‘Yes, Flick,’ interrupted Catherine. ‘I saw James and Diana arrive.’
‘Oh.’ Felicity sounded relieved. ‘So you know?’
‘Yes, I know.’ Catherine said swallowing hard, before Felicity could say any more. ‘Now I must go. I haven’t eaten properly for 24 hours or more and I’m starving.’
Which was almost true, she thought, wandering towards the kitchen after unplugging the telephone from the wall socket. She hadn’t eaten for ages, except for a slice of toast this morning, but she wasn’t hungry. She made herself a cup of tea, peered into the fridge, opened a tin of tuna, then wandered back into the living room and sat down at the desk, staring blankly at the word processor. There was a deadline to keep, she remembered, and what she should really do was try and pick up the threads of her ordinary day-to-day life and try and forget that James – or even Andrew – had ever intruded into it. And then, when January arrived, she would try and find somewhere else to live, perhaps to rent if she hadn’t enough money to buy, and go right away form here, from Felicity, from everybody. She knew Andrew would be disappointed, but he had coped without her up until a few months ago; there was no reason why he shouldn’t cope again. The trouble was that she felt as though she had suffered a relapse of some particularly virulent – and probably fatal – disease. And this time, the recovery process was likely to be almost impossible.
It was sometime later in the evening, when she rose stiffly from the desk, realising that she was cold and that it was time she went to bed, that something else hit her with all the sudden shock of walking into an unseen object. Supposing she was pregnant? This thought alone was enough to keep her awake into the small hours despite her almost pathological tiredness and it wasn’t until the early-morning sounds of the village began to penetrate her subconscious that she finally fell asleep.
For the second day running, she awoke feeling as though she was suffering from a particularly nasty hangover. Outside, it had obviously been raining, and a lowering sky thr eatened more. Wondering why Henrietta had never asked Andrew to install central heating in the cottage, Catherine went around finding electric fires, stoking up the Aga and laying a fire in the living room. Her bedroom had to remain icy, and she resolutely turned away from the thought of December and January, and snow, and the possibility of being cut off.
It wasn’t until after mid day that she finally plucked up the courage to replace the telephone plug and call the Hall. Mr Hamilton was due sometime late this afternoon, she was informed. Mr Grant had telephoned to say he was only waiting for the doctor to discharge him, then he would be driving him back. Catherine desperately wanted to ask if Mr Grant had said he would be staying, or whether he would be on his own, but instead asked if they would tell Mr Hamilton that she called and would see him when he was ready for visitors. Then she unplugged the telephone again, her courage failing. She knew she would probably have to face James eventually, when she went to visit Andrew at the Hall, if nothing else, but until it was absolutely unavoidable, she preferred to remain unobtainable.
When the doorbell rang that evening, she thought she had been unsuccessful and stood in an agony of indecision in the hall, trying to screw up her courage. The doorbell rang again, insistently, and slowly, she crossed the hall and opened the door.
‘Oh, Miss Long.’ The barman from the Hall stood there, a thick jacket over his short white coat. ‘Sorry to bother you, but Mr Hamilton can’t get through on the phone. He thinks it may be out of order.’
‘Oh.’ Catherine felt embarrassed colour flow up her neck. ‘Er, yes. I think it might be.’
‘He wondered if you could find time to pop down and see him sometime this evening?’
The young man was obviously bursting with curiosity.
‘Yes, of course.’ Catherine pulled herself together. ‘Tell him I’ll be there as soon as I can. Oh–’ she called as the young man turned away. ‘Is Mr Grant back?’
‘Yes, he brought Mr Hamilton back, but I think he had to go straight out again. That’s why Mr Hamilton wanted to see you, I expect. A bit lonely.’ He smiled in a friendly fashion and turned back down the path.
Letting out a sigh of relief, Catherine closed the door. A reprieve. How long it would be before James decided he wanted to know why she was being so elusive she didn’t know, but at least she didn’t have to face him tonight. Perhaps, after all, he would decide to leave well alone, the circumstances being what they were. If she was prepared to keep quiet, all the better for him and his reconciliation with Diana. She closed her eyes briefly on the thought and went to find a clean jumper.
Andrew was installed in a ground-floor suite with a view of the gardens and, in the daylight, the sea. He sat in a wing chair before a roaring fire, a plaid rug over his knees, looking, as Catherine told him, the very epitome of the elderly English squire.
‘Except, of course, that you should be suffering from gout,’ she grinned, going down on her haunches before him and holding out her hands to the fire.
‘Chilly out, is it?’ he asked. ‘You look frozen.’
‘Yes, it does seem a bit cold for October,’ Catherine agreed.
‘And there’s no central heating in that cottage is there? Henrietta kept refusing to let me have it put in. Stubborn old bird, she was.’ His gaze wandered to the fire, his old eyes dim, and they sat in silence for a while.
‘Well,’ said Andrew, finally, rousing himself. ‘So what’s the matter with your phone?’
‘Out of order, I think,’ said Catherine, not looking at him.
‘It was working when you phoned here to ask when I’d be back. I know you didn’t use your mobile, because your landline number was logged.’
‘I think it’s working for outgoing calls but not incoming,’ Catherine said, almost truthfully.
‘Which explains why my nephew has been going round like a bear with a sore head all day.’ Andrew looked at her bent head. ‘Look, my dear, I know it’s not my place to interfere, but I do think you should let him explain. Just talk to him. You’ll probably find there’s an explanation you haven’t thought of.’
‘An explanation of what?’ muttered Catherine. ‘He wasn’t keen to explain two nights ago, and then he went off and left me–’ she stopped.
‘Left you?’ Andrew reached down and turned her face up towards him. ‘I thought from what he said, you had run out on him again?’
‘In a way.’ Catherine gently pulled away. ‘Silly habit, isn’t it? I’m a coward, you see, Andrew. I don’t like facing up to unpleasant things.’
‘Yes, but you run away before people have a chance to put things right. You draw all sorts of conclusions, but you don’t bother to find out if they’re the right ones, do you?’
‘From whom?’ asked Catherine, getting to her feet. ‘If you’re talking about James, believe me, he had the opportunity to put things right, and all he did was make things worse.’ She hugged her arms and turned to look down on him. ‘Anyway, I came to visit you and cheer you up, not have you try and cheer me up.’
‘I’m very sorry, my dear, you’ll have to forgive an old man’s foibles.’ He smiled up at her. ‘And now, tell me how you’re keeping warm in that cottage?’
Catherine sat with him for another half an hour, until she sensed that he had had enough. James had organised nursing cover for the next two weeks, and by the time she left, a pleasant middle-aged woman had arrived to bully Andrew back into bed. She left promising to return the next day, and zipping up her quilted jacket stepped out into the brightly lit reception hall and came to a dead stop.
James regarded her from the other side of the hall, tall and forbidding in a dark suit, brows drawn low over the steely eyes. Catherine’s mouth went dry as images of how she had seen him the night before last floated into her mind. Slowly, realising that she could hardly stand petrified in the reception area until he went away, she began to move towards the main door. He waited, following her with his eyes, until she drew level with him and faltered to a stop.
/> ‘Are you leaving?’ he asked abruptly.
Surprised, she nodded.
‘May I see you home?’
‘No, I’m fine thanks.’ She pushed her hands further down into her pockets to stop them from trembling.
‘Could you spare me a minute in the office, then?’ He was being coldly polite, and Catherine’s heart twisted with every word.
‘No, I have to get back, if you’ll excuse me,’ she said, knowing he couldn’t argue in front of the various members of staff frequenting the reception area, and walked in a determined fashion towards the door. What she couldn’t prevent, however, as she soon discovered, was his own determination to speak to her, and she found that he was still beside her as she stepped outside into the misty darkness.
‘Why didn’t you answer your phone?’ he said, his tone changing as soon as they were out of earshot of the doorway.
‘It didn’t ring.’ Catherine quickened her pace and he caught her arm and swung her round to face him.
‘It bloody well rang all day yesterday and all day today, from the minute I discovered that, yet again, little Miss Catherine had run away.’
‘Oh, shut up.’ She wrenched her arm away. ‘Why the hell should I want to talk to you? You reappear in my life and turn it upside down, then just as I’ve begun to trust you again off you go back to your wife’s bed to save your bloody company – and I gave you the information to act on, for heaven’s sake. Then as you so rightly said, you took advantage of me in about the worst way you could and, having patted me on the head and admitted you shouldn’t have done it, left me to stew in my own juice. Well, thanks, but no thanks, Mr Grant. I can do without you in my life and I’ll thank you to just leave me alone.’ Aware that she was shouting, she took a deep breath, realised that tears weren’t very far off, repeated ‘Just leave me alone,’ in a very wobbly voice and set off at a run down the drive.
She didn’t notice at first that all the lights were off in Garth Cottage, not until she tried the switch in the hall and nothing happened. In a frenzy of desperation, she went round blundering into things switching on every switch she could before sinking down onto the stairs and bursting into tears of frustration.
‘Cat.’
Catherine let out a scream which turned immediately into a groan of despair as James loomed over her.
‘Cat, listen to me.’ James was pulling her to her feet. ‘You’re coming back to the Hall with me – no, no arguments.’ He placed a firm hand over her mouth as she drew breath to protest. ‘There’ve been a lot of wires crossed, and we’re going to uncross them, and as you appear to be without any form of light or heat–’
‘The Aga’s working,’ Catherine freed herself to say.
‘No, it isn’t. I just went into the kitchen. It’s gone out.’ He pulled her towards the door. ‘And, as I was saying, it’s freezing in here, so you can come back to the Hall and we’ll sort out the electrics in the morning – and maybe call a central heating engineer as well.’
All the fight had gone out of Catherine and she let herself be walked firmly down the path, along the lane and back up the drive to the Hall. It was only when they were actually at the foot of the steps leading to the front door that she pulled back.
‘James, I ...’ she looked round, frantically. ‘I can’t go back in there. I can’t .’
He looked down at her in the light spilling from the mock torches either side of the steps, and patted the hand he had drawn through his arm comfortingly.
‘We’ll go in through Andrew’s french doors, then,’ he said, and led the way round the building.
His knock was answered by a very startled nurse, who peered round a corner of the heavy curtains cautiously, before turning, obviously to speak to Andrew, and then sliding the bolts to open the doors.
Andrew was sitting up in bed, looking bright and interested.
‘I told you she’d run away again,’ he said with some satisfaction, and leant back against the pillows with a smug nod.
‘All right, so you did. What you didn’t tell me was that there’s no central heating down there. Why ever not? It’s like an icewell in there.’ While he was talking, James was drawing Catherine back to the fire she had left only 20 minutes previously and sitting her down in the same wing back chair Andrew had occupied earlier. She noticed vaguely that the nurse had vanished, and then James was putting a glass of whisky in her hand. She looked at it solemnly for a moment, then looked up at James, still standing over her, holding his own glass.
‘I haven’t had anything to eat,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I ought to have this.’
‘Good grief, woman.’ James turned away in exasperation. ‘No wonder you were bloody hysterical. When did you last eat properly?’
‘Sunday lunchtime,’ admitted Catherine in a small voice, and listened shamefaced to the explosion of anger from James and concern from Andrew. She heard James order something over the phone, then he came back to stand in front of her.
‘Right. Drink that, say goodnight to Andrew and come with me.’
Catherine dutifully did as she was bid, kissing the cheek Andrew held up to her and following James from the room. This time, she didn’t have to cross the reception hall – they turned right along a passage until they came to a small staircase, at the top of which James opened a door into a small sitting room, with, once again, a real fire. This one, though, was a more subdued, glowing coal fire, that settled with a little hiss in the silence as Catherine gazed at it. James was moving around the room behind her, opening the door and exchanging words with someone outside, then coming back to sit her in a chair by the fire and place a tray on her knees.
‘Now,’ he said, drawing forward another chair on the other side of the fireplace. ‘Shall we start at the beginning?’
Catherine picked up a spoon and tried the fragrant tomato soup before speaking. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said contemplatively after burning her tongue, ‘where the beginning is.’
‘Well, how about the last time I saw you down here? When you forbade me to phone you?’ He looked down into the whisky glass he had brought with him from Andrew’s room. ‘When I said I would be sensible. Remember?’
Catherine nodded, sipping cautiously at the soup.
‘I thought, at that time, that we had managed to get on a fairly even keel. Was I wrong?’ He looked up at her.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘You had admitted that we had a physical attraction for each other, and we both admitted that we fought a lot. At least we seemed to be in agreement on both those things.’
‘You didn’t appear ready to go on to anything else, though, did you?’ James was watching her, his face unreadable in the shadowy light from the fire.
Catherine was beginning to get hot. ‘How do you mean?’ she asked, pushing a heavy lock of red hair back from an almost equally red face.
‘Just what I said. Every time I tried, clumsily, I admit, to take our relationship forward, you retreated.’
Catherine gasped indignantly. ‘I can’t say I noticed you doing anything of the sort. Except physically, of course.’ She squirmed in the chair uncomfortably. ‘And then, when you did manage to – er – advance our relationship in that way, who was it who retreated? You. ’
‘If you’re talking about Sunday night, I’m sorry. But I thought I’d taken advantage of you and your emotional state unforgivably, however much I wanted it. I suppose I shouldn’t have left you, but it didn’t occur to me that you’d want me to stay.’
‘I didn’t want you in the first place,’ muttered Catherine.
‘Well, I have to say you managed to cover that up fairly well,’ said James, dryly.
Catherine put down the tray. ‘You just said, you took advantage of me.’
James ignored that. ‘And what exactly was it that you meant by going back to my wife’s bed?’ he went on, leaning back and loosening his tie. ‘I confess, that really did have me worried.’
Catherine stared at him. ‘Can you deny it?’ she as
ked softly.
‘Of course I can. I haven’t been near Diana’s bed in years. Since long before we separated, in fact. What gave you the idea that I had?’
Hope glimmering somewhere inside, Catherine said, ‘I went home to help Felicity move.’
‘Ah, I see. Felicity again.’ James smiled mirthlessly. ‘Tell me, is it just me she doesn’t like, or is she this protective with all your men friends?’
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘I mean that Felicity seems to have a habit of telling you all the things most designed to have you up in arms against me, whether they’re true or not.’
‘No, she doesn’t,’ Catherine said sharply. ‘And anyway, it wasn’t her.’
‘Oh? Who was it?’ James looked malevolently interested.
‘It was more than one person. And they were saying you’d moved in and Colin Eddington had been sent packing.’
James was silent for a moment. ‘Well, perhaps in a way that’s true.’ He leant forward and caught Catherine’s hand. ‘But what I moved into was not Diana’s bed. I stayed in the house, it’s true, but only after I had told her what I thought Eddington was doing, and she asked me to stay to keep him at bay. Before that, I stayed at The Angel.’
‘And what’s happened to Colin Eddington?’
‘The poor chap didn’t need keeping at bay at all. It appears he’s really smitten with Diana and had no thought whatsoever of getting his hands on her shares – so it was all a false alarm anyway.’
Catherine swore under her breath.
‘What did you say?’ asked James, with great amusement, leaning a little nearer.
‘I was merely expressing my feelings.’
‘Oh, I agree,’ grinned James. ‘After putting us both through all this – not to mention the inconvenience of my being away from the Hall.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ muttered Catherine.
‘And giving rise to all that gossip about me and Diana,’ he persisted mercilessly.
‘I saw you together Saturday night,’ blurted Catherine, pulling her hand away.
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