A Suitable Mistress. CATHY WILLIAMS
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from the sidelines just how many birds he had charmed off the trees as he had moved through adolescence into maturity. How utterly and childishly aware she had been of him.
It was difficult to know when exactly he had moved from the uncomplicated position of being her brother’s friend into the vastly more complicated one of being a deeply attractive person of the opposite sex.
She could remember when she was fourteen, looking at him surreptitiously from under her lashes, aware of him in a way that she had not been before: aware of him as a man, a first-year university graduate no less, already with the sort of cool, ironic self-assurance which gave him a maturity that her brother had lacked.
‘I suppose I had better ask you in,’ she said ungraciously, averting her eyes and walking back into the room, leaving him to shut the door. ‘I’m afraid I only have tea,’ she said, disliking his presence in her flat, disliking everything about him, and determined to be as churlish and unwelcoming as she felt she could reasonably get away with.
‘Tea would be fine.’ He followed her into the kitchen, which was barely big enough for one person and with him standing there felt chokingly claustrophobic.
She made them both mugs of tea, politely waited until he went back into the small sitting room, and then flopped into the chair furthest away from him.
‘I was very sorry to hear about your father’s death,’ he murmured, watching her intently with those grey, steely eyes, and she could feel the tears gathering momentum at the back of her throat. Again. Every time, in fact, she thought about her father.
‘I would have liked to have come to the funeral,’ he continued, looking at her over the rim of his cup, ‘but I was in New York at the time, and I just couldn’t make it.’
Suzanne shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have expected you to put yourself out,’ she said coldly. ‘After all, he was just your family’s chauffeur, for heaven’s sake.’ Just the chauffeur who had worked for them nearly all his life; just the chauffeur who had lived in their cottage and pottered around in their garden; just the chauffeur who had collapsed and died in the line of duty.
‘Why on earth do you continue working for her?’ she had once asked her father.
‘Old Mr Sutherland would have wanted it,’ he had told her, which had made absolutely no sense to her at all. Old Mr Sutherland, she had wanted to point out, was dead, and had been for some time, and now his wife, or rather his second wife, was in charge, and she was an awful woman.
But she had not said anything because they had covered that ground before, and she had known what his answer would be: he was too old now to change, and besides, he liked the house, he liked the grounds, he liked the calm and peace of the countryside. So he had continued to work there, doing whatever the grand lady of the house wanted, which mostly had nothing to do with driving and much more to do with tending the lawns and taking the wretched poodles for walks and repairing whatever needed repair in the great mansion.
And all for what? Martha Sutherland hadn’t even attended the funeral. She had been busy getting ready for a cruise and had made unalterable plans. So a wreath had been sent in her place. A huge, gaudy one. And Dane, who had known him virtually since birth, had been busy as well. Because, after all, he was just their chauffeur, wasn’t he?
Her mind jumped back to that overheard conversation, and she closed the door on it.
She gave Dane a tinny, frozen smile and waited for him to ask her what she meant, but he ignored the pointed sarcasm behind her remark, although his eyes narrowed on her in a way that made her feel just a little bit ashamed that she had said what she had.
‘I thought you were working with that firm of accountants in the town,’ he said, and she shrugged and looked away.
‘I packed it in when Dad died.’ She had been so utterly miserable, and studying to qualify as an accountant—something of which her father had been so proud—had suddenly seemed trivial and meaningless. She had never been entirely sure that that was what she had wanted to do, and without her father’s encouragement she had been gripped by the thought that it was a career which had found her rather than the other way around. She had always been clever with figures and she had settled into accountancy the way that some people settle into marriage—because it was convenient.
‘Why?’
‘Because I wanted to leave the area. Is that a good enough explanation for you? Or would you like to pursue it further?’ She had had a plan, she thought defensively. Where had it gone? How could it have evaporated so quickly, like mist? How could she have ended up like a lost soul wandering in a fog, when she had started out with such determination?
‘And you think that he would have been happy to see you living like this?’ He looked around him at the scrappy room, with its sad, faded rug in front of the fireplace and skirting-boards which were in desperate need of a lick of paint. The bare essentials were so in need of repair that they sabotaged her every effort to make the bedsit into something warm and comfortable. The most she could achieve was neatness.
‘What have you come here for?’ she asked abruptly.
‘I wanted to offer my condolences personally to you, and I admit I was worried when they told me that you had walked out of the company.’
‘So you decided to fit me into your schedule. Big of you,’ she said acidly. Shame, she thought, that he had never been big enough to see that her father got a fair deal working for his stepmother. Shame that he hadn’t been big enough to listen to her father when he’d started getting tired for no reason. Shame that he hadn’t been big enough to let him retire in that cottage, instead of allowing his stepmother to imply that once the old man could no longer function he would have to move out and make way for someone who could.
The threat of having nowhere to live had been enough to keep her father on his toes, when in fact he should have been resting far more than he had been.
She swallowed down the great lump of resentment in her and stared down into the cup of lukewarm tea. The milk was gathering itself into a fine brown film. She inspected the film with minute concentration.
‘Shall I continue to ignore your acid little rejoinders, Suzie, or would you be happier if I gave in and indulged your desire to have a blazing row over nothing?’
‘Nothing!’ Her head shot up at that one and she looked at him with savage dislike. ‘How dare you sit here and say that? I’ve lost the only person in my life who has ever meant anything to me and you call that nothing? That stepmother of yours treated him like a workhorse and you call that nothing? He was old and frail and he should have had the dignity of being able to enjoy the rest of his days in that cottage of yours, without thinking that if he stopped lugging ladders and walking poodles he would no longer have a roof over his head.’
He stood up and walked across to the window and stared out, and although she couldn’t see the set of his face she could tell by the rigidity of his shoulders that he was angry.
‘I don’t like what you’re implying here,’ he said with disarming softness, turning round to face her. The light behind him threw his face into shadows and lent it an air of dark menace.
‘Then you’re free to leave.’ She nodded in the direction of the door and she was perversely pleased when he remained where he was, because, for the first time in the six months since her father had died, she was shouting, and glad to be shouting.
‘He loved your father,’ she threw at him. ‘Why do you think he continued working there, even when your father remarried three years ago? Why do you think he stayed there after your father died?’
‘I have been out of the country for nearly three years,’ Dane said in a controlled voice that didn’t quite manage to hide the undercurrent of anger and impatience at her accusations. ‘I had it on my stepmother’s word that everything at the house was fine.’
‘And that was the extent of your interest in the place?’ she asked bitterly. ‘And how thrilled your dad would have been with that!’