Watch for Me by Twilight

by Kirsty Ferry

  Kim pouted. ‘Oh, Aidan. You’re no fun today.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m very busy, as I say, and I’ll soon be short-staffed. So, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get some plans drawn up for my new client. Petra, would you just lock up after Ms Barrett leaves, and then you can get away for Misha?’

  Petra, God love her, showed no sign of being thrown by this turn of events, and had, instead, already put her handbag on the desk and laid her car keys next to it.

  ‘Certainly,’ Petra said smoothly, and stood up. ‘Ms Barrett?’ She indicated the door. ‘Thank you so much for understanding.’

  Kim stared at Aidan for a second. ‘But what about my extension?’

  ‘We’ll discuss that another time. Drop me an email. Bye, Kim.’ He forced another smile onto his lips and melted into his office as Petra ushered the woman out of the building. Aidan shut the office door firmly behind him and leaned on it. My God! If Kim Barrett only knew he was willing to cross that professional boundary for Cassie Aldrich, she would think she, Kim, also stood a chance with him.

  And she didn’t. No way. No way at all.

  May 1941

  Stella made out a list that didn’t mean much. The girls were going to have a little get together – maybe a bottle or two of wine and a cosy chat. It was late spring, early summer and not warm enough for the pool by any stretch of the imagination.

  Her lists had lost their excitement somehow. It seemed wrong for them to be enjoying themselves when the boys – all of them, now, she acknowledged with a pain as sharp as a knife in her heart – were away fighting for their country. She looked out of her bedroom window and saw a plane fly past. It was one of their own, she knew, and she wondered if, at any time, Rob had flown over Hartsford, over Suffolk, and looked down at the estate. She wondered how he’d felt; whether he’d still been angry at her, or whether she had faded into insignificance as he travelled to the continent to attack Germany.

  Perhaps, he could see the pool from up there – a tiny lozenge of aquamarine, with the squat shape of the squash courts beside it and the River Hartsford rushing past in a silver ribbon. It seemed like a lifetime ago, that summer, when she’d taken him down there giggling and they’d swum naked in the moonlight.

  Abandoning her list, she went over to the window and opened it wide. She leaned on the sill, her chin in her hands and just felt … empty. There was no other word for it. And then as she stared outside and thought about it, a different emotion began to creep in and replace the emptiness. Anger. She recognised the red-hot, burning feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  All of sudden, the room was stifling. She wanted to escape and run as far and as fast as she could, scream at the top of her voice in the woods. She was angry at herself, at her father and, most of all at Rob.

  She clutched the sill and leaned out. ‘Why the hell did you do it?’ she shouted out. ‘Why?’ But deep down, she knew the answer. He was an honourable man. A courageous one; a man who couldn’t sit around doing nothing while all his friends defended their country. He was never going to back down. And he was right. She was silly and spoiled and selfish. The words were imprinted on her memory and she hated them, hated the fact that they summed her up so concisely.

  Catching a sob in her throat, she turned and raced out of the bedroom. She ran as quickly as she could along the corridor and dashed down the stairs. She jumped the last few steps and burst out of the front door. She ran blindly, her feet taking her to the Spa, her heart and her mind taking her anywhere but.

  She reached the pool and threw herself onto the ground near it, lying there sobbing, hating herself dreadfully, wishing she could turn back time. She’d never even heard from him. He must hate her so.

  There was the noise of a vehicle from the lane behind the Hall, near the service gates, and Stella stifled her sobs. The last thing she needed was a delivery coming, or one of the staff finding her in such a state. She bit her lip, sitting up and hugging her knees. Staring at the gate, she saw a car pull up, a door open and someone tumble out.

  The passenger wasted no time. He slammed the door shut and turned to face the estate. For a split second, he cast his gaze over the gates, then ran towards them.

  Stella caught her breath. The man was dressed smartly, his slate blue uniform neatly belted, his cap jauntily on his head. But that was all secondary to what she focused on – it was his face; his face, so dear to her and so familiar. So much part of her thoughts and her dreams and so much a memory that she thought she must have forgotten it. But no – it was him. His dark blonde hair and his dark blue eyes. But his hair was shorter now, and his eyes were haunted and they were desperate. And he was running, towards the gates, towards her—

  ‘Rob!’ She was surprised she could even speak, let alone formulate his name. ‘Rob!’ In an instant, she was on her feet and speeding towards the gates, her hair flying out behind her. ‘Rob! Oh, God!’

  ‘Stella!’ He caught sight of her, and shouted her name. ‘Stella!’

  She reached the gates just as he did, and they stood inches apart as she fumbled to free the catch. He grabbed hold of her wrist and pulled it through the wrought-iron work. He pressed his lips to her hand and she thought she would faint. ‘In a minute, just one minute. I can open them. Let me just – let me—’ She managed to release the latch and pulled the gate towards her as he stumbled into the grounds of the estate.

  In another instant she was in his arms and he was kissing her urgently, the lengths of their bodies against each other. His uniform was scratchy against her skin and his hat fell to the ground as he picked her up and she wrapped her arms around his neck.

  ‘Stella, oh, Stella. I wish I hadn’t called you those awful names. I wish I hadn’t. I don’t ever want to be without you again. Ever.’

  ‘Rob, I deserved them, I really did. But – now,’ she gasped between kisses, experiencing such a surge of emotion that she thought she would explode. ‘The changing rooms. Now.’

  Stella clung more tightly, as he ran over to the building and shouldered the door open, then kicked it shut behind him.

  They didn’t even consider the fact that they could have used the secret room. It would have taken too long to get into it, and they didn’t want to waste one precious second.

  Rob had twenty-four hours’ leave before he had to return. All the Squadrons based at the main fighter airfields were going to operate together as integral Fighter Wings. The RAF was testing out different types of short-penetration fighter operations to try and draw the Luftwaffe into a war of attrition and keep fighters tied down in France. Rob didn’t know when he’d get the chance to go to her again.

  The conversation he’d had with Harry niggled away at him until he could think of little else. Stella’s blue and white silk scarf came with him on every mission like a fluttering talisman, but he was no good in the skies if his mind was in Hartsford with a certain redhead and her infectious giggle and her warm arms and her lithe body …

  So he had come straight to Hartsford. As he completed his RAF training and began to fly over Europe, he learned exactly how precious life was and bitterly regretted the way it had seemingly ended between them.

  ‘Why didn’t you contact me?’ Stella was now nestled safely in his arms.

  ‘I did! I sent you letter after letter. Didn’t you receive them?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Oh, Rob – it must have been my father. Next time, write to Leo and disguise your handwriting. That’s what I did when I wrote to Jack—’

  ‘You wrote to Jack? Bloody kid never said a thing. He’s got the idea that’s it’s all heroic and glamorous and he’s already tried twice to get in — lied about his age, the little idiot. Anything beyond how the hell he can join up will have dribbled out of his head.’

  ‘I had to try, though, you wouldn’t answer my letters. Jack said he didn’t know where you were. It was all classified. It was ages after you’d left anyway.’

  ‘I’m sorry I sent your letters back, the first ones; the ones bef
ore Jack. I was so stupid – I was so angry. Dear Lord.’

  Exhausted from their love-making, he held her as if he never wanted to let her go again. They’d ended up in their secret room after all, when reason had come back to them a little, and their clothes were now discarded in the corner. The warmth of their bodies had kept the creeping chill away to some extent, until Rob had insisted on lighting the little ParkRay when Stella started to shiver.

  ‘I’m not cold,’ she told him. ‘I just can’t believe you’re here and you’re real. I never thought I’d see you again. It’s that kind of shiver. It’s a scared kind of shiver.’ A sob caught in her throat and he kissed her tears away. ‘I have to tell you, Rob. I don’t know what you thought I meant. But I wanted to marry you – so, so desperately. I still want to. But I wanted to wait until you were safely home. I didn’t want to do it quickly and cause all those problems with my family, not if I was going to lose you, because I can’t lose you, I just can’t. I want to be with you forever.’

  ‘You’ll never get rid of me again.’ He grinned. ‘I’m far too fast for the enemy. Stella, my love, when I read the letter, I thought you were just saying no and trying to stop me from going away. I was too stubborn to find out for sure, too bloody-minded to ask you.’

  ‘I hated to think that you were so far away from me.’ She turned her face into his chest and sobbed some more.

  ‘I say, on a brighter note,’ he added, kissing her tears away, ‘I’ve found a great deal of inspiration in the skies. I’ve written some poems. Some of them are quite good, if I say so myself.’

  She laughed at that, little jerky laughs. ‘I hope you outlast your war poems, Rob. I don’t want you becoming another Rupert Brooke.’

  ‘Brooke! Good God. He died from a mosquito bite. Hardly heroic, dear heart. He never faced a bloody bullet. If you’re going to generalise, please, link my name to Wilfred Owen. He died in action, you know.’ He said it with a spark of his old self and he was gratified to hear her laugh as she buried her face further into his skin. There was a pause and he felt little thoughtful kisses on his chest that made him groan silently and close his eyes, lost in the sensations; the sensations of her. God, he’d missed her.

  ‘That’s as may be, but do you know Virginia Woolf once swam naked with Rupert? In a moonlit pool, no less. Now who does that remind you of?’ There was a teasing note in her voice that pleased him, and he smiled into the room.

  ‘Me, you and our beautiful River Hartsford?’

  ‘Of course. But I still want you safe. I don’t want to lose you – to a vicious mosquito bite or a bullet. Or a bomb. Or anything.’ She shuddered. ‘Can’t you stay here? We could hide you away somewhere. The estate’s big enough. You could live in the folly, perhaps?’

  ‘So you could bring me out every so often to have your wicked way with me?’ He flipped her over onto her back and she laughed up into his face. ‘We’ll have time enough for all that after the war. We’re like the stars – we’re forever, until we die. Maybe we’ll last even longer. Anyway, the war can’t go on like this. I think—’

  ‘Shhhh.’ She pressed her fingertips to his lips. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. If you’ve only got a few hours, I want to spend them doing this. With you. Right here.’ She lifted her head and removed her fingertips, and kissed him.

  Rob didn’t want to argue with that one, so he didn’t. He did have one more thing to say though.

  ‘Stella. I’m going to ask you again. Will you marry me? Will you?’

  ‘God, Rob. Of course, I will. When you come back next time? Despite what my father might say. He deserves to lose me to an elopement if he’s bloody destroying my letters.’

  Rob laughed and buried his face in her copper curls. ‘Next time,’ he replied confidently. ‘Next time I’m home, most definitely.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Present Day

  Cassie sat up in the attics for ages, going through the old papers and letters and documents that were the detritus of Hartsford family life.

  Much of it was deadly dull. There were shopping lists, invoices, menu plans – lists not unlike the ones Delilah’s grandmother had squirreled away.

  She decided she would do a little board about Delilah’s grandmother and was hopeful that she would come across some photographs of her. The owners of Hartsford Hall had a long history of capturing everything on camera. There were, she knew, hundreds of photographs much older than the era she was currently interested in, of servants arranged outside the building and footmen standing to attention whilst her Edwardian and Victorian relatives sat stiffly in the carriages, bundled up against the wind as they took the air around the carriage drive.

  Cassie knew it was only a matter of time before she found Granny Delilah and that thought renewed her vigour in poking around the paperwork. The written papers were starting to run into one another and she was finding it difficult to maintain her concentration. She’d found nothing about Robert Edwards and nothing about Astrophel, which was irritating her as well.

  Cassie sat back in the chair and stretched. She looked at the piles of things around her and she was surprised to see how much she’d actually done. She’d even made notes on the A4 pad Elodie had left on the desk. The next step, she guessed, was putting it all into Elodie’s database. She was a bit nervous about that – she hoped she wouldn’t mess it up.

  Sighing, she leaned down again and dragged a battered old vanity case towards her. This had to have something interesting in it, unless it had just been used as a convenient receptacle for receipts and old birthday cards of course. Who knew where the Hartsford inhabitants would have stashed stuff?

  Vanity Case, she wrote on the pad and underlined it.

  She opened the lid and stared into it. ‘My word!’ It looked, at first, as if the case was full of instruments of torture – then she realised it was a pile of hair curlers from the 1940s. They looked like thumb screws. ‘Bloody hell. And a lot of serious ouch.’ She picked one of the curlers up and turned it around in her fingers. It had a couple of long, reddish-coloured hairs stuck in the metal. ‘Definitely ouch.’ She touched the roots of her own dark hair, imagining that swift stab of pain when you accidentally pull a hair out with a hair grip or a bobble. She sympathised with this red-headed girl – big time. But hold on. Red-headed? Her heart beat a little faster.

  She put the curler down and moved the rest of them around until she found the papers that had been stuffed in the box along with the curlers.

  Lady Estella Aldrich is invited to a Hunt Ball … she began to read on the first one, a small, stiff card. She was right. Stella! The girl in the awesome photograph. The one with the long red hair – or at least that was the colour it was painted on the picture. Looking at those hairs in the curler, Stella had indeed been a natural redhead.

  ‘Well I never.’ Cassie’s spirits rose. At least she’d made that little discovery. ‘Come on Stella. I’ve got you now. What else were you up to in your social life?’

  She delved deeper and pulled out hairdressers’ bills, scrappy notes about buying tack for horses, invoices from local shops – written very politely and reminding Lady Estella Aldrich she still owed the retailer a couple of pounds for her latest purchases. Cassie giggled. She liked the sound of Stella. She clearly didn’t give a damn. Maybe next week – ask Daddy, if he’s not grumpy, she had scrawled on one receipt from a rather exclusive dress shop with a London address. In Cassie’s head, it was the gown she was wearing in the photograph. Cassie’s own father had never really been around in a grounded, physical sense. He’d been so busy with scholarly works and race horses and losing money to strange investments, that he was usually there in body, but very rarely in spirit. And her mother … well, forget her. That was another issue she had to deal with, but at least sifting through these things was taking her mind off that letter a little.

  In amongst Stella’s treasures, there were also stubs of cinema tickets and London theatre programmes, and, bizarrely, a couple of labels f
rom champagne bottles, clearly saved from special occasions. Cassie shivered. The atmosphere in that wine cellar had been alive – and hadn’t one of the bottles been unlabelled? So far Stella’s life was rather superficial and shallow, but it was quite exciting to visualise it, and imagine that she herself had popped the bottles back on that shelf for some reason.

  ‘Stella, sweetie,’ Cassie addressed the vanity case, ‘you simply have to be the sort of girl who would enjoy a weekend party. I bet you went in that pool at any rate.’ She imagined her jumping off the diving board and maybe doing an elegant swallow dive into the water – quite a contrast to Robert’s dive-bombing. She didn’t know if the pool would have been deep enough to factor in an elegant swallow dive, but she liked the image. She wondered if Stella would have swum with her long red hair streaming out behind her Ophelia-wise, or whether she would have had it tucked into a neat little swimming cap – maybe one with pink rubber flowers all over it.

  Cassie pulled out a small, bound notebook which had blue, splodgy ink on the front. ‘List of my jolly good chums. Happy days!’ it declared. Cassie hoped it would let her into more of Stella’s life, but when she opened it, she was disappointed to find there was nothing of any substance.

  As the cover had promised, there were lists: names and dates, rooms her chums were assigned to, which Cassie recognised as Hartsford Hall rooms, and various streams of consciousness and nonsense where Stella had randomly jotted things down for other reasons, as if they’d just occurred to her at that particular moment in time. On one page, she’d apparently decided to make a list of perfumes and lipstick colours, underlining the ones she possibly felt needed replacing or maybe the ones she was going to wear to a particular party. Tabu. Je Reviens. Blue Grass. Joy. Wild Peach. Rose Pink. Scarlet.

  Cassie thought of her list of foodstuffs for the Country House Party Weekend. Clearly, some things were genetic. Cassie had even made a list of particular dresses she fancied wearing, along with the websites she could obtain them from. More than half a century separated Stella and Cassie Aldrich, but they were dreadfully similar in some respects.