‘Let me go,’ I grunted, trying to struggle free, but he still had me in too firm a grip.
‘No,’ he said with a self-satisfied smile. ‘Not yet. You’ve been telling me little porkies about you and Hamish Laing, haven’t you?’ he asked. ‘He must be really keen on you to pop round and see you on his way to work.’
‘You bastard.’ I hissed, trying to knee him, but he moved smoothly out of the way, muttering, ‘Naughty, naughty!’
I don’t think I’ve ever hated anyone as I did Luke at that point, or been so overwhelmed with need for retaliation. I drew back as far as I could and looked at him with narrowed eyes, then lunged for his shoulder. The last time I’d tried biting someone was at playgroup when I was aged three and I had a go at Marianne Carter’s leg because she wouldn’t let me have the saucepan from the Wendy House. The reaction this time was even more deeply satisfying. Luke shrieked, letting me go and clasping his hand to his arm. Rose and Tilly poked their heads around from the bottom of the stairs just in time to see me reach back with my freed hand and slap his face as hard as I could.
I tore myself away and ran towards the door, calling, ‘Hamish!’
Rose caught my arm as I was opening the door. I turned a savage face towards her and she let go of me, prudently backing away a step, no doubt remembering the strength of my right hook. ‘It’s too late, Susie. He’s getting in his car. Even if you don’t mind making a spectacle of yourself running across the green in your nightie, you won’t get to him in time.’
That was the bit that convinced me. I couldn’t have given a damn about making a spectacle of myself. My shoulders slumped in despair. Oh God, what was I going to do now? She shut the door, saying in a soothing voice, ‘You can always ring Hamish later and tell him that he got the wrong end of the stick.’ The wrong end of the stick? He’d just had the sharp end of the whole ruddy caber landing on his head. I knew what I’d think if I walked in on a scene like that. ‘I expect he was embarrassed about barging in on what he thought was something intimate,’ she continued, and laughed slightly. ‘Honestly, what did Luke think he was doing?’ I had only too good an idea, I thought grimly, my fists balling up. ‘He’s such a prankster!’ The ‘prankster’ was looking in disbelief at a livid mark on the fleshy part of his arm. I hoped it hurt, really hurt. ‘What was Hamish here for? Did he have something for you to give Stephen?’
I looked at Rose incredulously, unable to believe that she was so wrapped up in her own problems she hadn’t twigged exactly why Hamish had hit the roof on seeing Luke kissing me. But since, despite everything I’d said, she still believed I’d dumped Arnaud for Luke perhaps it wasn’t so surprising she didn’t appear to have a clue that her ‘staid’ friend had thrown her cap over every windmill in the flaming country for a third man, I thought, trying to be fair. It was very difficult to be fair. Impossible for anyone who wasn’t a saint. And I’m not. She had eyes, didn’t she? I thought, whipping up a good bit of rage as an antidote to the sick fear that was threatening to overcome me. I wanted to kill both her and bloody, bloody Luke Dillon. If she hadn’t been playing at being a single girl instead of the married woman she was, none of this would have happened. I could hardly breathe for the lump in my throat. What if Hamish didn’t believe me?
I struggled to get a grip on myself. ‘I’m sorry, you must think this is a complete madhouse,’ I said to Tilly, belatedly remembering that I was a hostess.
Her eyebrows went up at my oversocial manner. ‘Life in the country sure is eventful,’ she said. ‘You don’t get excitement like this in Brixton. Here.’ She shoved a bundled-up tea towel towards Luke, who was slumped in a chair, holding his hand to his face. ‘Ice cubes. Put them on that bruise.’
He put the bundle gingerly against his cheekbone and looked at me reproachfully. ‘I think you’ve given me a black eye, Susie.’
‘Good!’ It looked like it was going to be a nice big one too, the large silver ring my brother gave me for Christmas must have just clipped him on the edge of his cheekbone. I put my hands on my hips, glaring at him. ‘Let me tell you this, Luke Dillon, if you ever dare lay one finger on me again, I won’t only give you another black eye to match this one, I’ll kick you so hard you’ll be singing soprano for the rest of your life, understand?’
I noted with some pleasure that he instinctively crossed his legs protectively.
‘Come on, Susie, you can’t blame me for getting carried away,’ he said, smiling at me with a sugary charm that made my stomach curdle. ‘But that nightie of yours gives a man ideas and the last time we kissed was so passionate, I thought you’d be happy…’
His effrontery was so immense that I almost laughed. ‘Balls! You didn’t give a damn what I thought. Why should I want a reprise when the last time we kissed held all the passion of eating a cold fried egg? Your technique doesn’t match up to your looks, Luke. Personally, I prefer more expertise.’ His mouth settled into a mulish line. That hit home. One small point to me, I thought grimly.
Rose was looking at us both in a bewildered fashion. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said plaintively. ‘Aren’t you going a bit over the top, Susie? Luke was just having a joke, I know it wasn’t very funny, but all the same-’
‘That was no joke, it was concentrated malice!’ I interrupted. ‘Just get this, Rose, your pin-up boy here was prepared to throw you to the wolves and risk letting Jeremy discover everything just so he could have a chance to get at Hamish. And why? Not because he’s got the hots for me and was jealous of Hamish, but because it might gratify Nigel if Hamish had the impression his girlfriend had been nicked off him by Luke. And you’ll do almost anything if it pleases your paymaster, won’t you, Luke?’ I asked, staring at him with contempt.
‘What’s Nigel got to do with this?’ asked Rose, sounding even more confused.
‘Hamish had an affair with his wife,’ I said flatly. Her mouth opened in a horrified ‘O’.
‘Quite,’ I said grimly. ‘Nigel did his best to destroy him. He didn’t succeed, but you told me yourself what Nigel’s like. Didn’t you ever wonder what sort of person Luke must be to hang around with him? And Luke thought Nigel would want the boot put into Hamish one more time, and you like to keep Nigel happy, don’t you Luke? Because what you manage to squeeze out of your doting grandmother can’t possibly pay for that nice lifestyle you have, or all that white powder everyone says goes up your nose.’
Rose was staring at Luke as if she’d never really seen him before. ‘That was a foul thing to do,’ she said severely, ‘and a complete waste of time as well.’ Luke looked up at her blearily out of the one eye that wasn’t closing up. ‘Hamish won’t particularly care if he thinks Susie’s having an affair with you, Luke, though he might question her taste. He’s already got a girlfriend, that gorgeous woman he was with the other night.’
‘That can’t be true,’ Luke said instantly, then doubt began to overshadow his face. ‘Then why did he turn up like that?’
He can’t have seen Hamish kissing me, I realised as I said, ‘He’d dropped his diary when he was returning a book the other evening. As Rose said, it was a waste of effort on your behalf.’ I looked pointedly at Tilly as she opened her mouth to speak. God knows she’d heard me banging on for long enough last night to know that wasn’t true, but it was some small compensation to know that Hamish wasn’t going to have to bear the indignity of Nigel and Luke rubbing their hands together in delight at having aimed yet another broadside at him. I’d have to work out how to cope with the rest of it later.
The next hour or so was a complete blur. I was concentrating so hard on not giving way to the terror gnawing away inside me that I can’t remember much, apart from Tilly being a complete trooper and taking charge. She got rid of Luke in under five minutes, sent Rose up to wash and change, rang for a taxi to take her to where she’d left her car last night, and made me a coffee with a large slug of something alcoholic in it. It tasted horrible, but after a stern look from her I drank it. At one time she was matron
in a boys’ boarding school. Despite being five foot one inch and weighing about six stone she terrified them all. I wasn’t surprised.
She despatched me upstairs to get dressed and I moved around like an automaton, choosing a dress at random, yanking my unruly hair into something like neatness and splashing make-up in the direction of my face as if I was dressing a dummy in a shop window. All I could think of was, What if Hamish doesn’t believe me? Any man is going to smell a very large barrel of rotten haddock when he finds a near-naked rival in his girlfriend’s house at eight in the morning. Even if I broke my promise to Rose, there was every chance he’d think the two of us had conspired to cook up a good story. He knew she owed me one over the drink in the cocktail bar and this was going to sound uncommonly like the sort of alibi dreamed up by his more dubious clients - much too unlikely to possibly be true. Tilly offered to spend another night so we could both go to Hamish and, partially at least, explain what had happened, but I sent her on her way with many thanks, though I did take the precaution of getting her contact number in Scotland, just in case I needed verification of my story.
I needn’t have bothered. He wouldn’t speak to me. I must have tried telephoning him about thirty times, each time to be put off by the same smooth-voiced assistant, who informed me first that Mr Laing was in court, then he was in a meeting, finally simply he was unavailable to take my calls. There was a disturbing amount of sympathy in her voice when she gave me this last message. I put the telephone down with a shaking hand, unable to believe that Hamish wasn’t even going to give me the chance to explain, a band of misery tightening around my chest so hard I thought I was going to suffocate. Martin came over with some pointless correction to something I’d done for him and I gave him such a stare of loathing that he backed away muttering it wasn’t so important after all.
I started about twenty letters, but they hit the bin, one after the other. My normal ability with words had left me completely, besides, if Hamish wouldn’t talk to me he probably wouldn’t read anything I’d written either. I felt so desperate I’d have gone and camped outside his gates, for he had to come home sometime if I’d felt it might do some good. But he’d most likely blank me out so I set off for my parents. I’ll never know how I got down there without having an accident. The Ml and the M25 aren’t the best places to drive when your eyes are almost permanently blurred by tears.
I was passing the telephone box outside the post office in my parents’ village when I remembered the phone card in my purse. I slewed to a halt at an angle to the pavement and jammed it in the slot with trembling hands. I’d been planning to try Hamish again from Mum and Dad’s and had been chanting his number like some mantra that could act like a charm to make sure he’d pick up and listen. This’d be better, more private. His phone seemed to ring for ages before he picked it up.
‘Hamish, I must speak to you-’ I began.
‘Susie, one day I’ll feel up to hearing your excuses about what was going on this morning, but frankly, I don’t want to just now,’ he said, his voice sounding infinitely tired, and put the phone down.
My eyes again blinded with tears, I misjudged the corner to my parents’ driveway and clipped the side of the car on the gatepost. I only dented the front wing and I knew the local garage would be able to knock it out tomorrow, but it still gave me a good excuse for falling into my mother’s arms in floods of tears when she opened the door.
CHAPTER 19
‘Did you have a good weekend?’ asked Jenny cheerily as I arrived on Monday morning. She dunked a chocolate doughnut in her coffee and took a large bite, ‘I must say you look a bit peaky. You aren’t coming down with this flu thing, are you?’
It couldn’t make me feel much worse. It might even make me feel better. And I’d appreciate an excuse to drop my brave face and go to bed with lots of Lemsip to hibernate for a while.
‘’Cause I don’t want to have to run the office entirely on my own,’ Jenny continued. ‘Stephen’s still in Paris and both Amanda and Martin have rung in to say they’re ill too.’ She sniffed contemptuously. ‘Martin sounded like he only had a slight cold to me. Typical man, sneezes once and imagines he’s got pneumonia.’
I assured Jenny that though I might be sick at heart, I wasn’t harbouring any germs. Well, I didn’t put it exactly like that, I just included the no germs bit. She smiled in relief. ‘Good, I know Mondays are usually fairly quiet, but I hate it when you’re alone and you have to lock the door to the street every time you want to go to the loo, and then you’ve got to rush because you’re afraid there’s going to be an impatient queue waiting when you’ve finished.’
Amazingly enough, her rash statement didn’t immediately give our chances of a peaceful day the kiss of death, conjuring up queues of people beating a path to our door and demanding to see all our house details immediately. Mind you, it would have been better for me if they had, I needed something to occupy my mind. At least being with my parents over the weekend meant I had to keep myself functioning, doing the cooking, putting on a decent face in front of Dad’s business contacts, and soothing various parental fears about the reason why I’d arrived on the doorstep doing an imitation of a lawn sprinkler. It had taken them only about five minutes to work out it was unlikely to be about a minor prang with the car. My father leapt to the conclusion I was afraid to tell them they were about to become grandparents and started to mutter dire threats about ‘that bloody Frog’ and what he’d do to him when he got his hands on him, though it wasn’t clear whether this was going to be before or after Arnaud had been marched forcibly up the aisle at the point of Dad’s duck gun. Mum’s diagnosis was more accurate, though she tends to the dramatic, and I had a hard job convincing her I wasn’t about to throw myself in the brook at the bottom of the garden like some latter-day Ophelia, which wouldn’t have achieved much even if I’d felt like it. It’s only about six inches deep in summer.
Mum had the bright idea of plying me with drink so that I’d Tell All. What actually happened was that she happily worked her way down a bottle of wine herself and after a certain amount of prompting told me some very interesting stories about when she and Dad were first going out. I’d never heard the one about the tarot reader, the tie-dyed shirt and the tent at the Glastonbury festival before. I’d sort of assumed, seeing photographs of Dad with shoulder-length hair and wearing trousers so tight you wondered he could move, let alone father children, that he’d been briefly indulging in a bit of fancy dress before returning to his true métier in insurance. But, I realised now that, even if he was now thinning on top and thickening around the middle, he couldn’t always have been conventional or he wouldn’t have ended up with my mother. And he must still have some sort of, if not exactly a wild streak, one that wasn’t entirely tame, for they wouldn’t have stayed together otherwise. Mum isn’t your usual sort of lifelong partner for a Captain of Insurance.
Needless to say, once Mum had softened me up with a few risqué parental stories she homed in with the maternal searchlights on full beam, and under a lot of expert probing I told her about the whole damned mess. She was justifiably confused; the last time we’d discussed my love life in any depth I had one amoral, part-time boyfriend and in the last week or so I had, she complained with some exaggeration, been picking up and discarding men like confetti. ‘You’re going to have to make him talk to you,’ she said firmly.
‘It’s difficult to make Hamish do anything,’ I said.
‘One of those, is he?’ she asked with interest. ‘Then you’ll have to trick him into seeing you and then tell him the truth.’
‘Do you think he’ll believe it?’ I asked dolefully. ‘Come on, Mum, as an excuse for why his half-dressed girlfriend was being kissed by a man in a towel it’s fairly high in the implausibility stakes, isn’t it?’
‘Mm, but I’ve heard worse. You should have heard your father… but we’re discussing you, not him,’ she said, abandoning this promising non sequitur to my disappointment. She looked at me, eyes seri
ous. ‘Don’t let false pride stand in your way. If he doesn’t believe you the first time, just go on telling him. He’ll hear you in the end.’ She reached over and patted my hand. ‘You never know, he might be there when you get back on Sunday evening.’
When I’d got in last night the light was winking on the answer machine. For a moment I’d felt almost sick with relief, I was so convinced that there had to be a message from Hamish, telling me he was prepared to hear me out at least. But not one of the messages was from anyone I wanted to hear from. Which was a bit unfair on my mother, who was checking that I’d arrived safely (and successfully evaded the police of three counties, who if they’d had any inkling of the number of consolatory gins she’d been pouring down my throat all weekend would have been following me in convoy waving breathalysers out of their windows), or Tilly, who was seeing if I was OK. I was surprised there was silence from Rose. And not a little miffed too. Surely she must have twigged by now that I gave Luke a black eye, to say nothing of biting him, because of rather more than mere annoyance over a cruel and crude joke. Had she refused to face up to the truth because she knew putting things right would entail Hamish knowing what she’d been up to? I didn’t want to believe she could be so self-centred. I didn’t believe it, but it still left a nasty taste in my mouth.
I tapped my tooth with my nail thoughtfully, glanced up to check that Jenny was occupied in the back room sorting out brochures, and mustering my courage dialled Hamish’s office number yet again. It wouldn’t have surprised me if number pads hadn’t worn out under their recent usage. I’d decided to take my mother’s advice and trick him into seeing me. It might make him even angrier with me, but at the moment what did I have to lose? I tensed as the call was answered. If it was the smooth-voiced woman who’d taken all my calls on Friday, I’d simply ask if I could speak to Hamish. There was no point in trying anything on, she must know my voice almost as well as she knew her own by now. But it was another woman, one with a warm and motherly tone, who sounded rather like someone’s grandmother, so the die was cast. I took a deep breath and explained that I wanted to make an appointment with Mr Laing to discuss a boundary dispute with a neighbour.
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