by Daphne Clair
This time her grandfather didn't protest, and when he repeated the question, she laughed and said, Talk to him yourself. I'll call him.' She had wanted Shard to go away. Now she was annoyed because he had left so readily, as though he wanted her company even less than she wanted his.
It was hot in the night, humid and sticky, and she didn't sleep. Early in the morning, when it was barely light, she got up and put on a skimpy black bikini and went out to the pool. She slipped into the cool water and did a fast crawl to the other end, and then turned to backstroke to the starting point. The water made her feel alive and the chill soon receded. She floated a while, then swam to the deep end and climbed on to the small diving board erected there. She pushed her wet hair away from her shoulders. The house looked blind and sleepy. Elise was the only early riser in the family; everyone else slept late on holidays.
Slowly she moved her arms forward, eyes closed, then raised them above her head, her body taut, streaming with droplets of water. She held her head straight and opened her eyes—and looked straight at Shard Cortland, standing at the other end of the pool, dressed in faded jeans and nothing else but a folded towel slung over one shoulder.
He stood with his feet planted slightly apart, his thumbs hooked in the belt of the blue denim pants. And he looked at her. He looked at her as if she was standing there, her body poised, arms upstretched, just so that he could look at her. As though she was flaunting her body before him, as the old-fashioned phrase had it.
She moved, just a second late, rising on her toes and bending her knees, feeling the spring of the board as it lifted her, and her body arced into the air and descended in a graceful curve into the water.
Elise surfaced and swam to the side, and as she found the smooth tiles, a hand took her wrist and strong fingers hauled her out. She pushed the wet hair from her eyes and said, Thank you.'
He said, 'Beautiful.'
'Thank you,' she said again, coolly. 'I had a very good swimming coach at school. I got a medal for diving.'
She turned away from him to walk along the side of the pool. She hadn't looked at him.
He caught at her hair, tugging the wet strands, and said, 'I didn't mean the dive.'
Elise turned on him, anger blazing in her green eyes. 'Let me go!'
His mouth moved in mockery. 'Sure.' His hand slid down the strand of hair he held, that her movement had brought to the front. The hard knuckles grazed the skin of her shoulder, her breast, and then she was free.
She stepped back and moved past him to pick up her towel and went on to the house. When she turned to the door he was unzipping his trousers, and her breath choked her throat. Shard pulled them off and he had dark swim shorts underneath. He dived into the water with a beautiful clean movement that left hardly a ripple behind. She closed the door before he surfaced.
The day after Boxing Day the shops were open. Shard went out in the afternoon and came back with a huge sheaf of flowers for Katherine and wearing a new shirt made of Chinese natural silk with an expensive look, and a beautifully fitting casual suit that might have been made for him—and by an excellent tailor at that.
He threw the jacket down on the back of a chair as though it was one of his frayed denim outfits worn on the building site, and Elise saw her mother glance at the label and grow suddenly rigid.
'You look very smart, Shard,' said Katherine with condescension. Assuming a look of embarrassed concern.
she added, 'I hope you haven't been spending your savings with the idea of having to live up to our standards. I'm afraid I was very tactless on Christmas Day—and Gary tells me that since the building you were both working on is finished, you're—well, out of work.'
'Don't worry, Mrs Ashley.' Shard smiled, without rancour. 'I needed new clothes, that's all. As I'm sure you would agree. And I still have some savings left. Though it's true I haven't a job.'
'Well, I'm sure you'll find something,' Katherine said vaguely, adding, 'Meantime, I'm very glad Gary brought you here.'
Elise caught her breath, but Shard was still smiling, apparently unconcerned. No, more than unconcerned, Elise decided. He was positively enjoying himself.
He sat in the chair on which he had thrown his new jacket, apparently careless that his shoulder might crush it, and she saw that his shoes were new, too, but already the soles were well scuffed and the uppers dusty. The crease in the trousers was still sharp and she wondered how he managed in patently brand new clothes to look as though he had been wearing them for years, so comfortably did they conform to his body.
On New Year's Eve the Ashleys had a party. Peter and his parents were there, and a mixture of generations, Gary's and Elise's friends and friends of their parents.
There was a barbecue on the terrace with swimming and music to dance to for the young people. Elise was surprised when her girl friends, surveying the available men, demanded introductions to Gary's friend.
'You lucky thing!' one of them said. 'Fancy having a gorgeous-looking male like that actually staying in the house!'
Vaguely startled, Elise queried, 'Is he?' She hadn't thought about whether he was good-looking. She supposed, in a rugged, careless way he could be called handsome.
Another girl laughed. 'She's only got eyes for Peter, silly! She's just engaged, remember.'
Elise smiled at the general laughter, surprised at the strength of her reluctance to introduce Shard to these girls. She supposed it was because they weren't of his world—no, he wasn't of theirs. She knew he wouldn't be interested in any of them. And suddenly she thought it would be amusing to introduce him to these girls. They had gone to the best schools, most of them to her own school, they had been presented as debutantes with her, they were well educated and came from well-off families, were poised and pretty and accustomed to sophisticated men.
'He's a labourer,' she said. 'An unemployed builder's labourer. You know how Gary's always picking up strays. Be nice to him. He's out of his depth and he has no conversation.'
She introduced him to five girls, one by one, and watched them being nice to him. He danced with them all. He didn't look at her. She danced with Peter, and sometimes with others, and watched Shard with his arms about other girls, the lazy grin that he slanted at them from time to time lightening the near-boredom on his face. She waited for him to seek her out, but he didn't. She thought he should have the manners to ask Gary's sister for one dance. And he didn't.
Once she saw him standing alone, leaning on a pillar. She went over to him with a bright, hostess smile and said, 'Are you enjoying yourself, Shard?'
'Yes,' he said. 'Thank you.'
'You're not dancing.'
'I've been dancing, a lot.'
There are some very nice girls here.'
'I know. You introduced me to some of them.'
Suddenly shakingly angry, she controlled her voice and smiled straight into his eyes, her eyes limpid. 'I asked them to be nice to you,' she said. 'Specially.'
She saw at once that he had guessed exactly how, and she could have borne it better if he had been angry. But the answering smile he turned on her held nothing but pure enjoyment, his voice broken only by the threat of laughter. 'How kind of you, Elise,' he said. 'You're very like your mother.'
She turned and walked away, unable to face him any longer. It would have been kinder if he had hit her. She almost wished that he had; she could have hit him back, then. Her hands itched to do it. She wanted to fight him, to watch him flinch as she struck out at him and felt the sting of his hard flesh against her hand.
CHAPTER THREE
There was lathing Elise could do but go on with the party, making sure everyone was enjoying themselves, keeping the music and the food going.
After eleven a cold breeze sprang up, and the crowd moved inside. They spilled through all the rooms and some of the older ones left before midnight. The noise swelled near twelve o'clock, then hushed expectantly as Howard called for silence before the hour.
Elise stood with Peter, his han
d loosely on her waist, and they kissed as the clock struck the hour. Everyone was laughing around them and there was the usual singing of Auld Lang Syne and a lot of kissing. When she 'felt hands pluck her away from Peter's side, she turned with a smile, not knowing at first who it was.
She saw grey eyes blazing in a dark face, and gasped. And then hard hands clasped her waist, pulling her against him, and a hard mouth touched hers, pressing her head back, bruising her lips against her teeth. She tasted blood before he released her, and she fell back against Peter's steadying arm as Shard turned away.
She heard Peter mutter, 'He's got a nerve, hasn't he?'
'Oh, don't be so stuffy, Peter!' she snapped, immediately appalled and contrite. She smiled to soften the words. 'It was nothing,' she said. 'Scarcely a kiss at all. Everybody does it at New Year.'
It had lasted only a few seconds, and she didn't know if it could come under the general heading of a kiss. She felt—branded.
*
They spent New Year's Day at the beach, picnicking on cold ham and chicken, strawberries and champagne, and spending a lot of time in the water. Gary brought a surfboard and it turned out that Shard was very good at , surfing. He looked magnificent standing on the board riding in on a high breaker, and Elise couldn't bear to watch him. She went for a long walk with Peter along the sand and over the rocky headland at the end of the beach. Tiny black mussels clung to the rock and cut her feet, and blue crabs scuttled into cracks ahead of them with a scratching sound, and as the tide flung itself against the rocks in increasing swells, washing into the pool and disturbing the tiny starfish and shrimps, hermit crabs and seaweed crabs that peopled them, Peter began to worry about getting back.
They had to scramble through thigh-deep water in the sand to reach the soft sand again, Peter frowningly anxious, and Elise laughing and nonchalant, as the waves pushed and sucked at them, the spray in their faces.
Gary and Shard were lying on towels near the big beach umbrella where Katherine sat, elegant in a boutique sundress and big sunglasses, on a mohair rug, and read a new bestseller that her husband had given her for Christmas.
Elise and Peter shared a large beach towel, putting suntan lotion on each other's backs, lying close together, her head pillowed on his shoulder, and one knee raised. Shard hadn't moved since they came back, but she knew that he was watching her. He watched her all the time.
They packed up early, because more people were expected for drinks that evening. Elise, who was tired of parties, wished that her mother didn't see the Christmas-New Year season as an endless round of hospitality. She tended to use the week to gather in one fell swoop all the people she might have missed issuing invitations to through the year, or those she hoped would issue her and Howard some in the new year.
Peter was spending the evening with his own parents, and Elise was rather relieved. He hadn't left her side all day, and she had noticed towards the end of the afternoon his frequent annoyed glances at Shard. She didn't look at Shard herself. She concentrated all her attention on Peter, knowing that Shard was watching, knowing that she wanted him to watch her, and hoping he didn't want to, that he couldn't help himself.
She put on a slim, cool, dark blue patio dress with a deep neckline and halter tie at the neck, and no jewellery. The people invited tonight were business acquaintances of her father's, and they wouldn't stay late. She was handing around dainty canapés to the guests as they sat in a rough semi-circle in the lounge, when someone turned to Shard, at ease with a drink in his hand, his long legs stretched from the depths of a leather chair. 'Shard ‑' the woman said interestedly. 'What an unusual name.'
'My birth certificate says Sherard,' he told her. 'My mother liked upper-crust names. But somehow it got shortened to Shard, and it stuck.'
Howard's voice struck in with, 'What do you mean, upper crust, Shard? We don't have any class distinction in New Zealand. You know that.'
Shard didn't look around the room at the real leather of the armchairs, the thick pile of expensive carpet, the original paintings on the wall, or remind them of Katherine's casual mention of her family, land-owners since the pioneering days, connected to English nobility. He looked at his host and after the briefest of pauses said, 'Yes. Of course.'
Katherine, sitting beside her husband, smiled at Shard and asked lightly, 'Well, what, did you mean, then.
Shard?' as though she could have no idea and awaited enlightenment.
Gary said, 'It was just a figure of speech, Mother.'
Shard glanced at him and said, 'Sure,' and raised his drink to his lips.
But Katherine was not to be deflected. 'Your mother's dead, and your father too, I believe, Shard? Gary said you had no people.' She turned to the other guests and added, That's why Gary brought Shard to spend Christmas with us. So sad, to have no family at this time, isn't it?'
Having effectively focused their attention on him, she returned to the attack. 'By the way, Shard, what did your father do?' She took a canapé from the plate that Elise held, standing beside her, and added, 'For a living, I mean?'
Elise's fingers tightened on the plate, and she turned to look at Shard, forgetting to hand the savouries on to the man seated at the other side of her mother. Echoes of her childhood returned suddenly and she felt her breath stop in her throat. No, she thought, don't do this, Mother!
Shard looked unperturbed, his half-empty glass steady in a negligent hand, his shoulders relaxed against the wide back of the chair. Without hesitation he said easily, 'I believe, he got quite good at making mailbags, Mrs Ashley, but I don't know if you'd call it a living. He spent most of my childhood in prison.'
There was an electric silence, while the guests tried to look as though they hadn't heard, and two flags of colour appeared in Katherine's cheeks.
Gary said, his voice strained, 'I thought you were an orphan, Shard.'
Shard turned to look at him, apparently unaware that he had said anything untoward. 'Virtually. My mother died when I was five or so and I was brought up in institutions. Most kids in orphanages these days aren't true orphans, you know. Those get adopted. Children's homes cater for those whose parents are living but can't —or don't want to—care for them.'
One of the women said quickly, 'Yes, I've heard that! It reflects the state of our society, don't you think? All the broken homes these days --'
General conversation broke out and Elise went on passing the plate of savouries around the circle.
She kept her eyes on the plate she was holding as she reached Shard. She said quietly, 'I'm going for a drive later. Would you like to come?'
The slight pause before he answered might have indicated surprise. Then he said, 'Yes. When?'
'I'll let you know,' she said, and passed on.
He sat beside her in silence as she drove along the southern motorway into the gathering dusk. Lights were flickering on in the houses alongside as they passed the outer suburbs of the city, and a deep purple haze hung over the farther hills as they moved into rolling green countryside. Elise turned off on to a side road and switched on the headlights, picking up grasses waving in the evening breeze by the roadside, and passing shadowing macrocarpas. She changed gear, swept round a corner and put down her foot on the accelerator. The car leaped forward and flew down a long straight, over a broad, shallow hill, into a dip and over a steeper, longer rise. A rabbit fled in panic at the side of the road, and an early opossum loped away from the beam of the lights, amber eyes gleaming huge.
'What did your father do?' she asked, her eyes on the road. 'To get sent to prison.'
'Which time?'
She looked at him then, briefly, to see if he was being sarcastic.
He wasn't. 'He was what's called a habitual criminal,' he told her. 'Petty thefts, burglary, receiving. Not a grand, romantic crime of passion—not murder or a clever bank robbery. Just sordid, cheap little criminal activities. Disappointing, isn't it?'
She couldn't mistake the mockery in that. She braked, suddenly, so that S
hard had to brace himself with a hand on the dashboard, and the car slid to a stop at the brow of a hill, the lights of the city winking at them from the distance on the dark harbour's edge.
Not looking at him, Elise asked levelly, 'What do you mean by that?'
'This sudden interest in me. I know your style, Elise. The moneyed background, the best school, the sheltered life style and eventually the right marriage with a guy from the same sort of family as your own. Only every so often you feel the need to break out and show your independence, live a little dangerously, take a fashionable swipe at your parents' values. Your small rebellions never last long, they just liven up your life a bit, and you'll soon settle down and become a replica of your mother—a little younger, a little more liberal, but a reasonably faithful carbon copy. I thought, when I first saw you, that you were something different—unique. But you're cut from the same basic pattern as all the other spoilt little rich girls you know. What did you hope for from a drive in the dark with the son of a criminal? Just a few hours of worry for your parents, to show them you're all grown up and able to take care of yourself? Or something a bit more exciting? Are you hoping I'll make a pass at you? Try to rape you, perhaps?'
'Have you finished?' she asked between her teeth. She still hadn't looked at him. Her hands gripped the wheel in front of her. She turned her head at last and in the darkness her eyes blazed up at him. 'Now you can listen for a change. I'm not remotely interested in you, Shard Cortland, so don't flatter yourself! I asked you to come with me because I was sorry for you, that's all—as I'd be sorry-for a dog that got accidentally kicked. You're not a person to me, you're one of Gary's stray dogs—he was always bringing home misfits and oddities as a child, it's a habit he's never grown out of. And it always annoyed my mother. Sometimes she can't help showing it. It was stupid of me to think you might have been hurt, tonight. You deliberately caused a sensation because you have an outsize chip on your shoulder about people who happen to have been luckier than you. You enjoyed shocking my mother's guests—I wouldn't be surprised if you made up that story about your father just to draw attention to yourself.'