'He isn't Robert,' explained Judith when she could get a word in edgeways, and Mrs Murry stared at Luke in surprise. 'Grandma, this is Luke Doulton. Mr Doulton, my grandmother, Mrs Murry.'
Mrs Murry peered at Luke as he strolled forward, offering his hand. For a second Judith thought her grandmother was going to offer him the cucumber, then she switched it to another hand and gave Luke the right one to shake, smiling.
'I'm sorry! I thought you were Judith's young man.'
'Perfectly natural, I'm very glad to meet you, Mrs Murry, I've heard so much about you.'
'Have you?' Mrs Murry looked at Judith. 'I'm afraid I can't return the compliment; I could have sworn Judith was going out with someone called Robert.'
'I am—and Mr Doulton isn't my young man, he's my new boss. I'm going up to change into some clean clothes—could you make him a cup of coffee, Grandma? I won't be ten minutes.' Judith was embarrassed, mainly by Luke Doulton's smile rather than her grandmother's confusion. She ran upstairs, leaving Mrs Murry to deal with Luke.
She stripped off her jeans and shirt, washed quickly, chose a dark red wool dress from her wardrobe and was dressed and brushing her hair when Mrs Murry tapped at the door five minutes later. 'Come in,' Judith said as the door opened. She looked at her grandmother with a smile. 'I was just coming down.'
'Did you want some coffee?'
'I haven't got time; Mr Doulton's in a hurry. Did he tell you we were going to have lunch at his mother's house?'
'Yes. He's charming, isn't he? And so handsome—I can't remember when I last met such an attractive man. I had to put my glasses on to look at him properly— such an unusual colour, his hair. What colour would you call it? Mahogany?'
'Brown,' said Judith, giving her own reflection a quick check. She looked calm and neat and that was all she could say for herself, but that was precisely the image she wanted to give Mrs Doulton. She got up and Mrs Murry followed her down the stairs, telling her far too loudly: 'Couldn't you have found something prettier than that dress?'
Luke Doulton loomed in the hallway, and Judith could tell he had been eavesdropping. He was smiling; she was beginning to recognise the variations on his smiles and this one was his teasingly amused smile, it was probably the one she liked least of all of them.
'Ten minutes exactly,' he said. 'Only just made it, though. '
'Pedant.' Judith murmured, picking up her suede jacket. She was aware of her grandmother looking at him hard. Turning, she kissed her on the cheek. 'I won't be late,' she said.
'Definitely mahogany,' Mrs Murry told her. 'I can't imagine why you say brown.'
As they drove away from the house Luke asked curiously: 'What's mahogany?' and Judith said: 'Oh, nothing,' her eyes on the driving mirror, watching a car pulling out behind them.
'Where exactly does your mother live?' she asked, settling into the comfortable leather seat with a sigh. It was a beautiful morning for a drive into the country, much more enjoyable than working in her flat. She considered the sight of Luke Doulton's long-fingered hands on the steering wheel; they suggested a sensitivity and strength which did not fit with what she had learnt about him so far. Well, she corrected herself, the strength maybe—but she hadn't seen many signs of sensitivity as yet.
'Just outside Canterbury, a tiny village called Lambourne—on the motorway we should make it there well before lunch.'
'Is she expecting you?'
'I rang her this morning.' He turned his head, the thick hair whipping across his forehead, and smiled at her. 'She's expecting you, too—I told her I'd bring you even if I had to manhandle you to get you there.'
'Oh, did you?' Judith's voice held cool hauteur, but it only made him laugh; he was not an impressionable man, she decided, the only way you might be sure of making an impression on him was to use a hammer. He was too used to having his own way, he had had too much money and too much power at an early age and had been answerable to no one but himself all these years; it had made him as impervious as a steel wall.
'Did Baba tell you I'd been dating Caroline before I met Baba?' he asked suddenly, and Judith looked round at him, her eyes wide and startled.
'Yes; she told me what Caroline had said to her at the party, too. Not a very pleasant girl, is she? She upset Baba on what should have been a wonderful evening.'
'I wonder what else Baba has told you,' he mused, half to himself. 'You make me nervous, Miss Murry. You have a horrible habit of saying what you think and damn the consequences. It can be unnerving. I'm amazed you've made it as far as you have in banking, that sort of habit usually gets you into trouble. You must have had a very tolerant boss.'
'John never did anything I disapproved of,' Judith told him.
'How wise of him; who did the embalming?'
'What?' She looked round, baffled, then saw his teasing smile again and relaxed. 'Oh, very funny.' But, in a sense, he had hit the nail on the head. John had been slightly stuffy, totally devoted to his work and scrupulously conscientious, a very admirable man, but she had to admit—slightly stuffy. Her gaze travelled to the wing mirror on her side of the car and she saw the vehicle which had pulled out behind them when they left London still firmly in place, glued to their tail. Judith frowned. She stared at the two men in the front seat: they wore dark glasses, you couldn't see much of their faces, but their shoulders had a bulk under their jackets which made them fairly menacing, not men you would like to run into on a dark night. She looked at the scenery flashing past. They had been driving for a good twenty minutes now and it might be a coincidence that that car was still behind them after what must be around twenty miles through the suburbs of London, but Judith had very little faith in coincidence.
'I don't want to sound alarmist, but we're being followed.' she said to Luke Doulton. 'Look in your mirror—that blue car has been there for miles and it never budges; I'm certain it's following us.'
He looked obediently into his mirror, she saw his dark brows wing upwards and flushed.
'I'm not imagining it! Now that we've hit the motorway put on some speed and just see if they fall back—I bet they don't. You must be insane driving around alone in an ordinary car, you know. You must be at risk, someone in your position. I realise you must feel much safer over here than you do in the States, you aren't such a public figure in Britain, but you really should be more careful. You've even put the top down on this car, haven't you? You're a sitting duck in an open car. I know you must enjoy being able to relax and act as though you were just like everybody else now and again, but it isn't wise, even in Britain. Those men back there could be anything from kidnappers to assassins.' She stopped talking because Luke was looking at her with laughter in his eyes. Judith stared at him in disbelief, then went rigid as he put his hand on her knee.
He took his hand away almost at once, though, after giving her knee a paternal pat. 'Thanks for the concern, but those assassins back there are on my payroll. What is it you call them over here? Minders, isn't it? Well, those guys are my minders. They're security men, and you're quite right, I would be a fool if I didn't take precautions, but I prefer to ignore my minders when I get the chance. That's why they're in that car back there and I'm here with you, which is a much more enjoyable experience.'
'Oh, hell!' Judith muttered with force. 'Why did you let me make a fool of myself? Why didn't you tell me right away?'
'It was sweet of you to take such an interest in my welfare,' he said, grinning, and she could have hit him.
'And I was impressed by your powers of observation; I must tell those guys to be less obvious in future. They're | supposed to be discreet; if events did take a nasty turn their arrival unexpectedly could make all the difference. I rely on the element of surprise.'
'I'll remember that,' said Judith. She was learning a lot about him very quickly; some of it was surprising, but all of it was very illuminating. Was that how Luke timed his raids on unsuspecting companies—discreet observation from a distance followed by a surprise swoop out of the blue?
Very effective, no doubt, and difficult to fight him off once he had arrived, you wouldn't know for a while what had hit you.
Just before they reached Canterbury he turned off on a narrow road which meandered away across the Kent countryside with low hedges on each side and beyond them grassy fields full of black and white cows and elms just coming into leaf; in the orchards in the distance pink blossom made a lacy pattern on the blue sky and beyond the swaying blossom she saw the white cowls of a pair of oasthouses. Luke slowed as they approached a pair of open gates; he swooped through them and headed down a drive bordered with lime trees. The blue car followed and parked at the end of the drive, a stone's throw from the black and white timbered Elizabethan house in front of which Luke had halted.
'Damsels,' he said to Judith; leaning his folded arms across the wheel and watching her as she stared at the house with delight. 'Originally it was called Damsel's Piece, according to the earliest deeds—probably because it was given to somebody's daughter when she got married, a sort of dowry, I suppose. Some time in the eighteenth century they dropped the word Piece and just called it Damsels. My mother has a theory that it was the land which was the dowry, not the house—the house came later.'
She was barely listening; her eye following the crooked line of the roofs, wavy and spotted with green moss, the pink tiles faded by time to a gentle rose. Barley-sugar chimneys twisted upwards; the windows were diamond-latticed, the black beams wandering like the road on which Luke had just driven, the house had a stubborn eccentricity as though determined to draw attention to the fact that it was a remarkable survival from a less uniform age, and the gardens surrounding it were laid out in period with low box hedges around the lush green lawns, yew trees trimmed into shapes here and there and in the distance a little wicker arbour overhung with climbing roses and ivy.
'How romantic!' Judith sighed, looking beyond the garden to the small park which stretched away to a belt of trees on one side and on the other to an obviously ancient red brick wall. 'What a dreamy place; has your mother lived here long?'
'Let me see—nearly ten years now, I suppose. She used to know the people who owned it years ago and when she heard it was on the market she rushed over to buy it at once. She was in love with it when she was just a little girl, I think; she said it was her great dream to live here.'
'I'm not surprised—it's that sort of house, it has magic'
He smiled. 'I've a strong feeling you and my mother are going to get on like a house on fire! Come in and meet her. She'll have heard the car, nothing happens here that she doesn't know about, she'll be waiting for us.'
Judith got out of the car and then saw that the front door stood open and an old woman was walking slowly to meet them. She was tall and very thin with snow-white hair and a wrinkled, sallow face; her dark blue dress blew about in the wind and she hunched her shoulders against it with a cross frown. Judith stared, thinking; no, his mother is nothing like him at all—but then did I really expect to see an immediate resemblance?
'Midday, you said, Luke! That means twelve o'clock to me, I don't know what time you call this, but the clock just struck one and I set that clock by Big Ben on the News at Ten every night, so I know it isn't wrong. If you're going to arrive at one, you should say so and not be so vague. It's very thoughtless of you. We've been very fidgety for the last hour, I can tell you; my legs have almost worn down to the anklebone running up and down stairs to say there hasn't been a phone call and you haven't crashed the car or been hijacked and taken off to South America in a laundry basket. When you specify a time, you should stick to it. If the lamb is ruined don't blame me, you only have yourself to blame!' Without drawing breath she turned and stared at Judith, demanding: 'Who's this, then? That's not your fiancée, she had fair hair. You didn't say you were bringing someone with you, is she staying for lunch? I don't know if there's enough.'
'Of course there is, Fanny,' said Luke, quite unperturbed by the scolding. He kissed her cheek. 'How are you? You look well. I'm sorry we're late, I hope the lamb isn't uneatable. This is Miss Murry, my new personal assistant.’
Judith offered her hand rather nervously under the penetrating stare the old woman gave her. Without taking it Fanny turned and stumped away towards the house, leaving Judith with the realisation that in Fanny's eyes guests did not shake hands with housekeepers. Luke gave her a rueful grin.
'Fanny has been looking after my mother for years, I don't know what my mother would do without her,' he said in a voice pitched loud enough to reach the departing Fanny's ears.
'Lunch will be ten minutes—and you've got to go up and see your mother before you sit down at the table, so don't dawdle,' the old woman flung over her shoulder, ignoring his flattery. Judith found it suddenly very funny, but when she looked down, smiling to herself, Luke gripped her arm, muttering: 'One day your sense of humour is going to get you into trouble!'
She looked down at the hand curled around her forearm. 'One day you're going to get a kick on the shins if you keep grabbing me like that!'
'Charm itself, aren't you?' he said drily, but he removed the hand, adding: 'You can come up with me and meet my mother right away. Keep that expression on your face—that's the one I want her to see; it would curdle milk at forty paces!'
Judith immediately assumed an angelic smile, dark eyes wide and innocent. 'This one?' she asked, and Luke gave her a strange, intent stare before which her eyes fell instinctively, although she had no idea why they should.
CHAPTER FIVE
SHE wasn't sure, afterwards, exactly what she had been expecting to see when she followed Luke into the large, sunlit bedroom, but it certainly had not been the vision she did see, sitting up against banked pillows, watching the door as they came through it. Mrs Doulton was beautiful. That was Judith's first thought—a flash of realisation which came with a jab of sharp surprise. Her second thought came hard on the heels of the first; beautiful? she asked herself, staring, was that the right word to describe someone who was obviously almost sixty and so thin and frail that as you looked at her you felt a pang of anxiety?
'Luke, you're so late—I was worried!'
'You shouldn't have been.' Luke sat on the edge of the bed and took the hand his mother held out to him; it was engulfed in his long fingers, Mrs Doulton's skin looked impossibly white against the hard brown strength of her son's large hand.
Judith waited and a moment later Mrs Doulton looked past Luke, smiling, and at once Judith saw the beauty again and this time knew where it came from—this was not a beauty you could pin down to any one feature. It was not in the wide-open grey eyes or the small delicately formed nose or the pale mouth. It was in that smile, that eagerness and radiance, in the impression of luminosity—Mrs Doulton was so insubstantial that the mind inside the body had become what you saw and reacted to, the physical shell so worn down that her inner light shone through it visibly.
Luke glanced round and got up. 'Mother, this is Judith Murry—Judith, my mother.'
Judith quickly went over to take the hand Mrs Doulton held out. 'Sit down, Judith, it's good of you to give up your Sunday to come and see me—I hope Luke didn't bully you into it.'
'Not much,' said Judith, sitting down, and Mrs Doulton looked surprised and then laughed.
'Careful, Mother, she has an annoying habit of telling the truth,' Luke warned in a dry voice.
'That must be a new experience for you, darling,' Mrs Doulton told him, giving him an amused look, then she asked Judith: 'You've just got back from New York, I hear; how was it?'
'Noisy,' said Judith, smiling. 'Electrifying and exciting—but it must be one of the noisiest cities on earth, and very disorientating, because they keep pulling it down and building it up again overnight. Nothing ever satisfies them. I suppose; they always think they can make it bigger and better. I don't know why they bothered to send spaceships to the moon— sooner or later the skyscrapers of Manhattan are going to get there anyway!'
Mrs Doulton laughed, watching her intent
ly and making Judith nervous and very aware of her own shortcomings. Luke's mother had only recently met Baba—Judith must be something of an anti-climax after that, in her very plain dark red dress with her windblown hair tossed around her thin, sallow face. Judith looked down, flushing; the brief vivacity extinguished in her the moment she remembered what she actually looked like. Mrs Doulton, like Baba, must have been a real knock-out when she was young if even at sixty she could make you believe she was still beautiful.
'Don't loom, Luke,' Mrs Doulton ordered. 'We don't need you—go down and coax Fanny into a better mood; she's very cross because you were late.'
'You shouldn't have got worried; Fanny only gets cross because you're upset, you know that.'
'I know everything there is to know about Fanny, thank you, and I can't help getting agitated when you're nearly an hour late.' Mrs Doulton waved an imperious hand at him. 'Go down and talk to her!'
Luke went out and his mother gave Judith a rueful smile. 'Stupid of me to fret over him at his age, a habit I picked up in the States—such a violent society especially when money is involved. His father had several narrow scrapes—I lived in terror for weeks when someone with a grudge against him threatened to have him killed!'
'Luke has his security men on hand all the time, I gather, even over here—so I shouldn't worry too much.' Judith hesitated, then told her about the little incident on the way down to Lambourne. Mrs Doulton listened and laughed.
'Were you scared?'
'Petrified,' Judith admitted. 'I felt so silly when he told me they were his own men; I'd been trying to work out how to escape them!'
Mrs Doulton lay back, her thin hands immobile on the sheet. 'You aren't what I was expecting,' she said suddenly, and Judith looked at her warily.
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