Seven Week Itch

by Victoria Corby

  Jeremy looked confused and worried, searching for something to say. ‘I expect he got bored with all that technical stuff’

  ‘Actually, Susie’s right. I blew it all right, but not, I believe, in the way you think,’ said a voice from behind me. I twisted around in horror, sending what was left in my glass slopping over my knee, as Dexter gave joyous voice and leapt at Hamish, who was standing in the doorway, looking very respectable in a dark suit, holding a large envelope under one arm. I wanted to smother myself in the sofa cushions. I’d have crawled under the sofa if there had been room. There’s nothing like being caught out being rudely curious about someone for a major humiliation factor. Hamish pushed Dexter off and stepped forward to kiss Rose and hand the envelope over to Jeremy, who promptly offered him a glass of whisky. I felt I needed one too.

  Hamish turned to me. ‘Hello, Susie. Nice to see you again.’

  Liar! I thought bitterly, feeling my cheeks burn. ‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered. ‘That must have sounded very rude.’

  Instead of instantly denying it, he considered for a moment. ‘More nosy than rude.’

  ‘Sit down, Hamish, and have your drink,’ said Jeremy expansively, gesturing at the place on the sofa next to me. He had taken one of the armchairs, Rose was perched on the edge of the other. For a moment it seemed as if Hamish was considering Jeremy’s knee as the lesser of two evils and then he plumped himself down near me.

  ‘You don’t seem to have any wine left,’ he said, his eyes flickering briefly but noticeably to the damp stain on my knee. I’d spilt my wine last time I saw him too. No wonder he was so reluctant to sit next to me, not only might he have to listen to tactless remarks, he probably thought he could be in line for an alcoholic bath. I might have imagined that I saw him smile as I crossed my legs hastily, realising just too late I was giving my other trouser leg a nice rub-down of red wine too. He reached over for the bottle and offered me a refill. I was tempted to refuse, but decided that would be childish. Also, he must be interested to see if I was capable of keeping liquid in a glass for longer than a couple of moments.

  Rose looked at us both and decided a bit of social emollient was needed. ‘We haven’t shown you the photographs of the wedding yet, have we?’ she asked brightly, reaching towards a large package in the middle of the low table. Hamish made an involuntary movement towards his drink, as if he feared the worst. We might have to sit through the video next. Rose looked up and grinned. ‘Don’t worry, Hamish. This won’t take more than an hour. We can look at all the honeymoon photos later.’

  ‘Not all the honeymoon photographs, surely,’ said Jeremy in an alarmed voice.

  Her eyes opened wide in horror. ‘Oh! I forgot! I gave them to your mother.’

  He half rose from his chair. ‘I’d better go along now and see if I can get them back. She might not have looked at them all yet,’ then slumped back down again as Rose collapsed in giggles. ‘You wretch! You nearly gave me a heart attack,’ he said reproachfully, taking a restorative swig of his drink.

  ‘You should have seen your face,’ she crowed gleefully and riffling through the pile of photographs in front of her pulled one out. ‘Look, Susie, I think this one of you is rather good, don’t you?’

  I hate nearly all photos of me, since I tend to look like a scared rabbit notwithstanding the most valiant efforts of the photographer. Something to do with having round eyes, I think. I couldn’t see that this one of me talking to Rose was much better than average, though at least it had been taken after I’d removed my topknot of flowers. I hadn’t realised taking off that fichu thing from the neckline would make it quite so low cut, there was a lot of my cleavage on display, especially in the candid shot where I was leaning down talking to Grace. Or it might have been Clemmie, it was no easier to tell them apart in pictures than it had been in real life. Still, Rose’s Uncle Julius had enjoyed the display, judging by the way his eyes were bulging.

  Hamish had put the photographs between us on the table, so we could both look at them at the same time, and was leafing through them slowly, commenting on people he knew, laughing at a couple, and saying all the proper things about the ones with the bride in them. Rose glowed. She did look fabulous actually, but then her small features always photograph beautifully and with a figure like hers (to say nothing of the basque) she need never worry about the supposed fattening effects of photographs.

  ‘Extraordinary how you don’t seem to get to meet even half the people who come to your own wedding,’ said Jeremy. He gestured expansively at the pile of photographs, ‘I don’t even recognise lots of them, but then I suppose it’s because most of them are old flames of Rose’s. There were certainly enough of them there,’ he added reflectively, with the slight complacency of the man who has beaten them all to the post.

  ‘You invited all your old girlfriends, didn’t you?’ asked Rose. ‘Including that dire female Clarissa, who went around telling everyone how you’d ruined her life and she’d never look at another man.’ Jeremy began to look rather pleased with himself, until Rose pulled out a picture and said in a disgusted voice, ‘If I’d known you could look like this I’d have told her she could have you, with my blessing.’

  I was leaning forward, giggling, my knee brushing slightly against Hamish’s when I felt his leg stiffen next to mine. His hand was resting on a contact sheet, his eyes fixed on the picture in the top left-hand corner in which you could just see Nigel talking to some unknown woman, the back of Luke’s head was half out of the frame. He bent and examined it closely. ‘I’d begun to think I must have imagined seeing him. Evidently I didn’t. Is Nigel Flaxman a friend of yours, Rose?’ he said in a neutral voice.

  ‘Nigel Flaxman?’ asked Jeremy, glancing up quickly. He took the sheet, examining it with interest. ‘Which one is he? Oh, I see. I can’t remember coming across him at the wedding. Another old boyfriend, darling?’

  ‘I used to know him,’ admitted Rose, with an unusual degree of circumspection for her, ‘but I didn’t realise he was in the country. You must have asked him.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Jeremy firmly. ‘Never set eyes on the blighter in my life before. You must have forgotten you invited him, Rose. You were in such a flap over all the arrangements, it wouldn’t be surprising if you forgot a casual invite to someone you met in the street.’

  ‘I’m not the sort of idiot who’d forget asking a . . .’ began Rose in an irritated voice.

  ‘Maybe he gatecrashed,’ suggested Hamish in a mild voice, trying to cut off any argument.

  ‘He did, but he didn’t mean to,’ I cut in without thinking. Three heads swivelled around to look at me. I squirmed uncomfortably under this combined scrutiny. ‘Luke was supposed to ring Rose’s mother for an invitation, but forgot.’

  ‘Luke?’ asked Hamish. ‘Luke Dillon?’

  I nodded. ‘But he didn’t tell Nigel he hadn’t done it until they were at the reception.’

  Rose surveyed me coolly, as if I were a dog caught doing something naughty on the carpet. ‘And how do you know this, Susie? Was this something Luke let slip while you were talking to him at the reception?’

  I shrugged as casually as I could. ‘No. I bumped into Luke and Nigel in Market Burrough a couple of days ago and we had a drink.’

  ‘What were they doing there?’ asked Hamish casually.

  ‘Haven’t got a clue,’ I replied. ‘I imagine that Nigel was visiting Luke or something.’ I glanced up and saw Rose’s intent face and sighed inwardly. Well, she’d have to know sometime, I supposed. ‘Luke’s got a weekend cottage near there, at Wickham,’ I ended up unhappily, sensing rather than seeing Rose’s sudden alert interest.

  ‘Really?’ she enquired frigidly, with a glare that promised I was going to be made to pay later for holding out on her. ‘You seem to have garnered a lot of information over the course of this one drink.’

  Fortunately, the acid annoyance in her voice was lost on Jeremy, for even he might have started to wonder what she was getting so cross about.
He broke in with, ‘Wickham? Oh yes, I remember hearing something about his grandmother buying him a cottage there. I’ve never had much to do with Luke Dillon though. He’s not really our sort.’

  This earned him a cold stare from his wife. ‘Do you mean he’s not grand enough for you?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ exclaimed Jeremy promptly. ‘Nobody would dare say old Mrs Dillon isn’t grand enough, or any of her descendants. She’s the most terrifying old tartar, can out-handbag Lady Bracknell any day,’ he said with feeling. ‘She’s loaded too. Luke’s the favourite grandchild and is going to cop the lot, so I hear, but apparently away from his grandmother’s censorious eye he mixes with a pretty wild crowd. I outgrew that sort of thing a long time ago, of course.’

  I saw Rose begin to smile at this untypically middle-aged statement from her husband. ‘Outgrew what? Loose women, fast cars and too much to drink? Come off it, Jeremy! The only one of those you’ve given up is the first,’ she said. ‘Or at least you’d better have,’

  The sticky moment was temporarily forgotten amongst Jeremy’s loudly protesting denials, though I knew that I wasn’t off the hook yet. Sure enough, a few minutes later Rose, with a fine disregard for gender equality, motioned for me to get up and help her lay the table, while the men stayed in front of the fire to attend to the serious masculine business of discussing the one-day international against Australia. She dumped a pile of knives and forks in my hands and said with a tight smile, ‘Well, you’re a close one, aren’t you?’

  ‘I can’t think what you mean,’ I said blandly.

  She cast me a fulminating look from under half-closed eyelids. ‘Can’t you?’ she asked meaningfully, clattering the plates down with more force than was strictly necessary.

  ‘No,’ I said flatly, and untruthfully. And then showed myself up by adding, ‘But perhaps you’d like to tell me exactly what this is about. Is there something going on between you and Luke?’

  ‘Of course not!’ she said, so promptly I reckoned she really was telling the truth. ‘I’ve never so much as kissed him, if you must know.’ She didn’t look particularly pleased about this. She glanced at the two men, deep in conversation about batting averages, then turned to me with a serious face. ‘But I meant what I said before, Susie. Don’t get mixed up with Luke Dillon.’

  ‘For what reason?’ I asked, manfully swallowing the rider of, ‘Other than you fancy him yourself.’ There were certain cans of worms I thought it best not to open, even with my closest, just married, friend.

  ‘Um, well…’ She concentrated on arranging the water glasses just so, at forty-five degrees to the ends of the knives. Her mother would have been proud of her. ‘As Jeremy said, Luke’s rather wild.’

  ‘But yesterday you said I was staid,’ I said dulcetly. ‘What better way to liven myself up than to have a fling with someone like Luke?’

  ‘You’re not!’ she squeaked, loud enough for the men to lift their heads and look at us curiously.

  I giggled at her horrified face. ‘Come on, how fast a mover do you think I am? All I did was have a well-chaperoned glass of mineral water with him in a horrible pub, when he was so hungover he probably couldn’t even focus on me. Hardly the start of a great romance. So you don’t have to worry, he’s still free for you.’

  ‘Is he really?’ she murmured, in a most disquieting manner, then screwed up her face comically. ‘You forget that I’ve got an impediment in the shape of Jeremy.’

  ‘Is that going to make any difference?’ I demanded, only half joking.

  ‘We-ell,’ she began slowly, then grinned. ‘When you’re faced with temptation in the shape of someone like Luke Dillon, perhaps the best thing is to give into it,’ she said, returning to her normal teasing manner. The only problem was I had a horrid feeling it wasn’t teasing.

  CHAPTER 7

  An untidy heap of papers landed on the desk in front of me. ‘I need this report for two. I’ll pick it up when I come back from lunch,’ said Martin as he disappeared out of the door.

  I gazed in his direction venomously. This meant I was going to have to skip my lunch for the second time in a week. So the first time was for Stephen but he’d asked me nicely if I would mind, just this once, as it was urgent. Bloody Martin Prescott never asked me to do anything, instead he barked orders with a slight sneer in his voice that suggested he doubted I could do it properly. I wasn’t supposed to be working for him either, I only helped out when Jenny was snowed under, but even Martin knew better than to suggest Jenny work through her lunch hour. She was in her mid-thirties, highly efficient and completely unambitious. She worked for money, did her set hours conscientiously and left promptly each evening to go and cook tea for her family. Amanda said it had taken some persuasion to convince Jenny that if the clock struck five while she was in the middle of typing a letter she ought to finish it rather than leave it half done until the next morning. For obvious reasons, she found it difficult to cope with Stephen.

  She looked up from her computer screen, made a face at Martin’s retreating back, and said, ‘Tell him you had an appointment to do your hair or something. Teach him a lesson to be more considerate in future.’

  It was a distinctly tempting idea, except I felt the only way I’d ever be able to drum a lesson into Martin Prescott would be at the end of a sledgehammer. He’d been even more odious and off-hand than usual with me since I’d bumped into him with Luke and Nigel, making comments along the lines of ‘people who make fools of themselves by pushing in where they aren’t wanted’. I’d have made some smart and inflammatory remark in reply if an uneasy little voice hadn’t said that truthfully I had pushed myself in when maybe Nigel and Luke had fancied a boys’ only drink at the pub and had been too good mannered to say so. Also, I listened, for once, to the wiser half of me that that pointed out going head to head isn’t always the sensible way to behave. There was no point in blowing on the embers of Martin’s hostility any more than I had done already. Besides, he was the senior negotiator and, when push came to shove, was a lot more important to the success of this firm than I was. If Stephen had to choose between the two of us I was well aware of whom it would have to be. I must be growing up, I thought, as I picked the report up and looked over Martin’s crabbed writing, I never used to be this circumspect. I sighed. Maturity could be very boring.

  It’s nice to be able to report that sometimes virtue has its own reward. Though I suppose the reward would have come anyway, even if I’d been thoroughly badly behaved and had sloped off to buy the book I wanted, but it would have come later. I’d about given up hope that Luke would ever contact me for that promised drink. Actually, I’d begun to spiral into gloom when he didn’t ring me that very same afternoon, telling myself it hadn’t ever been more than a casual suggestion, yet still jumping as if I’d been stuck with a pin every time the telephone went. If he ever did ring, I certainly wasn’t going to fall over myself accepting his invitation, I decided, he must be bored to tears with that sort of reaction from girls. No, I was going to be icily cool and sophisticated, indicate that perhaps I could find a gap in my busy social schedule in about a week or so.

  Cool? Like hell I was. When I heard his voice I almost dropped the phone and agreed to meet him that evening almost before he’d managed to get the words out. I would have preferred to meet him somewhere a little more picturesque than my local pub, but he explained apologetically that he was in Brum doing something for Nigel and had to leave for London later that evening. Unless we made it strictly local he didn’t think he’d have a chance to see me at all. Put like that, in honeyed tones audible even through the come and go of a car phone, how could I say anything other than the pub sounded perfect?

  For once, I was just like Jenny and beetled off on the dot of five, though I was absolutely sure she never did it so she could spend two hours washing and blow-drying her hair so it was sophisticatedly straight rather than curly and countrified, bathing, making up and trying on every single garment in her wardrobe, only to reject n
early all of the same. All so I could look like I’d just had the time to dash into the cottage, fling off my office clothes and reappear a minute later in casually understated glowing natural beauty. The best you could say is I didn’t look as if I’d just spent two hours dolling myself up. And I have to admit Luke didn’t immediately cover his eyes when he saw me, muttering, ‘Get thee away from me.’ In fact, he grinned and said I looked super, so even allowing for polite exaggeration I suppose the effect wasn’t too bad.

  He was as stomach-churningly gorgeous as ever. He was wearing a pair of black jeans that fitted so well he might have pre-shrunk them to size in the bath that afternoon, and a tight black tee-shirt, his golden hair swept back untidily from his forehead, the fallen-angel air accentuated by the slight bags under his eyes. He said he’d had a bit of a rough evening the night before. He seemed to have a lot of rough evenings, I thought indulgently.

  The Dearsley Arms doesn’t have what you might call the most romantic ambience in the world, even if compared to the Bull and Bush its floral carpet and bentwood chairs are positively drenched in hearts and roses. For me, going to the pub with a desirable man is like trying to conduct a romance in front of the computer, it smacks too much of work and I can’t help automatically assessing how quick the service is and which are the most popular brands of beer. But at least on a mid-week evening it was quiet in the saloon bar and we were able to find ourselves a corner table where Luke installed me on a banquette while he sat opposite. For a moment I was disappointed, my mind had been lightly running along the lines of our thighs gently brushing each other under the table, and then I realised that not only was this being just a bit forward and presumptuous, but this way I could lean my chin on my hand and feast my eyes on his face.