‘WELL, I think this shade would be perfect, especially with the wood you’ve chosen for the units.’
‘Mm. I like this brighter yellow,’ Sheila argued.
Sophy had started work with them on Monday morning, and now the three of them were sitting round the desk in the upper room studying paint-shade charts.
As good as her word, Sheila had produced the names and addresses of three painters and a couple of joiners. Choosing the wood for the kitchen units had been relatively easy. Charlotte had fallen immediately and heavily in love with the satin sheen of a pretty cherrywood, but choosing the paint for the walls was proving to be more of a problem.
Now, rather hesitantly, she produced a magazine and said quietly, ‘I was wondering about this wallpaper…but I’m not sure.’
When she showed them the photograph the other two women instantly approved.
‘It’s perfect,’ Sheila pronounced, ‘and fun too. What is it?’
‘It’s Kaffe Fassett-style,’ Charlotte told her. ‘I’ve read about his work, and I saw this article mentioning the wallpapers he’s designed. I thought this yellow one, with the pottery motifs.’
‘It will be perfect,’ Sophy agreed. ‘And with some of those lovely old terracotta floor tiles. You’ve got to have an Aga, of course.’
Charlotte laughed. ‘Well, as a matter of fact I am rather tempted. Vanessa has one, but she doesn’t use it for cooking.’
Sheila clucked disapprovingly. ‘What a waste. My mother had one years ago. She swore by it.’
‘Well, most of the local farms still have them.’
‘Have a dark green one,’ Sophy suggested temptingly. ‘It will look wonderful with your cherrywood.’
She had never realised that redecorating could be such fun, Charlotte admitted as she firm-mindedly tidied away her brochures and turned her attention to the post on her desk.
‘Fun, yes, but expensive too,’ Sheila said shrewdly, and then added, ‘Has all this work you’re having done mean you’ve decided to keep the house rather than sell it?’
Charlotte grimaced. ‘I’d like to keep it. I think in the past it’s been a case of the shoemaker’s child going unshod as far as home has been concerned, and I hadn’t honestly realised what potential the place had.’ She wrinkled her nose and admitted, ‘I think while Dad was alive I was too busy looking after him and running the business to notice our surroundings very much. Besides, he’d have had forty fits if I’d ever suggested changing anything. I thought when he died that the best thing I could do was to put the place on the market and have a fresh start somewhere else, somewhere that I felt was completely my own, but now…’ She gave a faint sigh. ‘I am tempted to keep it, but it’s far too large for one person, and too expensive to run, especially if we lose a lot of business to Oliver Tennant.’
‘Well, you know the answer to that one,’ Sheila told her promptly, grinning as she exclaimed, ‘You’ll either have to get married or find yourself a lodger!’
She ducked as Charlotte threateningly threw a heavy brochure at her.
‘Of the two,’ Charlotte said loftily, ‘I think your second suggestion was the more feasible.’
‘Well, I should think seriously about it if I were you,’ Sheila advised her. ‘I must admit I wouldn’t like living in that huge place all alone. It is rather remote.’
‘It’s two hundred yards off the main road,’ Charlotte scoffed.
‘Yes, down a narrow, rhododendron-lined drive that doesn’t have any kind of lighting. Now that is something you should think about while you’re having all this work done,’ Sheila advised her firmly. ‘If I were you, I’d see about getting some good security lights installed outside the house, and proper illuminations down the drive, plus a burglar alarm.’
‘Heavens, the place will look like the Blackpool illuminations,’ Charlotte complained, but Sophy shook her head.
‘I agree with Sheila, you can’t be too careful these days,’ she said quietly. ‘You read such dreadful things in the papers.’
For a moment all of them were quiet, soberly reflecting on the truth of what Sophy was saying, and then Charlotte said thoughtfully, ‘Well, maybe I should make enquiries about having some kind of lighting on the drive.’
‘And about looking round for a suitable tenant to share the running expenses of the house with you,’ Sheila told her firmly.
‘I’ll think about it,’ Charlotte promised, having no intention of doing any such thing. She liked her privacy too much, for one thing, and for another… Well, much as she liked Sheila, she had to acknowledge that the older woman had a decided tendency towards matchmaking. She was pretty sure that the kind of tenant Sheila had in mind for her would be male, and eligible.
‘I drove past the new agency’s offices this morning,’ Sheila informed her, changing the subject. ‘Very glitzy and modern, but I felt that it was a little too streamlined, if you know what I mean. It might appeal to the local high-fliers, but I think the older people would find it rather intimidating. I didn’t see the new man there, though.’
‘I’ve seen him,’ Sophy told her, before Charlotte could speak. She grinned enthusiastically. ‘He’s a real hunk.’ She laughed at the disgusted sound Charlotte made in her throat and insisted, ‘Well, he is. He seemed nice too…as though he knew exactly how women were going to react to him.’
Charlotte snorted again and muttered under her breath.
‘Vain.’
‘No, that wasn’t what I meant,’ Sophy complained. ‘It was almost as though he was asking you to look beyond his looks. I can’t explain properly what I mean. It’s just that he made me think that he was basically nice.’
‘Nice?’ Charlotte protested. ‘Of course he wants you to think he’s nice. That’s all part of the act he uses to secure business.’
But, even as she spoke, she knew she wasn’t being entirely fair. Like Sophy, she had been struck by an essential lack of vanity and conceit in Oliver Tennant.
Despite Vanessa’s attempts to depict her as some kind of man-hating anti-male campaigner, he had treated her with the same degree of politeness he had shown to Sophy. At first glance he had seemed so essentially male that she had expected him to respond immediately to Vanessa’s derogatory comments about her, by challenging her in some way, or trying to make her look even more stupid than Vanessa had done, but instead he had ignored it…had looked at her in a way which had suggested that he preferred to make his own judgements rather than to rely on those of other people. A tiny wistful thought crept into her mind…an odd weakening sensation that made her wonder how he would have reacted to her had she been sexually desirable.
Immediately she clamped down on the thought, horrified that it should have formed at all. So powerful was her sense of anger against herself that her skin lost colour, causing Sheila to frown and ask quietly, ‘Charlotte, are you all right? You’ve gone quite pale.’
Privately Sheila thought that, after the trauma of her father’s death, and the strain of nursing him for so long plus running the business, it was a wonder that Charlotte hadn’t cracked up completely.
If it weren’t for the opening of this new agency, she would have been urging Charlotte to take a proper holiday—something she hadn’t done since she returned home. Much as she herself had liked Henry, there was no doubt that he had been something of a tyrant, and privately she considered that he had never valued Charlotte as he ought.
She was well aware of Charlotte’s lack of confidence in herself as a woman, and longed to tell her that, if only she could learn to project an image of sexual confidence, she would soon discover how very attractive the opposite sex could find her, but for all her independence Charlotte had a very vulnerable side to her nature, and Sheila knew she would hate her mentioning a subject she thought completely hidden from anyone else.
She was such an attractive young woman, and many many times Sheila had longed to shake Henry for the damage he had done to his daughter’s personality with his constant put-downs. The trouble with Henry had been that he was one of the old-fashioned chauvinists who could never accept a daughter in place of a son.
Over the years Sheila had done her best to introduce Charlotte to a variety of young men, but invariably she would clam up with them, holding them so stiffly and determinedly at a distance that Sheila had shaken her head in despair.
Now, as she opened the post alongside Charlotte, she glanced idly out of the window and then whistled softly under her breath.
‘What’s wrong?’ Charlotte asked, without lifting her head, absorbed in the letter she was reading.
‘It looks as if we’ve got our first client of the week…and what a client!’
The awe in Sheila’s voice was enough to make Charlotte put down the letter she was studying and walk across the room, to stand behind Sheila looking curiously through the window.
She saw him immediately, and, as though by some machiavellian instinct, he paused and stood still looking directly at her, so that she had no opportunity to move out of his view.
She felt like a schoolgirl caught ogling him, and her face burned dark red.
‘What’s wrong?’ Sheila asked her.
‘That’s Oliver Tennant,’ she told her friend tensely.
‘Ah.’
The short word held a wealth of expression.
‘I wonder why he’s coming here,’ Sophy murmured.
‘There’s only one way to find out,’ Charlotte told them briskly. ’Sheila, you’d better go down and find out. Sophy, perhaps you should go with Sheila and get some experience of dealing with the public.’
She saw the look her two companions exchanged, but pretended not to. There was no way she was going to go down to the reception desk and face him—not after she had seen the slow, almost boyish smile which had curved his mouth when he’d looked up and found her watching him.
It was a very dangerous thing, that smile, inviting her to share in some special secret kind of magic, when in reality he had been laughing at her. A very deceptive smile. A very deceptive man, she reminded herself, grimly forcing her attention back to her post.
When ten minutes had passed without Sheila’s and Sophy’s returning she began to feel distinctly twitchy. She imagined him walking round their downstairs office, studying the brochures on display, reading the details which she herself wrote, meticulously trying to show each property to its advantage, without any embroidery that might lead a prospective purchaser to claim that they had been misled.
Where a property had a fault, she always made a point of listing it on the final page of her brochures, where she always placed the property’s good and bad points under the headings ‘Advantages’ and ‘Disadvantages’. To be fair, which she always was, one man’s flaws were another’s attractions.
A house served not by mains drainage but by septic tank would be anathema to some, while others would consider this to be no problem at all. For purchasers with children, proximity to schools must come higher on their list of priorities than, say, being within walking distance of village shops, which might be a prime requirement of an older couple.
Remembering her own working life in London, Charlotte was well aware that this was not normal city practice, where competition forced agents to be far more ruthless, far more elastic with the truth.
She abhorred that kind of selling, and dreaded discovering that Oliver Tennant intended to introduce it into their quiet country life, thus forcing her to either yield the major share of the market to him, or compete with him on the same footing.
Nervously she looked at her watch. There was no sign of him leaving. What on earth was he doing? Curious though she was, she was not going to give in to the temptation to go downstairs and find out.
In the end it was twenty minutes before she saw him striding back across the street in the direction he had come. Maddeningly, before Sheila and Sophy could report back to her, there was a small flurry of business, and it was almost half an hour after he had left before Sheila came back upstairs to tell her breathlessly and triumphantly, ‘You’ll never guess what…I’ve found you your lodger!’
As she stared at Sheila in silence, a horrid suspicion struck Charlotte.
‘Not…not Oliver Tennant,’ she protested in dismay.
‘The very same,’ Sheila told her cheerfully, apparently oblivious to the fact that, far from sharing her delight in the news, Charlotte was looking decidedly unhappy.
‘Don’t worry,’ Sheila added. ‘I’ve warned him about the alterations et cetera and he says they won’t bother him. Apparently he eats out a good deal. In fact, he says you’ll hardly see him. He came in looking for a small property to rent, but I explained how seldom we get rented stuff, especially in the tourist season when everyone with a spare room to let is looking to make a bit extra from B and B.
‘He was just about to leave when I remembered what we’d been saying earlier, so I told him about your place. I explained all the disadvantages, don’t worry,’ Sheila went on, before Charlotte could interrupt and inform her that it wasn’t Oliver Tennant’s reaction to the disadvantages of becoming her lodger that worried her, but the fact that Sheila had actually made such a suggestion in the first place.
‘As a lodger he’ll be ideal,’ Sheila enthused. ‘He’s prepared to pay well above the norm. He did ask if it would be possible for him to have the use of a room to work in, and I immediately thought of your dad’s old rooms. Remember when he was first ill, how he insisted on trying to work at home, and we kitted out the adjoining bedroom with a desk for him?’
Charlotte’s hissed indrawn breath must have registered what she was feeling, although Sheila misinterpreted the reason for it, as she turned to her and said gently, ‘Yes, I know how you must feel, but your dad’s gone, Charlotte. I’ll bet you haven’t even been in those rooms since he died. I know when I lost my mother I couldn’t bring myself to go near her bedroom for months, but once I did… Well, once I’d sorted through her things and turned the room back into a guest room, I felt as though I’d finally come to terms with her death. I know it will be difficult for you having someone else in those rooms—’
‘Difficult?’ Charlotte exploded, unable to keep back what she was feeling any longer. ‘Sheila, you can’t seriously stand there and tell me that you’ve really invited Oliver Tennant…to become my lodger. Please tell me it’s just a joke,’ she implored grimly.
Sheila stared at her. ‘But I thought you’d be pleased.’
‘Pleased? Pleased!’ Charlotte was stunned. ‘How could you think that?’
‘Well, for one thing, it will give you an opportunity to keep an eye on him, so to speak,’ Sheila told her. ‘And for another…well, you couldn’t really find a more suitable lodger, could you?’
‘But, Sheila, I don’t want a lodger.’
Now it was Sheila’s turn to stare. ‘But only this morning you said—’
‘No,’ Charlotte corrected her ruthlessly. ‘You said. To be quite honest with you, I think I’d rather sell than share my home with Oliver Tennant—not that it’s come to that yet. You’ll have to telephone him and tell him that there’s been a mistake.’
She looked away from Sheila as she spoke, cravenly hoping that her friend wouldn’t see the emotions she was trying to hide.
Oliver Tennant…sharing her home. Her heart was still thudding like a sledgehammer, the shock of Sheila’s announcement reverberating through her body. She tried in vain to picture the two of them sharing the old house in cosy intimacy, but her mind refused to conjure up any such visions. Oliver Tennant might just be desperate enough to believe that the two of them could live alongside one another in harmony, but she couldn’t believe it. And besides, what on earth would people say? She closed her eyes in stunned dismay that Sheila, of all people, could actually have suggested that Oliver Tennant lodge with her.
Almost as though she had read her mind, Sheila said cautiously, ‘I suppose you’re worried about what people will think.’
‘That’s certainly one of my worries,’ Charlotte agreed grimly. ‘Honestly, Sheila, you know what people are like round here.’
‘Well, yes, but look at it this way—with both of you being unattached, people were bound to gossip, to speculate, to connect the two of you together. This way, the whole thing will be a nine-day wonder and then forgotten.’
Charlotte raised her eyes heavenwards and denounced, ‘I can’t follow your logic at all. You’ll have to ring him.’
As she turned her back, Sheila and Sophy exchanged glances. Clearing her throat, Sophy said quietly, ‘It’s no business of mine, I know, but I think Sheila did the right thing. People round here love a bit of intrigue and mystery; if they think that you and Oliver Tennant are going to become deadly enemies fighting for the major share of the local property market, you’ll both become subject to all kinds of speculation. This way, people will just assume that you’ve come to some harmonious agreement. The fact that he’s sharing your home will raise a few eyebrows at first, but once people realise—’
‘How unlikely that a man like him would be interested in someone like me,’ Charlotte supplied bitterly for her. ‘Yes, well, I suppose you’re right about that, but neither of you seem to have stopped to think that I might not want a lodger at all…any lodger.’
‘But you agreed earlier that it would be a good thing. Personally I’ll feel a lot easier in my mind if he is there. I’ve been worrying about you ever since Henry died and I don’t mind admitting it. You are off the beaten track, you know, no matter how much you might deny it,’ insisted Sheila.
Biting back the acid comment that a bedridden father would surely have been no defence against any would-be attacker, Charlotte struggled to preserve her temper. She couldn’t understand what had got into Sheila. She was normally so circumspect…
‘I can’t understand why Oliver Tennant should have agreed with your suggestion.’
‘Agreed? He nearly bit my hand off,’ Sheila told her, with what Charlotte suspected was an exaggeration. ‘I only mentioned it idly really, as you do, but he insisted that I tell him more about the house and the more I told him, the more he seemed to like the idea.’
‘He might, but I don’t!’ Charlotte retorted.
‘Well, he’s going to see about getting a tenancy agreement drawn up,’ Sheila continued. ‘It seems that, because they deal with rented property such a lot in London, he knows a solicitor who’s familiar with the ins and outs of such agreements. He said he’d call round with it tomorrow.’
Charlotte stared at her. She couldn’t believe what was happening.
‘Look, why don’t you sleep on it before making any decision?’ Sheila counselled. ‘He struck me as being very pleasant…and very trustworthy.’
‘Well, I’m certainly not worried that he’s going to be driven mad with lust for me,’ Charlotte told her forthrightly, making Sophy giggle.
‘Well, what are you worried about, then?’ Sheila asked her.
For someone who was normally so astute, Sheila was being remarkably obtuse. Surely it was obvious why Charlotte didn’t want the man living with her? He was her competitor, for one thing, and for another…well, for another… Well, she just would not feel comfortable about sharing her home with such a very male man, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to voice these feelings to her friends.
‘Look, think it over, and if you still feel tomorrow that you don’t want him as a lodger then I promise I’ll tell him,’ Sheila suggested.
‘Very magnanimous of you,’ was Charlotte’s sour response. She’d no intention of changing her mind, no matter what Sheila might think, and she’d have preferred her friend to telephone Oliver Tennant and tell him her decision right away, but Sheila was behaving as though the matter was settled, leaving her little option but to grudgingly accept her suggestion or telephone him herself.
She wasn’t sure why she should feel it was impossible for her to do that; she only knew that it was.
For the rest of the day she could not concentrate properly on what she was doing. Leaving Sophy in Sheila’s charge, she went off to value a pair of semi-detached cottages belonging to a local farm. With so much mechanisation and less need for agricultural workers, the cottages had been empty for some time. Now the farmer wanted to sell them.
They were in a very dilapidated state, nearly a mile off the main road, with no gas and no mains drainage. With planning consent to turn them into one larger house, and an offer from the farmer to supply some land with them, they might just appeal to someone with enough money and enthusiasm to take on the job of remodelling them, but Charlotte doubted that she would be able to sell them as two separate homes.
The farmer proved surly when informed of her misgivings. Typically, he wanted to achieve the most money for the least output, and Charlotte wasn’t surprised when he told her that he was going to try ‘yon new agent’, adding insultingly, ‘Women…they don’t understand nothing about business.’
Charlotte was furious, but hid her anger, saying smoothly that of course it was his decision. She couldn’t regret losing the sale—the farmer would have been an awkward client to deal with—but she couldn’t help acknowledging that without Oliver Tennant to turn to the farmer might have been more disposed to consider her suggestions.
Well, good luck to him, and good luck to Oliver Tennant if he told the farmer that he would be able to secure sales as two separate houses. She didn’t envy him that task, she thought sourly, and yet the farmer’s parting insult about her sex rankled, and for some reason as she drove home it was Oliver Tennant who was the object of her acid thoughts of the male sex and its arrogance, rather than the farmer who had made the comment.
The Volvo was still playing up, and on impulse, instead of returning to the office, she drove to the local country town some twenty miles away where she knew there were several reputable dealers.
She wasn’t sure just what sort of car she should get—something reliable…another Volvo perhaps, but a smaller model.
The salesman proved to be very informative and helpful. When she left the showrooms half an hour later, she had several brochures and a fairly clear idea of what she was going to buy.
On the way home she had to pass another car showroom. This one had several immaculate gleaming Jaguar saloons in its window. She sighed a little enviously, looking at them. The Oliver Tennants of this world might be able to afford such unashamed luxury, but she could not.
He must be desperate indeed for somewhere to live if he was prepared to consider lodging with her, but then, she reflected contemptuously, he probably considered that she would make a far better landlady than someone like Vanessa, whose ego would constantly need massaging, and who would expect far more from him than the simple payment of a set sum of money each month. It would be obvious to him that a woman like herself would never dare to imagine that a man like him would consider her in any remote way desirable.
Sheila would describe him rather old-fashionedly as ‘eligible’. Charlotte knew that he wasn’t married, but he was a man in his mid-thirties, who must surely have had at least one long-standing relationship, and perhaps more. She wondered if there was anyone special in his life right now, and then caught herself up. What possible concern could that be of hers?
Frowning fiercely, she forced herself to confront what was in her mind. All right, so he was a very attractive man, a man to whom she seemed to be far from as immune as she should be, but the matter started and ended right there. She had long ago learned the folly of dreaming impossible dreams, and anyway she was far too sensible these days to imagine that loving someone and being loved by them was enough to guarantee perfect happiness.
Marriage, especially these days, was something that required hard work and complete commitment from both parties. When she had finally abandoned any idea of marrying, she had consoled herself with the knowledge that even the best relationships of her friends were sometimes fraught and difficult. If she did not have the closeness that came from sharing her life with a partner, then neither did she have the trauma and pain that such closeness inevitably brought.
When she eventually left the office an hour after Sheila and Sophy had gone home, it had started to rain. The house, when she turned into the drive, seemed to lift an unprepossessing and austere outline towards the sky. The rhododendron-lined drive, pitted with holes in places, suddenly seemed forbidding and almost frightening. Until this morning, she had never even thought about the house’s remoteness, nor the fact that the drive so effectively sheltered it off the road, but this evening for some reason she was acutely conscious of the silence around her—conscious of it and vaguely alarmed by it.
Once she had stopped the car, she didn’t linger, but instead hurried to the back door, suddenly anxious to get inside the house. When she was in, although it was something she rarely did, she found herself slipping on the security chain as she closed the door.
Heavens, she wasn’t going to turn into one of those timid types expecting the worst to happen at every corner, was she?
While she waited for the coffee to filter, she played back the messages on her answering machine.
The joiner had telephoned to say that he was able to start the kitchen sooner than planned, and there was a message from the decorator Sheila had recommended. She would phone him later and ask if he could obtain the wallpaper she liked.
As she drank her coffee and ate her evening meal, she found herself wondering what Oliver Tennant would think of her new kitchen. Would he find her choice of décor overly feminine or…?
Abruptly she put down her coffee-mug, revolted by her own weakness. It didn’t matter what the man thought. For one thing, he wasn’t going to get an opportunity to voice his thoughts, because first thing tomorrow morning she was going to make Sheila telephone him and retract that idiotic suggestion that he become her lodger.
After she had finished her meal, she stared disconsolately out into the rainswept garden. She had planned to do some work in it this evening. Whenever she felt on edge or bad-tempered she found an hour or so spent pulling up weeds excellent therapy. Tonight she was denied that release, and instead she wandered aimlessly around the house.
It was a family home really, with its large high-ceilinged rooms and its funny little passages…a house that should be filled with noise and laughter.
When she walked into the drawing-room that was never used, she sniffed the stale air with distaste and went to open the french windows.
The fresh, clean scent of the rain filled her nostrils as she eyed the dull beige walls and carpet with distaste. Why had she never noticed before how hideous this room was? She looked up at the ceiling, trying to imagine the plasterwork picked out in different colours, and then studying the rather attractive period fireplace. This room faced south, and she tried to imagine it decorated in shades of soft yellows and blues…
Restlessly she left the drawing-room and walked round the house, ending up outside the door to her father’s old suite of rooms. Beyond the door lay the room her father had used as his study-cum-sitting-room at the start of his illness, his bedroom and his bathroom.
Since his death she hadn’t been inside them. The vicar’s wife had arranged for his clothes and personal effects to be removed, and Mrs Higham had gone through the rooms giving them a thorough clean. Now, with her hand on the door, Charlotte felt a deep shudder of pain go through her.
Their relationship should have been so different, she acknowledged. She had loved her father, but had never been able to express that love because she had always known that she was not the son he had wanted. On the surface they had got on well enough, but under that surface there had been a distance between them, a lack of closeness which had hurt her deeply when she was child, but as she had grown up she had learned to accept it, just as she had learned to accept that in her father’s eyes she would never be what he wanted.
Was that why she had always felt so inferior and vulnerable with other men—because she expected them to reflect her father’s disappointment in her?
It was a disturbing thought, and one she did not want to pursue. It was too late to go back now, looking for motives, for reasons to explain away her lack of appeal for the male sex. She had long ago come to accept that she was the way she was. Too late now to look back and wonder if perhaps things could have been different.
Gordon had after all laid it on the line for her when they had broken their engagement. He did not find her desirable, he had told her; he liked her as a person, but as a woman… Those words were still buried inside her, sharp slivers of steel that still ached and hurt, that had left a wound long after she had got over the loss of Gordon himself.
When she finally steeled herself to walk into her father’s rooms she was disconcerted by her lack of emotional reaction. They were simply rooms, furnished with heavy but good furniture, their décor dull and uninspiring, although her father’s desk and the comfortable armchair behind it gave one room a certain austere masculinity.
She tried to picture Oliver Tennant sitting behind that desk, holding her breath tensely, relieved when she found it impossible to conjure up his image and superimpose it on to her father’s chair. In the morning she would insist on Sheila’s telephoning him and telling him that it was impossible for him to lodge with her.
Her mind firmly made up, she went back downstairs. She had some paperwork to do, which would fill her time far more profitably than mooching about the house the way she was doing at the moment.