Woman at Willagong Creek

by Hart, Jessica

  ‘Just having a look around.’ Unperturbed by the abrupt change of subject, Lyall glanced around the overgrown garden and up to Penbury Manor. Dating back to the fifteenth century, it had grown in a haphazardly graceful way, acquiring extra wings and gables which had added to rather than detracted from its mellow charm. With the afternoon sun turning its warm stone golden, it stood silhouetted against the blue-black storm clouds like an elaborate film set. ‘This old place hasn’t changed much either, has it?’

  ‘It’s about to,’ said Jane with some bitterness, although she was glad enough to keep the conversation on neutral ground.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Miss Partridge couldn’t manage here anymore, so she had to sell. Some ghastly high-tech company is going to ruin it by turning it into an office and building a research laboratory in the rose garden.’

  Lyall assumed an expression of outrage and threw up his hands in mock-protest. ‘Not the rose garden!’

  ‘It’s not funny! It takes years to create a garden like that. All it needs is some care and then it could be beautiful again, but this company isn’t interested in beauty. The roses interfere with its neat, tidy plot, so they’re going to rip them up and burn them!’

  ‘Still the same old Jane,’ mocked Lyall, a faint edge to his voice. ‘You always did care more about plants than about people, didn’t you?’

  ‘That’s not true!’ Jane marched up the steps to the terrace as the sun was abruptly swallowed by a billowing black bank of cloud and the thunder rolled ominously close.

  ‘Isn’t it? I seem to remember you were much nicer to flowers than you were to me.’

  ‘At least I always knew where I was with plants!’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  But Jane was already regretting saying as much. The first heavy drops of rain were already splattering on to the terrace and she had no intention of getting into an argument with Lyall. He was a stranger now, and that was how she wanted to keep it. ‘Does it matter?’ she said, proud of her own self-control. ‘It’s going to pour. If you want to stand around arguing about the past, that’s up to you, but as far as I’m concerned it’s not worth getting wet, so I’m afraid we’ll have to cut the reminiscences.’

  The heavens opened as she spoke, and, grateful for the excuse, she shouted what she hoped was a cool goodbye before she began to run. Eyes screwed up against the downpour, she didn’t look back, and her shoes crunched over the gravel at the front of the house. It wasn’t far, but the rain was so heavy that she was drenched and breathless by the time she reached the old van with Makepeace and Son painted proudly on its side.

  Jane practically threw the trug in the back and banged the door shut against the rain and against Lyall, but the next instant the passenger door opened and he got in beside her, running his hand through his wet hair. Jane froze in the act of wiping her wetness from her cheeks and looked at him in outrage. ‘I don’t remember offering you a lift!’

  Lyall didn’t appear in the slightest bit bothered by the hostility of his reception. ‘You can’t really mean to drive off and leave me standing out in this, can you?’ He nodded up at the roof where the rain was drumming with a tropical fury, and thunder rolled menacingly as if to underline the inhumanity of the idea.

  ‘Why can’t you get into your own car?’ she asked accusingly.

  ‘Because I left it in the village and walked up here,’ he said. ‘Any objections?’

  His plain white T-shirt was sticking damply to the powerfully muscled shoulders, and as his eyes dropped from her face to her chest Jane realised that her own sleeveless cotton shirt was clinging equally revealingly. The quick colour rose in her face, and she plucked the wet material crossly in an effort to make her curves a little less obvious.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here anyway,’ she grumbled, unnerved by the knowing look in his eyes. What was it about him that set her so on edge? To everyone else she was a model of cool practicality, but Lyall only had to look at her and she was a flustered teenager all over again. ‘This is private property, in case you’d forgotten.’

  ‘You’re here.’

  ‘I’ve got permission to be here,’ she pointed out.

  ‘From the “ghastly company”?’

  ‘From the estate agents,’ Jane said coldly. ‘I can come and pick flowers for Miss Partridge until the company takes possession. I hardly think they’d want people like you poking around.’

  ‘In that case you’d better make sure I leave by giving me a lift back to the village,’ said Lyall with an odd glinting look. ‘If they’ve been generous enough to let you swipe all the flowers, I’d have thought it was the least you could do.’

  ‘It’s the least I can do,’ he had said, leaning across the seat to open the car door. ‘I’m going into Starbridge anyway. Come on, get in.’

  Jane hesitated, and Lyall’s eyes glinted with amused understanding. ‘Don’t say that you’ve been warned against me already?’

  She had. She had had quite enough time since he had knocked her off her bike that day to discover that Lyall Harding meant trouble. He was wild, he was reckless, and it was uniformly agreed in the village that he would come to no good. The girls in the district might have brightened at the rumour that he had come back after a mysterious eight-year absence, but their parents had wasted no time in warning them against him. Jane’s own father had been horrified to hear that his daughter had been one of the first to meet Lyall after his return. ‘You don’t want anything more to do with him,’ he had said. ‘Lyall Harding’s a maverick. He’s never fitted in around here and he never will.’

  Jane could believe it. Lyall Harding was like no one else she had ever met in her safe, quiet Penbury life. There was a quality of electric excitement about him, a vigour and an unpredictability that made everyone else look a little dim and dull in comparison, and she had been unnerved by its impact as he’d helped her up from the verge where she had landed, winded but unhurt, when she’d wobbled off her bike.

  No, she didn’t want anything to do with Lyall Harding. Jane was a sensible girl – everyone said so – and sensible girls knew better than to make fools of themselves over men with dancing blue eyes and heart-shaking smiles.

  In later years, she wondered how different her life would have been if the bus had appeared on time that day. But it was late, and there was no shelter from the drizzle, and since he was going to Starbridge anyway … So Jane put up her chin in response to the unspoken challenge in his smile and got into the car. If he thought she stood in any danger of succumbing to that dangerous charm, he had another think coming!

  He drove much too fast, but his hands were utterly steady on the wheel. Jane clutched at her seat, tense and yet conscious of a deep, unsettling excitement. The firm’s van barely managed more than a trundle – rather like her life, she realised with a sudden pang. She was only nineteen; wasn’t she too young to be pootling along in the slow lane of life? Lyall probably lived his whole life in top gear.

  ‘I hear you’re a good girl,’ he said with a sidelong glance as they raced along the narrow country lanes. ‘Are you?’

  ‘That depends what you mean by good,’ said Jane warily.

  ‘Everyone says how nice Jane Makepeace is,’ he explained, almost as if he had sensed her momentary dissatisfaction. ‘Jane looks after her brother, Jane’s nice to old ladies, Jane never gives her father a moment’s worry … you can’t really be that sensible!’

  ‘What’s wrong with being sensible?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Lyall. ‘Nothing if you’re middle-aged, that is. But you’re not, are you, Jane?’ He glanced at her again, noting the silky hair and the sweep of her lashes against her skin. ‘You must have been a little girl when I left or I’d have noticed you, so you can’t be more than eighteen now.’

  Jane folded her arms defensively. ‘ Nineteen.’

  ‘Oh, that old?’ She hated the laughter in his voice. She guessed that he was about twenty five or twenty six, but he already had the assura
nce of an older man. ‘It’s still too young to be boring and sensible. You should be learning how to have fun.’

  ‘I know how to have fun!’ Jane protested.

  ‘Do you?’ he said sceptically.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘OK, let’s go to the sea and see if the sun’s shining there.’

  Jane stared at him. ‘What, now?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I – I can’t,’ she stammered. ‘I’ve got to do the shopping.’

  ‘We’ll do it on the way back.’

  ‘But I can’t just disappear for the day! They’ll wonder where I am.’

  ‘Ring them and tell them you’ve met a friend and you’ll be late back,’ said Lyall. ‘Or do you only know how to have fun if you’ve planned it a week in advance and made sure it’s all right with your father?’

  Of course, she should have ignored him. She should have told him that she didn’t care what he thought about her and insisted that he drop her at the supermarket. Instead she had let him drive her all the way to the sea and the clouds had cleared and the sun had come out.

  And so it had begun.

  Did Lyall remember? Jane couldn’t look at him. She clung to the steering wheel as if it were an anchor against the tide of memories. Outside the rain beat relentlessly against the windscreen, but in the van the air was taut and tight with tension.

  ‘Why have you come back?’ she burst out.

  Lyall half turned in his seat so that he could watch her face. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘You’ve been perfectly happy not to come back for the last ten years,’ said Jane, hating the accusing note in her voice.

  He shrugged. ‘There was no reason for me to come back before,’ he said, and his eyes rested for a moment on Jane’s mouth. ‘Was there?’ He might have said that he only remembered the good times, but the bitterness of their last parting still lay bleak and undeniable between them.

  Jane kept her eyes on the rain. ‘What’s the reason now?’

  ‘Oh … business,’ said Lyall vaguely.

  ‘In Penbury? I thought we were all too small minded for you here?’ The accusation had rankled for ten years, and it showed in Jane’s voice.

  ‘Perhaps I’m hoping that other people will have changed more than you have,’ he said, and she flushed. He had always had the ability to put her in the wrong.

  ‘That doesn’t explain why you’re snooping around Penbury Manor,’ she said sharply.

  Lyall’s expression didn’t change, but Jane had the oddest feeling that he was suddenly amused. ‘I wasn’t snooping,’ he said. ‘nor do I have to explain everything to you, but if you must know I happen to have been thinking about the manor recently, and I thought I’d come and look at it again.’

  Instinctively, they both peered through the windscreen at the old house. Even shrouded in rain, its jumbled chimneys and leaded windows had a timeless, tranquil beauty. ‘Remember how I said I would buy it for you one day?’ said Lyall slowly, as if the memory had caught him unawares.

  Oh, yes, she remembered. They had been in the woods, looking down on the manor and the sunlight had thrown dappled shadows on Lyall’s face as he’d undone the buttons on her shirt and smiled. That had been the first time they made love, that day when she had thought that his promise meant that she was somehow different from all the other girls he had kissed in Penbury woods. His hands had been so warm and sure against her skin, his mouth so exciting …

  Abruptly Jane reached down and fumbled the key into the ignition. ‘It’s lucky I didn’t hold my breath, isn’t it?’

  ‘Just as well,’ Lyall agreed calmly, infuriatingly.

  Jane reversed jerkily. The past obviously meant nothing to Lyall, so why should she let it bother her? ‘Where did you leave your car?’

  ‘At the King’s Arms. Do I take it you’re going to give me a lift, after all?’

  ‘It doesn’t look as if I’ve got much choice,’ said Jane ungraciously as lightning forked outside. ‘You’re going to have a bad enough time driving back to wherever you came from in this.’

  ‘I’m not driving anywhere,’ he said. ‘I’m staying at the pub.’

  Jane’s heart sank. ‘Staying?’ she echoed in dismay. ‘For how long?’

  ‘That depends,’ said Lyall. He looked across at Jane. She was leaning forward to frown through the rain, her honey-coloured hair dark and wet and pushed behind her ears. Her face was thinner and more guarded than it had been at nineteen, but her skin was still soft and clear. ‘I gather you’re running Makepeace and Son now,’ he went on after a moment, and the grey eyes flickered briefly towards him.

  ‘How do you know that?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘I spent last night in the pub,’ he said, as if that explained everything. ‘From what I heard, you’re still busy being the sort of nice, sensible girl who visits old ladies and does the church flowers.’

  ‘You’ve got no business to ask around about me!’ said Jane furiously.

  ‘Oh, come on, Jane, you know what village gossip is like. I didn’t even have to ask. All those who remembered me were only too anxious to tell me how much better off you were without me.’

  Jane refused to be mollified. ‘You used to despise village gossip!’

  ‘I’ve decided it has its uses,’ said Lyall, settling himself more comfortably into his seat. ‘For instance, I found out all sorts of interesting things about you that you would probably never have told me yourself.’

  ‘Such as?’

  He ignored her sarcasm. ‘Such as the fact that you didn’t last long in the big bad world. You didn’t even finish your first year at horticultural college before you came home.’

  ‘I had to come back,’ Jane found herself saying defensively. ‘Dad couldn’t manage on his own.’

  ‘And like the good girl you were you came running as soon as he called?’

  ‘I suppose if your father had had a heart attack you’d have just let him struggle on by himself?’

  Lyall’s face closed. ‘My father was quite capable of looking after himself,’ he said with a bitter edge.

  ‘Well, mine wasn’t! He needed me to help run the firm when he was ill.’

  ‘Why did it have to be you? Why couldn’t your brother do it?’

  ‘Kit was too young.’

  ‘Then, perhaps, but he’s not too young now, is he? I heard that he’s gone off to South America, leaving you to struggle on with the firm on your own.’

  Jane turned out of the drive and concentrated on not letting Lyall under her skin. ‘Kit was at university when Dad died,’ she said coldly. ‘It was stupid for him not to finish his degree. I’d been helping out in the office since Dad’s first heart attack, so I’d learnt how things were run by then. Kit wasn’t ready to settle down after he graduated. He wanted to travel, and there was no point in both of us giving up our plans. It made sense for me to carry on by myself.’

  ‘You always did make excuses for Kit,’ said Lyall, shaking his head. ‘He was the one person you were never sensible about.’

  She hadn’t been at all sensible about Lyall either, but she could hardly tell him that. ‘You never liked Kit,’ she accused him instead.

  ‘That’s not true,’ he said. ‘What I didn’t like was the way you used to turn yourself into such a martyr for him. You were always worrying about getting back to cook his meals or iron his shirts or clean his shoes.’

  ‘He was just a little boy!’

  ‘He was thirteen – old enough for you to have some life of your own.’

  Jane sighed. It was an old argument. Lyall had always resented her closeness to her father, had never understood that she had been looking after her little brother ever since their mother died when she was eleven and that she couldn’t just walk away from them.

  Lyall himself seemed to realise the futility of arguing about the past. ‘So Kit’s off in South America, and sensible Jane’s stuck in Penbury holding the fort.’

  ‘If you want to put it like th
at,’ she said frostily.

  He glanced at her again. ‘You were always happiest out in a garden. I can’t see you rewiring a house or installing new plumbing.’

  ‘I don’t do any of that myself. We employ specialist craftsmen for all the building and restoration work. I just deal with the paperwork and try and find enough work to keep them all busy.’

  ‘Still, it’s not exactly what you wanted to do, is it?’

  Jane thought of her dreams of finishing the horticultural course one day and setting up as a garden designer. It was all a long way from wrestling with the accounts at Makepeace and Son. ‘Not exactly,’ she said.

  ‘What’s the point of wasting your life doing something you don’t want to do?’ asked Lyall, just as he had asked all those years ago. ‘Your father’s dead. You did what you could for him. There’s nothing to stop you selling the firm now and going back to gardening.’

  ‘It’s not that easy.’ The windscreen wipers slapped desperately at the rain and in the fields the sheep huddled together along the hedgerows in search of some meagre shelter from the downpour. It was dark as a December afternoon, and Jane belatedly remembered to turn on the headlights. ‘I can’t turn Dorothy and the men out of a job just because I’m fed up.’

  ‘Still making excuses, Jane? Why don’t you just admit that you’d rather stay in your nice, safe rut?’

  Jane’s grey eyes flashed. ‘Because it’s not true!’

  ‘Isn’t it? Why don’t you get a manager if you don’t want to sell the firm?’

  ‘Do you think I haven’t thought of that?’ she said bitterly. ‘It’s all very well for you to sit there and tell me to do what I want, but we can’t all be as selfish and irresponsible as you are! The fact is that I can’t afford to pay anyone to do my job at the moment, and, the way things are going, unless we get a big contract soon there won’t be a firm to sell.’

  ‘Is there any chance of that?’ Lyall’s voice was very casual. It wasn’t his firm on the line.