Kay arrived back from Lourdes to find a note from Graham on the noticeboard but although it began with ‘dearest’ and went on to say how disappointed he had been the night she failed to turn up, she could feel none of her usual pleasure at hearing from him. As usual it was unsigned. And no wonder, she thought grimly as she climbed into the crew car. His very caginess about putting things in writing should have warned her from the beginning.
To have things out or not was the thought uppermost in her mind when next evening she slipped into the front seat of the Alfa Romeo. Graham sat at the wheel looking very relaxed and summery in a pale lemon shirt and stone-coloured slacks and his arms were more deeply tanned than Kay had seen them all summer.
‘How was Lourdes?’ he asked when they were speeding along the coast road, the tape- deck softly playing their favourite Country and Western.
Kay shrugged. ‘Very hot and sticky. I was glad to leave it.’ She couldn’t help feeling a twinge of resentment that he knew so much about her movements when she knew so little of his.
‘New York was a nightmare,’ he responded. ‘We went on the roof of the Sheraton Atlantic and almost fried.’
‘You’re very brown,’ she agreed, unable to resist running a finger lightly down his tanned arm. At once, he turned to give her a look of such complicity that a blush mounted to Kay’s cheeks and she took back her hand rather sharply.
‘You got the sun yourself,’ he remarked when later they crossed the railway tracks and strolled down to the water’s edge.
It was a warm bright evening, so mild that after a few moments she slipped off her linen blazer.
‘What a long week it was,’ he sighed, tucking her hand into his arm. ‘Two trips to New York without the pleasure of you in between. Did you miss me?’
‘Yes,’ Kay admitted in a low voice.
Graham touched a caressing finger to her averted cheek. ‘Only yes... in that quiet, unfeeling little voice,’ he teased.
‘It seemed dreadfully long,’ Kay reluctantly admitted. She had made up her mind never to reveal her true feelings to him again. ‘I kept hoping we’d get back in time but when we didn’t...’ She gave a small expressive shrug. ‘I just hoped there was some way you would know what happened.’
‘I waited an hour then I rang your house. Someone told me it would be Saturday before you returned.’
The strand was almost deserted at that hour except for a couple strolling by the water’s edge and a small child busily digging in the sand, her dark curls tied in a ponytail, her cotton dress shoved into matching knickers.
‘Enchanting,’ Graham murmured approvingly. ‘Just like you must have been at that age, my dear.’
His eyes, dark and warmly musing, met hers as Kay was thinking, we could have a child like that. Hastily, she lowered them for fear he would read her thoughts.
It seemed, however, as if his mind was running on similar lines for he said suddenly, ‘That’s the kind of lovely child you’ll have some day, my beautiful Kitty.’
She withdrew her arm feeling suddenly bereft at his choice of pronoun. You not we, she thought sadly. She would have walked a little way from him but he took her arm again and held it firmly against him.
‘You’re cross with me,’ he said, sensing her constraint. ‘Did I say something to offend you?’
‘Of course not,’ Kay’s tone was brusque while inwardly she kept telling herself she was being unreasonable to expect anything else from him. He never could say the words she so longed to hear. How could he? She asked herself forlornly. He wasn’t free.
‘Was it because of the child?’ he asked in gentler voice.
‘She was a pretty little thing but could never come near to you, believe me.’
Kay could almost have laughed at the rueful anxiety in his tone. It was so near and yet so far from the mark! As if she could be jealous of so little a girl. She shook her head, not wanting him to probe deeper and perhaps arrive at the true reason for her downcast spirits.
With a slightly perplexed frown he stared into her eyes and said softly, ‘Whatever it is, I hope I’m forgiven.’
Kay returned his glance shyly. ‘It was nothing,’ she said.
Suddenly it did seem nothing compared to the bliss of standing in the circle of his arm and seeing that divine look of concern in his eyes. What if he were married? It wasn’t his fault if his wife drove him to look elsewhere for love. Penny Norton had suggested as much and she seemed to have good reason to know the circumstances. Even in her thoughts, Kay couldn’t bring herself to name Captain Pender’s wife. It made her too real somehow, too much of the ice queen, Penny suggested.
‘It was nothing, Graham,’ she again
By his sudden smile she knew the sound of his name on her lips gave him pleasure. ‘Say it again,’ he urged with that smiling look. When she did, he caught her to him and closed her mouth with a long kiss.
All Kay’s earlier desire to have things outvanished as they continued hand-in-hand over the sand. Unknowingly she had slipped into another phase of her relationship with Captain Pender. Without fully analysing what it might mean for her, she had subconsciously accepted his married state and might never have referred to it, at least not voluntarily, if something had not happened soon afterwards which brought matters to a head.
As they went into the Sanditops Hotel for their usual nightcap, Graham gave a sharp exclamation and hurried her out again. Turning her head, Kay had just time to see a couple seated across the room stare curiously after them. Nothing was said for a few moments. Then, almost at the car, Captain Pender confessed in a low voice that the couple across the bar were his in-laws.
Kay winced and then, unable to bear the thought of hearing the rest of what he had to say, sitting stiffly and unnaturally in the car (and maybe run the risk of being driven home never to see him again), begged in panic, ‘Oh please... please let’s go back down to the beach.’
Partly understanding, Graham nodded. Observing her shiver and hug her arms to her chest, he caught up the car rug and brought it with him.
As they went back through the barley field he gave her a rather hang-dog look and said haltingly, ‘I know it was wrong not to tell you before but I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you. I did try in the beginning to keep away from you, you may remember. God knows, I did my best.’
And how I prayed you’d come back, thought Kay miserably.
They crossed over the railway tracks and stepped down on the beach once more. Overhead, the sky had turned to navy and was edged with paler streaks of cobalt. In the shelter of two rocks, on a patch of beach grass, Graham laid the car rug, then seating himself a little way off, continued in a grim voice.
‘Of course, I realise now if I’d been more honest I could have stopped this... this,’ he waved a hand helplessly searching for a suitable word to describe what existed between them, came up with ‘infatuation...’ Clearly dissatisfied, he struck it out in favour of ‘loving passion... On my part at any rate,’ he quickly added, letting her out but clearly wishing to believe it was reciprocated.
Oh but it was, Kay thought fervently, he must surely know it was. She gazed wistfully at his aloof profile and longed for him to come and sit beside her.
‘My marriage hasn’t been particularly happy, not for a long time,’ Graham told her in a low voice, ‘but I suppose it’s no worse than a lot of marriages.’ He paused, then said a little wretchedly; ‘God knows there was love in the beginning but somewhere along the way the special quality went out of it. No one’s fault, my wife has had her own share of trouble...’
Kay winced. How appallingly it hurt to hear him speak like this.
‘Nerves and so on... which I prefer not to go into. Perhaps we might have separated if it hadn’t been for our two sons. As it is we lead fairly separate lives.’
He shrugged and fell silent, thinking of Jeremy and Nicholas. Those two meant more to him than anything in the world. They filled him with a sense of joy and the kind of fulfilment that his relationship with Sile never had, and never would. He felt a sudden pang realising that his present actions might lose him their unquestioning love and, at the same time, a thrill of panicking recognition that what he had embarked on so cautiously at first with the girl beside him, had become so vitally necessary to him now.
Kay patted the rug, ‘Please,’ she begged, ‘come and sit beside me.’
He was so terrifyingly distant from her, she thought. At any minute he might get up and walk right out of her life.
After a moment’s hesitation, he came over and dropped down wordlessly beside her. He lit a cigarette and gazed abstractedly at the darkening horizon.
‘I knew you were married,’ Kay blurted, feeling that if he thought she had willingly continued to meet him while knowing the true state of affairs, it might relieve some of the guilt he clearly left at deceiving her.
‘You knew!’ he looked at her, unconvinced.
‘Yes, for quite a while,’ she lied. ‘I shared a flight with Penny Norton and...’ Graham cut sharply across her. ‘What did she say to you?’
‘N...nothing,’ Kay stammered, taken aback by his fierce expression. Whatever about Penny’s declared fondness for Graham, it didn’t seem now as though he returned her regard. ‘I overheard her discussing crew members, that’s all.’
She could have cried for the severity of his expression but it only lasted a second. Then his features relaxed and when he smiled that devastating smile of his, she felt almost dizzy with relief.
‘Forgive me. I’m not angry with you.’ He caught her hand contritely and bent his dark head to kiss it. ‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ he said wearily, ‘How you must wish you’d never set eyes on me.’
‘Oh no,’ Kay’s voice cracked slightly on the word, glad only that she hadn’t caused that grim, unforgiving expression. ‘I could never wish that, no matter what.’
She had no guile, attempted no subterfuge to hide her true feelings from him. ‘You darling!’
At once his arms were around her drawing her close and there was no hint of anything but tenderness in his expression as he bent over her. His kisses bruised her lips and throat and something wild in her leaped to meet his passion. Her slim body pressed against him as they lay on the rug and her arms were silken ropes holding him to her, her satin smooth shoulder a haven for his aching forehead. Screened by the rocks, they lay in the sandy hollow under the dark canopy of the sky, the hush hush of the waves advancing and receding behind them.
Supposing someone comes, was Kay’s half-formed thought, succeeded by, I don’t care, Oh I don’t care, as he removed the last of her clothing. Shyly, yet intoxicated by his eyes taking in the whole lovely length of her, she lay like some pearly mermaid washed up on the shores of his kingdom.
‘How beautiful you are,’ he murmured. ‘A true Aphrodite.’
He traced the swell of her breasts and stomach with a slow caressing hand.
‘No,’ she whispered in answer to a solicitous enquiry as to whether she was cold.
She felt quite warm in fact ad strangely without shame, her nudity all the more deeply felt as still fully dressed, he bent to force her mouth apart with kisses. She was fancifully reminded of a Velasquez painting in which a swooning buxom maiden is ravished by a nobleman still attired in cloak and sword, and felt further aroused by the image. At the same time, she was conscious of the exhibitionist impulse to impishly run, to be chased and borne to the ground. But when he had set aside his shirt and pants and lowered his hard muscled body on to hers, even while she became more excited, Kay grew afraid.
‘I can’t,’ she whispered.
At once he moved away, and burying his face in her neck, murmured soothingly, ‘Don’t worry, darling. I won’t do anything.’
She relaxed against him and enjoyed the comforting feeling of flesh upon flesh and his hands roaming freely over her body beneath cover of the rug he had pulled up cosily about them.
Dave sat before the television some evenings later taking a break from his studies but his thoughts were not on the screen. He was disturbed by certain remarks his mother had made earlier about Kay, and he was mulling them over in his mind.
‘So it looks very like he’s married,’ she had said, at her most irritatingly obscure. ‘What are we talking about?’
‘Kay... your air hostess friend. She’s having an affair with a married man. I mean it’s obvious. A man like that so good-looking and prosperous with an expensive sports car and all - according anyway to Ginny Halpin - doesn’t get to that age without being snapped up.’
Dave stirred restlessly. If Kay was in love - he winced at the word - he supposed it must be with some married pilot. Somehow it hurt more than he thought possible picturing her in the arms of such a man. But there could be no future in it, he consoled himself. At least that was something.
Lately, Dave hadn’t seen much of Kay. The last time was the day she had been made permanent with Celtic Airways. He had happened to call round that evening and she had delightedly told him her news. Florrie had been there too and the three of them had gone round to the pub to celebrate.
‘What about you?’ he had smilingly asked the fair-haired girl as the three of them linked arms along the road. ‘Are you still in limbo?’
‘Afraid so,’ Florrie grinned, but after their recent letter of commendation she was happy about her chances.
Dave liked Florrie, and only he favoured dark-haired beauties he might even have fallen for her. Now he supposed that Kay could be considered to be fully launched on her career. Secretly, he had hoped she might have got over her obsession with flying, but if anything she seemed more enamoured than ever. Certainly it seemed to suit her. That night he had never seen her look prettier or happier. Because she was in love?
Suddenly, Dave decided to abandon his study plan for the night and go round to see her. A month earlier he had sat the first part of his accountancy exams and judged he had done fairly well. Soon he would be hard at it again, he told himself, but in the meantime he owed himself a break.
In his bedroom, he gave in to a sudden impulse and stripped off what he was wearing to change into a new sports shirt and smartly creased pants. He slapped on some of the scented after-shave Kay had given him for Christmas - he hadn’t got around yet to opening the one she had brought him back from Spain. Must be getting commission on the stuff, he thought in amusement.
As he walked briskly up Carrick Road, the heady scents came intermittently on the gentle breeze, reminding him of other summers. In another few days it would be July. He was almost at Kay’s house when he became aware of a white sports car parked at the kerb. At the wheel lounged a dark-haired, exceptionally handsome man. As their eyes made contact, Dave felt a shock of recognition. It could only be the married pilot, he thought, and felt a rush of fury. The man was so damned good-looking and self-assured.
With a grim set to his jaw, Dave strode on past the house, all thought of seeing Kay that night gone from his head. He made his solitary round of the block and returned home to study.