He looked her up and down unhurriedly, then said, ‘And you are the final word on what’s best for a child, are you? Tell me, have you any children of your own?’
‘No,’ she admitted in a low voice, lowering her eyes. ‘But I really don’t see what that has to do with it. I have a great deal of experience with children in general.’
‘No children,’ he mused, with enough thick irony in his voice to make her flush with anger. ‘No husband. What happened to the misguided lover?’
She didn’t have to think too hard about that one. She remembered the fictitious lover whom she had hurled at Dominic when he had demanded a reason from her, a reason for leaving.
‘That’s none of your business,’ she muttered, looking away and staring at the playing-fields, where more girls were playing hockey in the distance.
It had never struck her before, but now she thought, how strange, to surround myself with children, children who represent everything that I no longer have—hopes, dreams, a life ahead to be filled with everything I shall never be able to attain.
Would Dominic Duvall ever know just how successfully he had wrecked her life? She would never forgive him for that, even though she knew that the fault for it all lay in her own hands, because she should never have become involved with him in the first place. Not in the way that she had, not fuelled by motives which had seemed so right at the time, but in the end had proved so misguided.
‘Did the grand reconciliation never take place?’ he asked, sarcastic and amused, which made her even angrier. ‘Poor little Katherine Lewis. Or maybe you’re one of those ever-hopeful women, still walking along the garden path, optimistically thinking that she’ll get her man in the end, if only she can hold out for long enough.’ He laughed under his breath, a cruel, jeering sound. ‘Is he still holding out the promises he made to get you back?’ he asked, looking down at her with a smile that was as hard as ice.
‘This is irrelevant,’ Katherine said, trying to sound brisk and instead only managing to sound defensive.
‘Oh, but I’m merely trying to piece you together. Natural human curiosity. You asked me about what I’d been doing over the past six years. Well, I’m merely speculating on what you’ve been doing.’
‘I must get back to the school,’ she said, turning away, but before she could walk off she felt his fingers snap around her arm.
‘What for?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows. ‘To tidy desks?’
‘You may think that what I do is boring,’ she snapped, ‘but teaching is as essential as what you do. A person’s usefulness in life isn’t judged by the amount of money they earn. And kindly remove your hand from me.’
He removed his hand and she drew back, aware with horror that she was shaking like a leaf.
‘Dear me,’ he said, coolly amused, ‘I do hope my questions haven’t upset you.’
‘You hope nothing of the sort, Mr Duvall. And, no, your questions haven’t upset me. They’ve annoyed me.’
She fervently wished that that were the case, but she knew that she was deeply unbalanced by this sudden appearance in her life of the one man whose image she had spent years trying to erase.
‘Do you normally tremble when you’re annoyed?’ he asked, politely curious.
‘No,’ she answered icily, ‘I don’t. Perhaps it’s just that you were the last person in the world I expected or wanted to confront. No one likes to be reminded of past mistakes, do they?’
His lips thinned and she had to steel herself not to take a step backwards. Had she forgotten how threatening he could be? His green eyes could assume the wintry, terrifying depths of the ocean, and that leashed power which always hovered so close to the surface reminded her that he was not a man to be crossed.
‘Least of all when they’ve learnt nothing from them,’ he countered with dangerous calm. ‘Did your lover hold out promises to you on condition that you buried yourself here, teaching? Tell me, what makes a woman give up a life of excitement in exchange for the sedate, the unthreatening?’
Of course, she had always suspected that her real life would arouse only his contempt, but hearing him say so made her stiffen.
‘Is he worth it? You must introduce me to him.’
‘I happen to like it here,’ she said evenly. ‘And since you feel so free to ask me questions about my private life, you won’t mind if I ask you a few about your own? How long did you wait after we broke up before you married?’
‘Would you like to hear that I gave our dead relationship a suitable period of mourning?’ He laughed aloud at that. ‘I met Franise six weeks after I left London and I married her two months later. Disappointed?’
‘What happened to her?’
There was a thick silence, which only lasted seconds but was long enough for her to wonder whether anger had pushed her into asking something which really was none of her business. She wished that she had not asked; she wished that she had simply walked off. The last thing she wanted to do was reveal to him the depth of her interest in his life, reawakened after so long a slumber.
‘Franise was involved in a fatal accident nine months ago,’ he said abruptly.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘How kind of you,’ he grated.
‘I meant it! It must have been very hard on Claire, and on you as well.’ Was this why he appeared so bitter at the mention of his ex-wife’s name? The deepest pain, she knew, was the pain caused when love was prematurely extinguished. She tried not to contemplate the hurtful fact that that ring, still lying at the bottom of that pond in Regent’s Park for all she knew, had been the mistake which he had rectified.
‘I don’t think that strolling down memory lane is serving any purpose, do you?’ he asked, and the mask of cool self-control had settled back on his face. ‘You say that Claire is doing well, but is she keeping up with the other children?’
Relieved that they were once again back on home ground, she visibly relaxed and began to discuss Claire’s progress.
She was accustomed to talking about children and their performance at school. It was a subject with which she felt comfortable. She only realised that they were strolling back to the car park when she found herself standing next to a black BMW. By which time she had regained all of her lost self-control, and could actually lift her eyes to Dominic’s face without that numbing loss of composure which she had experienced earlier on. She even managed to smile, which was something she considered quite a feat, given the circumstances.
‘I tend to get a little carried away when it comes to discussing the children,’ she heard herself say in a very normal voice, the sort of voice she would have used for any parent, half apologetic, half amused, wholly sincere.
‘So I see.’ There was speculation in his eyes and she wondered uneasily what he was thinking. ‘Your career obviously suits you.’
‘I like children,’ Katherine said, in a voice which did not invite comment. ‘Why did you decide to move to the Midlands?’ she asked, changing the subject.
He pulled open the car door and paused.
‘Because, next to London, Birmingham has the most potential for my company,’ he said, and she could tell from his manner that he was still speculating about her, trying to match up the two halves of the personality which he had seen.
‘All part of the master plan to conquer the world?’ she asked lightly, and for the first time, when he laughed, there was none of that metallic edge to his laughter.
‘I have to fill my time somehow,’ he said, his eyes still intent on her face, and for reasons which she could not explain to herself she felt in real danger now. She didn’t want to be reminded of that lethal charm beneath the aggression. That was even more disturbing than the bitter dislike.
She folded her arms and said nervously, ‘Well, I must get back now. If there’s anything you wish to discuss about Claire’s work, then do feel free to contact me.’ She backed away slightly from the car. ‘After half-term, Mrs Gall, who’s been off with appendicitis, will be ret
urning, and there’ll be a ballet option. You should have received a letter from the school about that.’ He was still staring at her, and she felt herself getting hot and confused all over again.
‘It’s possible,’ he said, with a shrug of his broad shoulders. ‘I’m afraid I don’t manage to keep track of all those letters.’
‘I think she would enjoy it,’ Katherine said lamely. ‘It might do her good to see some of the other children out of the classroom.’
‘Fine.’
‘Well.’ She threw him an efficient smile. ‘I do hope everything goes well with your business. This may not be London, but I’m sure you’ll find the countryside just as pleasant.’ She couldn’t have been more bland if she had tried, even though she was quite sure that there was nothing he would find less appealing than rolling fields. He was not a man who would relish the peace that country life carried with it. He was too restless, too much a city animal. She wondered how long he would stay. Maybe just long enough for the subsidiary to be established, then he would return to the fast pace, the glamour, the constant demands of London or Paris or New York. Poor Claire. Would she become one of those children who were constantly transported around the world, who never tasted the roots of permanence? Or perhaps a lonely little child, sent to boarding-school because her father’s career left no time to play at being a parent?
As she walked back to the school she heard the deep roar of the BMW as he started the engine, and she fought the temptation to look round.
He was back, she thought, but this was no grand reunion. There was too much bitterness, too many unspoken secrets flowing under this bridge.
She stopped to look at the girls playing hockey, remembering most of them from when they had been little four-year-olds, their minds waiting to be shaped, to be taught. This was her life and it had no room to house the past.
She stared at the running figures and wished, with a kind of quiet desperation, that the past had not caught up with her.
CHAPTER THREE
DAVID was saying something about departmental changes because of cut-backs, and at the same time worriedly attacking a piece of fish on his plate, as though it had something to do with what was happening at his school.
Katherine was only half listening to him. She couldn’t really hear what he was saying anyway. The music was a little too insistent and her thoughts were wrapped up somewhere else.
For the past two weeks, ever since seeing Dominic, she had had the unfamiliar feeling of living on a knife’s edge. She kept expecting him to surface at any moment to pick his daughter up, or else to discuss something with her, and every second that she was on the school premises had been spent in an agony of dreaded expectation.
Of course, he hadn’t shown up, and it was only in the last few days that she could feel herself relaxing, although the relief which she should have felt at his non-appearance was not as immense as it should have been, and that in itself frightened her.
She looked down at her half-finished plate of pasta and tried to tune in to what David was telling her. Greg Thompson was going to be in line for assistant headmaster. She didn’t know Greg Thompson, though, so she mumbled something unhelpful, some soothing, nondescript remark which could have been used for any number of conversations.
Poor David, she thought. He was the maths teacher at one of the local comprehensives and he lacked that ambitious edge which would have helped him overcome his deep suspicion that he was somehow unable to control his unruly classes. It constantly nagged away at him.
She looked at his kind, unassuming face, with its carefully cut brown hair and anxious brown eyes, and for the first time in years felt a certain amount of irritation. If the departmental changes bothered him so much, why on earth didn’t he say something about it? But she knew better than to raise the issue with him. He was forever telling her that she had a cushy job, that teaching in a private school was leagues away from teaching in a state school.
‘No get up and go,’ her mother would have said. ‘A born victim, that boy.’ Her mother had been good at classifying people into categories. She used to tell her that she was one of life’s victims, that she was destined to walk on the sidelines, until the day that she rebelled and did something disastrous.
‘Cut in the same mould as your father,’ she would say, with the overlying edge of certainty which did not invite argument. ‘And look at what he did. I did everything for that man. I could have done better, but no, I stuck it out, married to a man who was never going to rise in life, and instead of being grateful, look at what he did—upped and left with a woman almost young enough to be his daughter.’
Was she a victim? She had fallen in love with a man who was too sophisticated for her, had put herself in a situation from which retreat had been painful and inevitable, and in so doing had condemned herself to a lifetime of wondering. What if things had been different? What if she had gone to London and had not been propelled for reasons that had been so complicated? What if she had stayed there? What if she had told him the truth? But no, that had never been an option. She had built their relationship on a personality which she had created, a convincing three-dimensional doll. No, the truth had never been an option, but what if…? What if…? She was here again, wrapped in the security of what she knew, but recently she could feel a disturbing restlessness in herself.
‘You’re not listening to a word I’m saying.’ David pushed his plate aside and looked at her with a certain amount of pique. ‘I’m boring you.’
‘No! I’m very interested in what’s going on at your school.’ She looked at him with affection and applied her mind to the conversation at hand. ‘Perhaps you should leave.’
‘Leave and do what?’ He sighed. ‘Teaching is all that I’m cut out to do. That’s like telling a fish to leave the water and try and make a life in a tree.’
Katherine grinned at him. ‘You can be so descriptive,’ she said. ‘You’re absolutely wasted teaching maths. You should give it all up and write a book.’
‘You’re mad,’ he said, laughing, ‘but maybe you’re right. There’s quite a lot to be said for getting out of school politics.’ He sighed, and she noticed all the tell-tale signs of a man showing his age, even though he was only twenty-nine, younger than she was, in fact. There were small wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, and a sprinkling of grey hair in between the fine brown.
In an attempt to steer him away from more maudlin self-analysis, she began chatting about books, and was relieved when he took the cue.
She didn’t feel that she could cope with David’s problems, or anyone else’s for that matter. She had enough of her own, and for once she decided that she would be selfish and not allow herself to become a never-ending sounding-board for other people. She had spent a lifetime listening to her mother and she had acquired a talent for listening, but the talent, she was discovering over the past few weeks, was not quite as accessible as it used to be. She couldn’t bring herself to discuss her own problems with anyone else, she was too private a person for that, but neither could she bring herself to be the helpful ear that she once was.
It had only struck her recently that friends and colleagues took her availability for granted, and they always had.
They always knew where to find her; they always knew that she would be around if they were at loose ends or else had something to discuss.
Should she be flattered at that? she wondered. Or was it a reflection of some essential lack in her own life?
She frowned, leaving David to hold forth on the pleasant daydream of giving up the orthodox life for something more adventurous, and only snapped back to reality when her eyes, aimlessly drifting around the room, flitted over a tall, dark man standing by the bar with a drink in his hand.
She felt her heartbeat quicken and her mouth went dry.
The club, not the kind of place she normally frequented, was crowded and semi-dark. It was also loud. The owner, out to reap as much money as possible, had turned the place into restaurant,
bar and disco. As far as Katherine was concerned, it was an unfortunate combination, because it ensured that none was quite good enough, but David had insisted, and she had not been able to come up with any valid reasons for not accompanying him.
Now she wished that she had stood her ground and found some excuse not to go, however lame.
She cringed back into her chair in an attempt to make herself invisible, and she would have succeeded if Dominic hadn’t become fed up with the crush of people at the bar and decided to find somewhere quieter.
She watched him circle the dance-floor and make his way across to where they were seated, although it was only when he was virtually on top of them that he saw them, by which time it was too late to stand up suddenly and pretend to be on the way out.
She saw the way his eyes flicked across to David, then back to her, with a sinking heart, and forced herself to smile with some semblance of a neutral welcome.
‘Miss Lewis,’ he said, speaking loudly to be heard over the din of the music. He turned to David, and said with a certain amount of lazy amusement in his voice, ‘And you must be—’
‘David Carr,’ she cut in hurriedly, running through the introductions at the speed of light. ‘We were just on the way out, actually.’
‘Were we?’ David looked at her with irritating bewilderment. ‘I’ve still got a full glass here.’
‘So you have,’ Katherine mumbled lamely, horrified when David invited Dominic to join them.
‘Why not?’ he shrugged. ‘But I’ll have to pull another chair across. I’m here with a friend.’ His voice was relaxed, pleasant, but every nerve in her body was attuned to the fact that there was something watchful about him, about the way his eyes slid over them, veiled, hidden, speculative.
He moved a chair across, which meant that they all had to shift their seating slightly, and she could feel his eyes on her as she re-adjusted her position and made an effort to view the situation with some degree of calm. She wouldn’t let him rattle her like the last time. She could forgive herself for that—after all, the shock of seeing him again for the first time in six years would have thrown anyone—but their brief affair was now dead, and she would not let him see how much he still affected her.
The Price of Deceit Page 4