Her Frozen Heart

by Lulu Taylor

  Tommy laughed. ‘So much for saving the family fortune with your masterpiece! Thank goodness I never expected we’d actually see it through. Come on, I’ll help you up.’ She went over and he put out his arm. She grasped his hand and he leaned on her so that he could turn around to climb out of bed. He was heavier than she expected, when he looked so slight, even more so since his illness. But he was broad of shoulder and muscled, from his army service, no doubt. When he pulled on her arm, she was taken by surprise and was unable to resist his force, so that she fell forward and, putting her arms out to stop herself, she landed across him, almost embracing him.

  Fred groaned.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, flustered, looking up to find herself gazing straight into his eyes. ‘Have I hurt you?’

  He said nothing for a moment, regarding her intently with a strange softness on his face, then said, ‘No. Not at all. Not really.’ The next moment he leaned forward to kiss her, his lips brushing hers and then pressing harder. She let it happen, feeling the rush of joy as he touched her, and then she pulled rapidly away.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, panic-stricken.

  His expression changed immediately. ‘I’m sorry, Tommy. How awful of me. I thought—’

  ‘No, it’s not you at all. I . . . it’s my fault. But . . . I can’t. I wish I could. I can’t.’ She took several steps away from him as if afraid that he would lunge for her and she hated to see the mortification on his face as she did so. She longed to explain, but that was impossible. Her panic had subsided to be replaced with embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry, Fred. Really, I am. You must come downstairs as soon as you like.’ Then she hurried out of the bedroom, closing the door behind her and rushing to her own room where she lay down on her bed and stared at the wall, her heart racing with a mixture of fear and longing.

  Now, more than ever, Tommy was grateful that she had Barbara to keep the eyes of the others off her. She was sure that her inner agitation, sparked by the brief but intense moment of her kiss with Fred, would have been obvious to them all otherwise.

  She couldn’t understand why she had reacted so strongly to it, but it had shaken her deeply, causing her pleasure and pain in equal measure, along with a large dose of confusion. Having previously visited Fred several times a day, she stopped abruptly, unable to bring herself to see him.

  Instead, whenever she could, she escaped to her bedroom, where she drew the curtains around the bed to make a dark cave, and lay in there thinking.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen. I told myself I would never let this happen to me again. What have I done?

  And yet, when she thought about it, she could see that all along she had been walking the path to the moment that Fred would kiss her. She had made it come to pass by removing him from everyone and keeping him to herself – No, that was his illness . . . or did I use his illness as an excuse? – which had intensified their relationship. But I don’t want him! I don’t want any man. That’s what I decided. And that’s how it must be.

  And so, to punish herself for her secret desire for Fred, she shunned all contact with him. Whenever she felt the yearning for Fred’s company, or remembered with a burning thrill the moment their lips had touched, she shut it firmly away.

  No. It can’t happen. I promised myself. Never again.

  Tommy told Thornton to take Venetia down from the hall and move her into the library. The fire that had been set in Fred’s room while he was ill would now be lit in there, so that he could paint without freezing.

  Fred got up at last, thinner and weaker, dressed himself as warmly as possible and vanished inside. Tommy knew, as she walked past the library door, that he was in there, sketching out the form of the painting on the stretched canvas. But she didn’t go in, and now she only saw him at mealtimes, although she found it hard to look at him. When she did glance over, he was rarely looking at her. Despite polite conversation, there was very little interaction between them.

  I’ve offended him. It’s awful. Why have I spoiled everything like this? It was so nice before – and now it’s all ruined. It hurt her horribly but she felt that she was to blame for it all.

  At dinner the day after Fred had rejoined them, he barely looked at her and she only stole glimpses of him while talking to the others. Then, looking up, she found Barbara’s gaze on her, her expression knowing and faintly amused. From Tommy, she looked to Fred and then away.

  It was nothing, and yet Tommy couldn’t help feeling a little afraid.

  Barbara always liked to stir things up. Perhaps she hasn’t changed so much after all.

  Roger, delighted that Fred was back, spent long hours in the library, talking while Fred painted, but in the afternoon, when Fred went to rest, he resumed his walks with Barbara, round and round the ground floor in a slow promenade.

  Tommy was on the upstairs landing on her way to the stairs when she heard Roger’s voice say sharply, ‘Do you really think so?’

  She stopped suddenly as Barbara said, ‘It’s as plain as day, darling.’

  ‘I suppose, now you say it, it makes sense.’

  Tommy realised she was eavesdropping, but she couldn’t move. She stood still, letting the voices from below rise up to her.

  Barbara went on: ‘Just think about it. She kept you away from him all that time when he was ill, even though you would have done him the world of good. I saw it at once – remember what I told you at the time? You knew it was true. And now, when you’re with him while he’s painting, she’s gets terribly agitated. Well, doesn’t she?’

  Tommy’s mouth went dry as she realised that Barbara was talking about her. She heard Roger say slowly, ‘Why doesn’t she want me close to Fred?’

  ‘I should think she’s jealous of your friendship. And she knows Fred has your best interests at heart. And those aren’t Tommy’s interests, I’m sorry to say.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The house, darling. The estate. She wants to stay in charge. She’s dividing to rule.’

  ‘I never thought of that,’ Roger replied.

  ‘Of course you didn’t. You’re far too pure of heart. But I hate to see you being manipulated . . .’

  The voices faded as Roger and Barbara walked out of the great hall and away. Tommy stayed standing there, her heart beating rapidly. What are you doing, Barbara?

  Tommy felt a coolness prickle over her skin. She remembered the day at school that Arabella Guthrie’s fountain pen had gone missing. Everyone had been stood at the front of the schoolroom to swear on their honour in front of Miss Bates that they hadn’t taken it. Barbara had been as convincing as the rest of them, wide-eyed and innocent. And then Tommy had seen it glint with an ebony shine from the inside of Barbara’s desk that same afternoon. At least, she’d thought she had, though she didn’t want to believe it.

  What’s your game?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Caitlyn stared at Sara who stood on her front step with a suitcase and hand luggage next to her. A rush of confusion and shock raced through her. But, she realised, she was also afraid. Afraid of her, and afraid of myself and the way I act around her.

  ‘Glad to see me?’ Sara said brightly. She was looking good, a touch of Hamptons golden sun on her usually pale skin, her red hair twisted up in a thick ponytail.

  ‘Er . . . I’m very surprised!’

  ‘That’s the idea. Can I come in?’ Sara peered over her shoulder into the cottage gloom beyond.

  I ought to tell her to go. But the reality of Sara, so insouciant, acting as though everything were completely normal, was hard to confront. ‘Of course.’ She stepped back and a moment later Sara was standing in her sitting room, looking around, the suitcase and hand luggage by the door. She was somehow too large for the space. ‘Your house is really sweet. So different to your old place. Where’s Max? Call him in. Max! It’s your godmother!’

  Max came running in from the garden. ‘Hi, Sara!’

  ‘You’ve grown, young man.’ She gave him a kiss, then f
ished a large bar of chocolate out of her bag. ‘Here, this is for you. Eat it now if you like.’

  ‘Oh, wow! Thanks!’

  Caitlyn said, ‘He’s about to have his supper.’

  ‘It’s a treat! How often does he see me?’

  Max turned pleading eyes to her.

  ‘All right,’ Caitlyn said, not wanting to let him down. Two seconds in the house and Sara was already steamrolling over her.

  ‘Now,’ Sara said, taking off her jacket and tossing it onto the sofa. ‘I could kill for a glass of wine. What’s in the fridge? I’ve got duty free if you haven’t got anything.’

  Caitlyn went to the kitchen, feeling helpless. So much for my new-found bravery. ‘Why are you in Oxford?’ she asked as she looked in the fridge for the bottle of white wine chilling there.

  ‘I got a call just as my job in the Hamptons came to an end. A boutique hotel is being completely refurbished here and they just lost their project manager and designer, so they asked me if I could take it on at short notice. Isn’t that great? We can hang out when I’m not working!’

  Caitlyn poured two glasses of wine. It was, she could now see, typical of Sara to act as though nothing had happened after no word for months. As she went back through with the glasses, her gaze fell on the luggage by the door. ‘Are you planning to stay here?’ she said with a hint of trepidation in her voice.

  ‘Well . . . if I can. Just for a night. I can move into the hotel tomorrow. Just say if it’s a problem, I can find somewhere else. I should have called but I didn’t want to ruin the surprise.’

  Caitlyn knew she should say that it was a problem and Sara should go to the hotel right now, but she wasn’t ready for a battle yet, and Max was here too. Just one night. I can handle that. She’ll go in the morning and I can get myself organised. Sara had sat herself down on the sofa and Caitlyn took her place opposite.

  ‘How did the Hamptons project go?’ she asked.

  ‘Brilliant. They loved it. Did you see the Instagram posts?’

  ‘Yes. It looked amazing.’

  Sara nodded. ‘Amazing. They want me back to do the place they’re buying in Colorado. Now I’ve got this hotel to sort out – only because the owner’s been left in the lurch. It’s a really lovely project, an old house on the edge of town.’

  Sara chattered on about her job, her feline gaze sliding about, taking in all the details of the new house. She subtly looked Caitlyn up and down, noting what she was wearing, how she looked, the style of her hair. Caitlyn felt a sensation she had not experienced since Sara left: that she was being examined and found wanting.

  Caitlyn wanted to get to her feet and say, That’s it! It’s all changed now. You can’t sit in judgement of me any more. Go away. Patrick’s gone, and losing him has cut the cord between us too.

  Instead, she lifted her wine glass to her mouth and gulped the cool liquid, her hand shaking lightly as she thought, I mustn’t let Sara see how I’m feeling. I don’t know why . . . but I mustn’t.

  Sara stayed where she was, drinking and flicking through magazines while Caitlyn sorted Max out and put him to bed. When Caitlyn came back down, Sara had opened a fresh bottle and was ready to chat.

  ‘There you are! You’ve been an age. How is he? Asleep?’

  Caitlyn nodded as she sat back down. ‘Getting there.’ While she’d been upstairs with Max, she’d taken the chance to think over her strategy. She wouldn’t provoke a reaction right now. Sara could stay tonight but after that, Caitlyn would take a stand and tell her that things weren’t going to go back to the old ways. And she’d also gone into the spare room and pushed all of Patrick’s boxes against the wall and covered them up with a cloth. Then on top of that she’d piled books and old box files. It was hardly Fort Knox, but at least Patrick’s things weren’t quite as obvious now.

  Sara had switched on the lamps now that the evening sun had moved to the other side of the house. She gazed over at Caitlyn with a laugh.

  ‘Goodness, what would Patrick think if he could see you now?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve let yourself go a bit, haven’t you?’ She smiled to take the sting out of her words. ‘When did you last get your hair seen to, or have a facial?’

  ‘I don’t know. It hasn’t seemed important.’

  ‘Patrick would not like that one bit,’ Sara scolded. ‘You need to keep up standards, just like he did. Remember?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I can’t pretend I’m not disappointed to see how much you’re changing now he’s not here. The house is sold, all his stuff gone, and now you’re reverting back to the little plain Jane I rescued at university.’ Sara took another sip from her wine glass. ‘Patrick was the making of you, darling. Before him, you were absolutely hopeless, don’t you remember? One disaster to the next, getting laid by anyone who so much as smiled at you. No wonder you were so miserable! I know, darling, because I held your hand so many times.’

  ‘That’s not how I remember it,’ Caitlyn said slowly.

  Sara didn’t appear to hear her. ‘And then, when I found Patrick for you, you weren’t happy either. I think, really, he was too much for you, don’t you? He was just a different calibre, wasn’t he? More like me, in a funny way! Obviously you were his wife . . . but I was definitely a kindred spirit. We were very alike, him and me.’ She sighed. ‘I know he made you wretched but I always seemed to touch a chord in him.’

  When she took a drink, Sara’s grey eyes flicked up at her over the rim of the glass.

  Caitlyn blinked at her, biting her tongue. So it was no accident that Sara was back, she had plenty of venom to disperse. She must have been waiting until she could return here and get her teeth into Caitlyn. Perhaps she’d been laying her plans all these months. Caitlyn watched Sara as she drained her glass and poured another. The second bottle was almost empty. She remembered what Nicholas had said about Sara’s drinking.

  She actually has a problem. I never noticed it before. How did I not realise?

  ‘A party animal.’ That was what Patrick had called Sara. ‘She doesn’t have limits,’ he used to say. Sara’s second husband Mark had been the same. They had lived only for entertaining, parties and buckets of booze. Dinners at their house were marked by wonderful food and the way they went on until the early hours, fuelled by rivers of champagne and ice-cold vodka shots. Sometimes, Sara brought out wraps of white powder and chopped them on the coffee table, sharing the lines with anyone who wanted one. Caitlyn didn’t and refused shyly, while Patrick simply laughed when Sara offered them to him.

  ‘No thanks, darling. As a barrister, I’d better not.’

  But they drank with the others, because that’s what they all did.

  When Caitlyn announced her pregnancy with Max, the first thing Sara said was, ‘Oh my God, no booze for nine months! What will you do?’

  ‘I know! Awful!’ Caitlyn said, but in the event she couldn’t stand the thought of it anyway. She craved soft sweetness: elderflower, diluted cranberry, fizzy apple. The hard medicinal reek of alcohol turned her stomach. Suddenly the dinner parties that had been such fun and so enjoyable became marathons of tedium. The first hour was great, the second okay and from then, she found it increasingly boring and bewildering, as people lost their trains of thought, yelled loudly across one another, screamed with laughter at the smallest and dullest things, or argued, or starting singing and dancing.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ she would beg Patrick, desperate to sleep, and after a while she refused to go altogether.

  ‘You’ve become so boring,’ Sara would say accusingly, sunglasses hiding her hangovers, ‘and that’s why I’m never having children.’

  She was mildly irritated by the reality of Max once he arrived, and the way his needs took priority over everything, even though she cooed and smiled and demanded to hold him. She was thrilled to be a godmother, but uncomprehending of the fact that a baby needed constant attention. For a while, Caitlyn saw much less of Sara and Mark, and sh
e was able to concentrate on motherhood and her beloved boy.

  But when she and Mark began the descent towards divorce, Sara was back, regaling Caitlyn with stories of his treachery and unfitness to be her husband. It was, Caitlyn realised, a story she had heard many times before. It was identical to her break-up with Rupert. And all the others, before and after. They were not up to her high standards and, it turned out, they were not her equals. Even Rupert, the nephew of an earl, had a mother whose roots were – Sara’s nose wrinkled as she said it – ‘rather common’.

  Mark was revealed to be the same: an upstart who didn’t deserve a thoroughbred prize like Sara.

  And of course, the trauma of her break-up meant Sara needed to drown her sorrows in drink. Plenty of drink.

  Why didn’t I see it before now? Caitlyn wondered again, as Sara took another gulp. She’s a functioning alcoholic, and she has been for years. Did Patrick know? He must have. Nothing escaped him. She must be drunk now, she’s had most of two bottles at least.

  ‘So you and Patrick were kindred spirits?’ she said casually.

  ‘I think so,’ Sara said, with only the slightest slur in her voice. She could obviously hold her drink, no doubt used to it.

  ‘Did he . . . reach out to you? Confide in you?’

  ‘Caitlyn, anything I did, I did for you.’ Sara leaned forward in her chair. ‘I always had your best interests at heart, you know? I always have.’ She sighed heavily. ‘God, don’t you miss him?’

  ‘Of course,’ Caitlyn said. Her heart began beating faster.

  ‘So do I.’ Sara sighed, her eyes suddenly dull, as though the cumulation of two bottles of wine was finally telling. ‘I miss him so much.’

  ‘Why do you miss him, Sara?’ Caitlyn asked. All these years she’d been Sara’s confessor, listening to the baring of her soul. Why stop now?

  Sara rolled her eyes up to Caitlyn and smiled. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’

  ‘So you were close. You used to meet up with him without telling me.’