“Marion, for heaven’s sake! Stop—”
“Then, you have Aunt Lin and I have my mother. We couldn’t just park them like pieces of chewing-gum. I not only love my mother, I like her. I admire her and enjoy living with her. You, on the other hand, are used to being spoiled by Aunt Lin—Oh, yes, you are!—and would miss far more than you know all the creature comforts and the cosseting that I wouldn’t know how to give you—and wouldn’t give you if I knew how,” she added, flashing a smile at him.
“Marion, it is because you don’t cosset me that I want to marry you. Because you have an adult mind and a—”
“An adult mind is very nice to go to dinner with once a week, but after a lifetime with Aunt Lin you would find it a very poor exchange for good pastry in an uncritical atmosphere.”
“There is one thing you haven’t even mentioned,” Robert said.
“What is that?”
“Do you care for me at all?”
“Yes. I care for you a great deal. More than I have ever cared for anyone, I think. That is, partly, why I won’t marry you. The other reason has to do with myself.”
“With you?”
“You see, I am not a marrying woman. I don’t want to have to put up with someone else’s crochets, someone else’s demands, someone else’s colds in the head. Mother and I suit each other perfectly because we make no demands on each other. If one of us has a cold in the head she retires to her room without fuss and doses her disgusting self until she is fit for human society again. But no husband would do that. He would expect sympathy—even though he brought on the cold himself by pulling off clothes when he grew warm instead of waiting sensibly to get cool—sympathy and attention and feeding. No, Robert. There are a hundred thousand women just panting to look after some man’s cold; why pick on me?”
“Because you are that one woman in a hundred thousand, and I love you.”
She looked slightly penitent. “I sound flippant, don’t I? But what I say is good sound sense.”
“But, Marion, it is a lonely life—”
“A ‘full’ life in my experience is usually full only of other people’s demands.”
“—and you will not have your mother for ever.”
“Knowing Mother as I do, I have no doubt that she will outlive me with perfect ease. You had better hole out: I see old Colonel Whittaker’s four on the horizon.”
Automatically he pushed his ball into the hole. “But what will you do?” he asked.
“If I don’t marry you?”
He ground his teeth. She was right: perhaps her mocking habit of mind would not be a comfort to live with.
“What had you and your mother thought of doing now that you have lost The Franchise?”
She delayed over her answer, as if it were difficult to say. Fussing with her bag, and keeping her back to him.
“We are going to Canada,” she said.
“Going away!”
She still had her back to him. “Yes.”
He was aghast. “But Marion, you can’t. And why to Canada?”
“I have a cousin who is a professor at McGill. A son of Mother’s only sister. He wrote some time ago to ask Mother if we would go out to keep house for him, but by that time we had inherited The Franchise and were very happy in England. So we said no. But the offer is still open. And we—we both will be glad to go now.”
“I see.”
“Don’t look so downcast. You don’t know what an escape you are having, my dear.”
They finished the round in a business-like silence.
But driving back to Sin Lane after having dropped Marion at Miss Sim’s, Robert smiled wryly to think that to all the new experiences that knowing the Sharpes had brought to him was now added that of being a rejected suitor. The final, and perhaps the most surprising, one.
Three days later, having sold to a local dealer what had been saved of their furniture, and to Stanley the car he so much despised, they left Milford by train. By the odd toy train that ran from Milford to the junction at Norton. And Robert came to the junction with them to see them on to the fast train.
“I always had a passion for travelling light,” Marion said, referring to their scanty luggage, “but I never imagined it would be indulged to the extent of travelling with an overnight case to Canada.”
But Robert could not think of small-talk. He was filled with a misery and desolation that he had not known since his small soul was filled with woe at going back to school. The blossom foamed along the line side, the fields were burnished with buttercups, but the world for Robert was grey ash and drizzle.
He watched the London train bear them away, and went home wondering how he could support Milford without the hope of seeing Marion’s thin brown face at least once a day.
But on the whole he supported it very well. He took to golfing of an afternoon again; and although a ball would always in the future be for him a “piece of gutta-percha,” his form had not seriously deteriorated. He rejoiced Mr. Heseltine’s heart by taking an interest in work. He suggested to Nevil that between them they might sort and catalogue the records in the attic and perhaps make a book of them. By the time Marion’s goodbye letter from London came, three weeks later, the soft folds of life in Milford were already closing round him.
My very dear Robert (wrote Marion)
This is a hasty au revoir note, just to let you know that we are both thinking of you. We leave on the morning plane to Montreal the day after tomorrow. Now that the moment is almost here we have discovered that what we both remember are the good and lovely things, and that the rest fades to comparative insignificance. This may be only nostalgia in advance. I don’t know. I only know that it will always be happiness to remember you. And Stanley, and Bill—and England.
Our united love to you, and our gratitude.
Marion Sharpe.
He laid the letter down on his brass and mahogany desk. Laid it down in the afternoon patch of sunlight.
Tomorrow at this time Marion would no longer be in England.
It was a desolating thought, but there was nothing to do but be sensible about it. What, indeed, was there to do about it?
And then three things happened at once.
Mr. Heseltine came in to say that Mrs. Lomax wanted to alter her will again, and would he go out to the farm immediately.
Aunt Lin rang up and asked him to call for the fish on his way home.
And Miss Tuff brought in his tea.
He looked for a long moment at the two digestive biscuits on the plate. Then, with a gentle finality, he pushed the tray out of his way and reached for the telephone.
Chapter 24
The summer rain beat on the air-field with a dreary persistence. Every now and then the wind would lift it and sweep the terminus buildings with it in one long brush-stroke. The covered way to the Montreal plane was open on either side and the passengers bent their heads against the weather as they filed slowly into it. Robert, moving up at the tail of the queue, could see Mrs. Sharpe’s flat black satin hat, and the short strands of white hair being blown about.
By the time he boarded the plane they were seated, and Mrs. Sharpe was already burrowing her bag. As he walked up the aisle between the seats Marion looked up and saw him. Her face lighted with welcome and surprise.
“Robert!” she said. “Have you come to see us off?”
“No,” Robert said. “I’m travelling by this plane.”
“Travelling!” she said, staring. “You are?”
“It’s a public conveyance, you know.”
“I know, but—you’re going to Canada?”
“I am.”
“What for?”
“To see my sister in Saskatchewan,” Robert said demurely. “A much better pretext than a cousin at McGill.”
She began to laugh; softly and consumedly.
“Oh, Robert, my dear,” she said, “you can’t imagine how revolting you are when you look smug!”
About the Author
&nb
sp; ELIZABETH MACKINTOSH used two pen names during her writing career: Josephine Tey, who was also her Suffolk great-great-grandmother, and Gordon Daviot. She was born in 1897 in Inverness, Scotland, where she attended the Royal Academy. Miss MacKintosh later trained for three years at the Anstey Physical Training College in Birmingham, then began her teaching career as a physical training instructor. She gave up teaching to keep house for her father, who lived near Loch Ness, and pursue her writing. Her first book was The Man in the Queue (1929), published under the Gordon Daviot pseudonym, and it introduced the character of Inspector Grant, familiar now from the Tey novels. The author wrote chiefly under the signature of Gordon Daviot from 1929 to 1946, during which time her works included the play Richard of Bordeaux (1933), which ran for a year with John Gielgud in the lead part. The first of the Josephine Tey mysteries, A Shilling for Candles, was published in 1936 and was eventually followed by Miss Pym Disposes in 1947. Also included among the “Tey” mysteries are The Franchise Affair (1949), Brat Farrar (1949), To Love and Be Wise (1950), The Daughter of Time (1951), and The Singing Sands (1952). Elizabeth MacKintosh died in London on February 13, 1952.
OTHER BOOKS BY JOSEPHINE TEY
Brat Farrar
The Daughter of Time
The Man in the Queue
Miss Pym Disposes
A Shilling for Candles
The Singing Sands
To Love and Be Wise
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TOUCHSTONE
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 1949 by Macmillan Publishing Company
Copyright renewed © 1975 by R. S. Latham
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover design by Amy McHenry
Cover painting by Alan Witschonke
TOUCHSTONE and design are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tey, Josephine, 1896 or 7-1952.
The franchise affair / Josephine Tey ; with a new introduction by Robert Barnard. —1st Scribner pbk. fiction ed.
p. cm.
1. England—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6025.A547F7 1998
823'.912—dc21 98-18696
CIP
ISBN-13: 978-0-684-84256-1
ISBN-10: 0-684-84256-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-4767-3316-6 (eBook)
Josephine Tey, The Franchise Affair
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