The brief bare ground of the squatters’ camp between all the fields of grain had flown by long ago. It had been possible to discern the scorch mark where the flames had consumed a small outhouse and crept painfully close to the line of tin houses. No wonder the residents had been alarmed.
It made me ask a little tentatively, ‘Did the men from the camp have anything to add when you spoke to them in the field?’
The reason why my question was posed awkwardly was that he hadn’t yet said anything. I suppose I’d been expecting quick reassurances now that we were in the car and that he would say something, anything, to restore our peace after that odd encounter. But he hadn’t. He’d done nothing except set this car at the freedom of the main road to Gloucester and turn those alert eyes to the task of negotiating the thin traffic ahead, as if I wasn’t even here. I felt as if I’d done something terrible in leaving her and that in the process I’d somehow betrayed him too.
Finally he spoke and his answer to my question about the source of the bonfire was a sharp sideways glance followed by a swift shake of his head and then, ‘They didn’t say much, no. They were thinking about getting down to my father’s meeting.’ The car checked with a hard touch of brakes for a turn before accelerating again. We’d passed beyond my knowledge of this area. Our speed wasn’t even close to reckless but beneath his hands the car – his brother’s car – was loving this chance to prove its power.
Unnervingly, I wasn’t entirely sure that the thought wasn’t uppermost in his mind too because he chose that moment to ask, ‘Do you drive?’
‘I can drive. My brother’s friend taught me in his Sunbeam coupé. It was a dream.’
My tone betrayed my unease. I wasn’t quite sure whether the question had been designed to permit me to introduce the awful subject of Mrs Abbey’s last words. But I wasn’t brave enough to do it blind. The car abruptly dropped like stone over a deep wooded escarpment so that the wide fields of the Severn Valley spread in a patchwork from the white pillar of a cathedral tower that must have been Gloucester.
‘Runkled.’ Again my driver broke the silence and this time it really didn’t make any sense at all. After a swift sideways glance to catch my stare as I waited for him to give a better cue, he added, ‘You said your change of outfit would be runkled. A combination of wrinkled and rumpled, I presume?’
Oh. It was as if he’d forgotten that we’d had a minor disagreement about a point of vocabulary once before. I’d thought, at the very least, he’d wish to ease the peculiar shame that had run through that confrontation with Mrs Abbey, but I was carrying it with me. I suppose I felt a little like I’d been sullied by the choice I’d had to make and I was waiting for him to say something that would smooth the thoughts away. Instead I was being made to revisit a subject that couldn’t help but make me feel just a fraction smaller.
It took considerable effort to sound normal as I said, ‘I noticed my use of runkled myself and, actually, I’ve thought about it and I’m pretty sure it’s a valid term. I swear I learned that one from someone else.’
‘I’ve never heard it.’
‘In which case,’ I retorted slightly less patiently, ‘it’s a legacy of war.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘Really. And how, may I ask?’
High hedges streaked by and the occasional cottage gleamed grey in the gaps. We were racing along a road that led like a spear straight towards the distant prospect of the heart of the city.
Suddenly energy awoke within me. I fidgeted in my seat so that the leather squeaked. I told him, ‘I believe you’ll find that my grasp of the English language lies abandoned somewhere in an underground station that was doubling as an improvised schoolroom in an air raid. It was accidentally left there after a particularly disrupted – and final – grammar lesson at the age of thirteen and fifty-one weeks. I never went back to claim it.’
The tartness of my reply made a brief touch of what presumably was amusement show at the corners of his mouth. Probably because he could tell it blatantly wasn’t true. The occasional entanglement of my word use was a weakness that was a part of me and stalked me as a faithful reminder of just how endlessly difficult I found it to voice precisely what was in my thoughts. Impatience made me try a little harder.
I asked, ‘Did you see much of my pursuit of that man? Did you come back with Danny from the field in time to see me follow him through your house?’
‘What man?’
It must be said that I really didn’t expect this bland reply. I was, in fact, utterly stupefied. It wasn’t just the absolute denial of what we had shared but the manner of it. His profile was relaxed, calm and conveyed mild curiosity. He steered the car around a bus. Blindly, I clung stubbornly to the thought I had that I was supposed to tell him this. ‘I met that man today in your house when I was looking for your father’s cane. He ran when I spotted him so I followed him out, only you held me back and left Danny to run onwards on his own. Why did you do that?’
‘Why do you think?’
I watched him as I said slowly, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
In truth I hadn’t the faintest idea about any of it. Houses closed in; the vast hangars of an airfield retreated beyond our wing and I barely saw any of them. This wasn’t merely the old confusion of reaching for the right words to convey precisely what I meant. In my mind was the memory of the way he’d steered me as he’d led me quietly back to the house for a chat just so long as he’d thought we were only dealing with imposters and itinerant arsonists. But then Mrs Abbey had appeared on the scene and he’d practically bustled me into his car. I believed I never would quite escape the chill that had possessed the way he had said the word please.
I said carefully, ‘I believe you meant to prevent me from speaking to her, or rather stop her from speaking to me and I thought that was why you brought me along. I thought you meant to explain.’
He didn’t explain though. He negotiated a junction and then, as the first houses of the city closed in, I found that I was suddenly in the midst of a long lecture about the people hereabouts and the River Severn. He paid particular attention to its tidal bore and the local adoration of jellied eels.
It was so mundane, it felt like an insult. As he did it, the man beside me was looking the way he always did and yet also completely unlike himself. He was calm, concentrated and unnervingly attractive, which didn’t seem right at all because it wasn’t like him to capitalise on it. It was as if he’d decided I was a stranger and was tactically evicting me from this scene by any means possible, even to the point of using charm; quite as if I hadn’t myself just been party to the abandonment of a woman with an awful bruise on her face to a lonely and unguarded walk back to her isolated farmstead. He was making absolutely no allowance for my own raging guilt.
It made me say loudly into a pause, ‘Do you know, I’m increasingly concerned that despite everything, Mrs Abbey might be the victim of this thing, not the perpetrator of it.’
That got though. ‘Fine,’ he said at last in a tone that implied we might have been bickering about the availability of eggs. ‘Since you clearly are determined to make a point here, I really ought to let you get it over and done with. Do you want to ask me if I hit her?’
He knew I didn’t. He’d just said it for effect. My exclamation came out as though I’d received an act of violence myself. ‘No!’
Then I added gingerly, doubtfully, ‘Did Danny?’
The question provoked a short, hard laugh. ‘You don’t like Hannis much, do you?’
‘I feel as if I can’t get to know him. But you should; he’s your old childhood friend and yet you call him Hannis when you could call him Danny and he doesn’t like it.’
‘Emily, I call him Hannis because, given our respective positions in this place now that we’re grown men, to call him Danny would be to risk dismissing him to the level of old-time Manor servant. Particularly as situations must inevitably still arise when he would have to address me as ‘sir’. Elsewhere we could forget it. Here the use of surnames is the best balance we have. And, anyway, he calls me Cap’n. I doubt you’ll find he means to imply much respect by that.’
While the brief flare of better humour faded, the real question hung unanswered. He finally said firmly, ‘No. I do not believe Danny Hannis struck Mrs Abbey. For the sake of curiosity, whatever would make you ask?’
‘Because there’s something between them—’
‘Between them?’
The way he repeated my words made me flush. I was fighting an increasingly desperate battle to assert some control over what I said and how he took it, and finding it all systematically eroded. It touched a nerve. I’d experienced this before and not from him. I said in a hard little voice, ‘Yes. And when he spoke to you in the yard this morning, he said very specifically – as a warning, I thought – that he’d seen her face.’ And in my head was the Captain’s awful reply; grim and resigned. I know.
Unexpectedly, my question seemed to shake him. I mean it shook him out of the concealment I now knew he was trying to exert here. I saw his mouth suddenly lose its air of disinterest. He took a shallow breath and then another and with an urgency which was quite unlike the rest of his carefully unhelpful answers, he told me briskly, ‘That was something else. Nothing. It doesn’t have anything to do with Mrs Abbey. You needn’t concern yourself with that.’ It was for the first time an honest plea.
I saw his hands shift on the wheel. An almost angry narrowing of his gaze as he searched out some guiding landmark on the road ahead, and used it to avoid meeting my stare. There was something here that could wound, that was somehow more unpleasant to him than his strange decision to make a secret of his hunt for the man who had invaded his house.
After some time while the buildings around us grew from stained brick terraces into warehouses and grand company frontages, he risked a glance at me. He caught me watching and what he read in my expression he didn’t like. And that was the moment I realised that Danny Hannis hadn’t been warning this man about the marks on Mrs Abbey’s face. Danny had been commenting on the emotion he’d read on mine. It was my face that had raised comment and my feelings that had caused him alarm. And now this man beside me had attempted to make a hasty deceit of it. And it was both touchingly protective and humiliating at the same time. I’ve never known mortification like it.
I’d already been feeling unnerved by all these things I couldn’t quite comprehend. This was a crushing, burning shame. It made me feel like the delicious conflict between what I kept presuming he must be and what I was repeatedly discovering he was – and the confusing power of the latter – must have been drooping from my lips like the simpering of a dewy-eyed schoolgirl. Suddenly I had no control whatsoever over how my mouth shaped itself. My face felt bloated like a gargoyle’s. I couldn’t settle to any particular expression and I couldn’t look at him because then I’d have to test how he himself had perceived the rushing in my heart and watch him struggle to tactfully meet whatever awful contortions were marking my face now. It made me lurch into speech purely for the purpose of refuting the idea that there had ever been any warmth inside me at all.
I turned my gaze fiercely to the dirty terraces passing outside my window and said with such airiness that it betrayed my disgust, ‘Do you know, after our misunderstanding yesterday I’ve realised I don’t know how to address you any more. ‘Captain’ seems a touch pointed now.’
The car had slowed to wait at a junction. ‘Well, make it Richard, then.’
There was unease in the way he said that. He knew that I’d guessed this particular secret. It also made me suspect that I might have called him by his name from the start. The use of my first name by him hadn’t been a mark of my inferior status but an assumption that there was no distinction to enforce between us at all. It was horribly disarming, but I was already sweeping on with all the blind bitterness of a woman who had thought she was playing a part of quiet usefulness, only to learn that she had cast herself in the role of a slavish fool who was almost certainly becoming an ever- increasing liability. I said in that same brittle tone, ‘So I wondered if, instead, I should take the other tack. I wondered if I should call you Langton …’
He concealed his flinch well. It was a terrible thing to say. It was the kind of cruelty that was born from the sheer dumbfounding agony of finding myself exposed here, and I had no right to do it. I suppose he might have taken it as a clumsy demonstration that he wasn’t alone and I had at least guessed something of what had disturbed him in that encounter with Mrs Abbey, but he didn’t. It still didn’t suit him to shed these secrets. They bubbled away in that house and multiplied with loneliness and his father had been right to worry because now they were working to claim this man’s decency too.
I knew they were because while I rushed headlong into a genuine and heartfelt apology for the appalling barb, my eyes took in the shabby frontage of the building that was looming alongside our slowing car.
I found my pulse settling back into cold reaction. He could read any emotion he liked in my eyes now. They were all there, plain to see. I forced out the words in an unnatural snarl. ‘The railway station? This is where you’ve been taking me all this time?’
He didn’t have a reply. The car slid to a stop with a hiss of brakes and after a few painfully speechless seconds, his hand moved to set the handbrake and silence the engine. Without the roar of the motor, I could hear the distant cry of the announcer and one sharp blow of a conductor’s whistle.
In that same altered voice, I said, ‘You’re packing me off back to parents and London and you didn’t even leave me time to collect my clothes, or a jacket and handbag … or money.’ My breath caught on the shock of comprehension. I said slowly, ‘That’s why you wanted me to bring my bags with me on our outing today. You never were going to carry me and my cousin back to her cottage. You were merely intending to soften the blow by breaking it to me over lunch first.’
I’ve never known revulsion like it. The feeling in itself scorched every nerve. ‘Did you …?’ I had to stop and begin again. ‘Did you have this in mind all morning?’ I meant from the awful moment that I’d been rattling on about my cousin’s letter as if honesty mattered. My mind shied from the rest of that conversation. I continued in that same voice ripped to roughness by disgust. ‘Or did it come about when I first mentioned Duckett by name and you thought I’d been speaking to Mrs Abbey?’
I saw his head tip in the only brief, uncontrolled gesture that betrayed his frustration at being brought back yet again to the subject of Mrs Abbey. For me it was inescapable. For him it was rapidly suppressed to the level of an inconvenience. With his gaze fixed on the people milling outside, he conceded carefully, ‘I was going to ask you about it over lunch. But time’s slipped away from me and circumstances have … changed.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘You and I both know you meant to prevent me from speaking to that woman, or rather stop her from speaking to me and yet you still won’t admit it. You’re just going to send me off without so much as a nod towards the confidences that you’ve been working out of me endlessly for the past two days.’
He actually turned his head and looked at me then. Very briefly. Then he added this last point as if it answered everything; as in a way it did. He said gently, ‘You might simply choose to trust me.’
The awful validity of the appeal shattered my resolve. It deflated me. It made me sit back in my seat and blink fiercely at the glass.
After a time, while a few more passengers dashed in and out of the station, I finally managed to say, ‘No.’
I took a breath before adding, ‘Please don’t do it like this. You know I can’t compete on this footing. You know what you’re doing here and this isn’t about trust. You have this wonderful decisiveness that overwhelms – don’t deny it; you know you have – it runs through everything you do. But when you use it now, like this, as a weapon, just so that you can steer me into doing what you want when you know full well you could simply explain and I’d probably agree to almost anything anyway … It makes me afraid that there’s danger here and it isn’t just from those people.’ It wasn’t much of an explanation. I took an unsteady breath before adding the rest. I felt the intensity of his attention. Finally, I managed to articulate what was making me resist so much and my voice grew stronger as I added at last, ‘I can’t stop you from buying my ticket and I expect I’ll let you put me on the train, since it clearly matters to you and I suppose I can guess why. But I don’t think you realise what damage it’s doing. When you could just ask.’
He didn’t reply. I sensed the sudden frown, though I didn’t see it. I felt the temporary dip of his confidence. I’d thought it would help to put my agitation in terms of my desolation. I’d thought it was right that he should understand what this manner of inflicting his decisions upon me was costing me in terms of hope and that fragile independence that I’d been working so hard to nurture. I’d thought it vital to give a hint, too, of what I thought he was risking in terms of his own nature. But I hadn’t quite anticipated how close this came to comparing his kind of instinctive action in the face of a threat to the first hard choices that must have set his brother on his long slide into dereliction. It was an unforgiveable repetition of the cruel misuse I’d just made of his name purely for the sake of reasserting my own bit of control. In its way I thought it was as shamefully manipulative as any of the manoeuvrings of the Mrs Abbeys, the Ducketts and the visiting vagrants of these parts.
So I’d go. And peaceably. But first I found I was speaking again; fighting to remedy the mistake; confessing that I knew he was a man who depended on his power to identify a complication and then to act upon it, and working to cancel out the authenticity of the feelings I’d betrayed by forming some kind of ridiculous excuse for my resistance based around the fate of the goat and the raven.
I heard the springs in his seat squeak as he moved restlessly. His voice was clouded with frank incomprehension. ‘Pardon? Did you say a raven? What on earth am I supposed to have done wrong now?’
There was resignation there rather than the same dip in certainty that had frightened me a moment ago. I worked to reduce my dignity a little bit further by taking a shaky breath and saying in a bitter rush, ‘You’re going to ask Danny to shoot it. Poor thing. I presume its mistake was to take up residency in a set of trees that you’ve just happened to determine are vital for your darling young pheasants.’
I heard his breath go out. With relief, I thought. His manner was suddenly softer. I found I was bracing myself to meet a laugh and further humiliation but he didn’t find it amusing at all. He said seriously, ‘So this is what has been upsetting you? Emily, I’ll just issue a decree that the raven is to be left in peace. There must be at least one permitted use of authority here, don’t you think? And actually, for your information, I don’t care to go blasting pheasants or carrion birds or any other kind of fowl out of existence either. I told you I wasn’t ready to step into my brother’s shoes. He enjoyed the sport. I like to keep it very clear in my mind precisely what weapons are actually for.’
Now, suddenly, this was more like the man I thought I knew. There was humour there. I found myself replying in a stronger voice, ‘I know that you’re trying to tell me that you don’t think death and sport belong together, but actually that’s not quite as reassuring to hear as you might suppose, given that it only serves to reinforce the idea I have of just how much you personally must know about the proper use of a gun.’
I heard the creak of leather as he relaxed. He’d seen the brief show of a wry smile on my lips. I sensed the answering warmth in him. Outside, a train must have been due because a steady stream of cabs was flowing past us and drawing up outside the entrance to the station. People and suitcases and office workers were all clambering out and racing in.
After the rush had passed, I too was calm at last. I broke the silence that had stretched for some minutes. ‘This is an evacuation, isn’t it?’
I felt his hesitation. Then he accepted the term. ‘Why not? Yes. That’s as good an explanation as any. After all, as you just remarked yourself, there is a ferocious bruise on a woman’s jaw and even I can tell no swelling of that kind was ever applied with make-up. So if she’s vulnerable, I really don’t want you to be next. I feel responsible enough as it is, and I am, I suppose, your employer of sorts—’
Exasperation made me interrupt, despite all my good intentions. I said hotly, ‘No, you’re not. You’re the one who keeps mentioning renumeration – remuneration, thank you – and I think you’ll find that I haven’t asked for it once. I had thought I was only being neighbourly. I thought I was being useful.’ My voice caught on that last word and I snatched it back with a sharp intake of breath. ‘You asked me to help. You wanted me to do what I could to make things easier for your father. I’ve been trying to help him.’
‘Well,’ he replied with his gaze firmly fixed on a passing pigeon. ‘Now I’m telling you that you can help us both by going home.’
He shifted in his seat to face me. Here was rejection again, firm and final. The body of the car tilted slightly as he moved. He said reasonably, ‘You told me you don’t like violence. You don’t like distress. What else am I supposed to do?’
‘Ask me.’
I hadn’t meant to repeat that one unresolved argument, but the validity of the point was inescapable. At last he could gauge how far I believed I was fighting here for more than just myself. I might just as well have been asking why he might not simply choose to trust me. It drew an impatient jerk of his head. He really hadn’t expected this. He hadn’t expected to encounter any other reasonable point of view. The adjustment of his thoughts didn’t sit easily in his mind. I might have supposed that he was experiencing the surprise of meeting me as I really was for the first time. But this wasn’t one of those moments when a fearfully domineering male was forced to confront the news that a woman had her own capacity for independent thought. This was more tender than that. I thought instead that in this small moment I was confirming suspicions that he’d long held about my nature but hadn’t before glimpsed the proof.
It was then that I heard him say on a very odd note. ‘Very well. Let’s talk about this. You mentioned my brother’s name. Emily, will you tell me—?’
Then, before I could even begin to grasp that he was beginning to confide the truth, he cut the sentence short and I heard what might have been a mutter under his breath of ‘Oh, hell!’ before, significantly more clearly, he turned instead to the relief of accepting that capitulation I’d offered shortly before.
He said in a very different voice, ‘Look, let’s not do this. You know I meant to talk this through with you properly before you left. There isn’t enough time now. I’ve got a meeting in about half an hour that I can’t miss, not even for this. I’ll come and see you when I’m back in London. Won’t that do?’
My heart gave an uncomfortable jolt that told me that I still felt rather more for him than could possibly be healthy or perhaps even deserved. I was painfully unsure that the feeling wasn’t betraying itself all over again on my cheeks. But this was one concession I wouldn’t submit to. I couldn’t bear the idea of going home and meekly waiting there for the next in his line of rescues, as if there was truly anything for him to actually come for. Miserable pride made me shake that future away and say coldly to the hands clasped in my lap, ‘I don’t think that’s very wise, do you? If you’re worrying about reclaiming the cost of my fare, you needn’t. My father will send it back to you tomorrow.’
I heard an intake of breath. ‘Emily, sweetheart, come on …’
The gentle reprimand brought my head round. In his expression, I actually discovered a trace of amusement of the sort that grows from exasperation purely because he hadn’t meant to let this argument lead me into that kind of rejection. Not quite, anyway.
Suddenly I was wading through a different kind of shame. All along I’d been battling my own insecurities – my sneaking hatred of being made to acknowledge I was still an inconvenient tag-along when I’d hoped the little help I had to offer a person these days would be enough to make me fit to play a part even if I wouldn’t bear arms. But while there was certainly a threat here that had motivated him to act with such unswerving purpose on my behalf, I discovered within the sudden honesty in that reproof that his decision to fling me away wasn’t noble. It wasn’t heroic and it certainly wasn’t because he was trying to shelter a delicate young thing. It was a hard and uncompromisingly desperate act of self-defence.
He was trying to protect himself and, knowing him as I thought I was beginning to, the threat to him had to be something substantial or else he wouldn’t bother to do it at all.
Suddenly I was wishing passionately that I’d let this man talk more about the car and other harmless pleasantries such as the passage of elvers up the River Severn. I swallowed my pride. I managed to look him straight in the eye. I had the sudden disconcerting experience of discovering that he in his turn had been assessing me. It was safe to say that the results of his scrutiny hadn’t been very happy.
Outside the car, newly arrived passengers were flowing from the station and we were the only still people in a sea of motion. I knew I had to do something to make amends; to restore his confidence that his decision about me had been sound if I could; just so, at the very least, he wouldn’t think that the threat came from me.
In the midst of that flood of people, I told him urgently, ‘I’m sorry. Of course I’ll go. I didn’t understand what you were trying to do. I wish I didn’t always get things so wrong; or at least that I could say the right thing more easily.’ His left hand was moving. Not towards me but the little compartment on the dashboard before me, where presumably he’d put his wallet and the funds to purchase my ticket. It paused when I added in a flushing rush, ‘Only, before I relieve you of the cost of my ticket and perhaps beg you for a small loan to cover my lunch too …’
‘Yes?’
I finished in a smaller voice than I intended, ‘I think it’s important you know that I never did want anything real from you. I wasn’t meaning to pry. It’s simply that, for what it’s worth, I wanted you to know that I’m on your side.’
After a moment, his hand resumed its path. But it wasn’t heading to the catch on the storage compartment. I wasn’t entirely sure it ever had. It went to the heart of the dashboard where the starter button lay.
I wasn’t sure his confidence had ever needed my meagre restorative efforts either. He wasn’t me, after all. His self-assurance didn’t ebb and flow with every word of mine. The engine growled into life. Without a word, while a train steamed its way messily out of the station, the car was sent forwards gracefully into a wide loop down the slope once more. It hesitated at the junction. Then the traffic eased and we moved gently on towards the town. It didn’t escape my notice that with the same precision with which he had previously decided I wouldn’t stay, he had now decided to ignore my resolution to go.
I was brave enough to ask him about it when we parked the car at the point where a busy shopping street gave way to offices and workshops. It was reasonably near the hospital, he’d told me, and we were to meet back at the car in about an hour. It was all done in a very friendly fashion. Politeness reigned between us. He seemed as much a capable man as he ever did and I, for once, felt more like a woman than a naïve girl when I climbed out onto a sun-scorched pavement made deafening by the flow of city traffic. Petrol rationing didn’t appear to hold much sway here and noise shrouded me as I stood to one side while he came round to lock my door. While he did it, I risked unseating our renewed truce by asking tentatively, ‘Why did you let me stay? I mean, thank you very much and all that. But why did you?’
He paused in the midst of reaching into an inside breast pocket for his wallet and a note that would buy my lunch. His head turned to me. ‘I thought you’d decided that one for yourself?’
I raised an eyebrow at him. It said everything that needed to be said.
He handed me my loan and then returned the wallet to its place. His eyes were grave, but there was also a flicker of a lighter feeling playing there. I didn’t know what the difference was in my voice now, but he’d noticed it too.
‘Very well,’ he said, putting out a hand to my sleeve to warn me that someone meant to pass us from behind and to keep me from straying into their path. He let them go past and then dropped his grip. We were standing in the space between the car and the soot-stained stone of an office of some sort. Heat blazed off every surface.
He returned his attention to me. ‘It’s because you lied yesterday when you let me believe your greatest terror is that the peace means nothing and it’s your turn now to face something dreadful. I wondered at the time about it, but let it pass. I can’t let it pass again today. You gave yourself away just now when you made your sudden about-turn to tell me about that unfortunate raven. You did it just at the very moment that I was about to have to acknowledge how badly I was behaving, and I realised just how much you are in the habit of making endless calculations about what other people want, and then modifying your own wishes just so you don’t harm them.’
He cast a swift glance over his shoulder to be sure that no one else was coming past. No one was. The only bustle at this end of town came from the rumbling traffic as he confided gently, ‘I think I would even go so far as to suspect that yesterday the impulse led you to play to my own preconceptions when you let me believe you needed to be shielded from the distress of a violent scene. I suppose you were honest in as far as it goes, but I’ve also noticed that you’ve been regretting leaning on me ever since … Haven’t you?’
He was doing it again; this was like that instant by the bicycle outside the tithe barn. It was a disorientating swoop into a fuller empathy presented as a shatteringly perceptive portrait of myself. And again, just like the other time, I wasn’t sure he knew how close his judgement was cutting to the bone.
It felt as though someone else’s body were moving when I conceded the point with a faint tilt of my head. Then he added, ‘I think your real terror is the act of being sheltered itself. In part it’s just as you said: you’re afraid because the fact someone would even think you needed help must mean that aggression is close by. But I’m beginning to suspect that the real issue is that you believe that when nastiness does finally break, it won’t matter what you’ve decided you’re prepared to do. Other people will always set the rules for what counts as a valid intervention, and any effort of yours is, and will remain, perpetually below par.’
Suddenly I was smiling and shaking my head. Not because it wasn’t true but because he really wasn’t saying this to wound. This wasn’t quite as perceptive as I’d feared either. He wasn’t making me confront anything I wasn’t ready to admit and the discovery left me room to feel a powerful and disabling appreciation of the exact worth of this man who would act to save a person, even from an emotional hazard. Because this was what he was doing here. He was undoing all those parts of the argument that had worked upon my sense of being small and useless. He was letting me know that he would find a role for me if I wanted it.
Suddenly I was a step closer and my hand was on his sleeve. And, trying hard to avoid the agonised tones of our last conversation, I was telling him very earnestly, ‘This is going to sound terribly crass after the fuss and guilt I’ve just inflicted upon you about staying, and I’m certainly glad I’m here now so I’m not trying to turn this into yet another discussion on the state of my self-esteem. But please, I mean what I say. I don’t want my name to be added to your list of responsibilities. Your perception of this part of me is wholly accurate. I refuse to be made the object of any more grand gestures when I know full well it is impossible that I’ll ever be able to reciprocate and—’
‘Any more grand gestures?’ He queried the count as well as the term.
‘I won’t be indebted.’
I stalled there. He didn’t understand and I was straying into an explanation of those things I didn’t mean to lay bare. I shook it away and found my eyes had settled upon the grey fabric of his suit jacket where it ran smoothly beneath my fingers. My body was still feeling like it was something distant from me. Without really thinking that I ought to drop that hand, I lifted my head properly. I told him boldly, ‘To be perfectly frank, Richard, I think you’ve got quite enough to deal with as it is, without adding my silly insecurities to the list; what with your father and that house, and the very real antics of everyone else too.’
I expected him to smile in return.
I’d thought a man like him would value the way I was alluding to my sympathy without trespassing into barefaced commentary, after all that had been left unsaid in the car. I’d thought it would amuse him because it would make sense to him. I wasn’t expecting him to react as he did.
He was suddenly looking blank. The set of his mouth was a deeper mark of the puzzlement that had steadied him in the past; a sudden intensity of concentration that came horribly close to looking like I’d hurt him.
Then I was suddenly aware of how close I was to him and was thinking I ought to step away, and I was belatedly snatching my hand from his sleeve and touching my fingertips to my temple instead as if to hide my confusion. But his stillness broke like it had been an ache in the mind. He moved to stem that retreat. He took hold of me. He hesitated just long enough to read the sudden adjustment of my thoughts as I better understood his intentions. Then he bent his head and kissed me.
The touch of his lips was a very brief blaze. The merest scorching run of seconds or more of contact with the core of him before he drew away. It rocked me when he told me on an undertone, ‘I think, Emily, you woefully underestimate the contribution you make.’
There was a whisper of a laugh beneath that roughened edge. It mingled with the uncontrolled awareness of knowing that it had been my last little statement of care that had unwittingly laid bare something deep within this man; and that for him it went beyond trust that he’d let me see.
For me, I thought that sometimes it was wonderful to be so lacking in confidence. Nervousness was followed by the intensity of perceiving that he meant to kiss me again.
Then, in the next moment, someone was coming along the pavement and it wasn’t the done thing to give way to public displays of affection and Richard was straightening to watch them pass behind. I was dragging my mind back into some kind of order while I discovered at the moment I attempted it that I’d been leaning into him. His grip steadied me as I stirred. When his hand moved to my upper arm and settled there with a brief contraction of his fingers, the gesture was like a question; a first real greeting, perhaps.
His gaze dropped to me. The attractive line of his jaw was perfectly defined in this summer’s afternoon. So was the brief smile that showed in his eyes. It hit me like a bolt. But he grew reluctantly businesslike as he told me, ‘I’d better go if I’m going to make this meeting. Are you happy that you know how to find the hospital?’
I mustered a nod as he stepped away; a busy man in a neatly tailored suit on a city street. I was in control of myself again too by now, but my cheeks burned. And so did my lips with the memory of his touch. I put an unsteady hand up to them. I thought I finally understood the feeling that had followed me from the car. It was the consciousness that in the midst of blundering through an attempt to explain my distress at being sent away, I’d actually been daring to assert who I was a little more clearly before him.
‘By the way,’ he added as his hand lifted to sketch a farewell, ‘it’s nice to hear you call me by my name.’
It was then that I noticed that I’d called him Richard and realised that he’d been Richard in my head for a rather longer time.