The Enchanted

by Charlotte Bingham

  They heard the train long before it pulled into the station, heralding its approach like a bad guest arriving full of his own importance. Rory handed Kathleen her overnight case, and, noting how battered and worn it was, realised how much she must have spent to come over and see what might be wrong with the horse. ‘Can I give you something towards the cost of your journey?’ he asked.

  ‘You most certainly cannot,’ Kathleen replied smartly. ‘Coming over here was my idea, not yours.’

  ‘I just thought it might help.’

  ‘And there’s nothing wrong with the thought so you don’t have to look so tragic about it.’

  ‘I’m l-looking tragic?’

  ‘As if you’re being sent off to war. Now don’t forget the music, and don’t forget to give me a call if anything else goes wrong,’ Kathleen said as Rory held the carriage door open for her.

  ‘I won’t,’ Rory assured her. ‘And I’m awfully ger-ger – I’m awfully ger-ger-ger—’ He stopped, half closed his eyes and clicked a thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Me too,’ Kathleen said with a smile which through his half-closed eyes Rory missed seeing. ‘I’m awfully glad I came over as well. ’Bye now.’

  Then she was gone, disappearing into the rapidly filling train, turning to wave to him once she had found herself a seat by the window, then suddenly remembering something and sliding a window open to beckon to him.

  ‘One other thing,’ she said when Rory had hurried to stand below the open window. ‘He has a very soft mouth on him, and he won’t be hit.’

  ‘Right,’ Rory called back. ‘I’ll remember that.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Not once.’

  He watched the train leave the station, waving once or twice at the girl who could no longer see him and feeling at long last as if all the hurt had now gone from the past, although on the drive back he wondered if it was just the beginning of yet another heartbreak. He put any such thoughts from his head and instead played the second side of the John McCormack tape, listening to the great tenor singing ‘Bless This House’ and finding his mind straying straight back across the sea to Ireland.

  Chapter Nine

  Moving On

  Millie had decided for them both. They would keep looking at cottages and small houses until they found something near to Alice’s idea of where she might now like to live. In the short time she had been staying Alice had already been taken to see the outsides and some of the insides of near twenty properties, but, as she said, there was always a snag.

  ‘They’re either right on a road, just under a huge great pylon, slap bang next to a pub, or next door to a quarry,’ she had observed.

  ‘Which is why they’re still on the market, and stuck,’ Millie had replied. ‘It’s very difficult to find anything round here because everything nice gets snapped up before it’s even advertised. We’re just going to have to pray to whoever the patron saint of estate agents is—’

  ‘Croesus, perhaps?’

  ‘—or hope that I hear about something before it hits the market.’

  But they drew another blank that morning, finding something very wrong with each of the three properties they viewed. On top of that it was pouring with rain, which made the somewhat down-at-heel cottages look even more dismal as well as helping to compound Alice’s belief that this was a wild and miserable goose chase.

  ‘Come on,’ she finally urged her friend. ‘Take us to that nice pub near you and I’ll buy us a cheery lunch.’

  ‘You’re on,’ Millie replied. ‘Then after that I’ll drive us over to Rory’s. He wants to run Trojan Jack again next week at Wincanton, so we might as well go and see how the old horse is. We promised we’d look in anyway, remember? When we were at Sandown.’

  Just as Millie and Alice were disembarking outside the Cross Keys prior to enjoying the excellent lunch that was always available in the pub, Grenville Fielding was also about to eat. He was in the bar of the Wellington, one of his favourite lunchtime haunts, a small but smart hotel tucked away in a side street in Knightsbridge just behind Harrods, a venue that suited him not only because it served one of the best lunches in town, but also because it meant ease of shopping. Being a man, Grenville liked to be able to stroll into a store, buy everything he needed and then stroll off to lunch in the immediate vicinity. He had never been able to understand how women shopped. Pell-mell, rushing from one shop to another, and very often back again, never seeming to have a clue what it was they were meant to be buying.

  Grenville’s way was always to make a list before going on a shopping trip, often taking the extra precaution of telephoning the store in advance to make sure they had what he wanted in stock. It was only sensible. It saved time. It saved boredom. But women seemed to like to waste time; they even seemed to like boredom. Today, however, he had been too excited to visit any of his usual haunts. He was having lunch with Lynne.

  He arrived at the Wellington a little early so that he might enjoy a quiet and private early gin and tonic to settle his nerves. Even as he was sipping from his glass in that rather surreptitious manner that lone drinkers develop, he found himself wondering how he had plucked up the courage to ask such a beautiful young woman out. It seemed to him it was as if he had been propelled by some unknown force. It had never happened before. He had never asked someone he had barely spoken to actually out on a date, as it were. After all, they had hardly exchanged more than a few words at the races, nothing more than the briefest of conversations, and yet within hours of wishing her au revoir he had found himself picking up the telephone to ask her out.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean? You want to go on a date?’

  ‘No – no, well yes, at least what I was wondering was whether we might have lunch? Pick up where we left off?’ He cleared his throat. ‘I could help you with your affairs, perhaps?’ he added lamely.

  ‘What sort of affairs?’ Lynne had asked him, pretending to be shocked. ‘A bit fresh, isn’t it? I mean I’ve only been divorced a couple of minutes.’

  ‘No, look, I’m sorry, that’s not exactly what I meant.’

  ‘It’s all right. I’m only joking.’ She must have guessed how disconcerted he felt, because her next words sounded part maternal and part contrite. ‘Of course I would like you to look after my affairs, and have lunch.’

  As he put down the receiver Grenville found himself smiling in a way, now he looked back on the moment, he might not have ever smiled before, except perhaps when he was given a bicycle on his sixth birthday. She had accepted his invitation, and he knew he was done for, perhaps for ever.

  But now she was late.

  He tried not to look at his watch. Of course ladies were always late, and he had half expected she might be, because even with his limited experience with members of the opposite sex he prided himself on spotting the sort of person they might or might not be, and he had certainly marked this particular card down as perhaps a little disorganised. So he wasn’t surprised. Of course not. He just wished that she would arrive.

  He stopped looking at his watch, and settled for staring at the clock behind the bar. She was now nearing his maximum patience point, and that was half an hour late. Half an hour was the very longest time he could be expected to remain waiting for a guest.

  He ran through the telephone conversation in his head. She had seemed to have accepted his invitation not only readily but happily, so to have been stood up made him feel not only rejected but dejected. It had meant nothing to her.

  Someone arrived by his side. A waiter.

  ‘Mr Fielding? A young lady has just telephoned to send her apologies and to say that unfortunately she will not be able to meet you for lunch.’

  ‘I see. Thank you. Did she happen to say – did she happen to say why?’

  ‘No, sir. She simply asked me to convey her apologies.’

  Grenville leafed through his diary, found her number, and went to the public box in the hall to telephone her. He got her answering machine. Withou
t leaving any message he returned to the bar and immediately ordered another gin and tonic.

  She had been at the doorway of her flat and just about to leave when the panic had set in. It had been as unexpected as a sudden spasm of pain, hitting her without warning as she was just about to pull the door closed behind her. The next thing Lynne had known, she was sitting trembling in a chair with her head in her hands. Later she would vaguely remember making a telephone call but at that moment she could think of nothing other than trying to control the deep and totally unreasonable fear that had her in its grip. She thought she heard the telephone ringing and her own muffled voice saying something as the answerphone kicked in, but she was totally incapable of getting up to answer it herself. All she knew was that somehow she had to pull herself together and try with all her might to return to her previous state of perfect sanity.

  She could recall perfectly standing in front of the full length mirror fixed inside the wardrobe to check how she looked before going out; she remembered looking into her handbag to make sure she had enough money and her door keys; she knew she had taken one last look at herself in the small mirror hanging in the hallway and smiled at herself because she thought that she didn’t look at all bad, that in fact she really did actually look on top of it all; but that was all. She couldn’t remember with any definition at all what had happened after that, in the moments that had taken her from standing at the door of the flat to sitting in a chair, for some reason frightened out of her wits.

  Had someone been outside? Had she seen something dreadful or had someone perhaps threatened her and she had fled, banging the front door behind her and locking herself in for safety? She took her hands from her eyes and stared round the room and then out into the hallway, where she saw that far from being locked closed the front door was wide open. Lynne sat looking at the open door knowing that she should get up and shut it but unable to move, still petrified with fear. But why? she wondered. Why was she panic-stricken? Was the person she had seen, this someone who had obviously frightened her, inside the flat? But if so, why was the door still open and why was she free? Surely if someone was attacking her or robbing her they would have shut the door and rendered her helpless, instead of leaving her sitting in a chair with an open door in sight? There seemed to be no sense to it at all, no rhyme, no reason. What could have happened to her in the moments between opening the door and finding herself sitting shaking and nauseous in this chair?

  After a long time, a length of time that Lynne couldn’t possibly quantify, she found she had come back to her senses, seemingly as suddenly as she had lost them. She knew what had happened – she had panicked. In fact, she thought to herself, I think they even have a name for it now. A panic attack. She’d suffered a panic attack, in exactly the same way as the people she had read about only recently in some paper or magazine or other. She had been on her way out to lunch, something to which she thought she had been looking forward, when all at once she knew she just couldn’t go through with it. She remembered standing in the open doorway suddenly feeling sick and dizzy and unable to do anything else except go on standing there feeling sick and dizzy. Someone had walked by her to the lift, a total stranger who Lynne remembered had just stared at her, saying nothing. The woman had kept throwing curious glances back at Lynne, still standing marooned in the door of her flat, as she waited for the lift. Then the lift had arrived and the woman had disappeared, which was when Lynne had finally summoned up enough strength to go back inside her apartment and lower her shaking frame into an armchair.

  ‘Come on, girl,’ she now found herself muttering. ‘Come on – this won’t do at all. This won’t do one bit. Where were you going anyway? What was it that made you feel like this? You were only going out to lunch. That’s all you were doing,’ she repeated slowly. ‘You were only going out to lunch.’

  That was when she remembered making the telephone call. Lynne turned her head to stare at the telephone as if in hope that somehow the instrument would help unravel the next part of the mystery.

  ‘My God,’ she whispered miserably as another piece fell into place. ‘Grenville. It was Grenville, poor bloke. Oh, poor Grenville. He deserves better than that. No way does he deserve to be stood up.’

  Yet there was no way that she could have kept her date, not feeling like this. If by some miracle she had actually managed to get as far as the restaurant she knew she’d have only made a fool of herself, either by bursting into tears or by collapsing, which was not like her at all; but she knew something like that would have happened because whatever had been holding her together wasn’t doing the trick any more. The elastic had suddenly snapped and gone.

  Lynne spent the next few minutes sitting breathing in and out as deeply as she could, which was something she remembered being recommended in the article she had read about this sort of anxiety attack, and then, once she had all but stopped trembling, she went and made herself a cup of strong coffee.

  ‘Poor Grenville,’ she thought aloud once more. ‘What can he be thinking? What could I have been thinking? Of all the people to stand up.’ She shook her head sadly as she took her coffee back into the living room. She’d been looking forward to having lunch with Grenville, had been flattered when he’d asked her so unexpectedly to have lunch with him after they had met at the races. She’d never gone out with anyone of Grenville’s class before and she sensed that he would treat her very well, in complete contrast with the way Gerry had treated her. Gerry had always behaved as if Lynne was the lucky one, lucky to be there, lucky to be part of Gerry’s world, to be allowed to share certain moments of his life, and most lucky of all to have been allowed to be Gerry Fortune’s wife. There’d been no give and take in their marriage – at least, there had been, but it had always been Lynne doing the giving and Gerry doing all the taking. She sensed that Grenville was absolutely not that sort of man; that he was the very opposite, in fact, which was why she had been so looking forward to their date, particularly because she knew Grenville was the sort of man whom Gerry would take one look at and write off as a bit of a ponce.

  As she sat drinking her strong black coffee and trying to pull herself together, she reflected on quite how hard she had been hit by Gerry’s infidelity. She had felt humiliated, deceived, betrayed and cheated and those, she decided ruefully, were not good feelings. She had loved Gerry. She knew he could be mouthy, and she knew he could get a bit rough sometimes, but when he wanted to be, Gerry could be fun, and that, Lynne decided, was what made his treachery even worse. The fact that they had had fun together. But the fun ended the day she caught him with Maddy, when she finally discovered the real Gerry, a man who could obviously lie about anything and everything. And that meant, to her way of thinking, that when he had said he was having fun with her he might just as well have been lying. And when he had said that he loved her, that he really fancied her, that she was just the greatest and most gorgeous thing on two legs, he could have been lying as well. Everything about him and everything to do with their life together could have been a lie, and if he were to deny it now and tell her to her face that it just wasn’t true, who was to say that he wouldn’t be lying then as well?

  After her divorce had been granted Lynne had felt a sense of euphoria, but that had quickly evaporated and she had found herself starting to suffer from what she understood others called the come-down. She’d learned that dealing with a divorce was very like dealing with a death – not of someone but of something, a trust, a love, a union. She had read that when people got divorced the innocent party often went through exactly the same range of emotions that people go through when they lose a loved one – release and a sort of euphoria, the process of depression and guilt, then anger and helplessness before they start to rebuild. Now her own marriage was over Lynne was beginning to see how much truth there was in this theory.

  ‘Fine,’ she suddenly announced out of the blue. ‘But that’s all done and dusted now, and you are certainly not going to sit here feeling sorry for yo
urself for the rest of your life, my girl. What’s done is done and where you are right now you do not want to be. So take a deep breath – and get on with it! You have got to get on with your life, and getting on with it starts right here.’

  With that she went and repaired her make-up, left the flat, hailed a taxi in the Brompton Road and ordered it to take her to the King’s Road, where she shopped almost until she dropped. On her return home, with designer bags full of yet more new clothes and shoes, she poured herself a glass of cold white wine, took several more deep breaths, then made a telephone call.

  She also got an answering machine, but unlike the man she had stood up she left a message.

  ‘It’s me – Lynne – and please listen. I am terribly sorry about lunchtime, Grenville. But I can explain, and I’d really like to – so look, why don’t you let me buy you lunch in return for standing you up, and maybe we can start again. If you don’t want to I’ll quite understand, fair enough and all that, but if it’s all right then give us a ring back and we’ll make a date.’

  Her phone rang almost as soon as she replaced the receiver and Grenville and she made a date not for lunch but for dinner that very evening.

  ‘You couldn’t have come at a better time, actually,’ Rory said, when he greeted Alice and Millie in the yard that afternoon. ‘As you know, Millie, we generally work the horses in the morning, but the farrier was late this morning – had a shunt in his car – so everything was put on hold.’

  ‘Why does that make this a good time?’ Millie asked.

  ‘Because we’re just about to work old Jack now, so if you hop in the back we’ll go up to the gallops.’

  ‘Just don’t forget I have a train to catch,’ Alice murmured to Millie as they dutifully climbed into the back of Rory’s old Range Rover and took their seats alongside his dog Dunkum, among an assortment of old racing papers, sweet wrappers and much other ancient detritus.