Miranda's Mount

by Phillipa Ashley

  ‘As you pointed out, there is absolutely nothing sexual about massage, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  ‘I’m not that immature.’

  ‘Then take off your top and lie down. I’ll go away for a few minutes while you undress.’

  When he’d gone, Miranda couldn’t hear another human sound, just the hum of insects, the whisper of the breeze in the grass and the seagulls crying far overhead. Glancing around, she unzipped her shorts and let them slip down to her ankles. She stepped out of them and her flip-flops. Surely, at any moment, someone would come along and see her? Or worse, Jago would come back and find her half undressed. She wanted him to touch her so much. So much, she thought, for vowing to keep Jago at arm’s length. She was burning for him to touch her, even it was meant to be ‘therapeutic’.

  She pulled her T-shirt over her head, unhooked the back of her bra and shrugged it off. Quickly, she lay face down, her breasts sinking into powdery sand.

  She heard him coming back a few minutes later and closed her eyes, trying not to feel awkward about being topless.

  ‘Now, try to relax and just think of me as Dave,’ he said. ‘Only bigger and hairier.’

  Miranda giggled.

  ‘That’s good,’ he said, kneeling beside her. ‘This might be a bit sore to start with but that’s a good thing. It’s a shame I have no oil with me but I didn’t come prepared for this.’

  Miranda ignored his remark and tried not to tense her bottom or press her hips into the sand. He’d said the massage might be painful and that hadn’t helped her relax. Then it began. His hands were smooth, not calloused like in her fantasy. They were also warm and swept over her shoulders and spine, lightly and rhythmically. The pressure was gentle and didn’t hurt at all. She began to relax.

  ‘Ow!’ She let out a cry as his fingertips probed the flesh between her shoulders.

  ‘Sorry. But this is the best way, believe me.’

  So the first few strokes had just been a warm-up. Or exploratory. She tried not to tense as he started the massage proper and now knew why he’d warned her. His strong fingers sought out every knot of fatigue and tension, kneading until she could hardly bear it. She bit her lip, determined not to make any sound, but every so often she twitched in discomfort.

  ‘Try to relax,’ he said softly.

  Relax? She would have laughed if she hadn’t been too busy wincing. ‘Ouch!’

  She heard the laugh in his voice. ‘You needed this, Miranda. You’re as stiff as a board.’

  He was merciless in seeking out the stiff flesh and muscles and kneading it away. When she didn’t think she could stand any more, suddenly, he changed rhythm and pressure. His hands swept down the length of her back, either side of her spine. She felt her flesh relaxing, the tension ebbing slowly but surely away. She sighed softly as he pressed the skin around the small of her back, his fingers probing just above the waistband of her knickers. Now, that was much nicer.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Good.’

  She closed her eyes. He definitely wasn’t Dave. And she definitely mustn’t want him to go lower or turn her over and touch her breasts or hold her to him and kiss her. Or make love to her. Both hands swept firmly down the backs of her thighs. She felt deliciously relaxed and soothed.

  His voice reached her from far away. ‘That’s good.’

  His hands swept from her shoulders, along her back, over her bottom and down her thighs and calves. She waited for the next sweep along her skin, for the next touch but there was only the cool breeze whispering over her skin.

  ‘OK, that should do it,’ he said.

  She stifled a protest. No, she wasn’t ready for this to be over yet. She wanted more, of his fingers moulding her flesh, touching her everywhere, exploring.

  ‘I’ll leave while you get dressed.’

  He was going away. She pushed herself up until she was kneeling. ‘Jago. Wait.’

  He was squatting beside her a few feet away, about to stand up, but, as she called his name, he froze. She glanced down at her breasts, sprinkled with bone-white sand, her nipples dark and stiff. Jago stared at her, his lips parted, his breathing louder. Miranda felt powerful and she wanted him so much, she ached. She was ready to make love with him without worrying about the past or the future.

  She just wanted the moment. He met her gaze with eyes that seemed full of pain, not the pleasure at seeing her body that she’d expected. She reached out a hand to touch his arm but he sprang to his feet, her fingertips brushing the hairs on his arm.

  His voice grated like waves dragging over shingle. ‘You’d better get dressed. Let’s go and get something to eat.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  At the café, Miranda bagged a table on the terrace overlooking the coast while Jago ordered. He came out carrying a tray laden with mugs of steaming hot chocolate topped with whipped cream and a plate piled with slabs of fruit loaf, flapjacks, brownies and lemon drizzle cake. Miranda thought it hardly made up for being left cold in the dunes, but it was a start.

  ‘Is someone joining us?’ she asked, as he unloaded the plates onto the table.

  ‘Not as far as I know. I wasn’t sure what you liked best but I knew you’d be hungry. And I don’t think Dave would have done this for you.’

  She laughed. ‘Thanks but I can’t eat two great slices of cake,’ she said, but proceeded to do exactly that. She was just dotting up the last few crumbs with her fingertip when Jago asked, ‘Miranda, what exactly happened with your parents?’

  No preamble. No request to ask a personal question. Jago just dived straight in. ‘Was the surfing and cake to soften me up?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not at all. Now simply seemed the right time. I want to try to understand why the Mount means so much to you.’

  ‘It’s too late for that. It won’t make any difference to your plans.’

  ‘No.’

  Miranda pushed her plate away and fiddled with her paper napkin.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ he said. ‘Only if you want to.’

  She wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about something so personal but perhaps she needed to. More than anything, she didn’t want their day to end and if this was the price to pay so she could stay here with him, she’d do it. ‘My dad might be dead for all I know. I never knew him. I told you he left us before I was born.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Mum brought me up,’ she said, ‘Although “bringing up” is being generous. She made sure I didn’t starve, or at least made sure there were either baked beans in the cupboard or a pound to buy some with …’ Her voice tailed off. But as actual bringing up, as in emotional support, guidance, love? Her gran had done that, for a time at least.

  ‘And?’ he asked, probing again.

  ‘My gran helped in the early days, until I was about ten or so, but then she died.’ She felt a corkscrew of pain in her guts even now at the loss. She’d adored her gran and had often stayed over at her Victorian terrace with its tacked-on bathroom and narrow stairs. ‘I loved her and I would have lived there permanently if I could.’ Sudden insight hit her. No wonder her mother had felt sidelined, guessing her own daughter preferred her grandmother. It wasn’t Miranda’s fault; at ten she’d loved Gran with all her heart without thinking who it might hurt, but her mother must have felt pushed out.

  ‘I wanted to stay with Gran but Mum wouldn’t let me. I suppose she wanted me in her own way – then my gran died.’

  ‘That must have been tough.’

  She screwed the serviette into a ball in her hand, crushing it. ‘Yes. I loved her.’

  ‘I’m sorry you didn’t have a relationship with your mother. I know what it’s like when parents turn out to be a disappointment.’ Jago gave a rueful smile. ‘And children even more so.’

  Miranda guessed he was referring to him leaving his mother to run the Mount alone and not going back as expected. Yet Lady St Merryn did love her son; she was prepared to
give up her own life and dreams to look after his future. At least, she had been, until recently.

  ‘I’m not complaining. Mum wasn’t cruel to me and, if she was, maybe she never meant to be. As you say, I just wasn’t what she expected, I think. Maybe she’d been hoping for a friend or a younger sister because she was only seventeen when she had me. But I didn’t like boys and make-up and all that stuff. I preferred books and reading. I liked hiding away in my bedroom instead of hanging round the shops and going to discos and Mum found that hard to understand. She blamed Gran for encouraging the books too.’

  ‘So what made you leave home?’

  ‘Gran left me some money when she died. She always told me about it and she said it was “for my education”. I wasn’t sure what that meant, at ten. I thought it was for school but as I got older I realised she’d meant it to help me through university.’

  Miranda was plunged back to those days again, when she’d hidden under the duvet, battling the dragons. They were roaring fire and St George was raising his sword arm and, funnily enough, he looked a lot like Jago now, in her memory, but back then he hadn’t looked like anyone, just some unspecified knight in shining armour.

  She had to smile at herself. Jago was so far from a knight in shining armour, it was laughable, but she went on. ‘One day, when I was in the sixth form, there’d been a meeting at school about funding for university. Some of the parents had come along, in fact, most had come, but not Mum. I was used to that and I’d worked out what I needed to do for myself. And I knew I had Gran’s money to help me out. It wasn’t that much, but enough to ease my path a little bit so I wouldn’t have to ask Mum for handouts that I knew she couldn’t afford and wouldn’t give me. When I got home from school, I asked Mum where the money was and how I could get access to it. But she just told me it had gone.’

  She was back in the lounge of the caravan now, hearing her conversation with her mother, feeling the crushing sense of loss again when her mother had turned to her and shrugged. She’d shrugged away all Miranda’s hopes and any faith in her mother.

  ‘Gone? What do you mean? What have you spent it on?’

  ‘Stuff.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Over the years. We needed it, Miranda. Money doesn’t grow on sodding trees.’

  ‘But Gran said there was over ten thousand pounds. It was in the building society. It would have added up.’

  ‘Well, it hasn’t so tough shit.’

  She’d exploded, screaming at the top of her voice, losing control and hating herself for showing how much she cared.

  ‘I bet you drank it, you bitch! I bet you spent it on the fucking tossers you call your boyfriends. I hate you. I hate you!’

  ‘I went berserk, called her all the names under the sun, cruel names, but I thought they were true. Still do. Then she slapped my face,’ she told Jago. Her fingers rested on her cheek briefly, remembering the shock and the sting. ‘I expect I deserved it.’

  ‘No, never!’

  Miranda shook her head. ‘Yes, I did. We both deserved what we got, her and me.’

  ‘And then you ran away?’

  ‘Not immediately. I ran to my room and slammed the door and didn’t come out. Mum must have thought I’d got over it and that’s what I wanted her to think. Over the next few weeks I kept on going to school, finished my A levels and scraped together a bit of cash from a Saturday job in the tea room in the town museum.’ She shook her head. ‘You see, I’ve always had a soft spot for dusty old relics.’

  Jago didn’t smile back so she went on. ‘At the end of term, Mum thought I’d gone to the sixth-form leavers’ afternoon but I took the chance to run away and I never went back.’

  ‘You don’t mean you let her think you were dead?’

  ‘For a while, yes.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘I was terrified of her or the social coming after me and terrified of what I was going to do or where I was going to go. I was shit scared of what I’d done. It was a cruel thing to do. A weird thing to do. Maybe I wasn’t normal and Mum was right.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘I ended up at the housing office in Winchester.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I liked the cathedral and Jane Austen had died there. In Winchester, I mean, not the housing office. You see I told you I was weird.’

  He touched her arm, still not smiling, even though she’d managed to make a joke.

  ‘No. You were angry and upset,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Maybe a lot more even than I’d realised.’ She remembered the feeling of bubbling bitter anger inside her, boiling away like a kettle but never running dry. ‘For all Mum and her latest bloke knew, I was dead. But I cracked first. I phoned after a couple of days but only in case she called the police. Not for her sake, I remember. I just didn’t want them wasting their time and most of all I didn’t want them looking for me. But I wanted her to suffer. That makes me evil, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I think it does. After seeing what Louise went through when Braden fell in the harbour, thinking he was dead, I hated myself more than I’ve ever done. It was a wicked thing to do, to make her suffer like that. You didn’t want Rhianna to suffer, did you? You would have helped her to die if you could?’

  He hesitated before replying. ‘This is different, Miranda. Very different.’

  Was it? Miranda wondered what Jago really thought of her, if he was just being kind.

  ‘What happened when you called home?’ he asked.

  ‘She shouted and told me to get my arse back home, but I was too hurt to do that. I kept expecting to be less hurt as the days went by but I didn’t. I felt just as angry and still didn’t want to go back and that’s how it started. I stayed away forever.’

  Jago gave a sigh. ‘What amazes me is how you ended up at Mount. How did you manage with university – you obviously got your degree?’

  ‘I got the university to defer my place; they understood in a way Mum wouldn’t. I got a job in my gap year – three jobs, actually. I worked in the café at a National Trust place, in a pub kitchen and in a vinegar factory for a few months packing bottles.’ She laughed. ‘I went home every night stinking like a chip shop, with people avoiding me on the bus, but I learned to manage. I worked in the vacations in the university bar, the college gave me hardship grants and I ate beans on toast.’

  ‘And you’ve had no contact with your mother at all?’

  She shook her head and sat on her hands. ‘I’ve never spoken to her, not from the day I phoned to say I was alive and was never coming home. I haven’t seen her since. I’m not sure I’d even recognise her now and I’ve no idea what she’s doing.’

  ‘She might recognise you.’

  Miranda shrugged. ‘I doubt it. I shouldn’t think she ever thinks about me.’

  ‘I think you’re wrong but I won’t argue.’ Jago fiddled with a fork as if he wasn’t sure he should be probing. Miranda’s heart felt almost overfull with the relief of telling someone what had happened to her, what she’d done. ‘So the Mount is an escape from the real world? That’s why you love it so much.’ He gave an ironic smile as he added, ‘For the stability?’

  He didn’t need to add that he was snatching that stability away and Miranda was too tired to fight any more. It was too late.

  ‘You were right, Jago. Growing up as a little girl, it was my dream to go to university and then run somewhere like this. Gran supported and encouraged me. The money would have helped, it would have made things so much less difficult and hard, but that wasn’t all. When I knew the money was gone and no one was going to lend a hand, I was on my own. I managed to get my dream anyhow; it was just a lot harder.’

  She touched his arm. ‘You were right about me playing safe in staying here for so long, but I’m only trying to protect myself and what I’ve fought for. Once I got it, I was never going to let anyone take it away from me again. Even if you don’t want it as a part of your future, I wasn�
�t prepared to listen or think about what you needed. That was wrong. I can’t make you do what I want and I’m going to stop trying. You’ve won.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  On the morning of the Festival, Miranda pulled aside the curtain and peered out onto the harbour. Well, thank goodness something had finally gone right, or was in the process of going right. The sun shone, still pink, from a sky streaked by a few early morning clouds. A gentle breeze wafted her cheek through the open casement. Even though it was barely 7 am, she knew the crowds would flock to the event.

  Today, at least, she could forget that the place was being sold and that its residents and staff’s lives would soon change forever. None of the thousands of visitors who were even now packing picnics, loading up the car, calming excited children or cajoling cynical teenagers, knew that the course of history was actually being changed when the St Merryns sold it.

  Most of today’s visitors wouldn’t give a toss about the sale; perhaps a few of the older ones, the history buffs, the local MPs and old-fashioned sticklers for tradition would really mind and might complain. In the end, the Mount was someone else’s problem and who would shed a tear over the angst of its overprivileged owners and their hangers-on? Not Louise and Braden Dixon, that’s for sure, they had far too much to worry about surviving each day.

  Theo might even be pleased. He’d phoned her to confirm the final arrangements for the tug of war and asked her to go for a drink after the Festival was over. She’d agreed, deciding to give him another chance – and give herself another chance to like him. Soon the news would be out about the sale and whether she was staying, or more likely, leaving, it was time to get on with life. She hoped that by thinking the words often enough, they might one day come true.

  Miranda shook her head. What had she said about forgetting about the sale today?

  After bolting down a piece of toast and a cup of coffee, she headed straight to the office, rubbing still-gritty eyes and sucking in lungfuls of seaweed-scented air as she strode over the cobbled harbour side from the cottage. She hadn’t slept much. Her mind had waltzed its way through the night, whirling with a list of undone jobs to do before the festival opened and a maelstrom of thoughts that had nothing do with the event at all. Yet as she passed the staff and entertainers, she held her head high, determined to make this last event her best. For it would be her last. Even if she didn’t leave, she wasn’t sure if Southcastle would keep up the tradition, unless it made money for their organisation.