His head moved again; his lower lip trembled and he sucked it fiercely.
“Why did you do it?” she asked again, helplessly. “Will you for God’s sake say something?”
“I don’t know.”
She held her temper with difficulty, tried another tack. “You wanted to go hop picking with Aunt Annie again in the autumn, didn’t you?”
That brought his head up. “Yes.”
“Well, do you think they’ll want you with them now? How can they trust you? How can I trust you? Even if they would take you, how could I let you go?”
That broke him. Sobbing, he flung himself upon her. “I don’t know why I did it. I don’t! I knew I shouldn’t, but – oh, I promise I’ll never do it again. Cross my heart I promise—”
She held him from her, her own heart breaking at the desperation in the tear-drenched blue eyes. “Have you still got the money?”
“I spent sixpence,” he whispered, his breath hiccoughing in his throat.
She shook him, very gently. “All right. Now stop it. Come on, stop it.” She waited until the sobs had subsided. “Now listen. I’ll lend you the sixpence – you’ll have to pay it back, mind, penny by penny, as you get it – and you can take the money back to Aunt Annie. Tell her how sorry you are. And promise it will never happen again. Is that clear?”
Tears slid down smooth, rounded cheeks.
“Well?” asked Molly sharply.
“All right.” The woebegone voice was tragic.
“If you do that – and do it right now – then I don’t think we need to tell your father about it—”
Danny turned and walked away.
“Danny!”
He turned, his cherubic face alabaster pale, the tears quite gone. “I’m going to see Aunt Annie. To give her the money and tell her I’m sorry.” He walked composedly to the door, “and to ask her if I can go hop-picking with her again,” he added, and was gone before his mother could remonstrate.
* * *
“Oh, think nothing of it, love. Storm in a teacup. We’ve all done it, as kids, haven’t we? Pinched things? Crikey, I know I did. It’s over and done, and now we’ll forget it, eh? ’Course Danny can come hopping with us. We’re banking on it. And I was going to ask – what about the girls this year? Would you let them come too?”
“What? Oh, Annie, are you crazy? Three of them?”
“Why not? The more the merrier. If we’d had six of our own we’d have taken them, wouldn’t we?”
“But that’s different.”
“Too true. If they were ours we’d probably be dying for a few weeks away from ’em!”
“Yes, but—”
“I’d take good care of them I promise. You wouldn’t have to worry.” Annie’s voice was casual, her eyes were pleading.
“Well of course, I know that—”
“It’d give you and Jack a bit of a break. A bit more time together.”
Molly averted her eyes, busied herself with the button she was sewing onto Meghan’s dress. “Yes.”
“You could p’raps come down for a weekend? Nothing like those Saturday nights – a walk through the fields to The Chequers for a drink, a pudden left over the fire to cook while we’re gone. I sometimes think I should have been born a gypsy, that I do. I love the old Kentish fields. Bin every year since I was a nipper. Let ’em come, eh, Molly? It’s good for them, you know. Open air, bit of hard work, plenty of freedom. Teach ’em to look after themselves. Danny loved it last year.”
“I know he did. He hasn’t stopped talking about it yet. I’ll see what Jack says.”
Annie bent to pick up a cotton reel that had rolled from Molly’s lap, tossed it to her. “Talking of the lad,” she said, “how is he?”
Molly stabbed the needle with some force into the material. “All right.”
“Only all right?”
“Yes. Only bad-temperedly, pig-headedly, self-centredly all right.”
“Whoops. Sorry I asked.”
Molly pulled a face, half-laughing. “No you aren’t. And now you know. Here, make yourself useful—” she tossed a small pair of trousers across to Annie, “—unpick those hems, will you? My son’s growing like a weed.”
* * *
Adam Jefferson finally returned in July, and the first that Molly knew of it was one afternoon when Nancy, after her usual peremptory knock, threw open the office door with the words “Visitor for you” and stepped back to allow a smiling, suntanned figure past her.
“I – good afternoon, Mr Jefferson.” The unexpected sight of him was a shock to shorten her breath. How could she have forgotten the slender, physical beauty of the man?
“Mrs Benton. I’m just back from the States. My senior partner suggested that I should call and express our satisfaction with—”
Nancy shut the door.
He crossed the room, dropping his hat and stick on a chair as he passed, his eyes not leaving hers. She watched him come, a helpless excitement sharpening every nerve-end. He bent and kissed her. She did not move, made no attempt to touch nor to stop him. No mouth was like his. None would ever be. His teeth were very sharp. His hand ran the length of her throat, cupped her breast. Then he straightened, smiling, happy.
“I have thought about doing that,” he said solemnly, “for four months.”
“Liar.”
The spreading, long-fingered hands. “I have. I swear. Constantly.” He took note of her expression and qualified the word, laughing. “Almost constantly.”
She had to laugh with him. “Or ‘on and off’?”
“Unkind.” He perched on the desk. They looked at each other, smiling, for a long time.
“How was America?”
“Wonderful.”
“And successful?”
“Very.”
“You seem to have been gone a long time.”
“A bloody lifetime.” The warm intimacy of his voice brought blood to her cheeks.
“I’ve come to take you to tea,” he said. “And no arguing.”
“My coat’s in the hall.”
* * *
They had tea at the Royal, absurdly an old acquaintance of a place now, holding no terrors at all. Adam spoke with enthusiasm of America, made her see the teeming streets of New York, the almost incomprehensibly wide spaces of the West.
“I’ve a brother there,” she said, “and a father too, I think.”
“I’m not surprised. I sometimes think there must be more Irish in the United States than are left in Ireland. Do you know where they are?”
She shook her head.
“That’s a pity. I could have looked them up when I go back.”
“You’re going back?”
“Not until October.”
“But that’s—”
“—months away,” he finished for her gently. “Don’t think about it. That’s for tomorrow. This is today.”
She looked pensively into her teacup. “That’s how you live, isn’t it?”
“There’s no other way.”
As he helped her into her coat he asked, quite suddenly, “Next Thursday?”
She hesitated. “Here?”
He fussed with her coat a little, settling it on her shoulders. “Do you like strawberries and cream?”
“Yes.”
He smiled. “Then somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“It’s a surprise.”
* * *
The week passed in a pleasant dream. Nothing it seemed could put her out of sorts, things that just a short while before might have sent her into a rage hardly touched the bright surface of her happiness. She would not analyze it. It was simply as if a window had been thrown open in a cold and dark room and sunshine, warmth and the song of birds had flooded in.
On Thursday, however, she discovered herself to be nervous. She was aware for the first time of deception. She had to lie to Nancy about where she was going, had arranged with Adam for him to pick her up in the High Street by the station. Now she
stood fiddling nervously with her gloves half-wishing that she had not agreed to go.
“I’ll be back by six. Before probably.”
“Fine.” Nancy did not look up. “Don’t worry. If Jensons telephone what shall I tell them? Can they have Miss McPherson for another week?”
“Yes. And if Miss Johnston comes in tell her we’ve placed her with Tate’s, will you? She starts on Monday.”
“Right.” Nancy looked up as Molly still hovered. “Off you go then. Hope the meeting isn’t too much of a bore.”
The discomforting feeling of guilt pricked her as she hurried down the busy street. Then she saw him, saw the bright welcome in his eyes and her scruples dissolved like mist in sunshine.
“Where are we going?”
“Wait and see.”
They drove through the dense and decaying East End of London to the City. Molly shivered in the warmth as they passed the malodorous alleys, seeing in every face the vicious shadow of Johnny Cribben. “Must we come this way?”
“It’s the shortest. But no – we’ll go the long way round next time if you’d prefer.” Neither of them commented on that “next time”.
From the City they drove through the crowded streets to the West End. She expected him to stop, as he had before, somewhere here within the fashionable area of shops and hotels, but they chugged on through ever-increasing motor traffic and the chaos of horse-drawn vehicles into the charming and comparatively quiet streets and squares of Kensington. No noisy markets or narrow, crowded pavements here, nor yet that busy, beehive feeling of the City. Elegant mansions, tall, impeccably kept town houses, discreet and very expensive-looking hotels stood in peaceful tree-lined streets or edged the spacious green squares. The car turned into one of these squares; tall-windowed Regency buildings looked out onto a charming garden of lawns and shrubberies and well-established trees. Beyond the decorative iron railings nursemaids wheeled their smaller charges along the winding paths in perambulators, or sat upon the slatted benches talking while older children played together on the grass. Adam rolled the car to a halt at the foot of a flight of marble steps that led to a grand-looking door set between white-painted pillars.
“Where are we?”
He touched his fingers to his lips in a gesture of mystery. “I believe that Madam likes strawberries and cream?”
“Oh, Adam, don’t be silly. What’s that got to do with—”
“Do you, or don’t you?”
“Yes, but it’s August. You can’t get strawberries and cream in August. Not even,” she added, glancing up at the tall façade of the building, “in a place like this.”
“We’ll see about that.”
He handed her from the car, led her up the steps and into a lobby, cool and marble-floored, with on one side an enormous, sweeping staircase beneath glittering chandeliers and on the other the openwork wrought iron doors of a magnificently appointed lift.
“Good afternoon, Mr Jefferson Sir.”
Molly jumped as a small man, smartly uniformed in mulberry and blue, appeared as if by magic at Adam’s elbow. He preceded them to the lift, conducted them into it with a proprietary air, closed the door with a clash, pressed the button. The brass-trimmed monster rose with a muted whirr; floor after floor floated silently past.
Molly looked at Adam. “Where are we?” she asked. And this time her voice brooked no pleasantries.
He was still ready to try. “We are in one of the few places in London where you can get prime strawberries and cream, in copious quantities whatever the time of the year. Well, almost.” The lift, with the slightest of jolts, came to a halt and the man slid the ornate doors open onto a small landing whose polished wooden floor showed sign of neither footprint nor dust. There were two doors, imposingly solid, and with brass fittings that were, like those in the lift, shone to gold. Adam waved Molly courteously to one of the doors. The man touched a cap trimmed with more gold than an admiral’s, crashed his gates and was gone. Adam fitted a key to the lock.
“This is my home,” he said, and pushed the door so that it swung easily open to reveal a large room, expensively and tastefully furnished, its long velvet-draped windows looking onto the sun-gilded treetops of the square. It was a pleasantly masculine room, furnished with leather and shining well-polished wood. By the window stood a small table at which were set two chairs and upon which, bright in silver, was laid an enormous dish of crimson strawberries.
Molly did not move.
“Are you coming in?” Adam asked politely, his eyes tranquil, “Or would you rather that we eat our strawberries on the landing?”
She followed him through the door. In the ordered and comfortable main room of the apartment she could detect not the slightest sign of a feminine hand; even the large vase of flowers that stood in the empty summer grate were somehow too perfect, too mathematically arranged.
As he did so uncomfortably often, Adam detected her thoughts. “I said ‘my home’,” he emphasized quietly, “not ‘ours’. Mine. George – the gentleman in the lift – looks after it for me.”
“You have your own apartment?” Such an arrangement was far beyond any lifestyle she had ever known.
“Yes. Caroline prefers the country. During the week I live here. It’s more comfortable.”
“And more – convenient?” She could not quite keep the sharp edge from her tone.
“Yes,” he said. “More convenient.”
She had not moved. “You play games, Adam. All the time. Charades.”
He had stepped very close to her. The beating of her heart was suffocating her. All the laughter had gone from him, the ruthless, shadowed bones of his face were clearly drawn in the golden light.
“No, Molly. Charades is a game for children. My life isn’t in the least like that. Do you want me to take you home?” The question was purposely, cruelly blunt.
She could not answer.
“Well, then, stay awhile.” The lightness was back, veiling the arrogant core. “It would be a shame to waste the strawberries, wouldn’t it? They taste much better at this time of the year, did you know?”
“Because no one else is eating them?”
He took off his jacket, tossed it on a chair. “Exactly. Clever girl. Please, do take off your coat, It’s very warm this afternoon.”
She let him slip it from her shoulders; beneath it she was wearing a flounced blouse of lawn so fine that it frothed at throat and wrist like foaming water. She had bought it specially, though she had not admitted as much, even to herself. He dropped her coat on the same chair as his own.
She watched him go to the window.
“This is a nice part of London,” he said over his shoulder, “quiet.”
“Yes.” Outlined against the light he looked extraordinarily slight, almost boyish.
“Have you – lived here long?”
“Two years.” He turned. “Do you like it?”
“Very much.” Other words, other meanings beneath the conventional exchanges hung in the air between them.
“I thought you would.” The atmosphere of the closed room was heavy. “Perhaps I should open a window?”
“Yes. Please. It’s a little airless—” She was only vaguely aware of what she was saying. Her nerves were strung like wire.
He made no move to open the window. “Molly?” Musical voice, soft in the quiet room.
She did not answer, fixed her eyes upon the massive cloud of flowers in the grate.
“You’re very beautiful.” The words drifted into warm silence.
She shook her head, sucking at her lower lip. She should leave now. Now. She knew it. She sensed his coming, tensed against it.
A sharp-nailed finger ran along her arm, scratching her skin beneath the fine material.
She shivered, but did not move nor look at him.
The caressing finger moved from her arm to her shoulder, the skin of her throat, down to her breast, rubbing the rising nipple gently.
She closed her eyes.
; “Beautiful,” he said again. His other hand was moving on the tiny buttons.
She tried, half-heartedly, to move away from him. His arm prevented her.
“Please,” he said.
She neither helped nor tried to stop him. The blouse dropped in a soft drift of frills at their feet. His fingers were in her hair, drawing out pins and combs. Her shoulders were naked, her breasts half-bared, swollen, the dark nipples jutting through lace and ribbon. He kissed the hollow of her neck. His hands were at the fastenings of her skirt. At last she came to herself and tried to pull away.
“Adam, don’t. You mustn’t!”
He held her from him, his grip on her shoulders bruising, a dark flash of anger in his eyes. “Mustn’t?”
She turned her head away, unable herself to tell where fear gave way to excitement and both to wild hunger.
He shook her, not roughly but insistently, until she turned back to him. “Look at me. That’s better. Now listen. I have never – never, do you understand? – taken a woman against her will. Speaking of games, that is one that I will never play, neither to ease a conscience nor to satisfy an ego. I take nothing, I want nothing that is not freely given. Tell me now that you don’t want me and I swear I’ll not touch you. Tell me.”
“I—” Looking at him she could not lie.
“Tell me.” His fingers no longer gripped her shoulders; he had opened his hands and was caressing her bare arms with the flat, hard palms.
“I can’t. You know that I can’t”
He lifted her chin with his finger. “Don’t be afraid. We’re harming no one.”
“I am afraid. I can’t help it.”
“There can be no child, if that’s what’s worrying you.” He said it simply, with no embarrassment.
“It isn’t just that.” But she could not deny the lift of relief in her heart.
“I love you,” he said.
“Now you do, at this moment.”
“Yes. Now. At this moment. What else can you ask? You’re lovely, little Molly, lovely.” He caught her wrists, drew her to him.
Her eyes held his intent, unsmiling face. She wanted him. Wanted his body, his mouth, his hands, suddenly had to admit to herself that she did not care what he was. Just once. The phrase that has eternally been the precursor to addiction. Just this once. Or for the rest of her life regret it.
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