by Lucy Keane
‘Amy—you are Amy, aren’t you?’
Amy was taken aback. ‘Yes, but—’ Why should Fiona be looking for her? She seemed surprisingly friendly.
‘I’m awfully late—I’m sorry. You were expecting a friend called Celia?’
‘Has anything happened?’
Fiona gave her a reassuring smile. ‘No, no. Everything’s fine. I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Fiona—we met briefly one night at Julius’s house when you came to cook?’ She didn’t pause for a reply. ‘I’ve been instructed to fetch you—I’ll explain why as we drive. Look, do you mind if we go now? I got held up on the way, and I’m supposed to be meeting someone for dinner tonight—’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Shall I help you with one of those?’
Utterly bewildered, Amy let her offload the bag from her shoulder. What on earth was Fiona doing here—and why was she being so nice to her?
She followed automatically as Fiona led the way to her car, and got into the passenger seat. Fiona turned to her with a smile as she started the engine. ‘You must want to know what all this is about.’
Amy couldn’t help noticing that Fiona’s left hand, resting on the steering-wheel, was ringless. ‘I did wonder,’ she said uncertainly. ‘I was beginning to suspect this might be a kidnap plot—except no one would want to kidnap me!’
Fiona laughed. She had a light, attractive laugh, and she was somehow more warm and friendly than Amy had ever imagined she could be.
‘That’s just where you’re wrong—someone does! But I’ve been told you’re a bit unpredictable and I’ve got to get your solemn promise you won’t jump out of the car at the next traffic lights, or run away into the woods when we get to—’ She interrupted herself. ‘Where we’re going!’
Amy had the feeling that she knew… but it couldn’t be! Surely—
‘OK.’ Fiona took a deep breath as though about to launch herself off into the explanation. ‘Don’t blame me for any of this—it’s all Julius’s fault. This is entirely his idea.’ There was an awkward pause, then she went on. ‘I know this is all a bit embarrassing—we’ve hardly met each other—but you don’t mind if I just come straight out with it? I suppose you must have heard that the wedding was cancelled?’
‘Yes. Well, yes, I did. I’m sorry.’ She didn’t know whether that was the right thing to say or not.
‘Don’t be,’ her companion replied bluntly. ‘Look, Amy, I know all about you and Julius and you don’t have to feel bad about it. In fact, you’ve done me an enormous favour, although you’re going to think I’m being a bit unscrupulous when you’ve heard the whole story…’ She paused for a second, and then went on. ‘I suppose you must have thought I was a prize bitch when you first met me, walking out on Julius in the middle of a dinner party like that? It’s all right—you don’t have to answer! Well, I was. But I’ve got far worse things to confess than that.
‘I don’t have much of an excuse for any of it, except that I really was in a terrible state at the time. I have to admit I did deliberately do things that would rile Julius because I wanted him to break off our engagement. Only he’s so damned reasonable he always saw my point of view, even when he lost his temper, and the nearer and nearer we got to the wedding, the worse it became!’
Amy glanced across at her companion in surprise. ‘You wanted him to break off the engagement? But if you didn’t want to marry him why didn’t you break it off?’ She thought Fiona looked rather embarrassed.
‘It’s a rather sordid little story, I’m afraid, and the only person who comes out of it well is Julius. You see, when I first met him I’d just been ditched by another man. And then I found out I was pregnant. I couldn’t think what to do. I didn’t want to get rid of the baby but I couldn’t face my parents. My mother… well, she wouldn’t have approved. Then I met Julius at this party, and we really liked each other. I will admit that it did cross my mind that he might be the answer to all my problems, and I did deliberately try to attract him.’
Julius, a prey to a calculated deception? Somehow, Amy didn’t think he’d be fooled by something like that. Maybe he had seen through the siren act, but liked what he had found underneath. There was something very attractive about Fiona.
‘Well, after we’d seen each other for a month or so, I took a gamble, and confessed my situation. Julius said he’d guessed, and had been wondering when I’d get round to telling him. I suppose now he probably felt more sorry for me than in love with me. You know how kind he is. And we did like each other—we still do, believe it or not! It didn’t seem impossible at the time that marriage might work out. Anyway, to cut a long story short, we got engaged very quickly, planning to marry a month later—much to the disapproval of my mother. It wasn’t that she disapproved of Julius—far from it— but she never does things by halves, and immediately started planning the wedding of the year which we didn’t have time for.’
‘So what happened?’ No wonder Julius had told her nothing of Fiona’s story. It would have been difficult to do justice to her. And she had suspected him of being callous towards her!
‘A couple of weeks after announcing the engagement, I lost the baby,’ Fiona explained. ‘Julius was very kind to me then… He said there was no reason why we shouldn’t continue with our marriage plans—but now we should take things a bit more slowly—so mother was left to her wedding-of-the-year arrangements after all. And then William suddenly came back into my life. He was devastated to hear I’d found out I was pregnant after he’d left me—and I’d lost our child. There’s something between William and me that I don’t suppose I’ll ever have with anybody else, even if he is a bit of a rat. But the problem was that we were getting closer and closer to the wedding—we’d even received a couple of presents—and my mother was in top gear, and although it sounds a bit cowardly I am actually quite scared of her. And then it seemed so awful to Julius to say, Well, thanks for wanting to marry me when I was pregnant but now I’m not so it’s all right and I’m going back to William.
‘In the end, the only thing I could think of doing was getting Julius to see what a worthless person I was, and then he would break off the engagement. That way he wouldn’t be too upset—he’d just think he’d had a lucky escape— and… this is a bit feeble of me, I’m afraid… my mother wouldn’t blame me when the wedding had to be cancelled. It did mean she’d blame Julius instead, but he’d be miles away from her so it couldn’t hurt him.’
Amy thought about the way Julius had spoken of Fiona, defending her the night she had walked out on the dinner party, saying little that would betray any of her story even in Spain, when he might have used it to his advantage. Only once had he expressed any irritation, and that was the night he had kissed her under the mistletoe in the porch, and guessing now how he had felt about her she knew she had underestimated him. It wasn’t revenge that had prompted him at all, despite what he had said. He must have felt torn at the time, between loyalty to Fiona and his growing love for Amy herself.
‘So how did you finally sort it all out?’ she asked slowly. ‘How do you know about me?’
‘Because Julius told me. By the time he got back from Spain, I’d actually gone away for a few days with William—I’m afraid I did it deliberately in a last-ditch attempt to provoke him. I’d left enough clues for him to be able to come storming along for a terrible row, but he didn’t. He just waited until I got back to London, and then asked me quite calmly why I’d gone away. When I finally got round to explaining he said he’d suspected for some time that I’d changed my mind and wondered why I wouldn’t tell him. It was all very amicable, and when I said I’d felt terrible he said he’d felt pretty bad too since he’d fallen hopelessly in love with one of his secretaries—“the skinny one with the dark red hair”!’
Amy began to laugh as Fiona added apologetically, ‘I hope you don’t mind that description—I told him that, the way I remembered you, that didn’t do you justice at all, and he said the last time he paid you a compliment you’d been quite u
npleasant to him!’
‘No. I don’t mind at all,’ Amy said amenably. She could hear Julius’s words in her head.
‘Anyway, he told me a bit about what happened in Spain and said that, since I was going to be able to use the fact that he’d fallen in love with somebody else to keep my mother at bay, the least I could do was to explain to you why I was so far from heartbroken about it all. He thinks you ran away from him because you thought you were breaking up his relationship with me.’
‘Well, I did. And I did think that.’
Fiona smiled across at her. ‘So now you know you haven’t I hope you’re going to be extremely nice to him. I must say, Amy, you’ve been a lot more honest about it than I would have been! Off on a trip to Spain with a man like Julius—I don’t know how you could have resisted him!’
Thinking about it, she wasn’t sure how she’d resisted him either, except that Julius had done a bit of resisting on his own account. The night they’d left the show house in such a hurry, and the way he’d avoided coming into the bedroom to wake her earlier that evening—it all began to make much more sense now. He’d avoided being alone with her except in public places, even arranging that their hotel rooms should be on different floors.
Then they were turning in through some high wrought-iron gates that opened into a long dark drive. Fiona said, ‘You will invite me to your wedding, Amy, won’t you?’
‘What makes you think I’m going to get married?’
Fiona laughed. ‘I know someone who just can’t wait to ask you!’
They pulled up outside a long, stone-built house, with old-fashioned lattice windows. It wasn’t possible to see much more in the dark. Several of the windows on the ground floor were lit.
Fiona, with profuse apologies, insisted that she’d have to leave at once if she was to make her dinner engagement, and sent her love to Julius. ‘If you don’t mind, of course!’ she added. ‘Got all your stuff? Just ring the doorbell—he’ll answer it eventually. It’s difficult to hear if you’re at the back of the house. Bye, Amy. I hope you’ll be really happy!’
She was happy. Ecstatically happy, as she watched the tail-lights of Fiona’s car disappear behind a belt of trees round a bend in the drive.
She turned towards the house. The front door was made of stout old oak, with a little window of bottle glass in it. There was no light in the hall, although a warm glow spilled out of latticed windows to either side, from behind drawn curtains.
She rang the bell. There was no evidence that anything had happened, so she rang it again. Fiona had said it was difficult to hear, and there was an awful lot of house for the sound to get lost in. She was consumed with impatience. It seemed like a lifetime since she and Julius had been together in Spain.
After a few minutes’ wait she tried the bell again. Still no response.
She turned the door-handle experimentally. It was an old iron ring that lifted a latch inside, but when she pushed the door nothing happened. There must be a lock as well. Where was he? Had he forgotten she was coming? On a cold February evening, already dark, he couldn’t be expecting any visitors—except herself—and a house standing in its own grounds well away from the road would be vulnerable.
That gave her an idea. The prospect of a cold, indefinite wait on the doorstep didn’t appeal at all. Leaving her bags, she began to walk along the front of the house. There must be at least one other entrance—a pity Charlie wasn’t with her. He’d visited enough times to know his way about. Somewhere inside the house she heard a dog barking. At least somebody had heard her.
Then she saw the window. It was just open, secured by a long metal catch over a pin on the sill. It wasn’t difficult to slip her fingers up on the inside of the frame and push the metal strip up off its peg.
The sill was higher than she would have liked, but it wasn’t difficult to scramble up the wall, once she had a firm grip on the raised edge of the window. It was just as well she was wearing her jeans. She hauled herself on to the outside ledge, pushing festoons of creeper out of the way as she did so, to lean precariously through the open frame head first. She brushed one of the curtains aside to look in—no one was there.
It was in precisely that awkward position, head inside the room and bottom outside, that she heard footsteps on the stone paving that ran along the front of the house, coming from the direction of the front door. Twisting herself round with difficulty, she managed to look out again just as the footsteps halted.
He was a few feet away from her, illuminated by the glow from the window. He seemed taller than she’d remembered. He was casually dressed and wore no coat—he must have come from inside the house. There was a halfsmile on that rather long, handsome face, the dark eyebrows raised slightly in question.
The silence lengthened while they looked at each other. Amy couldn’t tell what she was feeling—a mixture of happiness and excitement, with a terrible doubt that now he had seen her again he might not really want her any more.
‘Most people try the front door,’ he said at last.
Despite a very abnormal heartbeat all of a sudden, she tried to sound equally casual. If he didn’t seem ecstatic about their first meeting in over a month, she wasn’t going to either.
‘I did,’ she said.
He continued to look at her. ‘I suppose breaking and entering might indicate a certain desperation for my company?’
This certainly wasn’t the kind of romantic reunion she’d been imagining. He sounded much too cool to be the impatient lover she had been hoping for, and her position—both uncomfortable and inelegant—put her at a distinct disadvantage.
‘I haven’t broken anything.’
His mouth twitched. ‘There was a Rockingham china dog on that windowsill given to me by my eldest niece. Is it still there?’
Contorting herself once again, she examined the sill. It was. Just. She moved it gingerly away from the edge.
‘I think I’m stuck,’ she said. ‘Julius—aren’t you a bit pleased to see me?’
All he said was, ‘Wait there.’ And then he vanished round the side of the house.
The window was too small and deeply set in the old stone wall of the house to leave much room for manoeuvre. It was also further from the floor on the inside than she’d imagined.
When he came into the room, she was still kneeling on the sill. She said awkwardly, ‘I can’t get down with all this clutter—I’m afraid of knocking it off on to the floor. Do you think you could remove your precious dog?’
He did. And several other china ornaments that seemed valuable. Then he came back to stand by the window, and they looked at each other again. He had made no move to touch her. She wanted to be in his arms, but despite what she thought she knew about his feelings for her she wasn’t sure what to do.
Then he said, ‘You’ve got dead leaves in your hair. I knew you were trouble from the day I met you. I should never have given you a job. Where’s Fiona?’
‘She had to go to dinner with someone. She sent her love to you. She wants to come to the—’ And she stopped herself just in time. He hadn’t even asked her yet! And maybe, despite what Fiona said, he wasn’t going to.
He was watching her closely. ‘And are you convinced now that her heart isn’t broken? And that I’m not abandoning her callously in favour of you?’
‘I never thought you were callous,’ she said quickly. ‘It was just—’
‘I know what it was,’ he interrupted. ‘You don’t need to explain.’
‘But I do!’ she insisted earnestly. ‘That was why I had to lie to you about the way I felt…’
Why was he looking at her like that? ‘Until then,’ he said slowly, ‘I was never really sure what your feelings were—just when I’d decided I’d got it all worked out, you’d act so cool and ordinary again that I’d think I was wrong.’
‘I never tried to make you love me, Julius! I didn’t want you to—’
‘I know. The world’s most reluctant enchantress. But I told you,
sweetheart—I understand.’ That one endearment did strange things to her, and she began to feel that ecstatic glow again. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he was saying, ‘just to set the record straight, you’d like to tell me the truth this time?’
‘Until then,’ he had said; until she had lied to him… Her mouth curved into a beautifully witchy smile.
‘What makes you think I love you?’ she demanded softly, ‘Why didn’t you believe what I told you in Granada?’
‘Because I knew you well enough to be able to detect an outright lie. Your eyes go glassy.’
The Charlie look… How very humiliating!
‘So we needn’t have been apart all this time…’
He took a step towards the window, so close now, they were almost touching. ‘I would have tried to explain it to you that day I phoned you, if you’d waited around long enough to listen.’
‘Were you very angry with me for walking out like that at the office?’
‘I wasn’t exactly pleased about it…’
She looked so abashed that he began to laugh. Then he put his hands round her waist and pulled her towards him off the windowsill into his arms, kissing her face and then her mouth.
Her arms went round his neck as he gathered her closer, and she gave a long sigh. ‘Why did that take you so long?’
He slid one hand up under her jacket, while the other stroked her hair. ‘I was beginning to be afraid you might have changed your mind since Granada.’ He kissed her ear. ‘So you do love me?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do. Very, very much.’
They didn’t speak for a long time after that. Then his eyes, that wonderful lucid grey, looked down into hers. He was smiling. ‘What were you going to tell me about Fiona?’
She avoided answering directly—they still hadn’t got round to the vital question.
Then, because she complained she was hungry, they found their way to the kitchen and a ‘Welcome home, Amy’ dinner which had been delivered earlier that day by Jess, courtesy of Cookery Unlimited.
‘You’ve all been very busy conspiring behind my back, haven’t you?’ she accused. ‘First Celia and Fiona, and now my best friend! Where are the treacherous Baileys?’