My brother Luc came home from school for the long summer holiday, a polished, young Englishman of fourteen with fluid foreign hands and eyes, a combination which went instantly to the head of my mother’s parlour-maid. And he at once informed me that he had no intention of returning to Hexingham.
‘Just not my scene any more, Liv – honestly, old girl.’
‘Liv!’
‘Well, Olivia then – dear sister, if you like – although it’s rather the thing, you know, right now, to use pet names. All the chaps do it.’
‘What fun.’
‘A crashing bore, actually, like the rest of that mausoleum. So it’s settled then, is it, old sport – that I’m not going back, I mean?’
‘Luc …’ And the tone of my voice warned him that whatever I was going to say next, I meant it. ‘You’ll go back to Hexingham if I have to drag you there by the scruff of your neck.’
He smiled, using an amount of charm that would have dazzled me had I been anyone else.
‘Do you know, Liv, I wonder – these days – if you’re up to that kind of thing. I’ve grown, you see, quite a bit.’
‘It makes no difference, Luc. You may be taller, but I’m fiercer you see – quite a bit.’
Yet his calm insistence that he would not return to school persisted through July and into August, worrying Madelon whom he tormented with wild schemes of expeditions to Equatorial jungles, Arabian deserts, New York – knowing she was the only one who would believe him – and certainly getting in my mother’s way.
‘Talk to him,’ I asked Robin, but he lifted his shoulders with what, for him, was exasperation.
‘I should think I’m the very last person to convince him. I wouldn’t send a stray cat to Hexingham, much less my brother.’
‘Talk to him,’ I urged Mr Greenlaw, who had brought up two sons of his own and ought to understand. But Mr Greenlaw did not hold with these ‘damn fancy schools’where they taught a lad anything but how to earn a living and he had nothing to offer but a possible situation in the Ironworks which was totally unacceptable to Luc.
‘Could you – do you think you could possibly talk to him?’ I asked my grandfather, with bated breath, the hope that he might one day extend just one hand to me still flowing strong. ‘He’d listen to you, grandfather.’
‘I fear not, my dear. We have no language in common.’
And when I opened my mouth to ask again, persistent to the last, his face tightened with its habitual spasm of distaste and he said curtly, ‘He is one of your people, Olivia, not mine. You must accept your responsibilities, as I do.’
‘Am I not your responsibility, grandfather?’
We were standing in the library at Clarrow, the August day entering through the long windows in shafts of amber and gold, showing me the dusty crevices of his face, the stoop of his shoulders, the veins and knuckles piercing the brittle skin of his hand as he tapped irritable fingers against the windowsill.
‘That might well be a cry from the heart, Olivia. If so, I regret that I cannot answer it.’
‘Oh yes you could if you …’
He raised the hand which may have lost its grip but in which authority still remained.
‘That will do, Olivia. You will serve no purpose by distressing yourself. Yes – I owe you far more than I have given. In fact, you have the distinction, I believe, of being the only person I have ever deliberately failed. That may or may not console you.’
‘It doesn’t.’
‘Then – it does not. I am not a capricious man, Olivia. I have my reasons. Should you meet Amyas on your way out would you be good enough to ask him to come and see me?’
Amyas? But no, Luc would not listen to Amyas, Hexingham having taught him to recognize his social inferiors. While Andrew Rexford’s opinion of public schools was even lower than Mr Greenlaw’s. There was Max, of course, who was often in Bradeswick now, keeping an eye on my grandfather but I would not have cared to ask Max for a drink of water had I been dying of thirst in the desert, much less his advice on the best way to handle my wayward brother. Yet, as luck would have it, Max was present on the morning I arrived in Aireville Terrace to find Madelon in tears, my mother biting her lips and frowning – a bad sign, in her, since frowning, which could permanently crease the forehead, was usually to be avoided at all costs – to be told that Luc had run away.
‘Run where? Has he any money?’
‘Well, of course, his letter didn’t say, but I rather think he has – just a little. Madelon’s pin-money and a few pounds I keep in the kitchen drawer to settle the butcher’s bills.’
‘He stole?’
‘Well, of course, dear. You can’t imagine that I would have given?’
‘He didn’t steal from me,’ whispered Madelon. ‘It was lent to him, and it wasn’t much anyway. But then he won five pounds last night from Mr Greenlaw at cards, while you were at the theatre, mamma.’
‘So,’ said Max, very much amused. ‘We know he has the train fare to London. And I know where I’d be heading, at his age.’
Of course. My brother’s route and his intentions were equally clear to me. The early train from Bradeswick to Leeds where he could pick up the London express. And then a life of adventure and squalor following in his father’s footsteps, seedy hotels, shady deals, turning a quick and usually short-lived profit on anything that came to hand, a card-game, a horse, a gullible woman. I would not have it. I would go now to Leeds and put a stop to it.
‘I see nothing to be done,’ sighed my mother, her resignation suggesting that she had found him rather too much for her of late.
‘We shall never see him again,’ sobbed Madelon.
Oh yes we would. He would come back regularly enough, if only to borrow Madelon’s pin-money again and whatever he could scrounge from my mother when all else failed; turning up on their doorstep – my doorstep, really – at odd hours, remaining for odd intervals, his creditors not far behind. I would not allow him to live like that. But in order to stop him I would have to catch him first and as quickly as possible, preferably in Leeds before the departure of the London train. And since this was no longer a personal matter of dying of thirst in the desert, but of Luc who must not be allowed to reach the anonymity of a capital city, I turned to the person who could help me most.
‘Max – that is your Daimler standing outside?’
He nodded, betraying by not one flicker of an eyelid his perfect understanding. ‘One may safely assume so, since there are only two or three other motor vehicles in Bradeswick, none of them Daimlers.’
‘Could it get me to Leeds in time for the London train?’
‘It could. If I happened to be going there.’
He wanted me to plead with him, of course. But – knowing him, knowing me – that was only to be expected and I would not think kindly of myself afterwards if I lost Luc because I had been too stubborn to say please and smile.
I smiled, therefore, with all the false brilliance of Luc himself, lowered my eyelids for good measure and gave a lingering little sigh. ‘Max – I would be so grateful.’
‘I very much doubt it.’
‘But you will take me?’
‘Naturally. I wouldn’t miss the fun and fireworks for the world.’
I had had no dealings with motor cars since just before my marriage when Robin had borrowed a vehicle he had thought very thrilling, to take me driving and flirting on Clarrow Moor. And despite the greater luxury of Max’s claret-coloured Daimler, the first half-mile was quite enough to convince me that I still did not entirely believe in this new method of transport, having no faith at all in either its performance or its future. The noise and odour of the engine still seriously incommoded me. I felt exposed, vulnerable, increasingly sick and instead of the exclamations of wonder and delight which most motorists seemed to think their due, I could do nothing but tie on my hat, grit my teeth and endure. An attitude which was difficult enough to sustain through the quiet suburbs of Bradeswick, but well-nigh impossible as we roared into the centre of Leeds where considerably more that Bradeswick’s three motor cars coughed and choked and jockeyed for position among the haphazard traffic of these industrial streets, the patient, ponderous shire animals dragging their coal-carts and wagons heavy-laden with raw wool or finished pieces; broken-winded hacks between the sinister shafts of the cabs one preferred not to hire since one never knew what drunken or infected persons had gone before; the nervous dancing hooves of thoroughbreds drawing showy private carriages; a sudden, solitary bicycle darting through the mêlée like a swallow; the constant ebb and flow of men and women on foot, ambling between the vehicles at will, in blissful ignorance of the fact that the motor car, which accelerated easily enough, was far more difficult to stop.
‘You are not at ease, Olivia?’
‘On the contrary, Max – perfectly easy.’
‘Why do you tell so many lies, my darling?’
‘They are not lies. They are called good manners.’
‘Your cousin Alys adores motoring.’
‘She had better not let her mother catch her.’
‘My dear,’ he said, narrowly avoiding – or so it seemed to me – the passengers who were swarming like harassed bees around an already overcrowded tram. ‘Sibylla Blackwood would be only too delighted to catch me with her daughter anywhere preferably in circumstances delicate enough to bring on an attack of wedding bells. You should know that.’
‘Yes. But you wouldn’t, would you, Max? I mean, you wouldn’t succumb to that sort of attack …?’
Could he, indeed, succumb even if he would? For I had always tended to believe not only that his wealth was of the kind to melt away just when one needed it most, but that he already had a wife.
‘I don’t know, Olivia,’ he said, turning into the station-yard by the simple process of driving in front of everything that stood in his way, ‘What would you advise? If I settle in the neighbourhood, as I may well do, if I set myself up with a good house and a good stable then I would need a hostess – a resident companion – who in this provincial society, would have to be a wife. And Alys is an original, one must give her that. It might be interesting to see what the right clothes and jewels could do. If one displayed all that silver hair and ivory skin to advantage, one could make her an ornament fit for any man’s table.’
My table, I thought, my house, Alys taking my place at Clarrow as had always been intended. I was not resigned to it. I would simply do it, when the time came, would take Max’s money and hand over the keys and hope, with all my heart, I would bear no grudge, not even for one bitter moment, against Robin.
‘So you will sell the house to me, Olivia?’
‘What makes you think so?’
He stopped the car and, smiling, helped me down as if I had been a princess alighting from a silk-lined carriage drawn by a team of white horses; which was, in fact, the way I most liked to see myself.
‘Because I usually get my way with women.’
‘How very monotonous for you, Max.’
He laughed, gave his light bow, looking at me with the concentrated enjoyment I had seen in him at the card-table.
‘Touché – at least for now, Olivia. Shall we find your brother?’
The station was full of steams and vapours and hurrying, anonymous faces, the London train standing in proud silence with half an hour yet to go before the start of its majestic, slightly condescending progress South.
‘Where would he be?’ I asked Max, meaning ‘Where would you be in his place?’, not liking the resemblance between them but unable to ignore it.
‘Drinking a brandy in the hotel, having eaten an excellent luncheon.’
‘He can’t afford it.’
‘Olivia, my pet, you must know a little thing like that wouldn’t stop him. And in a moment or two I imagine you’ll see him sauntering along the platform to his compartment – first class, of course.’
Of course; a handsome, elegant young gentleman from a distance, nonchalant and altogether at his ease, unless one happened to know that he was fourteen years old and had nothing in his pockets but Madelon’s pin-money, sadly depleted, one supposed, after luncheon with wine and brandy at a Leeds hotel. An Emil Junot to the life, with a whisper of my mother’s subtler fascination and the surface polish of Hexingham. A potent blend indeed, displayed to full advantage as he gallantly assisted what looked like a governess and a family of very personable young ladies into a first-class compartment and then joined them. And as we watched him through the open carriage door, reclining elegantly in his seat, engaging what seemed already to be an audience of adoring females in ready conversation, Max lit one of his thin black cigars and, his eyes narrowing speculatively through a veil of smoke, murmured ‘The young devil. Shall I give him a hundred pounds and see if he can make his fortune?’
‘I believe you would.’
‘Yes. I believe so too.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Max.’
‘All right. I shall stand here then and watch, with considerable interest, just how you mean to go about extricating him from that train.’
‘Oh – I rather thought that you …?’
‘Oh no. He is fully my height and something like twenty years younger. Your game Olivia. Absolutely yours, my pet.’
I had not thought of this. The urgency had been to get here before the departure of the train and now, having achieved that much – having risked life and limb in that abominable motor car to do it – I had no intention of standing tamely on the platform and waving a tear-stained handkerchief as my brother sped away. But what? I walked down the platform, no doubt looking brisk and bold but without a single constructive notion in my mind. Something would come to me. It would have to. For unless I handled the matter skilfully he would only run away again tomorrow.
‘Ah, Luc, there you are,’ I called out in English, beaming brightly, and then, in rapid French so that his female companions – and hopefully Max – would not understand, I informed him in no uncertain terms that before I lost what patience was left to me, he had better come home.
‘Olivia – must you meddle?’
Another voice had spoken those words to me several times. Robin’s. And my answer remained the same. ‘It is for their good.’ This time I was in no doubt of it.
‘Yes, Luc. I must. And there are two ways of going about it, darling. You can make some excuse to your friends, and saunter away – with me – to Max’s car, and they can spend the journey to London in a flutter about what a delightful young man you are. Or I can tell them that you’re fourteen, that you’ve run away from home, having cheated your sister out of her pin-money and stolen from your widowed mother. Well, she has been widowed once or twice hasn’t she and it’s not very grand, you know, to make off with the widow’s mite. These girls would laugh their heads off about that and you never know just who they might tell, or when you might meet them again – do you, Luc? Or just who might be listening in the station-yard when I start to tell the tale, because I’d raise my voice very loud and I’d have to break down and cry, of course, and wring my hands quite a lot – you know?’
He knew.
‘You wouldn’t, Olivia.’ But he was nobody’s fool and already, beneath his horror, I could sense the grudging beginnings of mirth.
‘Don’t be an idiot Luc. You know quite well I would.’
‘I won’t go back to Hexingham.’
‘We can talk about that – all right?’
‘All right – but don’t assume that you’ll get your way.’
‘Would I do that?’
He grinned, his resistance collapsing so suddenly that I wondered if he had been staging a protest rather than taking flight and had perhaps been rather more pleased to see me than he cared to acknowledge.
‘My apologies, ladies,’ he said, in his impeccable Hexingham drawl, ‘I fear our delightful journey is not to be – not today at any rate. For this person – my sister’s French governess, actually – has been sent with a message that I’m needed at home.’
And making his bows, accepting from these pretty, totally deceived young ladies, their wishes that the news was not bad and their hopes of meeting again, he raised a courteous hat and descended from the train.
‘Have a cigar, old chap,’ said Max.
‘Thanks old chap, I will.’
And they walked off together, two men about town, two boulevardiers, smoking their leisurely cigars, glancing in cool appraisal at every woman who passed by; leaving their French governess to follow after them a step or two behind.
It was quite in accordance with my mother’s character that she had not waited for us, having, after all, her social engagements to fulfil – her public who could not be let down – and she had gone out as usual, leaving Madelon, who was much better at it, to weep and worry and rejoice when we brought Luc home. Mother would be back for five o’clock tea accompanied by ‘friends’, but Luc’s crisis was solved long before that by an invitation in the late morning post to spend a fortnight with a schoolmate of his in Harrogate, a wealthy boy whose family had thoroughbreds to ride and a car to drive. Within ten minutes Luc no longer desired to take the London train. He wished to go to Harrogate to ride Tom Whitaker’s Arab mare and have a look at the Whitaker sisters who played tennis and danced and were a great deal livelier than Madelon who, unable to cope with stress so easily as mother, had started to cough.
I put her to bed with the hot milk and honey Victorine had recommended, sent Luc to pack his bags for Harrogate, had a note taken round to Robin’s office asking him to meet me here in time for the afternoon train home, and returned to the drawing room, surprised to see Max still there.
‘Are you waiting for my mother?’
‘Should I be?’
‘Oh, don’t be clever, Max – just a simple answer to a simple question is all I need.’
Suddenly I was very tired, I had stumbled through these domestic crises all my life, always managing – by trial and error, hit and miss, sheer stubborn refusal to give in – to find a solution. I had waded through murky waters on many occasions, carrying one or another of them on my back, and I had never yet failed, if only just, to reach the shore. I had reached it again today, without disaster but without much satisfaction either. The day which had been so hot and heavy had exhausted me, the drive to Leeds had strained both my stomach and my nerves. The thought of Max as the new squire of Clarrow Fell with Alys as his lady appalled me, infuriated me, hurt me far more than I could admit. Yes, I would sell to him – for Robin – yes – yes – I would do it. But until it became absolutely unavoidable, until my grandfather was dead and buried, I held the decision locked inside my body like a disease with nothing showing, as yet, on the surface. But I was tired now and irritable and wanted Max to go away. He ought to know that. He did know it. But he wanted to stay and, as was to be expected, his own desires were more important to him than mine.
‘So what happens next, Olivia?’
‘About what?’
‘Well, about young master Luc for a start. How do you rate your chances of getting him back to Hexingham?’
‘Excellent.’
‘You mean he’ll do as he’s told.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘He’s quite right, you know. Hexingham is a crashing bore.’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘How can you know that? Because it turns out honourable gentlemen like your husband. It produced me too, you know. So beware. And Luc doesn’t want to be honourable.’
‘I daresay. That’s because he’s young and doesn’t realize …’
‘Realize what? That dishonour doesn’t pay?’ He raised his arms, displaying the impeccable London tailored suit, the pearl stick-pin in his grey silk tie, the diamond on his hand. ‘But it does, my pet. It does.’
‘It may appear so.’
He leaned forward, nearer than I liked, an undeniably attractive odour of expensive cigars and a richly spiced eau de Cologne in my nostrils, enveloping me in the aura of ease and luxury and pleasure; for which purpose such costly fragrances are intended.
‘Olivia, do you still think of me as a walking masquerade? Really? You have known me for three years at least and whatever else I may lack it must be clear that I am never short of money.’
I shrugged, not in the least impressed.
‘I knew a man called Emil Junot much longer than that and there were times when he appeared to be as rich as you.’
He made an impatient gesture with his scarred, jewelled hand and clicked his tongue, dismissing my mother’s third husband – my second stepfather – rather as a top-flight courtesan, secure in the possession of powerful lovers, enduring beauty, a bank vault full of pearls, might dismiss the efforts of a common street-walker, plying her trade for pennies along the waterfront.
‘Oh yes – I have heard all about the famous Emil Junot. Your mother remembers him tenderly. But he has never come my way nor is he likely to. We have nothing in common.’
‘You play the same game.’
‘Yes. I win. He loses. As I just said –’
‘Nobody wins every time.’
But I had sounded truculent, mulish; and smiling, he got up and crossing to the sideboard began to make free with my mother’s decanters and glasses.
‘Sam Greenlaw keeps your mother supplied with an excellent brandy. Will you join me?’
‘At three o’clock in the afternoon? Certainly not.’
But he put the glass on the wine table beside me and after a moment or two I picked it up irritably and drank, the bouquet returning me to the cafés along the boulevard Saint-Germain, into an identity which, whether I cared to admit it or not, had been more truly mine.
‘Smooth as velvet,’ he said, enjoying in its entirety this moment of drinking, the act of tasting and of inhaling this rich aroma and knowing the exact cost of it, turning his glass to the light so that his eyes, too, might have their share of pleasure in the deep amber and gold gently swirling around cut crystal.
‘Beautiful.’ And I nodded morosely, the spirit sending hot little tentacles spreading through my body, removing me a significant distance from Bradeswick.
‘I am financially sound,’ he said suddenly, abrupt as a whiplash.
And just as abruptly I replied ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Why?’ He was not in the least offended. ‘Because I have no premises – no factory with a thousand employees like Sam Greenlaw, no smart suite of chambers in the city with a mahogany desk and a Turkish carpet? You should know better than that. All I need are my wits and a convenient telegraph office – occasionally a fast train.’
‘And a pack of cards.’
He laughed and threw out his hands in the swordsman’s wide gesture of surrender.
‘Marked cards, did you mean to say? No, my pet. No longer. I’ll tell you how it is with men like me, should you care to know?’
‘I know.’
‘I wonder. First of all one makes money, any way one can. Africa, in my case, took care of that. And then one uses that money to make more. Believe me, there’s nothing so effective as one gold piece when it comes to attracting another. Or so it’s always seemed to me. Any kind of gold piece, anywhere one happens to be. I’ll turn my hand to anything, Olivia. Wherever I see a need, I’ll find a way to supply it at a profit. There’s always somebody in some corner of the world who wants something he can’t make or can’t grow and who’ll pay my price. I ship hot-climate fruits to cold-climate countries; French perfumes and silks to the Australian outback where they’ve got plenty of rich women and no rue de la Paix. I ship goats to Corfu because somebody told me about a breed from the Scottish Highlands that would do well there – and it does. I deal in exotic feathers for women’s hats and when the fashion for feathers is over I’ll know about it – because I’ll have kept my eyes and ears open – and I’ll be ready with whatever the designers are wanting next. I deal in chinoiserie, carved ivories, hand-woven carpets, lacquer cabinets, fans, screens, cloisonné vases …’
‘Beads to the natives,’ I said sourly, ‘and guns.’
‘Well, not precisely, although I’ve sold Ashanti spears to British Officers who liked to think they’d won them in battle. And I used to fetch cartloads of Zulu beadwork down from the interior at one time for all the young English ladies at the Cape.’
I had not wished to show interest, had tried hard to stop myself from feeling it but now, a series of colourful images chasing each other through my mind, I could not hold back a laugh of real enjoyment.
‘I’m sorry. I just can’t imagine you on a mule-cart or an ox-cart or whatever, and then squatting down in those native villages haggling for beads – in a bush hat and a dirty shirt and no decent brandy …’
But in fact I could imagine it very well.
‘Olivia,’ he said, quite seriously, ‘I would go anywhere if there is a profit to be made. Absolutely anywhere. And one takes a hip flask, my pet, and an African servant or two to swat the flies and load up the cart and keep the witchdoctors and the missionaries at bay – and a sharp lookout for the headhunters and the husband hunters, both black and white. A good life – for a young man – although one knew plenty who didn’t survive it. Olivia, dear, I do believe I have won your attention. I must tell my African stories more often. They have a mesmerizing effect on Alys too.’
Yes, and the fortune he had made there – if it really existed – in Africa, Madeira, Corfu, the Australian outback, here in Bradeswick from the death of the Queen, would purchase Alys my inheritance, my hopes, the place in life for which I – as surely as my grandfather – had been created. Did I begrudge it to her more than to another? I hoped not. I was going to lose it in any case and if my loss should be her gain I would at least try to be glad. As she had done when I had married Robin.
The afternoon spread around me, sultry, lethargic, the house very quiet, Luc having dashed off to town to spend what remained of Madelon’s money, Madelon herself asleep, I supposed, the maid out somewhere gossiping, telling my mother’s secrets; the garden where Victorine had planted her careful rows of lovage and marshmallow and marjoram, wilting and colourless with the heat. There was no sound, no breath of air reaching me through the open windows, not even the busy, somehow comforting ticking of the drawing-room clock which no one remembered to wind since I had moved away. Would I ever live in this house again? I had been so certain of the future once – in a time that seemed a moment and a hundred years away – that I had begun to think it inevitable. Now – who knew?
‘So, Olivia – are you going to sell to me?’ he asked, reading my mind easily since the question was always between us.
‘No.’ But it was no more than a token resistance and without even waiting for his answer, I said quickly, ‘Why do you want it, Max?’
‘Ah – I believe we are making progress. Because I want it. That is the only reason that matters. You can agree with that?’
Yes. I got up and walked about the room for a moment going nowhere. Trapped. By whom? Myself? And how could I escape such intimate captivity? The truth was – and I must face it – that I could not.
Yes, Max, I will sell.
But the words remained locked in my head, a bitter iron weight upon my tongue.
‘All right, Olivia. I will tell you a little more about it. I came to Clarrow as a young child – you may know that much about me – a very alien child – far more so than you. My mother is half Spanish and half Dutch and I was born in Morocco. Don’t ask me what my parents were doing there. My mother hardly remembers herself – except that she did not enjoy it and there was no money.’
‘Is your mother alive?’
‘Excessively. She lives in my house in Funchal and we get on well enough – now that I no longer need her. When I was five years old she took no persuading to give me away to the Squire. I am not an emotional man – far from it – but just he same I feel a certain rancour. Wouldn’t you?’
Of course. But the feeling uppermost in my mind was fascination, intense curiosity, the beginnings of something like recognition – for who had more appreciation than I of the scars so casually left by cheap lodgings, absent fathers, careless mothers?
‘Yes, I suppose I would be bitter – although they say you were a handful.’
He shrugged, dismissing anything ‘they’may say as hardly meriting his consideration. ‘Well of course I was. I was alone in a foreign country among strangers. The only Englishness about me was my father and no one would talk about him, except I Amyas. He’d do anything for me in those days, good old Amyas, but he couldn’t tell me how my father had died or where my mother had run off to, because he didn’t know. I believe I had a crazy notion that my father was dead just because the Squire refused to talk about him. And so I gave him good reason – or rather bad ones – to keep on talking about me. I wanted his attention; I got it. I even kept it until I was old enough to know he didn’t really have the power to make me disappear by ignoring me. I think you’ll understand.’
I nodded.
‘Now I want his house.’
‘Exactly why?’
‘I want it, Olivia.’
‘It’s not particularly grand.’
‘No, nor even in a particularly healthy condition. But it has something, nevertheless. What would you call it?’
‘I don’t know. I try to ignore it.’
‘Do you succeed?’
I shook my head, finding that we had come face to face on the hearthrug a few inches apart, drawn together by this attraction – ridiculous, unfortunate, illogical, so very strong – for a heap of bricks and mortar, considerably in need of repair in places, which was powerful enough to overrule the plain fact that we did not trust each other.
‘I want it, Olivia. I don’t much care to analyse exactly what it means to me. The wanting is enough. You want it too.’
‘Yes.’
How wonderful, at last, to make that admission, to open that closely guarded door within myself and release such a soaring lark-rise of emotions.
‘Yes – I want it.’
‘Badly?’
‘Badly.’ And I took another step towards him, knowing that this was a kind of love-making, a dangerous indulgence in a shared passion which – because we were male and female and both of us handsome – was rapidly building into a moment of sensuality.
Step back, Olivia.
I had heard of high priestesses in ancient mythology who had made love as an offering to their temple, a form of consecration. Yes indeed. Or was that merely an excuse to enable them to make love with a clear conscience, to acknowledge that women too could feel desire without tenderness or any lasting affection, as men have always been allowed to feel it?
Olivia, do take care.
‘How badly do you want it, Olivia? Tell me.’ And his voice was itself a caress, an invitation; fully understood and deeply felt, to shake off all restraint, to be – if only for a moment – my real imperfect self again; to give free rein – just for one wild gallop – to the facets of my nature I had thought it wise, here in Bradeswick, to conceal.
‘Tell me, Olivia.’
‘Very badly.’
‘And it hurts you?’
‘Yes. It does.’
‘Then you should have waited, shouldn’t you.’
‘For what?’
‘For me, my pet. And then you could have had it all.’
I knew, of course, that he was going to touch me. I knew I was playing with fire and did not care. I wanted him to desire me, not love me, and none of it had anything to do with Robin. The woman who stood here a breath away from Max was not Robin’s wife, not Lavinia’s daughter, or anyone but the raw essence of myself. For the first time in my life I was aware of my own nature in isolation, entirely separate from all influences but my own, and I was intensely curious about it. This, then, was freedom. No one to consider but myself. How very odd. How fascinating. And, while this strange sensation lasted, I could say nothing, do anything I chose.
‘Did you want me to wait?’
‘I would have married you if you had. But one doesn’t let a little thing like marriage ruin one’s appetite. I want the house and I want you. I shall get the house, Olivia – all I need for that is money. And when I have it, I won’t care if the woman who shares it is married to me or to another – so long as she pleases me.’
‘And I please you?’
‘Yes, you do. Like the house pleases me – and pleases you …’
And so we came together, a purely physical meeting, as slowly, I thought, as if I had walked into him in a self-induced trance, his first kiss direct and none too gentle, his body hard, experienced, exciting, a body to which in that same entranced fashion I responded. I had believed Robin to be the personification of Clarrow Fell. How terrible – truly how terrible – that it should be Max.
‘I sent you a message,’ he said, his mouth still on mine. ‘Did you understand?’
‘What? What message?’
‘Victorine’s party. That message. It could have been for you. It still can. Yes, Olivia?’
‘No.’
‘Yes – oh yes, I do think so. You’ve never had a lover, have you, and it’s time now, darling. The house you can’t bear to part with and money to go with it – a lot of money. Yes, Olivia?’
But my sanity returned as quickly as it had left me and I broke free.
‘Good heavens – what on earth are you doing?’
‘Rather well, it seemed to me.’
‘Don’t ever do such a thing again.’
He laughed, neither flustered nor disturbed, nor even out of breath.
‘Olivia, what a ridiculous thing to say. Couldn’t you really see the ideal solution? You had the house, I had the money. If you hadn’t gone rushing into the arms of young Master Esmond …’
‘That’s enough.’
‘– so fast that he didn’t know just what had hit him …’
‘That’s enough.’
‘– then you wouldn’t now be in this sorry state –’
‘Shut up.’
‘You’d be rich enough to please yourself, not Dottie Potterton and Bessie Greenlaw. And at least the poor chap would have his peace of mind.’
I struck out at him hard and encountering nothing but a raised elbow, which hurt my hand, struck again, resorting to a wild flurry of blows none of which came even near to breaking through his guard.
‘Damn you, Max de Haan – absolutely damn you to Hell.’
He caught my wrists in a grip I thought would break them, and dragged me towards him, his intention to kiss me again very plain, my intention to get my teeth or my nails into him just as pressing, until – his eyes flickering around the room, remembering to check his security and guard his back even in a moment of passion I saw wariness, speculation, some spark of warning enter his face. And, spinning round, following his narrow gaze to the open window, I saw Robin on the path beside the herb-garden, watching us and hearing us, the expression on his face neither anger nor hurt, but a tremendous relief.
I could not fail to recognize it. I could never come to terms with it. Nor could I ever forget it. My husband had caught me in the arms of another man and he was glad.