By the end of the following week, I was relieved to find Aunt V already brighter. She called me on Thursday evening, sounding so much like her old self that it brought a lump to my throat.
“Edna and I have been into Appleton today,” she told me. “We had lunch at that little pub near the town center. Whatever is it called?”
“The Woolpack,” I told her.
“Yes, that’s it. I had the most delicious home-baked steak pie, and Edna ordered one of the specials—I think it was venison. Anyway, she said it was very good. We’ll have to go there next time you’re home.”
The enthusiasm in her voice relieved my guilt a little. Dear Edna Brown had worked her magic as usual.
“Oh. And I’m going to start helping her with Meals-on-Wheels,” she went on. “It will do me good to be useful, don’t you think?”
“Aunt V,” I cried, “It’s wonderful that you are getting on with your life. You’ll be helping with the Riding for the Disabled next and—”
“Funny you should say that,” she cut in. “Edna was just on about the Riding for the Disabled Association. There’s a riding school on the other side of Appleton that has a riding group for disabled children, and we thought we might go along and take a look. Perhaps you could come with us.”
“I’ll see,” I promised, knowing that I never would. I felt so distanced from everything now, and sometimes I almost felt a kind of anger. Anger at Daniel, I suppose, for breaking his promise, and anger at life for taking mine.
When Nicola approached me as I left work that Friday, I was ready with my answer. “Yes, I’ll come,” I told her. “But what sort of thing do you usually wear?”
She looked at me with disbelief.
“You are not seriously telling me that you’ve never been clubbing?”
“Well, of course I have,” I retorted, feeling stupid. “But the clubs in Appleton are very…you know…casual.”
Nicola raised her eyebrows and rolled her eyes. “Oh, of course. I almost forgot.” She giggled. “You’re from the country aren’t you?”
I gave a high-pitched, hollow laugh, but underneath I was bristling. “Yes, I am, but we’re really quite civilized in the country nowadays, you know.”
“Never mind.” She clasped my arm in a gesture of sympathy. “At least you escaped before it was too late. Black pants will do and a nice sexy little top. I’ll meet you in the Duck and Dove Pub at about nine o’clock.”
As I wandered along the busy street toward my tiny apartment, my mind kept going back again and again to Nicola’s comment. At least you’ve escaped before it was too late. But I had escaped because it was too late.
Images of a bleak fell flashed into my mind. I froze in my tracks, and there on the pavement, amid the faceless people scurrying eagerly about their business, claustrophobia took me in its grip. Oh, how I longed to have the cold wild wind in my face and to feast my eyes on the awesome space of the open sky. What was I doing here, so far away from home? The answer arrived at once. Surviving, that was what I was doing. Getting on with my life in the only way I could see how.
My feverish desperation stayed with me as I set off to meet Nicola that evening. The streets were alive with a bustling excitement that caught me by surprise and heightened my mood, making me feel more alive than I had in months. I lifted my chin and increased my pace. It was time to move on.
I spotted Nicola as soon as I walked through the door of the Duck. She was in the farthest corner, surrounded by a group of young people, all trendily dressed and wearing the same excitement on their faces.
“Lucy,” she cried, beckoning me over.
I slid into the smokey cloud that surrounded them all.
“This is Lucy, everyone,” she declared, clapping her hands.
“Drink?” offered a tall, angular man. His girlishly handsome face had a too-dark suntan and his auburn hair was carefully styled and streaked with blond.
“You don’t need to worry about Rodney,” whispered Nicola. “He’s gay.”
“Th-thank you,” I stuttered.
“Large dry white wine,” he called across to the slightly built, wide-eyed barman, who held his gaze and gave a provocative wink.
Did I really want white wine?
“Ignore them,” Nicola murmured in my ear. “They’re actually quite good company, totally harmless, and at least you know that they aren’t going to come on to you.”
I reeled in shock at first, feeling like an intruder, until my second glass of wine was emptied, and then the whole scenario took on a different feel; I took on a different feel.
Nicola’s friends were not so bad. Chatting to Rodney was just like having a conversation with another girl, and everyone else seemed so intent on listening to what Nicola had to say that they didn’t take much notice of me. When she glanced at her watch and announced that it was time to go to the Union, I felt quite disappointed. I felt comfortable here.
Rodney shrugged when I asked him why we were leaving, and I noticed he flashed a disappointed glance toward the barman as we stood and downed our drinks.
“It’s just the way it is,” he told me. “We always go on the same circuit. Everyone does. First it’s the Duck and then it’s the Union, and that just gives us a few minutes to get one in at the George and Dragon before closing.”
“And then we go to Idols,” Nicola stated. “Don’t worry, Rods. I asked Jeremy and he said he’d meet you there when his shift was finished.”
Who were these people? What was I doing here?
I was getting on with my life—that was what, transported into a wine-induced feverish state.
By the time we arrived at Idols, I felt as though I was on another planet. Everything anyone said made me giggle. I stood next to Nicola in the line, listening to the throb of the music, as eager as she was to get past the two thickset doormen and join the heaving throng of bodies we glimpsed whenever the heavy oak doors opened.
At last it was our turn. Nicola flirted with one of the burly young men who sported some kind of headset attached to his head, with a speaker in front of his mouth. I gazed at him in disbelief. In fact, the whole place filled me with disbelief; it was like being in a dream, an exciting, dangerous, unfamiliar dream. I liked dangerous, I decided.
“Come on,” Nicola ordered, pulling at my arm. “Quick, before he changes his mind.”
As she hurried past him, he boldly cupped her buttocks. She tittered, rolling her eyes in his general direction.
“Don’t forget,” he told her. “I’ll see you later.”
“In his dreams,” she muttered to me as soon as we turned away, and then there was no more chance to talk, for the thumping vibrating noise took us over.
I had never danced as I did that night. Or was it just the alcohol that made it seem that way? The music took me over. I didn’t have to think anymore or speak or remember. I just was. Undulating with the overpowering rhythm of the music, shoulder to shoulder on the packed dance floor. Thrusting my hips and allowing my body to move however it wanted. When I noticed a pair of glittering black eyes staring at me, for just a moment I faltered. I felt crazy, wicked, sensual, as if a stranger now lived in my body.
I glanced away and then looked back, mesmerized. They were still there, burning into me. A tingle of fear set my senses on fire.
“Follow me,” urged Nicola, dragging at my arm. Her face was damp with perspiration and her hand on my arm felt clammy. Or was it me who felt clammy?
“Let’s sit down,” she suggested. I trailed her reluctantly, back to the table where Rodney was in deep conversation with the barman from the Duck. Two more drinks were waiting for us and I drank half mine in one go before sinking onto the empty chair next to Nicola, fanning my face in a desperate attempt to cool down.
“I’m going to the loo,” she announced. “It’ll be cooler in there.”
Again I followed in her wake, staggering as I pushed through the crowd, and then suddenly a tall figure blocked my path. When I gazed up into the same impenetrable dark eyes that I had seen on the dance floor, fear washed over me. I liked fear. It made me feel alive inside again, in a place that I thought was dead.
“Come on,” cried Nicola anew, reaching back to drag me past the hypnotic stranger into the relative quiet of the ladies’.
“Stay away from him,” she ordered.
I eyed her in surprise. “Who? Stay away from who?”
“Alex Lyall,” she declared. “I saw him looking at you on the dance floor. He’s bad news, Luce, and way out of your league.”
“Whose league is he in, then?” I giggled, but she didn’t laugh.
“The league of drugs and violence and who knows what the hell else,” she told me.
“You are serious,” I gasped, abruptly sobered by the intense expression on her face.
She gave me a friendly shove. “Too right I am.”
“You mean he’s on drugs?”
“I think in drugs would be more like it. Honestly, Luce, I mean it. Keep well away.”
When we went out into the hot, seething buzz of the club again, to my relief, he was gone. We pushed through the crowd to find that our table had been taken over by someone else. Rodney and his friend had disappeared and Jane and Ros, Nicola’s other two friends, were so tightly wrapped around two guys on the dance floor it didn’t appear that they would be returning in a hurry.
“Great,” groaned Nicola, glancing at her watch. “Let’s go, Lucy. We may as well share a taxi home. It’s been a total disaster of an evening, anyhow.”
I clung to her arm as she elbowed her way out into the foyer, then she stopped dead and regarded me with a horrified expression on her face.
“Oh, no,” she lamented. “There’s that bouncer.”
My head was swimming pleasantly and I felt distanced and fuddled.
“What…what are you on about? What about the bouncer?” Then I remembered and started to giggle.
“It’s not funny,” snapped Nicola. “He’ll come on to me when I try to go out, and all for a damn fiver. You’ll have to go and grab a taxi, Luce, I’ll run straight out and jump in when he’s not looking.”
I hesitated and she gave me a push.
“Just go outside and wait until a taxi pulls up—any one will do—then hop in and wait for me…And don’t let anyone push you out.”
A wave of dizziness swept over me as the cool night air hit me with a bang. I could see a row of taxis waiting at the curb but groups of young people were jostling to get into them, shoving and yelling at one another. I couldn’t do this—I really couldn’t.
“Here…allow me.”
I pulled back from the hand that cupped my elbow firmly, my nerve ends tingling with terrifying anticipation at the sound of the deep voice in my ear. When I turned around, those glittering black eyes stared into mine with such hypnotic passion that my whole body froze into immobility.
He kept his firm hold on me, raising his other hand, and miraculously a taxi slid right up alongside us.
“Thank you,” I croaked. As he opened the door, I remembered Nicola and hesitated.
“Your friend is here now,” he told me, and as I collapsed on the seat, suddenly she was clambering in beside me and the taxi was roaring off down the street. For a moment I tried to glance back, but everything was a blur, including my head, which didn’t want to let the thumping music go.
Within minutes I was climbing out onto the road. “See you on Monday,” called Nicola. Then I was alone on the pavement outside my apartment, fumbling in my bag for my keys with hands that didn’t seem to work properly.
I awoke next day with a blinding headache, made worse by the jarring ring of the phone. Inching groggily out of bed I grabbed the receiver.
“Hello?” I rasped. Aunt V’s familiar voice in my ear unexpectedly made me want to weep.
“Lucy! Are you all right? You sound awful.”
I drew in a deep breath. “I’m fine,” I told her. “Just a bit of a cold that’s all.”
“Should I drive over to see you?”
“No…honestly. I’ll be fine.”
I tried to make my voice sound normal, and in doing so probably made it ten times worse, but she was so full of her own news that she didn’t notice.
“You’ll never guess what,” she announced.
Her words spilled forth in a torrent in her eagerness to get them out.
“Edna wants to open a tearoom and farm shop at Homewood, and I’m going into partnership with her. I’ll be in charge of the day-to-day running of it and she’ll do all the baking. Just think. Me in business. Oh, Lucy.”
When she finally stopped for breath, I made an effort to take stock of my feelings.
“I’m so happy for you,” I cried, fighting off the emptiness that filled my soul. Even Aunt V and Edna Brown were getting on with their lives. And so are you, I told myself.
“Of course, you could come back home and help us….”
There was such appeal in her voice that just for the slightest moment I wanted to say yes.
My heart pounded. “I’ve got too much going on here at the moment.”
“But maybe one day…?”
“Maybe one day,” I agreed.
Long after she had hung up, I sat on the side of my bed, going through our conversation—or rather, her conversation. I was so glad for her. And yet…Maybe one day I promised myself, when time had done the magic that it was supposed to do but hadn’t yet managed to for me. A stab almost of jealousy cut into my heart. So why had it worked for Aunt V and even for Edna Brown?
On Saturday night, I sat alone in my apartment, struggling to concentrate on a movie I had already seen a dozen times, while events from the night before kept flicking into my mind. The alcohol had brought a wild excitement—an escape, I suppose—but now my memories were intermingled with guilt. At ten o’clock, I switched off the TV and collapsed into bed with my head whirling, to wake early on Sunday with a void inside me. I almost drove over to see Aunt V but was too afraid that she might be at Homewood, making plans with Edna Brown, so I went for a walk, instead, through the park and along the Thames, around which London had been built. It seemed sad to me that a river should be trapped in concrete. My whole being longed for smooth grassy banks and soft green trees that blew in the gentle summer breeze. And then I found one area where someone had made an effort to bring nature to the city. I sat there for a while, on a bench with a view of the undulating water, enjoying the sight of weeping willows and the carefully designed gardens that bordered the river. Refusing to allow myself to compare it with that other riverbank that was firmly slotted away my past.
It was so breathtakingly hot that I wore shorts and a hot-pink sleeveless T-shirt. I thought they might have appeared out of place in the city, but everyone else seemed equally skimpily clad. In fact, the entire place had a different aura in the heat of the Sunday-afternoon sun. As I wandered in the general direction of my apartment, I suddenly realized that I was near the Duck and Dove, and my steps slowed. The doors were propped open, and laughter echoed from the pub’s gloomy interior. People relaxing and having fun. I wondered if Nicola was inside.
“Are you looking for someone?”
The voice beside me stopped me cold, and a shiver ran down my spine. Dangerous might seem delicious when you’re overflowing with dry white wine, but it had quite a different effect in the warm glow of a summer’s day. And then I realized, as I turned to look once again into the intense black eyes of Alex Lyall, in the bright light of day the man who Nicola had warned me so urgently to steer clear of appeared relatively harmless.
Despite the heat he was wearing an expensive lightweight beige suit, with a cream shirt and subtly multicolored silk tie. He smiled at me, his perfect teeth gleaming white against the deep tan of his face, and all of a sudden I realized that I was smiling, too.
“Well, country girl,” he repeated, narrowing his dark eyes so that I could no longer see their expression. “Are you looking for someone?”
I stared at him, mesmerized.
“Nicola.” My voice faltered and then the words rushed out. “I was just wondering if my friend Nicola was in the pub.”
“And you don’t fancy going inside dressed as if you are on holiday at the seaside.”
“It’s hot,” I announced defiantly. “Anyway, what do you mean by calling me country girl. How do you know that I’m from the country?”
“You’d be surprised at the things I know about you,” he told me.
Another shiver rippled through me as his dark eyes caressed my naked skin, and I turned away abruptly.
“I have an appointment,” I mumbled, glancing nervously at my watch. As I walked hurriedly down the street, I could feel his eyes boring into my back. I forced myself to walk slowly, glancing at my feet as my sandals thudded on the warm flags of the pavement, my ears pricked for the sound of his feet behind me. When I turned the corner into my street and still they hadn’t come, I heaved a sigh of relief and broke into a jog.
I let the door to my apartment click shut behind me, fumbled with the safety chain, and as I glanced around with relief at my familiar surroundings, I felt the heat of embarrassment for my own stupid behavior—running off down the street like a scared little kid! After all, the only thing the poor guy had ever really done was to try to help me. He’d obviously seen me looking nervous today outside the Duck, and I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t grabbed me that cab after the club. Nicola’s crazy stories had just spooked me, and they were probably just stupid rumors. I would find out the truth, I decided, and then if I ever came across him again, I would know whether to be polite or to run a mile.
As it turned out Nicola was off sick on Monday and Tuesday, and by the time she returned to work on Wednesday morning I had almost forgotten about my chance encounter outside the Duck. At lunchtime she appeared in front of me with a cheery smile on her attractive face.
“Fancy going for some lunch?” she asked.
My first reaction was to say no, then I grabbed my jacket from the back of the chair. I had nothing better to do.
We ordered tuna baguettes in the café down the street, and sipped our cappuccinos while going over Friday night’s exploits. Nicola, of course, had to mention my “dangerous liaison.”
“Seriously, though, Lucy,” she said. “That guy is dangerous. You should stay well clear of him.”
“I like dangerous,” I told her.
Laughter sparkled in her eyes. “Since when? Since when have you, quiet little Lucy McTavish, liked dangerous?”
I shrugged, uneasy with my own admission. Was it really true?
“Just joking.” I smiled. “Anyway, what exactly is so bad about this Alex?”
It seemed suddenly very important to me to learn the truth about him. But why? Was it just those black eyes that made me feel I had been mesmerized every time I looked into them? I shivered. Maybe he had hypnotized me.
She shrugged, sipping her coffee.
“It’s common knowledge that he sells drugs, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he was in some kind of protection racket, as well. The guy is in with all kinds of dodgy people.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
She pulled a face. “Well, no…but you have to admit he is seriously scary.”
After that, our conversation turned to Nicola’s latest love interest. All she appeared to care about was her next social outing. My mind just kept going back again and again to my own admission. Did I really like dangerous? Or was it the only thing that made me feel alive again?
I dreamed of my father that night, but in my dream he and Mrs. Brown were one and the same person, caring and gentle. He brought me new red shoes to wear, and when I woke up as the dawn filtered through my window, I was filled with such disappointment that I buried my head in my pillow and cried as I hadn’t done in months. Then I brushed away the tears and pushed the memories even deeper inside. All that was gone now. This was my life here. My job at Fawcett and Medley, my new social life; my whole future was here in the city. So why did I long for wide-open spaces where the majestic fells loomed against the sky?
Because I may have made my future in London, but the wild hills of Westmorland would always be my home.
We were so busy at work that I hardly had time to turn around for the rest of the week, and that suited me. When five-thirty on Friday finally arrived, I ran down the stone steps and out into the late-afternoon sunshine with a sigh of relief.
The phone was ringing as I inserted the key in the door of my apartment, and I burst inside and grabbed it eagerly.
“Hello.”
“Hello, love,” said Aunt V.
I felt so glad to hear her voice that for a moment I was speechless.
“Lucy…are you all right?” she asked.
The concern in her voice brought a lump to my throat and I laughed too loudly. “Of course I am. I’ve only just this minute got in from work, though. The phone was ringing as I opened the door.”
“Oh.” She sounded surprised. “I didn’t realize that it was so early. I wanted to talk to you, that’s all. Oh, Lucy, I have had such a day.”
Once started, she was like a ball rolling down a hill. She chattered on about her new project and was keen to tell me about her visit to the Riding for the Disabled group.
“We’re going to help every Monday afternoon,” she explained. “And Edna is just as excited as I am. Oh, Lucy, if you could see those poor dear children, you would want to help, too.”
I was so pleased for her, and yet I couldn’t ignore the pain that shot through my heart as I listened to her going on about her life. It was so full now, so…fulfilled. After she hung up, I dialed Nicola’s mobile number.
“Are you going out tonight?” I asked her.
“Ah, I’ve got you hooked, have I?” She laughed.
Had she? Had she really changed me so much? The answer hit me. Circumstance had changed me, not Nicola.
“Nine o’clock in the Duck?”
“See you there,” she said.
After two drinks in the Duck, then three more on the way to Idols, I felt very mellow and surprisingly confident. The music throbbed inside me as I watched the swaying bodies on the dance floor and I gulped down the drink that Nicola brought over from the bar.
“Hey, steady,” she cried. “Are you on a mission, or what?”
Maybe I was. I know that I was filled with an intense, almost feverish excitement.
“Come on,” I said, grabbing her arm. “Let’s dance.”
She pulled a face at Anna and Len, the two other members of our small group.
“Don’t let this table go,” she yelled to them above the noise. They smiled and nodded, far too taken up with each other to care about us.
The air was murky with smoke, and as we elbowed our way onto the dance floor, colored lights flashed around us and whirled inside my head. I felt all alone in my own private world of sound and sensation, a world where I could release all my pent-up emotion, yet feel no pain. I was living again, really living.
When Nicola shook her hands and made a face at me, I just stared at her vacantly.
She pointed toward our table. “I’m going to sit down,” she mouthed.
I nodded, still allowing my body to move with the music, as she pushed her way through the crowd. And then I looked up, drawn by a strange compulsion, and through the purple haze that glowed with flickering lights, a pair of uncomfortably familiar, penetrating dark eyes, locked onto mine. I tried to look away, but they held me with the same magnetism as before and as they drew closer, my whole body began to tingle with the strangest sensation—a disturbing, irresistible sensation that had its roots entrenched in fear.