by Marie Joseph
Sophie smiled, remembering the warm handshake of her long-time boss, then drove on, losing her way once, but only briefly, before driving down a road flanked by sturdy stone houses and seeing in the glare of her headlights the sign she was looking for:
Abbey Grey Hall. Fully Licensed Residential Hotel.
So this was it. This was the place Ivor had talked so much about, visiting it once, but never forgetting its comfort and friendly atmosphere.
‘The first thing you will see is a huge roaring log fire,’ he had told her, and so it was, exactly as he had promised it would be.
The walls were oak-panelled, and along the high mantelpiece toby jugs faced each other in smiling benevolence. There were deep red velvet sofas and chairs, and on an oak settle was a copper bowl filled with yellow and white chrysanthemums.
Sophie checked in and found that the long passage to her room sloped like the deck of a sailing ship. Long red plush curtains were drawn against the winter night, and she fingered their folds appreciatively before reaching for the telephone and giving Ivor’s number.
She wasn’t surprised or even perturbed when there was no reply. He had told her he could find himself catching a later flight from Moscow if things did not work out the way he had originally planned.
This is it, Sophie told herself. This is to be the pattern of your days from now on. There will always be a telephone that does not ring, meals that spoil, friends who have to be put off whilst Ivor waits for a fog to lift, or a strike to be resolved.
That was the way of life that had driven his first wife away . . .
She clicked open her case and took out a black woollen dress, shawl-collared and fringed, its skirt swirling into fullness below the waist. From the glimpse she had had of the dining room, with its shaded wall lights, Abbey Grey Hall was not the sort of place where guests dined in travel-weary suits.
Showering quickly, she put on her make-up and when she was ready fastened Ivor’s latest present – a pair of jade earrings.
She was a tall, slim girl, with water-straight dark hair which, worn long and brushed back from her forehead, made her look younger than her twenty-seven years. She was a girl who was kind to the old, fond of the young, with a sudden smile that lit her face to what was, for a brief time, real beauty. She worried too much; thought about wider issues with an anxious concentration at times, but had an outward serenity that attracted confidences as surely as if she had been surrounded by an aura of welcoming light.
‘I will not try Ivor’s number again,’ she told herself out loud. ‘I will go downstairs and, after a Campari, I will eat my evening meal.’
Anxiety, she reminded herself, had never yet been allowed to interfere with an appetite that totally belied her slim figure.
The staircase was wide and oak-panelled, with a hand-carved balustrade, and in the bar yet another log fire blazed and roared halfway up the wide chimney.
She took her drink over to one of the low tables, then sank down into a yellow-brocaded chair. After dinner she would try Ivor’s number again, but not yet, not quite yet . . .
‘Do you mind if I sit here? It seems silly, just the two of us trying to pretend the other doesn’t exist.’
She looked up, startled, and met the quizzical brown gaze of a man holding a glass in his hand and smiling down at her.
For a moment Sophie wished she were a stern lady in a tweed skirt and three rows of pearls who could have put this stranger firmly in his place, but her sense of kindness took over.
‘Of course. I’m waiting for a call from my fiancé,’ she added, just to show him what was what. ‘He’s flying in to Heathrow from Moscow, and there must have been some delay.’
‘Airports are the very devil,’ the man said. ‘I seem to spend half of my life hanging around in them. I’ve just come back from New York, and after a conference here in the morning I’m going home for a week’s leave.’
‘Home?’
‘Scarborough. My wife is expecting our second child any day, and when I telephoned just now she said she was holdig her breath against my arrival.’
‘What was your first one?’
‘A girl, with a boy ordered this time.’ His hand strayed to his top pocket for the inevitable wallet and photographs, and Sophie relaxed.
This man was no hotel Casanova, wanting to pick up a single girl in a bar. His dark suit could have been taken from Ivor’s own wardrobe, and his hair was just the right executive’s length, neither too long nor too short.
‘I should apologise for this,’ he remarked, passing across a snap of a smiling girl pushing a tiny elf of a child on a swing. ‘I’ve been away for three weeks this time, and part of me is back with them already.’
‘I heard on the radio that there was fog over the Channel,’ Sophie said when she had admired the snap.
‘Safer than driving down one of our motorways. Truly. I can quote the statistics if you like.’
Sophie shook her head. ‘No, thank you. Does . . . does your wife worry about you, or have you managed to convince her?’
‘She did at first. Now she has a family she has transferred most of her worries to them. When I spoke to her she said Penny has come out in a rash on her neck, and from the tone of her voice I know she’s convinced that it’s a deadly form of yellow spotted fever.’
He had already eaten, he said. He recommended the fish, thanked her for her company, and as Sophie went into the dining room she saw him walking up the wide staircase to work on the reports he had said must be in order for the following morning.
And as she ate her solitary meal, Sophie saw, in her mind’s eye, Ivor walking up countless staircases in countless foreign hotels, working on the inevitable reports.
Thoughtfully she went up to her own room, closed the door behind her, and put through another call to London. Again, there was no reply.
Sophie went to bed just after ten, but for a long time she lay awake waiting for the call that did not come.
The conference men came into the hotel as she was reading the morning paper in the lounge. About forty Ivors in their uniforms of dark suits, pale shirts, clutching slim folders to their respective chests. The man who had talked to her the previous night put up a hand in greeting just before he merged into anonymity with the rest.
She had paid her bill, and was actually shrugging herself into her suede jacket in the foyer when a bent old man tending a flower arrangement gave her a toothless smile.
‘You bain’t going without seeing the terrace and the Italian gardens, are you, miss? You can’t go without seeing them. Folks come from all over the world just to see them. They go back to the Middle Ages, them gardens.’ He nipped off a stray leaf with a brown finger and thumb. ‘This place was a manor house way back in William the Conqueror’s time, then the monks took it over. There’s stone from here what was used to build the Abbey, and just look at them windows. Nay, tha’ can’t go without seeing it.’
‘Then I’ll go now,’ Sophie said, wanting to please, and telling herself that as there was still no reply from Ivor’s number there was no hurry.
She stepped out of the front door, then turning the corner of the building walked slowly down the paved terrace. The stones of the old house were so weathered, so sombre, she noticed, that not even the weak shafts of winter sunshine had touched them to light.
She went down the steps into the garden and caught her breath with surprise and delight as she saw the wide, landscaped garden with its stone-ringed fountain in the middle. Flower-beds circled the lawn in intricate patterns, and over in the far distance was a green-fringed lake, traversed by a narrow rustic bridge.
As she stood on the bridge, she could see the concealed sweep of the kitchen gardens, the weather-bleached greenhouses, and a south-facing wall traced with winter-sleeping vines.
Back in the hotel the conference men would be sitting round the enormous oak table, folders open, fingers poised over the resolution under discussion. Men like Ivor, with no time to stand and stare, even
on a sunny Saturday morning when the dark branches of the trees traced the sky with a shifting pattern of black lace.
The wind was chill, and Sophie pulled the collar of her coat up round her throat and hurried back into the comparative shelter of the sunken Italian gardens.
Over six hundred years ago monks had walked these paths, stepping sedately down from the flagged terrace, shaven heads sunk deep into the upturned cowls of their homespun robes.
What would they have made of a world where intelligent, hard-working men were eating breakfast in America and supper in England? What would they have made of a world where living was at the double, where graphs and profit margins were made to seem of paramount importance?
A world where wives waited for telephone calls that never came, for husbands who spent the bigger part of their time unpacking clean white shirts in strange hotels.
She sat down on one of the benches facing the unflowing fountain. There was peace here, certainly, and a serenity that could not be denied. But, in less than an hour, even she would be driving down a motorway, changing lanes at a speed of some sixty miles an hour.
Marriage to Ivor would plunge her even deeper into this mad wild rush. She would have to watch him go and wait for him to come back, and their children would have dolls from India, and clockwork tanks from Hong Kong . . .
She turned her head into the warmth of her collar, and saw Ivor, taking the steps in an eager stride, coming towards her with his hands outstretched, and a broad smile on his face.
‘Thank heavens you hadn’t left, love! If only you knew how I felt when we had trouble with the car on the way up. I should have been here before eight.’
He sat down beside her, and she could see lines of strain and exhaustion on his face.
‘You haven’t been to bed!’ she accused, and he ran a hand over the dark stubble on his chin and smiled a rueful smile.
‘Met a fellow on the plane – which was long delayed, incidentally – who said he was driving up to within ten miles of this place, so I thought I would surprise you. Thought I’d be waiting at your table with your cornflakes and scrambled egg – and that’s the way it would have been, but for a fault that took over two hours to put right.’
He shot out a white cuff and showed her the oil stains, then he glanced at his gold watch with a gesture that showed her how he must have glanced at it a thousand times in the long dark stretches of the early morning.
‘Oh, darling . . .’ She put her arms round him and rocked him gently as if he had been a child. ‘What a wonderful, what a magnificent, what a crazy thing to do. I would have been gone if I hadn’t been sent out here to see this garden.’
‘Sent? By whom?’
‘By an old gardener,’ she told him. ‘Or – I wonder?’
She squinted up at the watery, wintry sun, hearing the muffled sound of the monks’ footsteps as they trod the paths down towards the lake and the wall where winter vines slumbered against a high stone wall.
She made Ivor drink coffee before they left, but he was too tired to eat. She was just about to start her car when out from the hotel streamed the conference men, making for the car park at the double, glancing at their watches as they ran.
The man she had talked with the evening before saw her, and came over, waiting until she had wound down the car window.
‘I’ve just telephoned. Nothing has happened as yet, and Penny’s spots have gone.’
He saw Ivor in the passenger seat beside her, and he smiled.
‘That’s the reason I couldn’t reach him by telephone,’ Sophie explained. ‘He just stopped by on his way from Moscow.’
‘Fair dos,’ the man said, and walked away, raising his hand in jaunty salute.
‘Who on earth . . . ?’
Ivor’s tired mouth framed the question with difficulty, and before she let in the clutch Sophie patted his knee.
‘Just a man who stopped by on his way from New York. If I knew his name and address, I think I would invite him to our wedding.’
‘Do that, love,’ said Ivor and fell asleep.
Before she drove out of the gate, Sophie turned her head and looked back at the lovely old stone building with its mullioned windows set high in its grey walls.
Some day they would come back, perhaps bringing their children with them, and she would walk in the secret garden and remember Ivor coming towards her with his arms outstretched.
But if they never came back it wouldn’t matter. She knew now that her doubts about marrying this man, this busy, lonely man, had gone.
Nothing mattered but her love for him, a love that would be with her even when whole continents divided them. If he had the strength to go on, then so had she.
Expertly, and with careful precision, she turned to join the stream of traffic thundering its way towards the distant motorway.
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Epub ISBN: 9781448107926
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First published in Arrow in 1995
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Copyright © Marie Joseph 1994
Love on the Menu © Marie Joseph 1970 – First published in Woman’s Own
Sentimental Journey © Marie Joseph 1963 – First published in Woman’s Realm
The House with the Pink Door © Marie Joseph 1962 – First published in Woman’s Realm
A Day of Daffodils © Marie Joseph 1964 – First published in Woman’s Realm
The London Look © Marie Joseph 1966 – First published in Woman’s Weekly
A Matter of Pride © Marie Joseph 1964 – First published in Woman’s Mirror
Home for Sale © Marie Joseph 1966 – First published in Woman’s Realm
Research on Love © Marie Joseph 1966 – First published in Woman’s Weekly
Back to Square One © Marie Joseph 1967– First published in Woman’s Realm
The Road to the Isles © Marie Joseph 1968 – First published in Woman’s Weekly 1970
To Love Again © Marie Joseph 1968 – First published in Woman’s Own 1969
Love in Top Gear © Marie Joseph 1970 – First published in Woman’s Weekly
I’ll Ring You Tomorrow © Marie Joseph 1970 – First published in Woman’s Mirror
The Psychologist © Marie Joseph 1970 – First published in Woman’s Realm
No Time for Love © Marie Joseph 1971 – First published in My Story
If I Lost You © Marie Joseph 1972 – First published in Woman’s Own
August is a Month for Loving © Marie Joseph 1972 – First published in Woman’s Own
The Solid Citizen © Marie Joseph 1972 – First published in Woman’s Realm
Rain in the Morning © Marie Joseph 1972 – First published in Mother
The Day of the Move © Marie Joseph 1972 – First published in Woman’s Realm
The Long Hot Summer © Marie Joseph 1970 – First published in Loving
Birds of a Feather © Marie Joseph 1973 – First published in Woman’s Own
Two Can Plan © Marie Joseph 1974 – First published in Woman’s Own
Funny Girl © Marie Joseph 1976 – First published in Woman’s Realm
The Cat Who Came in From the Cold © Marie Joseph 1976 – First published in Woman
Love in the Red © Marie Joseph 1976 – First published in Woman’s Own
Let the Sunshine In © Marie Joseph 1978 – First published in Woman’s Own
Jane © Marie Joseph 1966 – First published in Good Housekeeping
Love is a Girl with Stars in Her Eyes © Marie
Joseph 1978 – First published in Woman’s Own
Tomorrow I am Seventeen © Marie Joseph 1979 – First published in Woman’s Realm
The Secret Garden © Marie Joseph 1979 – First published in Woman and Home
The right of Marie Joseph to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in the United Kingdom in 1984 by Allison & Busby Ltd
This edition published in 1995 by Arrow, Random House UK Limited
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