A Suitable Mistress

by Cathy Williams

She thought regretfully of her brother’s hurried stay in England. It would have been comforting to have him around for a bit longer, although things between them had changed slightly anyway. He was married now and had been for three years.

  He had sent their father a ticket to Australia so that he could go to the wedding. She remembered with deep fondness the state of great excitement that had preceded the departure. Anyone would have thought that he had been picked to fly to the moon.

  But marriage had taken Tom away a bit from her. They still chatted easily, and wrote to each other often, but his attentions no longer focused on his little sister as indulgently as they had. He had a wife now—a wife whom she had never met although the pictures of her promised someone very friendly—and a baby on the way.

  ‘He asked me to go back with him,’ she said suddenly, leaning a bit against the door so that she could look at Dane’s averted profile.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘It seemed like the end of the world and beyond.’ At the time she had felt that to go that far away would be somehow tantamount to desertion. ‘Besides,’ she added, terminating the conversation because she could see it leading to another sermon on how far she had let herself go, simply because, after all these months, she still couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm to do anything, however hard she tried, ‘I hate huge spiders.’

  ‘I suspect there’s probably more to Australia than huge spiders,’ he said drily, half smiling, and she had that unpleasant, falling feeling which she could remember as a teenager, when he had smiled at her in a way that made her feel as though he had access to all her deepest thoughts.

  ‘Why did you decide to go to America?’ she asked, changing the subject, and his face hardened.

  ‘I had my reasons,’ he said in his usual, controlled voice, but there was an edge of granite there that hadn’t been there before.

  ‘What reasons?’ she asked with interest, and he frowned and glanced across at her.

  ‘I see that tact still isn’t one of your strong points,’ he said with lazy amusement.

  ‘Why should you feel free to ask questions about my life and I can’t do the same about yours?’

  ‘Because you’re a child and children shouldn’t ask too many questions.’ He laughed but she didn’t laugh with him.

  ‘What you’re saying is that, since I should be indebted to you, I should just bow my head in silence and accept what the master tells me without asking anything in return? ’

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ he told her calmly. ‘But, if you really want to know, I went away to make my fortune.’

  ‘I thought that your father left you everything?’ He had drawn the lines and she knew that she was overstepping them but he was right, tact never had been one of her strong points, and besides, she had no intention of allowing him to think that she had to be subservient simply because her father had worked for his.

  She was grudgingly aware that she was being slightly unfair in this generalisation, but every time she thought of him she thought of his stepmother and the blood rushed to her head with angry force.

  ‘He left me the estate and a fair-sized inheritance, but control of the company went to Martha.’

  ‘I’m surprised that she didn’t ask you to take over,’ Suzanne said. He had run it virtually single-handed for the four years before his father died.

  ‘Oh, there were a lot of things that Martha wanted,’ he said coolly, and this time the warning in his voice left her in no doubt that he did not intend to develop the conversation further. ‘But we don’t always get what we want in life, do we? I decided to make my own fortune in America.’

  ‘And you did.’

  ‘And,’ he said, turning to her briefly, ‘I did.’

  They had been driving through a very exclusive part of London for the past few minutes. The sort of place that made a very convincing show of being in the country somewhere. Lots of trees and houses hidden from public sight by walls and hedges and long, swirling drives.

  The car turned into one of the long, swirling drives and her eyes widened as she took in the proportions of the house. It was huge. A great Victorian building that had been converted into apartments.

  No wonder the pitiful increase in rent with which Mrs Gentry had threatened her had seemed a paltry affair to him.

  There was a security guard on the ground floor, sitting at a desk and surrounded by various strategically placed plants and a few pieces of discreet furniture here and there. It looked like someone’s lounge.

  ‘Are you allowed to have guests staying with you?’ she asked in a whisper as they took the lift up to his floor, and he looked at her with a mixture of amusement and irony.

  ‘This entire block of apartments belongs to me,’ he said. ‘An investment purchase made two weeks after I left the country.’

  ‘You knew you would come back?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said with a smile that held no warmth, ‘I knew that I would come back. The only question was when.’

  She looked at him, vaguely feeling that there was something here, something not being said, that carried a wealth of hidden meaning, but she couldn’t put her finger on it and he was not about to elucidate. He would never reveal anything unless he wanted to. It was what, she suspected, made him so formidable.

  She followed him out of the lift, along the thick white carpet, and it transpired that the entire floor of the building comprised his apartment.

  Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, an office, a lounge, a kitchen, all beautifully furnished, ready and waiting, she thought, for Dane Sutherland when he decided that the time was right to return.

  Suzanne dropped her little battered case in the lounge and looked around her with amazement.

  ‘No wonder you thought that the bedsit was dingy,’ she said, turning to face him.

  ‘The bedsit was dingy,’ he drawled. He had removed his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt to the elbows so that his powerful forearms were exposed, and she ignored the sudden quickening of her pulses.

  ‘Well, it’s certainly an eye-opener to see how the other half lives,’ she said honestly, and he frowned with impatience.

  ‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ he said, not moving from where he was standing, tall, muscled and disturbing at the other end of the room. ‘You’re going to be living here. Your rooms will be quite separate from mine, and I shall be out of the apartment most of the time so we probably will only see one another in passing, but when we do cross paths I do not expect to be bombarded with a litany of badly veiled insults. Do you understand?’

  ‘There’s no need to talk to me as though I was a child,’ Suzanne said, mouth turned down.

  ‘Then you’ll have to get out of the habit of acting like one.’ He walked towards her, picked up her three suitcases and said, over his shoulder, ‘I’ll show you to your room.’

  He’d been right about her being separate from him. Her room, which also included a bathroom and another small room off it which had been converted into a sitting room with a television, was at the opposite end of the block.

  She looked around her and said, with her back to him, fingering the wonderful patchwork bedspread, which looked as though it had leapt straight out of the pages of an interior decoration magazine, ‘How much rent would you like me to pay?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ There was impatience in his voice and she spun round.

  ‘I have to pay you something,’ she answered stubbornly. ‘I can’t live here for nothing.’

  ‘I don’t want your money,’ he grated. ‘I’ve known you since you were in nappies. Do you think I expect you to pay me for the privilege of being provided with a roof over your head?’

  ‘No more charity from your family,’ she muttered, meeting his hard grey eyes levelly.

  I’ve learnt a lesson from my father, she thought. What’s given with one hand is taken with the other.

  ‘There’s no point in letting pride get in the way of judgement, Suzie,’ he said,
not angrily but as though he was explaining something to a child.

  ‘Without pride, we are nothing.’

  ‘And from what book did you pick up that little gem?’

  She flushed angrily, thinking that she had read it somewhere and it had seemed like a damned good piece of wisdom at the time.

  ‘I’ll pay you what I paid Mrs Gentry,’ she told him. ‘I know it’s not a quarter of what it’s worth, but it’s all I can afford. Don’t think that you can ease your conscience over my father’s treatment by letting me live here free of charge.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Buy something for the place once a month. Would that satisfy your pride?’

  She gave it some thought and nodded. ‘All right,’ she conceded, lifting her chin, and he ran his fingers through his hair.

  ‘Now would you like something to eat? Or would the food stick in your throat?’

  Was he laughing at her? There was no smile on his face, but it was difficult to tell with him.

  ‘Would you like me to cook?’ she offered, and he raised his eyebrows sceptically.

  ‘Can you cook? I remember when you were thirteen you cooked something for Tom and me and it was a bit of a struggle to get through the meal.’

  ‘Very funny.’ Why did he still treat her as though she was a child? she wondered crossly. Rescuing her from her unpleasant bedsit, talking to her as though her wits were very slightly scrambled.

  ‘What was it you cooked?’ He was still amused at the memory, and she followed him into the kitchen, watching the lean build of his body, the way he moved with panther-like grace, every movement silent and economical.

  ‘Roast chicken,’ she replied, determined not to act the sullen child any more than she could help. ‘It burnt.’ Everything had burnt. She had turned the oven too high. The only salvageable item had been the gravy. She could remember how mortified she had been, infatuated with this dark, devastatingly handsome university graduate, clumsy and thirteen, with long, gangly limbs and long, unruly hair which she had tied up because she had thought that it made her look older.

  ‘Your father was a superb cook,’ he said, extracting various things from the fridge after he had made her sit down. ‘When you were very young, he used to try out dishes on your brother and me. At the time we thought most of them a bit odd, but they tasted excellent.’

  He wasn’t looking at her. He was busy doing something that involved chopping and opening of cans, but he expected a reply. She sensed rather than knew that.

  ‘Yes, he was a wonderful cook,’ she agreed, feeling that lump in her throat again. She fished inside her handbag and took out a block of chocolate, doing it surreptitiously. She wasn’t accustomed to talking about her father. She had bottled up her emotions inside her ever since his death and it was painful to voice her memories, even when the questions asked were so detached.

  She lapsed into her memories and licked her fingers absent-mindedly after she had finished eating the chocolate. She was only aware that Dane was looking at her when she glanced up, her eyes dry, and she said defensively, ‘I’m going to go on a diet.’

  He didn’t say anything, which annoyed her more than if he had. He just nodded to two of the cupboards, asked her to set the table, and then returned to what he was doing.

  Suzanne got up, feeling instantly lumpy after that forbidden piece of chocolate, and began putting plates and cutlery down.

  ‘I know that I’ve put on a bit of weight,’ she said into what she thought was a critical silence. ‘It’s simply that I’ve got into the habit of snackıng recently.’ Well, for months, she said to herself. Eating all the wrong things and justifying it by telling herself that she would start a sensible diet tomorrow. She tried to neaten her hair with one hand and decided that it was an impossible task. Her hair never did what it was told.

  ‘There’s no need to justify yourself,’ he said, bringing food to the table. He deposited two saucepans, one of which contained spaghetti and the other a red sauce smelling of garlic. He had opened a bottle of wine and he poured them both a glass, then sat down so that he was directly facing her.

  ‘I wasn’t justifying myself,’ Suzanne began, confused. ‘I was simply explaining...’ Her voice trailed off and she helped herself to some of the pasta and the sauce. ‘I happen to like the way I look,’ she continued.

  Why did he insist on making her feel so defensive and indignant? she wondered. Why couldn’t he have left her to muddle along to her own devices? She didn’t need his help to pull herself together. She would have done it quite completely on her own. After a while. Why did he have to come along and feel sorry for her? She didn’t want to be an object of pity. He didn’t owe her anything and she wished that he had just left her alone. Just because he had known her since she’d been in nappies didn’t mean that he now owed her something.

  ‘You’ve changed too, you know,’ she said accusingly, after a while.

  And she was taken aback when he leaned back in the chair and said with an amused, lazy smile, ‘Have I? Tell me how.’

  Suzanne stared at him with the drowning feeling of having got into something that was beyond her depth.

  She tried not to look addled but the only thing her mind would tell her was that, if anything, he had become even more devastatingly handsome than she remembered. His dark good looks had hardened, taken on the indefinable edge of power and control.

  ‘You look older,’ she said lamely.

  ‘I am older.’ He waited, amused.

  ‘Of course, you’re still—still...an attractive man...’ She gave her full attention to a mouthful of spaghetti, thinking what an undignified meal it was, especially when only one of you was doing the eating.

  He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Dear me, how embarrassed you sound saying that!’ He eyed her as though she was a charming curiosity. ‘Anyone would think that you had no dealings with the opposite sex.’ The grey eyes fixed on her face speculatively.

  Suzanne felt her face go hot. Try as she might, she couldn’t find any serious recollection of dealings with the opposite sex. Nearly twenty-one and still a virgin. Boyfriends, yes. Her father had always been very indulgent about boyfriends; maybe, she thought now, because he could see that, despite the parties she went to occasionally and the boys she brought back home occasionally, she was still as innocent as a wide-eyed child.

  Dane Sutherland had been the only one who had stirred her imagination. Everyone else had been little more than a bit of childish fun. True, when she was nineteen, she had had a fling with a man, someone who had worked with her, but she had never felt that driving passion which she had always associated with a serious affair, and she had not slept with him, despite his persistence. In fact, it had mostly been his persistence that had ended their relationship.

  ‘I’ve been out with men, yes,’ she told him coolly.

  ‘Slept with any of them?’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  ‘Just curious.’ He shrugged and laughed, not at all taken aback by her reply.

  ‘I don’t ask you about the women in your life,’ Suzanne muttered, irritated as much by his attitude as by his line of questioning.

  ‘Feel free to,’ he said, folding his arms and shrugging again. She caught his eyes and was struck, as she had been years ago, by his magnificent ability to make it seem as though one hundred per cent of his attention was focused entirely on her. A trick of sorts, she knew, a talent for pretence, but how she had once let it work on her. She couldn’t think back to her adolescence without cringing.

  ‘I’m not that interested,’ she said, wondering whether she should scrape her plate clean or whether that would appear greedy. The food had tasted wonderful—full of tomatoes and herbs. Far better than anything she could whip up. She had never been at her best in a kitchen. Things always seemed to go wrong whenever and wherever they possibly could. Sauces always curdled, or else became lumpy, meat always seemed to burn, and she always managed to forget whatever was boiling until the s
mell became unavoidable.

  She stood up and began clearing away the dishes, vaguely piqued to realise that if she was uninterested in his women then he was even less interested in her response.

  He employed, he told her, a woman who came in and cleaned every other day. She also did his ironing and cooked if and when he wanted her to.

  ‘Lucky old you,’ she said, watching him as he fixed them cups of coffee and nodded briefly in the direction of the lounge.

  ‘Shall we clear the air, Suzie?’ he asked with a resigned sigh. ‘Do you dislike me personally, or do you simply dislike the family I represent?’

  He sat down on the chair opposite her and stretched out his long legs, crossing them loosely at the ankles.

  ‘How can you expect me to give you an honest answer to that question, when I am not renting a room in your house?’

  ‘Because,’ he said steadily, his expression shuttered, ‘you haven’t yet learned the art of deception. You would like to maintain some kind of dignified coldness, I imagine, but your need to express yourself trips you up constantly. Am I right?’

  ‘You’re always right, aren’t you?’

  ‘I think that that’s one reason why you’ve let yourself go so utterly for the past few months. You’ve not spoken to anyone about your father’s death. Instead you’ve bottled up your emotions, which is alien to you, and the result is that you’re still as maudlin and confused as you were the day he died.’

  ‘I am neither maudlin nor confused,’ she denied hotly.

  ‘You seem to think that I washed my hands of your father the day I left the house,’ he said, in a cool statement of fact. ‘I did write to him, you know, and a little over a year ago I sent him a cheque in case he needed money. I knew that he had put aside the small legacy my father left him for you. He returned my cheque with a friendly enough letter saying that he was fine.’

  Suzanne stared at him, floored by this revelation about which she had known nothing. ‘Pride,’ she managed to say, recovering her power of speech.

  ‘Almost certainly,’ he agreed, either not noticing or else deliberately ignoring the effect that his words had had on her. ‘Still, I had no idea that my stepmother was giving him such a hard time.’