'Kit,' she said quickly before he could start the engine, `was it so very bad for you on Niakos? I mean ...' Her voice faded as he turned to look at her. Poor Kit, he'd had a tough time, how could she expect him to have fond memories of the place of his incarceration?
`Well,' he said thoughtfully, covering his surprise that she had brought the subject up, 'in all honesty, it was a beautiful place. But I was going off my head with worrying about you too much to enjoy it. Though in all fairness, once they'd dumped me on the boat I was treated with courtesy, cold though it was.'
He leaned forward to switch on the ignition, ready to leave the conversation there. But Clare didn't want to leave it there. She suspected he was nursing a grievance against Lazar and wanted him to see something of the quality of the man that she herself had seen.
'Don't start the car yet, Kit,' she stopped him, and stumbled on when she saw she had his attention. `L-Lazar was very kind to me,' she told him, bringing Lazar's name out with difficulty, for all she had no such trouble the times she had spoken his name out loud in the privacy of her room.
'Kind?'
'Yes,' Clare said quickly, eager to disabuse Kit's mind that the man she loved was any sort of a villain. 'I had a nightmare one night—Lazar was marvellous to me.' She heard an exclamation break from Kit that she had suffered one of her nightmares without anyone of the family there to help her afterwards, but an exclamation broke from her own lips as a sudden realisation hit her. 'Hey ! ' she said, 'I haven't had that nightmare since I came home.'
'Neither you have,' said Kit with equal surprise. 'Three months, Clare—that must be a record! '
They were each silent for a moment or two, Clare reflecting how much she had to be grateful to Lazar for. She had changed mightily, all for the better, since her return from his country.
Kit too must have been having similar thoughts, for he said, 'It would appear he's been able to do something for you none of your family have been able to achieve.'
'You've all been wonderful to me,' she said gently. 'I shall never be able to thank you, Bruce, Mum and Dad for the way you've sheltered me all these years.'
It was a sensitive moment, and her love for her family welled up within her.
'Not everyone has such a lovely sister,' Kit said gruffly, then went on, 'Perhaps that Lazar Vardakas chap wasn't such a bad bloke after all. He certainly got that lying Sophronia singing like a canary!'
Clare grinned at Kit's expression for Sophronia, revealing all there was to know. But her grin disappeared when Kit went on absently, almost as if he had forgotten she was sitting beside him!
'He needn't have offered to marry you either, but he did.'
'Marry me!' The exclamation shot from her. 'You mean ...' her voice started to peter out as incredulity took it. 'You mean Lazar said he would marry me?'
Kit mistook the hoarseness in her voice for another reason. 'Now don't get in a stew! I told him "No, thank you" on your behalf. I didn't mean to let anything slip, but you've been so different recently from the way you were I've rather got out of the habit of watching that I don't say anything that might upset you.' Kit was underlining again what she already knew, the extent of her family's caring for her. But just at that moment the conversation Lazar must have had with him in Athens when he had asked Kit to see him privately was overcoming her undying gratitude to her family.
'I thought he wanted to see you privately to apologise formally,' she said, a riot going on inside her. 'But ...'
'Oh, he apologised too, without reservation. But when he began asking when would our parents be home so he could come and speak to my father about you, I told him I was acting on my father's behalf and anything he wanted to say to Dad could be said to me —so he brought up this marriage thing. But there's no need for you to worry, love. He goes a bundle on this honour business, so I expect he thought it the only decent thing he could do since according to his way of thinking he'd compromised you.'
Kit was probably right, Clare thought, yet she couldn't leave it there. They had been back three months now and this was the first time they had discussed what had happened. She couldn't wait that long again to find out more.
'Er—what did Lazar say, when you said "No, thank you"?' She chewed at her bottom lip. 'I mean, did he just accept it with a sigh of relief?'
'Look, Clare, do you want to discuss it?' Kit replied, looking disturbed at having said too much already.
`Yes, I want to discuss it,' she said firmly. 'I'm no longer the terrified mouse I used to be, Kit.'
Kit was silent for a while as he considered her answer.
'All right then,' he said at last. 'I expected him to accept my refusal on your behalf, I must admit. As I saw it he could well think his honour satisfied by having made the offer.' He looked at her briefly as though to gauge if she was up to hearing the rest, then saw a determination on her face with no sign of panic. 'But he didn't. He then challenged me to give him a reason for my refusal.'
'Oh,' said Clare, careful not to let Kit see the agitation that was going on in her insides. A glimpse of that would have him clamming up straight away. `So,' oh, she could sound casual, though how she could when this was so tremendously important defied belief, `so what reason did you give him?'
Well ...' Kit hesitated. `Well, he must have seen how shy you were, for one thing. And you've said yourself how he looked after you when you had a nightmare —God, I'll bet your screams frightened the life out of him! They used to me. Was that when you told him the cause of your nightmares?'
Kit had to accept that it was without her answering; Clare was more anxious for him to get to the nub of the matter than to want to introduce a side issue conversation.
`Go on, Kit, do,' she begged, trying to hide her impatience.
`Well, knowing all that, it couldn't have come as any great surprise when I told him how ill you'd been and that our aunt, your doctor, had said that ...' Again he hesitated.
'Kit, if you don't hurry up and tell me I shall go and ask Aunt Katy myself to tell me whatever it is you're struggling with ! ' Clare burst out, her impatience getting the better of her.
'I'm not supposed to tell you,' Kit defended, then added, `but since you're miles better than you were—here goes. Aunt Katy told us that there was little possibility that you would ever marry, that she doubted you would ever be a wife in the full sense of the word to any man.' Clare blanched at that, before realising that until three months ago she would have gone along with that prognosis.
'Carry on,' she said, keeping the shock of what she had just heard from her voice. 'What else did she say?'
`She said that even if you did marry it must only be to a man who would love you so much he would know how to be gentle with you when—well, you know.'
'What else, Kit?' Clare asked again, her voice deliberately even, sensing there was more.
`She said that the man must be right for you, that he must love you so much that he would put you before himself. But more than that, you must love him in the same way too, because—because if you didn't then you could go right back to the way you were—or—worse.'
Kit finished telling her what Aunt Katy had said, an apologetic note in his voice as though he regretted having told her.
`You—you told Lazar all this?' Clare questioned quietly after a moment.
'Yes.'
'And what did he say?'
'Nothing. Not one single solitary word. It was as though what I'd told him finished the conversation about marriage. He went and looked out of the window for about a minute, then when he turned around told me that you and I were welcome to stay at his villa for as long as we liked, that he wouldn't be there, and when I said no, that I wanted to get you home straight away, he then proceeded to make flight arrangements to Salonika and from Salonika home.'
Alone in her room that night, Clare went over everything Kit had revealed to her. Oh, how she wished he had left her to do her own answering to Lazar's proposal ! Her answer wouldn't have been `No, thank yo
u'. She turned away from the fantasy. How could she have said yes? That wouldn't have been fair to Lazar, with his proposal only being made because his proud Greek honour demanded it.
What if his reasons for wanting to marry her weren't motivated solely by honour, though? For a good ten minutes she went into a dream world of his wanting to marry her being because he loved her. That he had accepted Kit's reasons for there being no chance of such a match because he did not know that she loved him, and that he loved her enough to put her before his wish to have her as his wife because he was afraid of what it might do to her.
Clare slept only fitfully that night, though she had no terrifying nightmare to add to her unrest. She rather thought that nightmares were a thing of the past and got up the next morning, her thoughts still with Lazar. During the afternoon, on the pretext of having something she wanted to do in her room, she went upstairs and dissected everything Lazar had ever said to her.
She recalled the time he had made her tell him what had made her so afraid of men. `It's important to me—to both of us,' he had said. Was it as she had believed, then, because with honour demanding to be satisfied he could not make her be the one to pay if there was some good reason for her fear—or, dared she think it, because he had to know for their future happiness? Could he possibly have meant he had to know why she was afraid so that he could take steps to ensure she was never afraid of him?
Coming to her senses, Clare discounted her thoughts as pure dreams, a product of her lively imagination. And yet, as she lay in bed that night, it came back to her as it had many times since, the way in which they had parted at Micra Airport. 'Hérete, karthia mou,' he had said, his voice full of emotion. Oh God, why had she backed out of his arms as though his tight hold had frightened her to death?
Her mother was bright and cheerful when Clare went downstairs the next morning. `Let's forget household chores today,' she told Clare. `We'll pack these men off to work and spend the morning in Guildford.'
Clare fell in with her mother's plans, and no sooner was the breakfast washing up out of the way than they were in the Mini heading for town, her mother reminding her of the new dress they had discussed as her Christmas present.
It will be nice for you to have something new to wear on Christmas Day,' Ruth Harper told her daughter as they stood in the cobbled High Street in Guildford wondering which store to go in first. `Though,' her manner teasing, `if we do get it today, don't you dare wear it until the twenty-fifth!'
Clare did see the dress she would like, and saw too a pleased smile cross over her mother's features that it was a snugly fitting dress and not at all like the `bell tents' her wardrobe held.
`Try it on, dear,' she instructed, and when Clare came out of the changing room, `Oh yes, you must have it!' It was a dress of fine wool in a deep shade of red, a colour that complemented her snowy head perfectly. The buttons down to the waist did up to make the bodice fit snugly over her bustline, the below-knee length ending with a flare of tiny pleats that fell from just above her knee.
She looked good in it, Clare had to agree as they left the dress department, her mother firmly taking charge of the carrier bag. She had looked modern, almost sophisticated, she thought, her thoughts taking flight to wish Lazar could see her wearing it—he would just have to change his mind then about her being ashamed of her body. Oh. Lazar ...
'There's Chloe Rattenbury!' Ruth Harper exclaimed, breaking into Clare's thoughts and taking her with her to meet the other woman half way, Chloe Rattenbury exclaiming:
'Well met! It must be time for elevenses.'
The three of them ambled to the store's lift, the two older women chatting away nineteen to the dozen as though they hadn't seen each other for twelve months and were anxious to catch up on news, for all Clare knew very well her mother had attended Chloe Rattenbury's coffee morning only last week.
It was while they were waiting for the lift to come that the idea Clare had been nursing in her waking hours last night suddenly had to have its way. She knew then she would no peace from the idea until she knew.
`Mum—Mrs Rattenbury—would you mind very much if I don't join you for coffee? Er—there's something I want to do.'
`Ah,' said Chloe Rattenbury, catching on straight away, or so she thought. `Come on, Ruth. We'll see you later, Clare.'
`What ...?' Her mother was obviously bemused.
'It may take me some time,' Clare put in quickly. 'If you're not here I'll go to the car park, I've got my set of keys.'
'But, Clare ...'
`Come on, Ruth.' Chloe Rattenbury ushered her into the lift, and the lift doors were closing as Clare heard her say, 'Clare obviously wants to get you a surprise Christmas present ...'
Thinking to get her mother an extra special surprise Christmas present, Clare left the store. Then, her errand urgent now, she almost ran in the direction of the library, taking a short cut down a passage. Somehow or other she just had to find out what those words of Greek were that Lazar had said in parting. She knew she stood to be sorely disappointed, but the way in which he had said them, that ragged emotion in his voice she had put down to her imagination up until a couple of days ago, kept making itself heard over and over again in her head. She just had to know what it was he had said; it seemed vitally important now that she knew he had been prepared to marry her.
Armed with dictionaries and many reference books from the library shelves, Clare sat down to begin her task, discovering very quickly that it was going to be no easy matter. She took many wrong trails in changing a phonetic sound back into the Greek alphabet and then back into English, but she had no intention of giving up until she had the answer she wanted.
How long it took her she had no idea. She had lost all sense of time. But at last she had got it. She had turned 'Hérete, karthia mou' into English, checked it three times because she just couldn't believe it. And then, when she was absolutely positive she had not made any mistake, she just sat there with a dazed expression on her face, for `Hérete, karthfa mou', translated, said `Goodbye, my heart'.
CHAPTER NINE
`GOODBYE, my heart,' came whispering from her, so perhaps it was as well she had the table to herself, though she was oblivious just then to anything save her discovery. What did it mean? Did it mean—her hands began to tremble—did it mean that Lazar's offer to marry her had not been purely because his sense of honour demanded it?
Afraid to think along those lines, too scared at the despairing let-down feeling she would get if she analysed the answer to that and came up with the answer of `Don't be ridiculous', she reached for the reference books again, her mind struggling to remember the word he had called her when he had cradled her in his arms comforting her after her nightmare. Agapémene, that was it! `Agapémene. You are safe now.'
More familiar now with the books in front of her, she ploughed through, checking each letter closely, her heart knocking against her ribs when she had the answer. She could take any one of' three words from the translation she saw, all of them endearments—beloved, dear, or favourite.
There was no room now to be afraid. She had to think along the lines her mind wanted to go. Could Lazar really want to marry her because—because he loved her? Oh God. She felt faint at the idea, her mind going over again the things he had said, the things he had done. Physically she had thought he desired her, let herself believe it without backing away from the thought as she relived that excitement his touch on her breast had aroused in her that day. She had desired him too.
Yet could he love her? Did he love her? `Goodbye, my heart,' he had said at the airport. Clare tried to think positive. She hadn't imagined that agony in his voice, she knew she hadn't. But had it been agony that for her sake he had to part from her?
A low groan escaped her at the remembrance of the way she had pulled away from him as though stung when she had heard that thick emotion in his voice. Oh God, she thought, he could have interpreted that as confirming everything Kit had told him as being true. That adult emotion
did send her back into herself, that adult emotion did frighten her, that she was too afraid to stay in his arms, was afraid of—him.
She became aware that someone was looking at her peculiarly, wondered if she looked as pale as she felt and awakened to the realisation that her mother would be waiting for her. She returned the books back to the shelves and left the library, her feet moving automatically in the direction of where they had left the car, her mind too busy with her thoughts to notice where they were going.
Oh, if only she could let Lazar know that far from making her afraid of him he had started a fire inside her that burned' fear to ashes. He had thawed that block of ice that encased her heart, but he would never know it.
It was Monday of the next week, December in its infancy, that Clare looked at the shadows beneath her eyes that told their own story of her restless nights and knew that she would have to do something. She couldn't go on like this. She was breaking up inside. Something was goading at her, telling her there was a chance of happiness for her if only she had the courage to do something about it.
In her room she sat deep in thought for a long time. She discounted the idea of travelling to Greece- to see Lazar. What could she say when she got there? Always supposing he was there anyway, travelling as much as he did he could be anywhere. And anyway, she would look a fine fool if the whole of it was no more than a figment of her imagination. It would look well if, face to face with her, he gave her that cruel look he had used on her on occasion and scoffed, 'Me in love with you? May I recommend you to a good psychiatrist?'
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