Captive of Desire

by Alexandra Sellers

  “I will let you know my decision before I leave tomorrow,” she said to them all, and saw in his eyes that he had already known it.

  Laddy went to her room early, but not to sleep. Instead, confused, heartsick and weary, she paced up and down the small blue-and-white bedroom, trying to discover what she ought to do, trying to understand how so much could have happened to her in one day.

  She looked down at her palm and with sudden impatience ripped away the small bandage that covered it. She stared at the razor-thin cut across the skin at the base of her fingers and at the deeper cut near the thumb as though she might read some truth there that was now escaping her. Then, with an exclamation, she pressed the sticky tape back into place.

  Her room faced out the back of the house, down towards the village, and one by one in the lonely hours of night she saw the lights going out, until it seemed as though she was alone in the world—alone with an impossible decision.

  Sometime after midnight she dressed again, crept down the stairs and slipped out into the night.

  The air was cold and damp, and the smell of the sea seemed stronger on the night air. Stumbling a little, Laddy made her way to the edge of the cliff and in the light of the stars found a convenient rock to sit on.

  She sat for a long time with the stars and the half-moon and the quiet sea, thoughts washing in and out of her head at random. The decision came to her slowly, on the wind, on the waves, and she listened carefully. When she understood it all, she returned to the house.

  * * *

  “Good morning,” said a friendly Welsh voice amid a tinkle of crockery that woke Laddy up.

  She rolled over and looked into a younger version of Mairi Davies’s bright dark eyes and upside-down V eyebrows, and she said, smiling, “You must be Brigit.”

  Brigit smiled back. “So I am,” she said. “And you would be the young woman from London who has people in Fishguard, would you?”

  Laddy sat up, eyeing the tea tray with great favour as Brigit set it on the bed beside her, and laughed. “You might say that,” she smiled. “My great-grandfather was born in Fishguard a hundred and fifty-odd years ago. I was born in Canada. And I haven’t been served breakfast in bed since I was nine years old and had the measles.”

  “Not breakfast,” Brigit corrected her. “Just tea. Breakfast will be downstairs. When I took Helen a cup of tea to her studio she said you might appreciate a cup, too.”

  Bless Helen, thought Laddy. When they were all staring at her last night waiting for her answer, she had felt as though she hadn’t a friend in the world. But Helen had cared enough to fortify her with tea—and a sign of friendship—before Laddy had to go downstairs and face them all.

  “Thank you, I do,” said Laddy. “I feel as though I haven’t slept at all. Is it late or early, please?”

  Brigit laughed. “It’s just after 8:30, and how could you not sleep well when you are escaping the horrible noises of the city?”

  “Maybe I’ve been programmed so I can’t sleep in silence,” Laddy suggested, taking a deep drink of her tea.

  “Programmed, is it? Well, if you stay here long, we’ll have you de-programmed in no time. And you’ll never want to see a city again!”

  Laddy regarded her quizzically. “You sound as though you’re speaking from experience,” she said.

  Brigit, a dark, almost gypsy-looking woman in her early twenties, put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “Three years I spent in London,” she said, as though she ought to have known better. “No one could stop me, you see. I went to study art, and I said I would never come back to Trefelin.”

  “And?” Laddy prompted, rather fascinated by this recital.

  She laughed. “And the city was big and sophisticated, but it was also noisy and dirty, and no one said hello to their neighbours. Three years was enough. I came back to Trefelin.” She glanced at her watch. “I must go now, or breakfast will be late.”

  Laddy put her empty cup down on the table beside her bed. “But what about the art?” she asked.

  Brigit smiled. “Ah—for art you do not need London! If you are staying, I will show you my work one day, if you like,” and she disappeared out the door.

  Getting out of bed, Laddy eyed with a grimace the blue jeans she had worn yesterday and wished she had brought a change of clothing in her overnight case. She had tossed in nightclothes, fresh underwear and cosmetics, but she had thought the jeans and red high-necked sweater she wore would do for Sunday. Now she wanted nothing so much as a fresh shirt.

  She put on eye makeup and a little lipstick, although normally she wouldn’t have bothered. Makeup might give her confidence, and this morning she needed confidence.

  The door to Helen’s studio was open, and as Laddy passed it on her way to the dining room, Helen called to her. “If you’ll hang on a second, I’ll go with you,” she said, laying down her pencil and standing up. “I’m famished.” She crossed to the door and Laddy had the feeling that Helen had been waiting for her to appear. Helen was going out of her way to give her moral support, and Laddy wondered just how badly Helen thought she needed it.

  Mischa Busnetsky, in black trousers and a black sweater over a check shirt, was standing at the trellised window looking out over the sea. One hand was in his pocket and the other hand was holding the delicate white curtain aside, and he was staring at the cliff edge as though it held the answer to a question he was asking.

  After a moment he turned around, and when he looked at Laddy, the question was still there in his eyes.

  “Good morning,” they all said together, and Helen, keeping up the light conversation by asking him how he was sleeping, began to load a plate from the sideboard.

  Laddy sank into a chair and poured herself a cup of coffee. She needn’t have bothered coming down to breakfast at all—she wasn’t going to be able to eat, anyway.

  “That glass,” Helen was saying to Mischa, “contains Ned Bear’s special protein-vitamin-mineral supplement and although it’s quite pleasant when fresh, it does taste rather murky if it’s been left to sit. So you had better have that first.”

  The glass she indicated was immediately opposite Laddy, and Mischa dropped into the chair and wrapped his hand around the glass.

  His hands were large and broad, but almost fleshless, and she watched the fingers curl round the glass with a detached, almost aesthetic pleasure as she stirred cream into her coffee.

  With an abrupt gesture he lifted the glass to his mouth, and unconsciously following the motion of his hand, she suddenly met his eyes. And his eyes were looking at her as though she had already betrayed him and he had accepted it.

  She said, “Would you like to hear my decision?” Mischa breathed once and nodded, as Helen sat down beside them, at the head of the small table, with a plateful of bacon and eggs.

  “I’m surprised you’ve been able to make a decision,” said Helen, and then Richard and Ned Bear walked into the room, making her audience complete.

  “I won’t file the story yet,” she began when they were all settled. “I won’t tell my editor I’ve got anything. I’ll keep a lid on everything until you—” she faltered a little, “—until you decide that you’re ready to talk to the press. As soon as I hear that, I’ll file a story. I’m not going to ask you again to let me have that information in advance. But neither am I going to wait in London and get the news at the same time as everyone else. I’m going to spend my holidays here in Trefelin—I’ll put up at a bed-and-breakfast—and as much extra time as I can get my editor to give me without telling him why.”

  Finally she looked at Mischa, but his face was unreadable, his jaw clenched. “You’ve already said you won’t accept any conditions for my silence, and I won’t ask for special treatment. But I hope you’ll give me equal treatment and notify me along with everyone else when and if you do decide to talk to the press.”

  And if I don’t get my story filed a day before anyone else under those conditions, she added to herself, I deserve to
be fired. She would check out a local photographer in Fishguard so that she would have one on call—in fact, she would bring her own camera from London—and while the members of the press were making their way to Trefelin or being drummed up in Fishguard or Cardiff, her first story would already be on its way to Harry.

  It sounded like the perfect solution, but in fact it posed several problems: how to get the extra vacation time from Harry, what to do if her time ran out and Mischa Busnetsky still had not come out of seclusion and what the hell she could say to Harry if the plan backfired and he found out. Probably “goodbye,” she thought, and snorted wryly. She looked at Mischa, who was no longer looking at her. Why was he doing this? It could have been so simple....

  “But you certainly are not going to put up at a bed-and-breakfast.” Laddy surfaced with a start to realise that Helen was speaking. “You must stay with us while you’re here. Much more comfortable for you, and anyway—” she looked round “—it would cause comment if Laddy were suddenly to go looking for a bed-and-breakfast in Trefelin.”

  “I needn’t be that close,” Laddy said. “I could put up at a hotel in Fishguard.” But Helen quashed that with a firm, “Nonsense. You can have one of our cottages,” and none of the men seemed inclined to disagree with her. So it was settled that Laddy would come back to Tymawr House as soon as time and Harry Waller allowed.

  The atmosphere relaxed after this, and Laddy saw that everyone was grateful to her for having discovered the way out of an almost impossible dilemma. She realised with some surprise that the attitude of Richard, Helen and Ned Bear towards her yesterday had not been the hostile suspicion she had imagined, but horrified understanding that Mischa Busnetsky’s attitude, however justified it might be in view of his past, had succeeded in creating a corner and pushing Laddy into it. If she had not reacted like a paranoid idiot last night, she might well have enjoyed the benefit of a joint discussion of the possibilities with these three, instead of battling things out alone in the small hours.

  Helen confirmed this as the two women took a quiet walk along the Coastal Path after lunch, a few minutes before Laddy and Ned Bear were to set out for London.

  “How long will it be before you can get back?” Helen asked as they tramped single file along a particularly narrow stretch of the track.

  “At least a week,” Laddy said. “My holidays officially don’t start for two weeks, and I doubt very much if Harry will give me more than another week at the beginning and perhaps a few days at the end. I hope that’s going to be long enough.”

  “So do I, for your sake. I don’t suppose that what you’re doing is going to be at all easy to manage, and I must say I think you’re bending over backward. I don’t think he quite understood what he was asking.”

  Laddy thought Mischa had understood exactly what he was asking. But she did not understand why, and she did not contradict Helen.

  “Will you have to cancel other holiday plans?” Helen asked. “It’s very pleasant here in late spring, but—”

  But sitting around a country village, trying to protect her interest in an exclusive story, however pleasant the village might be, would not make up for missing out on an exciting vacation, Laddy silently finished for her. With a certain degree of relief she realised that Helen had no suspicion that there was anything between herself and Mischa beyond Laddy’s loyalty, perhaps, to her father.

  “No, I was going to work on the ho...” she began aloud, and stopped dead. She had completely forgotten John. John had asked her to go to Lanzarote with him. And she had wanted to go—or rather, she had wanted to want to go, until Mischa Busnetsky came.

  “Oh, damn!” she said. She had thought seeing Mischa again would settle things for her, and instead her life was being turned upside down; she was more uncertain than ever. Laddy sat down uncaring on a dirty stile and gazed hollowly at Helen. “How could anybody get their life into such a mess?” she demanded savagely. She saw Helen looking at her in dismay and knew that Helen had no idea what was going on with her. Well, how could she? How could anyone know when Laddy herself didn’t know? She was utterly and completely confused—she didn’t know what she wanted, what was right, who she loved, for two minutes together.

  Laddy sighed and looked out over the sea. The decision she had made out here last night meant that she was going to lose John Bentinck, that was certain.

  Part of her loved Mischa Busnetsky, and part of her hated him.

  Chapter 7

  On Thursday the news came out that two major publishers—English and American—planned the simultaneous publication of two works of Mikhail Busnetsky, and thanks to Richard, the story broke in the Evening Herald under Laddy’s by-line.

  It was going to be a very noisy affair. The publication of two very different books by a newly released Soviet dissident was going to make literary headlines. And where had the manuscripts come from? Had Mikhail Busnetsky managed to bring them out of Russia with him? People were tearing their hair out trying to find Mikhail Busnetsky, but Mikhail Busnetsky remained very successfully in hiding. They had to be satisfied with Mr. Busnetsky’s agent, Richard Digby.

  “What we’re telling them,” Richard said to Laddy over the phone the day after she had broken the first news, “is merely that the manuscripts had previously been brought out of the Soviet Union and were awaiting him here. We’re deliberately leaving it rather mysterious. If you would like to let out the real story on that, we rather hoped—the publisher and I, not Mischa—that you might do that a little later on, Laddy.”

  Mischa Busnetsky might hate publicity, she observed wryly, but Richard did not—and he was going to do everything he could to assure good coverage while stopping short of actually countermanding Mischa’s wishes.

  “Did you tell the publishers the truth?” she asked.

  “No. I merely mentioned that there might be an interesting story attached to that,” he said. “We thought it might be better broken closer to the publication date.”

  Quite a story indeed, Laddy thought wryly, thinking of the flurry that would be kicked up if she were to suggest that her father’s last act had been to obtain the manuscripts and that he had then died in an unusual accident. She sighed. Thank God that information resided in only one brain—her own.

  And in that of whoever had run down her father in the street, of course. But she thought that the secret was safe between them.

  “Aren’t you afraid they’re going to find him through you?” she asked Richard.

  “We hope not,” he replied. “I’m afraid I’m stuck here in town for the next few weeks until he feels strong enough to speak to the press, however. It wouldn’t do to have me followed down there. But the house has always been in Helen’s name. The town flat is listed as my residence.”

  “Still, I’m surprised he agreed to this.”

  “I’m afraid once we’d chosen our publishers there was no alternative,” Richard said. “They have paid a very large advance, you know, and the news wasn’t likely to be kept quiet. Possibly nothing will be kept quiet for very long,” he added. “One never knows. When are you going to get down again, Laddy?”

  To sit on her story, he meant, in case somebody enterprising found Mischa.

  “Not before Tuesday, I’m afraid,” she said, grimacing across the newsroom towards where Harry Waller sat and remembering the difficulty she had had getting even those few extra days.

  “Will you be going down for the weekend, then?” he asked. Today was Friday. She could leave tonight and drive through the night again, but...but she was tired—exhausted—and suddenly she didn’t care if this weekend Mikhail Busnetsky exposed the entire Soviet spy network operating in the Western world. She was sick of the dispassionate words she had been writing about him, sick of seeing him as “good copy.” She wished he had been a factory labourer in Murmansk who had never looked at a piece of anti-Soviet propaganda in his life. Let the story break this weekend. Let Harry pack her off to the astrology column.

  “No,”
she said. “I’ve got to spend the weekend packing and arranging. I expect I’ll go down on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning.”

  “Well, then, I’ll talk to you again before you go,” Richard said. “Will you give me your home number—just in case?”

  She gave it to him, realizing there was a small conspiracy between him and Helen. If an enterprising reporter did locate Busnetsky this weekend, Laddy would know within five minutes.

  She wrote the follow-up story Richard had given her on Mischa, then talked to a stringer in Jerusalem about a recent border raid from Lebanon in which four Israeli children had been killed on the beach near a place called Rosh HaNikra. The story had been on the front page all day, and the stringer had nothing new to report other than a general conviction that there would be reprisals.

  “Shalom,” the man said as he hung up. The Israeli word for both hello and goodbye also meant “peace,” and Laddy sighed. Everybody talked about it…

  “The world is not as we would make it,” she heard a quiet voice say in her head, and she sat upright with a jerk. “Shut up!” she told Mischa Busnetsky’s insidious voice, to the amazement of the blameless reporter at the typewriter beside her. She smiled a weak apology at him, rolled paper into her typewriter and concentrated on the inevitability of reprisal for the lives of four children who had been shot down while playing on a beach on a sunny day.

  * * *

  “Oh, lass...why not?” John asked quietly, his northern accent thickened through emotion. He dropped the menu onto the table and looked at her.

  He had arrived back in town Friday afternoon after three days of getting pictures of an oil-rig disaster in the North Sea, and they had come to Charlotte Street to their favourite Greek restaurant for dinner. And she had told John she could not go to Lanzarote with him.

  Laddy looked away from his blue gaze, feeling a confusing swirl of emotions in which guilt vied with anger for predominance. She supposed she would never know now whether John Bentinck could have made her forget Mischa Busnetsky, because after this he would not be trying.