciation, and then came to rest once more on Nicola with still more obvious appreciation.
