From A Distance

by Gloria Cook

  He kept his back to her. ‘You wouldn’t understand or care.’

  ‘I do care and I’m sure I’d understand if you’d only take the trouble to tell me. Can we talk when I get back?’

  ‘Go, Emilia. I want to be alone.’

  ‘Fine. Have it your own way then.’ She swept open the bedroom door. ‘Be sure you’re nice to Lottie if your paths happen to cross when she comes home from school.’

  Emilia didn’t get as far as the village. Smelling the thickly smoke-laden air coming from the direction of Ford House and then meeting Jim and Elena in his van on the way there, she stayed and did the only thing she could do. Miss her longed- for meeting with Perry and offer to help clean up some of the mess.

  * * *

  Brooke entered the bedroom shortly after Emilia left. ‘Alec, are you coming down for coffee?’

  ‘What?’ Alec stayed at the window. ‘Oh, Brooke. I’m sorry. Forgive me. Where’s my mother-in-law? Tilda? Linda, the dairymaid? Was there no one to offer you hospitality?’

  ‘We were going to have coffee together. Remember?’

  ‘Oh… yes.’ He ground his fingers into his temples. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got a severe headache. It makes me forget what I’m supposed to do.’ Suddenly he put both hands on the window glass. ‘Come back. Don’t leave me!’

  ‘That wasn’t me you were talking to, was it? Who, Alec? Who do you see?’

  He turned to her. ‘You believe I see someone?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Do you think I’m going mad? Or senile? My grandmother went senile.’

  ‘I believe you’ve had a bad disturbance and now you’re seeing someone. But you don’t mind, because it’s someone very special to you. By the way you’ve been behaving, I would make a guess that it’s Jenna. If you’re pleased, then I’m pleased for you.’

  Alec came towards her. ‘I’m so glad you understand, Brooke. I see my little girl often. As she would be now. Beautiful and dainty and she dances for me. And smiles. She smiles so wonderfully, just for me. I’m waiting for her to call me Daddy. I’m longing for that to happen.’

  ‘She will, Alec. When the time is right.’ Brooke’s heart was filled with compassion for him. By right, she should tell Emilia what he’d said, but she knew it was a secret. She was the only one to have realized in the past that Emilia and Perry Bosweld had fallen in love. In view of his return and Emilia’s obvious continuing love for him, Brooke considered this new understanding to be a secret that should remain between her and Alec. He wasn’t mad, just confused. One day soon he’d see the doctor. For now, he believed he was seeing Jenna and it was giving him peace. He deserved that.

  Alec felt, as he often did nowadays, that he couldn’t breathe. ‘Come for a walk with me, Brooke?’

  ‘Into the woods where we went before?’

  ‘Yes. I want to sit by the stream and let the running water soothe my head.’

  ‘OK. I’d like to keep you company.’

  They left the house by the back stairs, walked down the back garden and passed through the small iron gate into the adjoining field. Not speaking, content to have sympathetic companionship, they strolled down the valley, which graded down through reams of golden buttercups, and entered the woods at the bottom. Then they followed the wide, twisty stream until they reached a quiet, sheltered spot. They sat side by side under a beech tree, and allowed their minds to drift.

  Brooke glanced at Alec. He was massaging his brow, grimacing in pain. ‘Let me do that for you,’ she whispered. She raised herself on her knees and caressed his brow, feeling the terrible tension in him. He closed his eyes. Eventually he sighed in relief and sagged forward, resting his head against her shoulder. Brooke put one arm round him and stroked his hair. ‘Better?’

  He nodded. ‘Mmm.’ He raised his head, opened his eyes and found hers were on the same level. Neither looked away but kept on looking at the other. Then it happened. Their faces grew closer. And closer. And their lips met. And softness and care and gentleness turned into passion and a sort of desperate need.

  Alec rose and helped her up, and led her into a copse of tangled undergrowth where they wrapped themselves in each other’s arms and made love. They took their time discovering each other. Kissing, touching, exploring, experiencing. It was as if he had never known the feel, the composition, the intricacies, the beauty of a woman’s body, the depths of a woman’s love before, and she had not known this in a man. They joined and connected in a way that was unique to them, not wanting the wonder, the joy, the brilliance of it to stop.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Perry had accepted an invitation of Ben’s to dinner and he had brought a sulky Libby with him.

  ‘Why have I got to be dragged along to this?’ she complained on the doorstep after getting out of her father’s Daimler. She took an instant dislike to Tremore House. Its origins obviously went back over a century but it had been mercilessly gutted and modernized. Knowing something about the big-headed Ben Harvey, she presumed the inside would be unfeelingly furnished with pretentious contemporary rubbish and absurd foreign pieces that its owner considered chic. There would definitely be no sense of the past or the mystical, which she could have taken refuge in.

  ‘Because you’re a little too young to leave on your own at night,’ Perry explained once again, trying to keep patient. At times Libby could be as difficult and selfish as her mother but, thankfully, or at least Perry hoped, not as conniving or malicious. He doted so much on Libby it had not occurred to him that she did not inherit Selina’s occasional compassionate streak; Selina had stopped the village’s intolerance to its war-injured imbecile and she had been very good to Emilia over the loss of baby Jenna. ‘I hope you’re going to behave, Libby. Promise me you will.’

  The last thing he wanted was for Libby to be here. Emilia and Alec were invited, along with Tristan, Winifred and Jonny Harvey. Hopefully Vera Rose Stockley, who had taken Libby out for walks during their brief residence in Hennaford, would come too and keep Libby occupied. He was desperate to see Emilia alone, to explain his decision to come to her after enduring so many years alone. So far, juggling everything and everyone out of the way so they could be alone had failed. There had been the Rawley fire, and the next planned meeting, in their secret meeting place on the moors, where they had first declared their love and made love, had been abandoned because Libby had got into a strop and refused to spend the day with Reggie Rule’s niece. Libby did not make friends easily, she had a way of offending people. Perry knew she had little confidence and it was her way of defending herself, and he ached inside for her because he couldn’t get her to see she was her own worst enemy. It was beginning to look as if he’d have to find yet another school for her. Selina was anxious for her to get the best education possible and to go on to university, but Perry was wondering if he shouldn’t teach Libby himself during her remaining school years. Her marks were poor anyway – she hadn’t settled in one school long enough to gain from its curriculum. He felt wretched and guilty about his daughter’s misery, he should have made sure she had a more family-orientated life in which she would have felt secure. Last night, he had telephoned Mrs Nicholson to enquire if she was well enough for him to send Libby up on the next train – at least Libby could amuse herself by visiting the museums and art galleries and church buildings, the thing she enjoyed most, but his housekeeper was now suffering from a chest infection.

  If only tonight he could get a few minutes alone with Emilia and share a quick proper kiss with her. ‘Libby, darling, promise me?’ he entreated again.

  ‘I will if I can have that dress I saw in Treneal’s yesterday,’ she said, looking up under her dull brows.

  ‘The one that’s much too grown-up for you?’

  Libby huffed and folded her arms. Her father owed her much more than a stupid expensive dress. He should be protecting her from the beastly girls who were making her life hell at school. They called her Lacking Libby. Because, according to their small minds, she lack
ed beauty, grace and style, and was hopeless on the hockey field and at singing and dancing. When her father turned up for a school play they had acted as if shocked that such a ‘dreamboat’ could produce her, ‘the most ugly duckling that ever there was’. No one wanted to sit next to her in class, share their tuck with her, even borrow the stylish clothes her indulgent father let her have. Often she was ignored altogether. Recently they had started tugging on her hair, saying no girl should have such horrid plain hair, and that she probably wasn’t really a female at all. Her breasts hadn’t started to develop yet and she was taunted about this in the changing room at every gym and physical training session. The last day of term, she had even been sent a poison pen letter, threatening that if she brought her hideous, dull presence back to the school in September she’d be the subject of more physical bullying.

  Perry sighed at the sight of Libby, rigid and silent and unco-operative. He had never given in to a bribe to gain her obedience before but he was worried that she might spoil the evening and then he wouldn’t be expected to show his face in any Harvey dwelling again. If he was denied the chance of being with Emilia he’d fall apart with frustration. ‘Oh, very well, but you’ll have to let me agree when and where you may wear it. And don’t think you can get your own way like this again, young lady. Now, do I have your promise?’

  ‘Yes, Daddy. I promise I won’t do anything to make you feel uncomfortable.’ Libby crossed her fingers. She really wanted the dress, of a bias cut with a narrow rolled hem and a low neckline, but if she got the chance to rattle some of the rotten Harveys, one in particular whom she wouldn’t be surprised to find would have a rose on her somewhere, then she would do so, in revenge for her Aunt Selina, who spoke of the family with hurt and hostility.

  The rest of the dinner guests had already arrived. All except two were drinking cocktails outside in the garden. Brooke was playing a plonkety-plonk jazz tune on the piano in the drawing room while glancing often at a silent, immobile Alec, who was close by and appeared to be listening with his eyes shut. She knew better. He had a particular expression. He was in another place, recalling Jenna dancing for him. He saw her more often now, most often on the bank of the stream. He was so sure that Jenna would come to him every day that he no longer searched for her and frantically tried to hold on to her. Brooke was glad it gave him comfort, but she was becoming increasingly worried about him. She was now the closest person to Alec. No one minded the numerous times they spent talking for they didn’t go off anywhere alone. After the time they had made love, Alec had said, ‘It was wonderful being with you, Brooke, but we had better make this the only time. If Ben found out, he’d kill me. I mean he really would. We’ve had past estrangements and even now I’m always wary of him. And I couldn’t be unfaithful to Emilia again. I love her so very much.’

  ‘I agree, Alec. I’m afraid Ben will always be jealous of you, that’s why he has this hard edge to him, the desire to always better you. You’ve got something he wants but can never have. The Harvey birthright. He wishes it was him who was the squire.’

  ‘Squire? What rubbish. I hate being called that. Few people actually did until Ben gained Tremore and people needed a way to differentiate between us. A long time ago, while I was raising Ben, he and I were close. I accept that’s gone for ever. He hates the fact that I wanted Emilia, that she turned to me when he lost control over the loss of his sight. Ben has no need to be jealous of me. I never took Emilia away from him. He never really had her. She loves me, I know she does.’ His voice had grown plaintive, weary and full of regret, making Brooke sit up in his arms and gaze at him. ‘But for some time, for years now, I’ve known that for some reason I haven’t had her full devotion.’

  A guilty flush had risen up inside Brooke and she’d settled down where their eyes couldn’t meet. How she wished she didn’t know about Emilia’s other love. ‘Alec, I know she gives a lot of her time to Lottie, but who can blame her after losing Jenna?’

  ‘Losing Jenna changed us both. I understand why Emilia puts Lottie ahead of me, I’m not jealous of that. But there’s something else. I think about it a lot. One day I might unravel the mystery.’

  I pray to God you never do, Brooke had thought, almost in a panic. Even though he’d just been unfaithful himself, the pain of knowing that Emilia loved another man more than him would destroy Alec.

  Out on the terrace, which was drenched in warm, peaceful evening sunlight and laid out with royal-blue, white-edged, canvas furniture, Winifred remarked to Emilia, ‘Alec’s paler and he’s lost weight but seems a little more relaxed.’

  ‘I’m grateful to Brooke. She’s got a way with him,’ Emilia said, glancing at her watch and hoping Perry would arrive soon. ‘She accepts Alec as he is and I’ve learned to do the same, so I’ve given up badgering him to see the doctor. He still pays Lottie little attention but he’s not so impatient with her now.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll snap out of it altogether eventually,’ Tristan said in jolly tones, but he was lying. There was something wrong with Alec, very wrong. Mrs Rowse had told him that Alec was dropping things and had even walked into a wall.

  ‘We’re having trout and guinea fowl tonight. His favourites,’ Ben said. ‘Building up, that’s what he needs. Don’t you agree, Em?’ He slipped an arm, deceptively matey-like, round her shoulders.

  ‘I’ll have to think about what I can tempt him with,’ she replied. Alec was fond of plain, old-fashioned lamb stew. Perry, where are you?

  ‘How’s Elena Rawley’s fire repairs coming along, Em? It was jolly bad luck,’ Tristan asked.

  ‘Yes. She’s such a pleasant little soul. What a shame something like that should happen to her,’ Winnie said. ‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it? What she’s doing for those two orphans.’

  ‘It’s amazing how fast Jim’s making everything good again,’ Emilia said. ‘He can paint, put up wallpaper, see to the electrics and goodness knows what else. He’s very talented. I feel proud of him.’

  ‘Elena Rawley must be mad spending so much time in his company. People are beginning to talk,’ Ben threw scorn on the discussion.

  ‘Only nasty-minded people. Like you, Ben.’ Emilia was vexed. ‘Jim is good to the children. They look up to him. He’s made a success of his life and it’s time you acknowledged it.’

  Ben felt any ground he might have made with Emilia slipping away from him. He rubbed her back. ‘I suppose you’re right. Oh, very well, I admit Killigrew has some worthwhile strings to his bow.’

  ‘I’m shaken, Uncle Ben, hearing that coming from you. I must say I’ve always liked Jim,’ Jonny said. He had just helped himself to another dry martini to relieve the boredom. He was looking forward to the excellent wines his uncle would lay on at the meal table – they would make this evening bearable. What a pity he couldn’t have brought Angeline along, but young Christine was welding herself to her with ever stronger force. Jonny was so besotted with the nanny that he hadn’t recognized that it was his eagerness with Angeline that was making Christine cling to her. He took himself off to join Alec, worried too about his favourite uncle.

  Now Jonny had decided against going up to London, Emilia wished he’d ask to stay at the farm for a few days, but Tristan had told her about his infatuation with some young woman he’d met on the beach. The special rapport Alec and Jonny shared might draw Alec out a little. She was pleased when they appeared, drinks in hand, chatting, and strolled off down the lawn.

  ‘Jonny mentioned bows just now,’ Tristan said. ‘That reminds me of the archery champion who is back in these parts. Perry’s invited tonight, isn’t he?’

  ‘Can’t wait to see him again,’ Vera Rose said from her upholstered garden chair, where she had been sipping lemonade and listening to all the conversation. ‘He’s simply the most best-looking man on earth. I hope he’s to be seated next me at the table, Uncle Ben.’

  ‘He’s far too old for you, darling.’ Tristan was all paternal over the stepdaughter he loved dearly. She had never spoken o
f men before.

  ‘But Jonny’s interested in an older woman.’ Vera Rose affected a wanton smile.

  ‘Now look here, there’s an age gap of at least fifteen years between you and Perry Bosweld!’ Tristan was burning with indignation. ‘You’re not to flirt with him, do you understand, Vee? You’d make a fool of yourself and I don’t think he’s that sort of chap. You’d embarrass him.’

  All the others were laughing, and when Winifred said, ‘Oh Tris, can’t you see she’s teasing you?’ Tristan was laughing too. ‘And if the dear girl was interested in Perry she’d be all fumbles and blushes. I agree he’s a devastatingly handsome man.’ Winnie aimed a coquettish expression at Emilia. ‘Don’t you think so, Em? I admit I’ve taken pleasure in taking a second look at him.’

  Emilia liked this, it would give her an excuse to gaze at Perry without anyone thinking it odd. ‘Yes, Winnie. Perry is a very attractive man.’

  Vera Rose was still smiling, but hurt was clamping the edges of her heart. She had no interest in any man but Jonny. She was in love with him, had been so for years, but it was unlikely he’d ever see her in a romantic sense. She was his cousin and stepsister and he saw her as nothing more.

  ‘Wish I’d never invited the fellow now,’ Ben laughed, squeezing Emilia’s shoulder. ‘On the other hand, if he can entertain you ladies by simply just being here, then us chaps can slip off to the snooker room. I forgot to tell you, everyone, he’s running a little late because he’s having to bring along that dull little daughter of his. Obviously, she takes after her mother.’

  The piano fell silent and moments later Brooke came out of the French windows. ‘Ben, everyone, our last guests have arrived.’

  Emilia’s soul and spirit lifted and with them her whole bearing the instant she saw Perry. His eyes homed in on her. Both found it an effort not to rush to the other’s side.