by Sara Craven
For a minute she stared at him, then with a little inarticulate cry, she struck him across the face and ran past him out of the room and down the hall. She was struggling with the stiff catch on the front door when he caught her.
‘You forgot your handbag.’ His tone was soft and jeering. ‘And your jacket.’
‘Thank you.’ She snatched at them, her face crimson with humiliation, suppressed tears stinging her eyelids.
Logan swore under his breath. ‘Oh God, Briony!’ He turned her to face him. ‘You got off lightly.’ he told her harshly. ‘Just be thankful that I didn’t take advantage of you, and for God’s sake don’t go round offering yourself to any other man who happens to take your schoolgirl fancy unless you want to end up as yet another unpleasant statistic for the sociologists to mull over.’
‘Suddenly everyone feels they have a right to lecture me―to feel responsible for me.’ she said stonily. ‘Now please take your hands off me. I’d like to go home.’
He released her immediately. That’s the best idea you’ve had yet.’ He sounded weary. ‘Go and play in your own league, sweetheart, and leave the adult games until such time as you’ve learned the rules.’
And the flat door slammed behind her.
The remembered sound seemed to strike an echo closer at hand, and Briony stirred in her chair, dragging herself almost reluctantly back from the pain of the past to the reality of the present. She soon saw what had roused her-the noise of a piece of coal falling out on to the hearth-and she knelt down to replace it on the fire and sweep up the resultant ash.
She was shocked when she glanced at her watch and saw how long she had been sitting there, remembering. A pointless exercise if ever there was one, she thought ironically. As she’d told Logan all those months ago, the past wasn’t very productive. Only no one had warned her that the future could be even less so.
She got to her feet, stretching wearily. Now was the time to go and see about her room, otherwise she could well end up spending a cramped night in that very chair.
But there was a surprise in store for her when she reached the top of the stairs and turned into the main bedroom at the front of the house. The bed was already made up and waiting, with crisply ironed sheets, and an old-fashioned eiderdown covered in flowered cotton.
Briony frowned as she set down her case and looked around her. Could it be possible that Aunt Hes was pected after all? But that was ridiculous, she knew Aunt Hes rarely visited the cottage after the beginning of November, because she said frankly that the cold of North Yorkshire seemed to eat into her bones these days, apart from the fact that Kirkby Scar was often cut off by snow for days on end.
On the other hand, could she have let the cottage, perhaps?
If so, when the tenant arrived, Briony would simply have to apologise and withdraw. She could spend a couple of days in York, she thought. Now that the tourist season was over, she would enjoy a leisurely tour of the Minster and the museums. It wasn’t what she had planned, but was that necessarily a bad thing when most of the things she planned went so utterly and disastrously wrong?
She took a nightdress from her case and threw it across the bed, then walked to the window to draw the curtains.
The second surprise was more in the nature of a shock. The darkness outside was full of the wild swirl of snowflakes, and the ground beneath as well as the kitchen roof and the neighbouring trees were already crusted in white. A swift sigh of exasperation escaped Briony s lips, She remembered now the forbidding leaden sky which had greeted her arrival, and realised she should have guessed its significance. She could still leave, of course. She could repack her case and find the car and drive to a slightly more accessible hotel. She glanced at her watch again, imagining the reaction if she turned up at this time of night without a booking. She might even end up spending the night in the car. No, she would stay where she was for tonight at least and risk being able to get out in the morning. It was surely too early in the winter for a really heavy fall, she argued to herself without a great deal of conviction. The real trouble was the isolation of the cottage from the village, and the difficulty of stocking up with fresh food if the weather was really turning nasty. She couldn’t subsist for ever on a diet of black coffee.
They said everything came in threes, and the evening’s surprises proved to be no exception. When she returned downstairs, the room was occupied. A large black cat with enormous green eyes was sitting in the middle of the hearthrug washing itself as if it had every right to be there. It turned its head gracefully as Briony came in and gave her a long speculative look before returning to its toilet.
Briony paused and watched it, her mouth curving upwards in amusement. Aunt Hes didn’t own a cat, but she was probably notorious to the neighbouring feline population as a soft touch who could always be relied on for a saucer of milk, and this handsome beast had obviously realised the cottage was occupied again and drawn its own conclusions.
The only thing was-how had he got in? Briony went out into the hall again, but the front door was securely shut. She had opened no windows, so the cat must have got in via the kitchen. But how? Puzzled, she walked out into the kitchen and looked around. The back door was shut and the place was deserted, but someone had been in, presumably while she was upstairs, because a large cardboard box full of groceries now reposed in the centre of the kitchen table. A piece of folded notepaper was stuck in one side of the box and Briony unfolded it.
‘Saw the car and thought I would bring these things up before the weather got worse.’ she read. ‘Hope all is satisfactory. Yours truly, N. Barnes.’
She looked into the box, her spirits lifting. Bread, butter, cartons of long-life milk, bacon and a couple of boxes of eggs. She wouldn’t starve even if the blizzard outside raged for a week. But how had Mrs Barnes known? Perhaps she had simply seen the car parked at the foot of the track and decided to bring up some supplies. It could all be as simple as that, and Briony would take it for granted that was what had happened until she knew differently. Perhaps Mrs Bames was naturally psychic, she thought grinning slightly to herself, as she unpacked the provisions and put them away. There was even a frozen chicken and a small joint of beef at the bottom of the box, so whoever was expected was apparently planning to stay.
The cat stalked into the kitchen and pushed itself against her legs ,purring vociferously.
‘Cupboard love,’ Briony accused as she bent to fondle the glossy head. ‘But we’ll both have a drink In a minute.’ A hot milk drink for herself, she thought, and one of those tablets the doctor had prescribed for when she could not sleep, as something told her she would not do tonight. All this time she had survived by shutting out the past, refusing to admit its existence. Now she had allowed it back to torment her with a vengeance, and it was not done with her yet.
‘Go and play in your own league,’ Logan had said to her, she thought as she stood waiting for the milk to heat, and it was sound advice, although she had not realised it then. Christopher had been far more suitable in every way. Christopher who would be now telephoning vainly round all her friends in an effort to find out where she had gone. Christopher whom she had seriously been considering marrying until that unbelievable evening almost .a week ago when she had gone to the head of the stairs, drawn there by the sound of her father’s voice raised in anger, and seen Logan standing there. Logan who was dead―who’d been shot as a spy by Arab guerrillas. A much thinner Logan, his deeply tanned skin fine-drawn over his bones, lines of weariness etched around the grimness of his mouth as he stood quite immobile, his hands resting on his hips, his head bent slightly listening as her father raged at him.
She had heard herself cry out in disbelief, and they had both looked up at her―her father’s face crimson with anger, Logan’s eyes cool and cynical as they studied her in the long evening gown of midnight blue velvet, hanging sheer and straight to the floor.
He said, ‘I’ve obviously picked a bad moment for my return from the grave. I’d like to se
e you some time, Briony, when you’re less busy. And alone, preferably.’ And then he’d turned and gone out of the door into the night, and she’d taken one step towards him, her hand reaching out in a futile attempt to prevent his departure, her voice speaking his name, but perhaps it had been in silence, inside herself, because no sound had emerged, and then that strange stifling darkness had risen up and engulfed her.
She shuddered as she remembered the scene that awaited her when she had regained consciousness.
Christopher had arrived by then for their evening’s date and was standing there totally bewildered while Sir Charles raged on in the background. Her father, it seemed, blamed everyone, from the Azabian government who had allowed Logan to escape, down to the Foreign Office who had given no prior warning that he was alive and due back in the United Kingdom. If it hadn’t been so horrible, it would almost have been funny.
‘The infernal nerve of that swine―just turning up here like that!’ Sir Charles fulminated, as Briony sat up, pushing away the glass of water that an anxious Mrs Lambert was trying to hold to her lips.
‘Where else would he come?’ she said. ‘I am still his wife, after all.’
A fact that it was odd to acknowledge even to herself, after almost a year of believing she was a widow, of trying to push to some distant recess of her mind all that happened in that brief, disastrous marriage because recriminations were useless now, because she would never be able to acknowledge the mistakes she had made. She had learned to live with all those realisations, and now her whole world had been turned upside down.
‘But not for very much longer.’ Sir Charles glared at her. ‘Divorce proceedings can start right away. It isn’t as if he hasn’t given you grounds,’ he added grimly.
‘You really think it’s as simple as that?’ She stared up at him. .
‘Darling, it has to be.’ Christopher moved to her side, his blue eyes troubled as he looked down at her.
‘Face the facts. Your marriage was over before Logan went to Azabia. You left him―you can’t deny that. He let you think he was dead. You can’t intend just to let him walk back into your life as though nothing had happened.’
They had talked for the rest of the evening, while Briony sat in silence, her mind still trying to absorb the incredible thing which had happened to her. The doctor had called at her father’s insistence, and administered a sedative, which she had not wanted. She needed to think, she had told herself. The sedative had been stronger than even she had imagined, and’ she had slept the clock round, to awake to a world that seemed blurred and slightly out of focus. She had dressed in a silk caftan and come downstairs to be told by Mrs Lambert that no one had called, no one had left a message. It began to seem that the events of the past twenty-four hours had all been some weird preposterous dream, but then the phone had begun to ring, and she had seen the front page stories in some of the newspapers littering the drawing room, and when she switched on the television Logan was there too, being interviewed on a news programme.
‘But why.’ the interviewer was asking him, ‘did the Azabian terrorists announce that you were dead?’
Logan shrugged. ‘Because they didn’t want to admit that they’d been sloppy enough to allow me to escape, I Suppose. They’d intended to kill me, and when I got away they were furious. They put a fair price on my head, and I think it’s proof of the unpopularity of the new regime that so many people were willing to hide me and help me out of the country in spite of the money being offered.’
‘Your escape took a long time.’
‘Indeed it did. I had to remain in hiding sometimes for weeks at a time because there were troops looking for me. If I’d been found, I would have been shot and so would those who were helping me, so I had to be extra careful.’
‘And there was no possibility of informing the British authorities that you were safe?’
‘None,’ Logan said. ‘I’d been one of the last Western correspondents left in Azabia as it was, and all the Embassy staff had been evacuated months before. I had to wait until I crossed the border before I could let anyone know where I was.’
‘And even then you didn’t let it be generally known that you were alive after all. Can you tell us why that was?’
‘Personal reasons,’ said Logan.
‘Can it have been that you wanted to avoid if possible the inevitable ballyhoo that would result when it was known you had escaped?’ the interviewer pressed him.
Logan gave a quick tight smile. ‘If I did, then it hasn’t worked,’ he said with a swift gesture at the cameras and microphones.
‘With the story that you have to tell, I would imagine that you’re in the line for another Journalist of the Year award. You will be returning to your staff job on the Courier?’
‘Perhaps. You could say my plans are fluid at the moment.’ For a moment Logan stared straight at the camera, and Briony had the oddest feeling that he was looking straight at her. She got up in one swift movement and turned off the set.
That evening the pressure began again. She found that her father had invited not only Christopher to have dinner with them, but also George Forrester, their family solicitor. It was like some strange council of war, she thought almost hysterically, as she listened to Mr. Forrester carefully outlining the grounds for divorce under the current laws, and the time period that would elapse before she could hope to be free.
Her father was nodding resignedly and Christopher was patting her hand, and it was a surprise to hear herself say, ‘Will you all please stop talking about me as if I didn’t exist! ‘
Sir Charles said brusquely, ‘Briony, you’re overwrought, and no wonder. Go and lie down, my dear. We’ll discuss this with you later, when you’re feeling calmer.’
‘I’m perfectly calm! And if my life, my future is being discussed, I think I have a right to be included in the discussions.’
‘But you’re still a child,’ her father declared angrily. ‘You’re no more fit to decide what’s best for you now than you were when you married that man.’
She said drily, ‘On the contrary, I don’t even think I’m the same person. Probably Logan isn’t either. We could be two strangers meeting.’
The milk boiled over and Briony rushed to its rescue, the word ‘strangers’ beating in her brain. She and Logan had never been anything but strangers, she thought achingly, and nor, it seemed, would they ever be.
Deliberately, she thrust the last, most hurtful memory away from her. She wouldn’t think about that now.
She poured what was left of the milk into a beaker and added some drinking chocolate to it. She switched off the kitchen lamp, and placed the guard carefully in front of the fire before turning off the living room lamps, The cat had vanished, but she was not altogether surprised when she arrived upstairs to find it curled into a sleek coil on her bed.
‘The nerve of you!’ she said aloud; but she was smiling and the cat made not the slightest attempt to move.
It was cold upstairs, and Briony was glad to put her housecoat on over her nightdress as she made her way to the tiny bathroom, which Aunt Hes had converted out of the third and smallest bedroom, to wash and clean her teeth. There was a rubber hot water bottle hanging on a hook near the basin, and she filled it, hugging it to her as she walked back along the narrow landing to her room.
Her hand was on the landing light switch when she heard from the hall below the unmistakable sound of a key being turned in the front door. For a moment her knees turned to water as she stood there, then common sense reasserted itself. If the late night visitor had a key, then he or she had a right to be entering the cottage. It would be, inevitably, this unknown tenant of Aunt Hes’s, Briony told herself ruefully, tightening the sash on her housecoat, whose food she had begun to eat, and in whose nicely aired bed she had been proposing to retire.
She would have to apologise humbly and do a quick rethink.
The front door opened and a blast of icy wind filled the narrow hallway, together with a
few odd snowflakes.
The shadow that came in was tall and distinctly masculine in shape, and Briony groaned inwardly. It would have been far simpler to have explained to a woman, she thought.
She peered down the stairs and saw that the shadow had turned into a graven image. Riveted to the spot, no doubt, she thought, by letting himself into an empty house to find a woman in a housecoat looking embarrassed at the top of the stairs. She began to hunt round for an appropriate phrase to begin the explanations and apologies, then the hall light clicked on and the words shrivelled and died on her lips as she looked down into the face of the man standing below her.
For a moment, they stood in silence staring at each other.
Then, ‘Hello, wife,’ said Logan with no expression in his voice whatsoever.