The house had come alive again now that Sophie was home. All the rooms were in use again, not merely the kitchen. Fresh flowers filled the vases, the elusive scent she used lingered everywhere. (Maggie had heard she had the scent specially made for her in Paris – or perhaps it was New York – and had no difficulty in believing it.) She ordered delicious and expensive food, nibbling at minute portions and leaving the rest for Maggie, for Sophie ate less than a mouse.
Maggie wasn’t grumbling. Her student days weren’t long behind; she was always short of money, and lobster and fillet steak were a decided improvement on baked beans and beefburgers.
‘I suppose you want me to pack up and go, now that I’ve finished my house-sitting stint,’ she said.
‘Now, darling, don’t be tiresome. You know you can stay as long as you want. Anyway, I don’t think I shall be here all that long. It’s always so cold in England.’
‘The thermostat’s up to eighty! I don’t know how you can stand it!’
‘Well, hie thee off to an attic, it’s cold enough up there, and get on with your painting. I’ve held you up long enough this morning.’
‘True,’ said Maggie, with a laugh, disappearing in a gust of energy to immerse herself in one of the large and violent abstracts which Sophie could never understand, while she herself, thin and elegant in her dress of fine soft wool, the colour of aubergines, drew her chair up to the desk near the fire to read her post, shivering in an exaggerated manner at imaginary draughts. But she loved England more every time she returned to it, realizing how much she missed this house where she’d been born. It was a small Queen Anne gem of a house on what had once been the village green at Pennybridge, its light, square rooms perfectly proportioned, the pale honey-coloured walls setting off her collection of gold-framed Baxter prints, the gathering together of which had become something of an obsession over the years.
Perhaps this time she’d stay. Perhaps it was time to stop running away. Sometimes recently she’d found herself in some part of Europe or America with no memory of why she’d decided on that particular place, and little idea of how she’d ever got there. She’d achieved the freedom she had so longed for at eighteen, and found by bitter experience that this meant she couldn’t bear to tie herself down to anyone or anything. Now there was nothing and no one who really mattered – unless it was Roz, and young Michael. And also, perhaps ... But deliberately, and now by habit, she switched her mind away from subjects that were unremittingly painful.
‘Do you still write?’ Felix had asked her last night, sitting opposite her in the firelit room, under the golden light of the lamps, while she sat curled up on the pale Chinese carpet, her legs folded beneath her, her hands held out to the glowing coals. They were simulated coals but they gave an illusion of warmth and the gas flames were real enough. After a long time she’d said no.
‘Why not, Sophie? You had such hopes –’
‘We all did. We were young, we believed ourselves capable of anything.’
‘But you were never a real writer,’ Tommo had said the last time she saw him, ‘and never will be.’ His outspokenness, not having softened with the years, had initially enraged her but, thinking about it later, she had been forced to acknowledge that he might well be right, though it was painful to accept: she didn’t have the passion, the determination to slog on that Maggie had, for instance, young as she was. Yet she had found compensations, other things she could do: she had discovered in herself an unexpected acuity in financial matters so that now she managed not only her own affairs but, ironically, Roz’s as well.
Felix hadn’t pressed the point. ‘I went to Flowerdew before I came here,’ he said abruptly, shocking her, though it was a logical enough follow-on from his previous remarks.
‘What? You didn’t!’ Sophie knew that her eyes were startled, frightened, as she raised them to meet his unblinking stare.
‘It was a mistake’.
She had caught the echoes of fear in her own voice and controlled it as best she could as she answered lightly, ‘Well, it always is a mistake to go back, they say, don’t they?’ In his case, she would have thought, an act of unprecedented folly. Her heart had begun to bang. Horrified at what his return might mean, she tried to change the subject, to ask him about his present life, his marriage, his work, but he interrupted her.
‘Don’t you ever think about Flowerdew, and Kitty – about what happened, Sophie?’
‘No!’
‘Doesn’t it ever weigh on your conscience?’
‘I don’t let it,’ she said evenly.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure! I don’t see any reason for tormenting myself with something that’s over and done with. We swore we would forget it.’ And she had, with that strength of purpose she could always summon when she needed it. She had locked it away in a dark cupboard at the back of her mind and told herself that she had thrown the key away. It was the only way she could have coped. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘But I do. We must.’
‘Felix –’ she began.
‘No, you have to listen.’
The words fell like sharp marble chips, his eyes were that icy pale blue they always used to be when he was angry.
Fourteen years ago he had imagined himself in love with her and had tried to persuade her that she was in love with him. It would have been easy enough to go along with that – he’d been very attractive in a confident, self-aware fashion, as intent on finding an identity for himself as she had been, though quite differently. His hadn’t then been the successful, smart image he projected now, but he was working on it even then – short hair, high collars and tailored suits when everyone else of his generation was long-haired and wearing jeans and T-shirts; the affectation of writing his forename with an acute accent, his surname with an apostrophe between the D and the a, pretending he had French ancestry. Félix D’Arbell. Like Tess Durbeyfield, Miss D’Urberville. Perhaps he still wrote it that way.
But, quite apart from the ever-present fact of Tommo that had begun to dominate her life, she’d never liked the ambition that drove him, the ruthlessness that he would certainly need to get to the top. She had always felt alarmed by his temper, which could explode into a sudden rage. She knew now that she’d been right not to let him persuade her, even though the years had changed him somewhat. He was more in control, less inclined to let his feelings get the better of him. All the same, she would never make the mistake of underestimating him.
‘Have you contacted the others?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Why me?’ He didn’t answer. ‘Why have you really come back, Felix, after all this time?’
‘Don’t you know? Are you really telling me you don’t know?’
And Sophie, to her chagrin, found herself trembling and quite unable to meet his cold, challenging stare.