by Liz Fielding
He handed it to her, then eased himself carefully into a sitting position.
He was in pain.
Had he just pulled a muscle? Or had he torn something in that long, desperate moment when he’d hung on to her? When he’d helped her over the top to safety.
She didn’t ask, knew he’d deny it anyway. Instead, she dug out the nearly empty pack of wipes from the soggy interior of her bag. Then, having used one to wipe the worst of the dust from her face and hands, she took another and, lifting the big capable hand that had held her, had hung on as the earth shook beneath them, she began, very gently, to wipe it clean.
Jago stiffened at the first touch of the cool, damp cloth on his thumb.
‘Manda…’
Not a slip, then…
‘Shh…’ she said. ‘Let me do this.’
Even through the cloth, she could feel a callus along the inner edge of his thumb that she knew would be a fit for the small trowel he’d found. The result of years of carefully sifting through the layers of the past.
Pieces of bone, pottery, the occasional button or scrap of leather that had been preserved by some freak chance of nature.
Objects without emotional context. Small pieces of distant lives that wouldn’t break your heart.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t throw myself on you,’ she said as she concentrated on each of his fingers in turn. ‘I haven’t done that in years.’
‘No? Just my bad luck.’ Then, as if realising that he’d said something crass, ‘So what do you do with yourself? Now you’ve given up on men?’
‘I work. Very hard. I used to work for Ivo, but these days I’m a partner in the television production company that I set up with my sister-in-law,’ she said, smoothing the cloth over his broad palm. ‘I’m the organiser. I co-ordinate the research, find the people, the places. Keep things running smoothly behind the scenes while Belle does the touchy-feely stuff in front of the camera.’
‘Maybe you should change places,’ he said as, having finished one hand, she began on the other.
She looked up.
‘You’re doing just fine with the touchy-feely stuff,’ he assured her.
‘Oh. No. This is…’ Then, pulling herself together, ‘Actually, since we recently won an award for our first documentary, I think I’ll leave things just the way they are.’
‘What was it about?’
‘Not handbags,’ she said. ‘Or shoes.’
‘I didn’t imagine for a minute it was.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No. It’s my fault for making uncalled-for comments on your handbag choices. Tell me about it.’
‘It was all tied up with one of Belle’s pet causes.’ He waited. ‘Street kids…’
‘The unwanted. You’re sure this was your sister-in-law’s pet cause?’
He was too damn quick…
‘She and her sister spent some time on the streets when they were children. Their stories put my pathetic whining in its place, I can tell you,’ she said quickly. ‘How’s your head, Jago?’
‘Still there last time I looked, Miranda.’
‘Your sense of humour is still intact, at least. Let me see,’ she said, cupping his face in her hands so that she could check it out for herself.
It had been so long since she’d touched a man’s hand, his face in this way. His lean jaw was long past the five o’clock stubble phase and she had to restrain herself from the sensuous pleasure of rubbing her palms against it. Instead, she pushed back his hair, searching out the injury on his forehead.
He’d really taken quite a crack, she discovered, remembering uncomfortably how she’d taunted him about that.
‘I’d better clean that up,’ she said, taking the last wipe from the pack.
‘I can-’
‘Tut…’ she said, slapping away his hand as he tried to take it from her.
‘I can do it myself,’ he persisted. ‘But why would I when I have a beautiful woman to tend me?’
She stopped what she was doing.
The crack on his head must have jarred his brains loose, he decided. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he wasn’t given to living dangerously, at least not where women were concerned.
Keeping it light, keeping his distance just about summed up his attitude to the entire sex, but ever since he’d woken to the sound of Miranda Grenville screaming in the dark it was as if he’d been walking on a high wire. Carelessly.
Maybe cheating death gave you the kind of reckless edge that had you saying the most outrageous things to a woman who was quite capable of responding with painful precision. A woman who, like a well-known brand of chocolate, kept her soft and vulnerable centre hidden beneath a hard, protective sugar shell.
‘You have no idea what I look like,’ she said crisply as she leaned into him, continued her careful cleaning of the abrasion. Enveloping him in her warm female scent.
Would her shell melt against the tongue, too? Dissolve into silky sweetness…
‘I know enough,’ he said, taking advantage of the fact that she had her own hands full to run the pad of his thumb across her forehead, down the length of her nose, across a well defined cheekbone. Definitely his brains had been shaken loose. ‘I know that you’ve got good bones. A strong face.’
‘A big nose, you mean,’ she said as, job done, she leaned back. ‘How does that feel now?’
That she was too far away.
‘You missed a bit just here,’ he said, taking her hand and guiding it an inch or two to the right. Then to his temple. ‘And there.’
‘Really?’ She slid her fingers across his skin. ‘I can’t feel anything. Maybe I should have the light.’
‘We should save the battery,’ he said. ‘You’re doing just fine. So, where was I? Oh, yes, your nose. Is it big? I’d have said interesting…’
‘You are full of it, Nick Jago.’
‘Brimful,’ he admitted, beginning to enjoy himself. ‘Your hair is straight. It’s very dark and cut at chin-length.’
‘How do you know my hair is dark?’ She stopped dabbing at his imaginary injuries…‘Did you take a sneaky photograph of me?’
‘As a souvenir of a special day, you mean?’ It hadn’t occurred to him down in the blackness of the temple when his entire focus had been on getting them out of there. Almost his entire focus. Miranda Grenville had a way of making you take notice of her. ‘Maybe I should do it now,’ he suggested.
‘I don’t think so.’ She moved instinctively to protect the phone tucked away in her breast pocket. ‘Who’d want a reminder of this to stick on the mantelpiece?’ She shivered. ‘Who would need one? Besides, as you said, we need to conserve what’s left of the battery.’
His mistake.
‘I was talking about the light, not the cellphone but I take your point. But, to get back to your question, I know your hair is dark because if it had been fair then the light, feeble though it was, would have reflected off it.’
‘Mmm…Well, Mr Smarty Pants, you’ve got dark hair, too. It’s definitely not straight and it needs cutting. I saw that much when you struck your one and only match.’ Then, ‘Oh, and you’re left-handed.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’ he demanded.
‘There’s a callus on your thumb. Here.’ She rubbed the tender tip of her own thumb against the ridge of hard skin. ‘This is the hand you use first. The one you reached out to me when I couldn’t make it across that last gap.’ She lifted it in both of hers and said, ‘This is the hand with which you held me safe.’
It was the hand with which he’d held her when she’d cried out to him to let her fall because she was not worth dying for. Because once, young, alone, in despair and on the point of a breakdown, she’d considered terminating a pregnancy?
Had she been punishing herself for that ever since?
‘You are worth it, Manda,’ he said, his voice catching in his throat. Then, ‘No, I hate that. You deserve better than some childish pet nam
e. You are an amazing woman, Miranda. A survivor. And, whatever it is you want, you are worth it.’
‘Thank you…’ Her words were little more than a whisper and, in the darkness, he felt the brush of silky hair against his wrist, then soft lips, the touch of warm breath against his knuckles. A kiss. No, more than a kiss, a salute, and something that had lain undisturbed inside him for aeons contracted, or expanded, he couldn’t have said which. Only that her touch had moved him beyond words.
It was Miranda who shattered the moment, removing her hands from his, putting clear air between them. Shattered the silence, rescuing them both from a moment in which he might have said, done, anything.
‘Actually, I’m not the only one around here with an interesting nose,’ she said. Her voice was too bright, her attempt at a laugh forced. ‘Yours has been broken at some time. How did that happen?’ Then, archly, deliberately breaking the spell of that brief intimacy, ‘Or, more interestingly, who did it to you?’
‘You saw all that in the flare of a match?’ he asked.
‘You were looking at your temple. I was looking at the bad-tempered drunk I was unfortunate to have been trapped with.’
‘I was not drunk,’ He protested, belatedly grabbing for the lifeline she’d flung him. Stepping back from a brink far more dangerous than the dark opening that yawned a few feet away from them.
She shook her head, then, perhaps thinking that because he couldn’t see, he didn’t know what she’d done-and how had he known?-she said, ‘I know that now, but for a while back there you didn’t seem too sure.’
‘A crack on the head will do that to you.’
‘Concussion?’
‘I hope not. The treatment is rest and plenty of fluids.’
‘Thus speaks the voice of experience?’
‘Well, you know how it is.’
‘Er, no, actually, I don’t. I suspect it’s a boy thing.’ Then, presumably because there really wasn’t anything else to say about that, ‘And, actually, no, I didn’t see your nose. I felt it.’
‘Yes…’
That was it. How he’d known she’d shaken her head. He could feel the smallest movement that she made. Without sight, every little sound, every disturbance in the air was heightened beyond imagining and his brain was somehow able to translate them into a picture. Just as every tiny nuance in her voice was amplified so that he could not only hear what she was saying, he could also hear what she was not.
The air moved and he saw the quick shake of her head, the slide of glossy, sharply cut hair. He touched her face and saw a peaches and cream complexion. Kissed her and-
‘I felt it when I cleaned the dust from your face,’ she said, her rising inflexion replying to some uncertainty that she’d picked up in his voice. It was a two-way thing then, and he wondered what image came into her mind when he moved, spoke. When she touched him…
‘As noses go,’ He said, ‘I have to admit that it’s hard to miss.’
‘Oh, it’s not that bad. Just a little battered. How did it happen?’
She was back in control now, her voice level, with no little emotional yips to betray her. She’d clearly trained herself to disguise her feelings. How long had it taken, he wondered.
How long before it had become part of her?
How long had it taken him?
‘At school,’ He said. ‘It was at a rugby match. I charged down a ball that was on the point of leaving another boy’s boot.’
‘Ouch.’
‘I was feeling no pain, believe me,’ he said, remembering the moment, even so many years later, with complete satisfaction. ‘I’d stopped an almost certain last-minute drop goal that would have stolen the match. I don’t think I’d have noticed a broken leg, let alone a flattened nose. I was just mad that I had to go to A and E instead of going out with…’
He stopped, his pleasure at the memory tripping him over another, spilling his own emotional baggage.
‘Out with?’ she prompted, then, when he didn’t respond, ‘It was your father, wasn’t it? He’d come to see you play.’
‘Yes…’
How could that one small word have so many shades? he wondered. In the last few moments it had been a revelation, a question, reassurance and now an acknowledgement of a truth that he could barely admit. Because she was right. His father had been there. Even with an election looming, he’d taken time out of a packed schedule to be with him that day.
‘Yes,’ He repeated. ‘My father had come to see the match.’
‘Good photo op, was it?’ she asked dismissively. ‘Senior politician with his son, the blood-spattered hero of the sports field. I bet it looked terrific in the papers the next day.’
‘No!’ he responded angrily. That touch of derision in her voice had him leaping to his father’s defence. How dared she…?
‘No?’ she repeated, but this time the ironic inflection didn’t fool him.
‘There was no photograph,’ he said, his voice flat, giving her nothing.
‘No photograph? But surely you said that was all it ever was?’
She was pure butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth innocence, but he knew that it had been a deliberate trip-up. That she’d heard something in his voice-his own emotional yip-and had set out to prove something.
‘So-what?’ she persisted, refusing to let him off her clever little hook. ‘He turned up just to see his son play for his school like any other proud father? No agenda? No photo opportunity?’
She did that thing with her fingers-making quotation marks-and he grabbed at her hands to make her stop.
‘You are a witch, Miranda Grenville.’
‘I’ve been called worse,’ she replied, so softly that her voice wrapped itself around him.
‘I can believe it.’ Then, her hands still in his, he said, ‘It was my birthday that week. My eighteenth. Dad came down from London to watch the match before taking me out to dinner.’
‘You missed your birthday dinner?’
‘Actually, it was okay,’ he said. ‘We sat in A and E, eating sandwiches out of a machine, surrounded by the walking wounded, a couple of drunks, while we waited for someone to fix me up. Give me a shot.’
‘Waited? Are you telling me that as the son of a Government minister you didn’t get instant attention?’ she said, still mocking him, but gently now.
‘The doctors were busy with more serious stuff. It didn’t matter. We talked about what I was going to do on my gap year. About the election. It wasn’t often I got him to myself like that.’
‘So the evening wasn’t a total wash-out.’
‘Not a wash-out on any level,’ He admitted. It had been the last time they’d been together like that. His father had been given a high-powered cabinet job after the election. He’d gone to university.
Manda knelt back on her heels, her hands gripped with painful tightness as Nick, seemingly unaware of her, relived a precious evening spent with his father. Did he, she wondered, realise how lucky he was?
She yearned for just one memory like that.
One day when her mother or father had taken time out of their busy lives to come and see her at school, take her out for tea. For her birthday to have been more than a date in a secretary’s diary.
‘I suppose now you’re going to tell me that I should remember all the good bits, forget the rest,’ he said, breaking into her own dark thoughts.
‘I wouldn’t dream of suggesting any such thing,’ she said.
‘Don’t be so modest, Miranda. We both know that you would.’
‘Then we’d both be wrong,’ she said vehemently. ‘I’d tell you to remember all of it. Every little thing. The good, the bad, the totally average and be grateful for every single moment.’ She caught herself. Shrugged awkwardly. ‘Sorry. It’s none of my business.’
The stone was hurting her knees and she shifted to a sitting position.
‘Here. Lean back against me, you’ll be more comfortable.’ Then, his arm around her, he said, ‘Tell me one of y
our memories, Miranda. Your first day at school. Was that good? Bad? Totally average?’
‘Not great. All the other new girls had been brought along by their mothers. Mine was away somewhere.’ She had always been away. ‘Let’s see…September? Shooting in Scotland, probably. Anyway, I told whichever unhappy creature was my nanny at the time to take me home since obviously it had to be a mother who delivered me to school.’
‘Did she?’
‘What do you think? The poor woman couldn’t wait to be shot of me and I was handed over kicking and screaming. No reprieve. A first impression that I strived to live down to. Can you remember your first day?’
‘I wish I couldn’t. My mother cried. I was so embarrassed that I wouldn’t let her take me nearer than the end of the road after that.’
‘Oh, poor woman!’
‘What about me? I had to live with the shame.’
‘What horrible little brats we both were.’
‘We were five years old. We were supposed to be horrible little brats.’
‘I suppose.’
‘Tell me about your first kiss,’ he said.
She sighed. ‘We’re doing all the horrible stuff first, are we?’
‘Was it horrible?’
‘I was fourteen. That dreadful age when you’re pretending to be grown up but you’re not. When kissing is a competitive sport, something to be dissected in detail with your friends afterwards and points awarded for technical merit, artistic style and endurance. Mine was with a boy called Jonathan Powell, all clashing teeth and acne. Of course, when we compared notes afterwards I lied through my back teeth. You?’
‘Thirteen. Her name was Lucy…Something. I think she must have been practising because I had a really good time.’
‘Not just a brat, but a precocious brat and, before you even think of taking this to the next logical step,’ she warned, ‘forget it.’
‘Okay. You choose. Tell me something that happened to you. Something that’s stayed with you.’
‘My very own heart-warming moment?’ she replied, mocking herself.
‘I don’t know. Have you got a heart to be warmed?’
‘Bastard,’ she said, but laughing now.