Snowfire. Anne Mather
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Americans particularly, came to take photographs of its ancient buildings and cobbled streets.
But at this time of the year there were few tourists stalwart enough to brave the east wind that came in over the marshes. The first weeks of February had been wild and blustery, and only that morning there had been a sprinkling of snow over the fishing boats lying idle in their stocks. Storm warnings had been out all along the coast, and the few fishermen willing to venture out into the choppy waters had been driven back again by the gales.
Standing at her bedroom window, her head stooped to accommodate the low lintel, Olivia felt no sense of regret at the inclement weather. On the contrary, it suited her very well that she did not have to put on a sociable face when she went down to the tiny dining-room for breakfast. She hadn’t come to Paget for familiarity or company. She didn’t want to talk to anybody, beyond the common courtesies politeness demanded. Because he hadn’t recognised her name, the landlord had assumed she was a stranger here, and it had suited her to foster that belief. As far as Tom Drake was concerned, she was one of ‘them crazy Londoners’, she was sure. Who else would choose to come to Paget while winter still gripped it in its icy grasp? Who else would book a room for an unspecified period when it was obvious from her appearance that she would have benefited from a spell in the sun?
Of course, the fact that she looked thin and pale and tended to drag her left leg might have given the staff other ideas, Olivia acknowledged. After all, this was hardly the sort of place to come for a rest cure. Perhaps they thought she had some awful terminal illness and had come to Paget to die. It was impossible to speculate what they might think, but in the week that had elapsed since she came here they had respected her privacy and left her alone.
And Olivia was grateful. In fact, for the first time in more than a year she actually felt as if she was beginning to relax. Her leg was still painful, particularly if she walked further than the doctors had recommended. But her appetite was improving a little, and she didn’t always need barbiturates to sleep.
Her lips curled slightly as she accorded that thread of optimism the contempt it deserved. Imagine needing drugs to enjoy a night’s rest, she thought bitterly. She was thirty-four, and she felt at least twenty years older!
But her low state of fitness was not entirely unwarranted, she defended herself. The shock of learning that Stephen had been unfaithful had barely been blunted when the accident happened, and weeks spent in a hospital bed had served to exacerbate her sense of betrayal. If she’d been able to carry on with her work, lose herself in its legal intricacies, she might have weathered the storm fairly well. It wasn’t as if her marriage to Stephen had been ideal from the outset. It hadn’t, and it had taken her only a short time to acknowledge that she had allowed her biological clock to induce her into a situation that was primarily the result of pressure. Pressure from her friends, pressure from her peers, but also pressure within herself at the knowledge that she was twenty-nine, single, and facing a lonely future. In consequence, she had allowed herself to be persuaded that any marriage was better than no marriage at all, and it wasn’t until the deed was done that she had realised how wrong she was.
She couldn’t altogether blame Stephen. Like herself, he had been approaching an early middle age without a permanent companion, and, if some of his habits had been a little annoying, and his lovemaking less than earth-moving, she had determined to make the best of it. No doubt there were things she did that annoyed him, too, and if her grandmother had taught her anything, it was that life was seldom the way one wanted it to be.
But, predictably enough, she supposed, it was Stephen who tired of the marriage first. And, equally predictably, she was the last to find out. Perhaps if her job had not been so demanding, if she had not spent so many evenings visiting clients or preparing briefs, she would have noticed sooner what was going on. But Stephen’s job in wholesaling meant that he was often away overnight, and it wasn’t until a well-meaning friend had asked if she had enjoyed her mid-week break in Bath that she had been curious enough to examine their credit-card statements more closely. What she had found was that Stephen often occupied a double room on his nights away, and that, while this was not so incriminating in itself, another receipt, showing dinner for two at a bistro in Brighton, was. Olivia knew that Stephen had purportedly gone to Brighton to attend a delegates’ conference, and the presentation dinner that followed it had supposedly been a dead bore.
When she confronted him with her suspicions, he had tried to deny it. For all the inadequacies of their marriage, he had still wanted to maintain the status quo. It had suited him to have a wife who wouldn’t divorce him hovering in the background. It gave him an excuse not to get too involved, and he’d enjoyed the thrill of forbidden fruit.
For Olivia, however, the idea of continuing such an alliance was abhorrent to her. She wanted out. She had learned her lesson, and she wanted her freedom, and Stephen’s pleas to give him another chance only filled her with disgust.
Nevertheless, although she moved out of the apartment they had shared in Kensington, Stephen had continued to hound her. Even though she employed a solicitor in another partnership to represent her, Stephen insisted he would fight the petition in court. And Olivia knew, better than anyone, how messy such divorces could be. And how ironic that she should be caught in such a situation which could only be damaging to her career.
In the years since she had become an articled solicitor she had gained a small reputation for competent representation. She still worked for the large partnership with whom she had trained, but her obvious abilities had not gone unnoticed. There was talk of a junior partnership, if she wanted it, or the possibility of branching out on her own. Neither option would benefit from adverse publicity of any kind, and Olivia knew Stephen would do anything to embarrass her. He was bitter and resentful, and, incredibly, he blamed her for their estrangement. He was not going to let her go easily, and his threats were a constant headache.
Which was probably why the accident had happened, she acknowledged now, even though she had never blamed Stephen for any of it. She had already been sleeping badly, and the extra hours at work she had been putting in, in an effort to keep other thoughts at bay, had taken their toll. She shouldn’t have been driving. She should have taken a taxi to the station, and caught a train to Basingstoke. But she hadn’t. She had driven—straight into one of the concrete pillars supporting a bridge over the M3. Or at least, that was what they had told her. She didn’t remember anything after leaving the office.
Of course, Stephen had been sorry then. He had come to see her in the hospital, when she was still strung up to so many machines that she must have looked like a marionette. She could have her divorce now, he’d said. He wouldn’t oppose it. He’d contact her solicitor straight away, and get the thing in motion. It wasn’t until later that she’d wondered at his speed.
By then, by the time she was lucid enough to understand that she was lucky to be alive, she had had other problems to contend with. Not least the news that, although her skull was evidently thicker than it had a right to be, and her wounds would heal, and her broken limbs would mend, her left leg had suffered multiple fractures, and it was unlikely she would ever run again.
She remembered she’d tried to joke about not being able to run before, but, as time went on, she realised what they had been trying to tell her. Her left leg had been crushed, badly crushed, and, although all the skills of modern surgery had been brought to bear, the tendons had been damaged quite beyond repair.
Physiotherapy had helped a lot. That and her determination to walk again. When she first left the hospital she had had to get around on crutches, and for weeks she had struggled to and from the clinic in an ambulance. But gradually she had been able to put the crutches aside and manage with a walking-stick, even taking up her job again, although that had been rather harder. Her leg ached if she had to stand for any length of time, and the stress of both the accident and the divorce had taken a toll on her defences. Eventually, she had had to accept that if she wasn’t careful she was going to have a complete nervous breakdown, and the senior partner at Hallidays had suggested she take a holiday.
Olivia knew he had had something different in mind from the east coast of southern England. The West Indies, perhaps, or South America. Somewhere where the sun was hot and life was lived at a slower pace. Somewhere