Almost Love

by Christina James

  “Hello, who is that?” asked a pleasant female voice with a slight foreign inflection. Juliet recognised it immediately.

  “Katrin?” she asked. “Is that you? It’s Juliet Armstrong speaking.”

  “Yes it is me. Hello, Juliet. Where is Tim? I really want to speak to him.”

  “Unfortunately he’s just left. You could try his mobile.”

  “I have done that. I think it’s switched off – it’s going straight to message mode.”

  “That’s probably because he’s on his way to meet a witness. He’ll be driving to meet her now – he should be with her in half an hour or so. Unless he turns the phone on briefly to collect any messages before he reaches her, he’ll probably not be able to respond for a couple of hours. Can I help you in any way?”

  “No,” said Katrin uncertainly. Juliet thought that she sounded close to tears. “Not unless he gets in touch with you before I can reach him. If he does, will you let him know that I need to talk to him?”

  “Yes, of course. I hope that nothing’s wrong?”

  Juliet heard a strangled sound before Katrin rang off abruptly. She held the receiver in her hand for a few moments, before replacing it carefully. She had met Katrin only a few times – she was based at Holbeach police station, where the South Lincs force’s small research unit had been set up – but she liked her tremendously. Tim’s entire team were united in liking his wife and appreciating his good fortune in having married her. They were such a warm and well-suited couple that their happiness seemed to rub off on to other people. But Juliet reflected now that Tim himself had been unusually taciturn over the past few days and had lost his temper on a couple of occasions. She had put this down to the stresses of the Claudia McRae case, but now she suspected that there might be a more personal reason. She hoped with the deepest sincerity that nothing had gone wrong with the marriage. She considered leaving a message on Tim’s mobile to tell him that Katrin was trying to contact him, but thought better of it. Katrin herself was certain to have left a message, so further prompting from Juliet was likely to be seen as interfering.

  “Oh, God,” she said, as she sat down heavily at her own desk. She had not realised that she had spoken the words aloud until Andy Carstairs looked up.

  “Something troubling you?” he said. “Apart from the usual, that is – too much routine work on a case that’s going nowhere.” He grinned to show that he was being sympathetic.

  “No; nothing at all, really. Just bogged down, as you guessed. Thanks for asking.”

  She turned away, and shuffled through her notes until she had found the telephone number of the ferry company. The number for Forensics was already programmed into her phone.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  For the tenth time Alex searched through her wardrobe. She was trying to find something to wear to the dinner of the one-day conference that she was attending with Edmund. The dresses that she usually wore to the Archaeological Society conferences were all too matronly, the frocks that accompanied her to France when she was on holiday with Tom too skimpy for the time of year. She held a flame-coloured backless dress with a halter neck against her for the fourth time.

  “That’s a gorgeous outfit. My favourite.”

  Alex jumped. Tom had entered their bedroom soundlessly and she had not noticed him.

  “You’re not going to wear that for one of your old farts’ dos, surely?” Tom continued, prowling restlessly round the room before he stretched out on the bed. Alex snatched a pile of newly-ironed underwear out of reach of his shoes.

  “It isn’t one of their ‘dos’, as you put it. It’s an international conference for society secretaries and officials – people like me. Some of them work for very renowned organisations, so they’re quite eminent, as well as much better paid than I am. I wanted to wear something decent to the dinner – so as not to show myself up, as much as anything.” Even to herself her words sounded feeble and unconvincing. Tom looked at her suspiciously.

  “You always look lovely,” he said, after a pause. “And you know as well as I do that most of them will be old farts – lecherous ones, in all probability. There’s no need to encourage them by wearing a frock like that. Do you know anyone else who’s going?” he added, with studied casualness.

  “Only Edmund,” said Alex.

  “There you are, you see!” Tom sounded triumphant, but also relieved. He evidently didn’t regard Edmund as a threat. “The old fart personified. And there’s probably a lecher hiding under all those layers of boring society procedures and archaeological detail, too.”

  “Nonsense!” said Alex, attempting a laugh. “You surely hadn’t forgotten about it, though, had you? I’ve written the dates on the planner in the kitchen. I shall be out only for tomorrow night. I get back late on Thursday – too late for dinner,” she added.

  “Now you mention it, it does ring a vague bell. In Scotland somewhere, isn’t it? At a fancy golf course or something.”

  “Yes. Roundberry. Not my kind of place, really.”

  “Well, I daresay you’ll cope. How are you getting there? By train?”

  “Goodness, no. It would take forever – and I’d have had to travel today and stay overnight tonight as well, because it starts at 11.00 a.m. tomorrow. Edmund and I are catching an early flight to Glasgow from Luton. He’s coming to pick me up. We’ll leave his car at the airport and he’s booked a hire car at Glasgow.”

  “Good Lord! What time does he intend to get here?”

  “About 5.00 a.m. We decided that would give us time to get to Luton and park the car in good time. The flight leaves at 8.30.”

  “Very cosy,” said Tom. There was no mistaking his tone this time. “Well, it will be chilly up there, so may I suggest that you wear something a little more substantial than that dress, even if the place is centrally-heated?”

  “I don’t have time to buy anything new,” Alex said defensively.

  “You don’t need anything new! Your wardrobe is bursting with clothes. Let me choose something.”

  This time Alex’s laugh was unforced.

  “This sudden interest in my clothes is quite overwhelming. You’ve never before given the slightest indication that you take any notice of what I wear.”

  “Ah, well, you see, I’m more observant than you think,” said Tom. He sprang to his feet and began leafing through the rail in her wardrobe.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The following evening Alex was sitting across the table from Edmund at dinner wearing a black knitted, sequin-spangled, silk jumper with a low neck and a long black velvet skirt. Tom’s choice of clothes, though hardly sexy, was at least not frumpy. In fact, she felt quite elegant compared to the other guests. Aside from the other delegates at the conference – about thirty of them and almost all, as Tom had predicted, men of ‘a certain age’ – the guests at the hotel were mostly rich elderly golfers with heavily made-up wives in tow, some of them wearing floaty chiffon creations that were rather too uncomfortably like parodies of her red dress.

  They were having dinner quite late by Scottish standards. Contrary to what she had assumed, no formal conference dinner had been arranged. Instead, the conference delegates had been invited to join the other guests at a time of their own choosing and, consequently, most of them had opted to eat earlier and were now propping up one of the several residents’ bars in the hotel.

  Edmund placed his hand over hers.

  “You’re looking very lovely,” he said. She allowed it to rest there for a while, before gently drawing her own hand away.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. “Don’t you like me to do that?”

  “It’s not that I don’t like it; it’s just that I don’t want anyone to see us. There are too many people here that we know for us to be able to make displays of affection in public.”

  Edmund nodded and withdrew his hand altogether.
r />   “Did you ring home?” he asked.

  “Yes, but Tom was out. He’s working on a complicated case at the moment. I doubt if he’ll even notice that I’m not there.”

  “Then he doesn’t deserve you,” said Edmund. He was obviously trying to sound gallant, but the words came out a little unctuously.

  “What about you? Did you call your wife?” Alex could not bring herself to say ‘Krystyna’. It would sound impertinent, somehow.

  “Yes, but she wasn’t there either. Visiting her mother, probably. As I think I’ve told you, she and her sister suffer from an unhealthy preoccupation with the minutiae of their mother’s life. In reality, the old girl’s as tough as old boots. They should just leave her to get on with it. I think that Krystyna needs her more than the other way round. She usually goes there when she’s becoming depressed.”

  “Does she suffer from depression?”

  “Yes, unfortunately. They all do: the sister and brother as well. I think it may have something to do with that sense of rootlessness that I told you about. They don’t quite fit in here – despite all their charm. Anyway, let’s change the subject. If you decide what you’re going to eat, I can choose some wine.”

  Alex had been determined not to drink too much on this occasion, but, as they started their second bottle of wine, she reflected that alcohol seemed to have become an indispensable prop to their relationship. She was enjoying Edmund’s company, though; and its illicitness, which had worried her so much at the end of the evening that they had spent in Peterborough, was not disturbing her unduly. “Thou shalt not be found out,” she thought ruefully. The devil’s commandment. She could hardly doubt that her more relaxed attitude stemmed less from her having been engulfed by an overwhelming passion for Edmund than from the feeling of security that she had gained from being almost 400 miles from home. As she also knew, once they had sunk the second bottle of wine, the caution that compelled her to reject his caresses in public would have evaporated completely. They would have to retire to avoid scandal. That she was not booked into a suite, as she had been at the Society’s conference, caused her a small tremor of apprehension. It looked so much more blatant to invite a man to her bedroom, even though she knew it was what they were both anticipating.

  Edmund was drinking more slowly than usual and she felt that he was taking extra care to make the conversation interesting. He had put aside his habitual combativeness and was talking to her earnestly about the best ways to label artefacts that had not been properly classified upon discovery. As this was at the heart of the ‘big project’ which they had now agreed to take on together, she felt touched, because she knew that he was trying to tell her that some of the logistical difficulties that worried her most could be overcome. She sipped the wine and smiled, catching his eye.

  He halted in mid-sentence.

  “What’s the matter? Am I boring you?”

  She laughed, a silvery, tinkling laugh that she hardly recognised as her own, and patted his sleeve.

  “No, of course not. I’m just touched by how seriously you’re taking the project.”

  “Of course I’m taking it seriously,” he said. “Everything depends on it!”

  “Not everything, surely?” Her flirtatiousness evaporated. Was he implying that he expected her to leave Tom? If so, she must be careful not to fall into the trap. She knew that she was not ready to change her life so irrevocably.

  Edmund’s voice was taut.

  “Well, everything eventually. We’re both proposing to give up our jobs, aren’t we? A great deal hangs on our success. For me more than for you, perhaps.”

  “I’m not sure that I follow you.”

  Edmund flushed and bit his lip. He took a long swig from his water glass.

  “I . . . just meant that I have to support two people, that’s all. Krystyna no longer works, as I told you; and, even when she did, she was only a part-time teaching assistant at a primary school. Stupidly, she has never paid into a pension scheme – despite good advice from me on the subject, I might add.”

  He was blustering, thought Alex: changing the subject.

  “I’ve been thinking that we might not have to hand in our respective notices until we’re pretty sure that the business idea is going to work,” said Alex smoothly.

  Edmund steepled his fingers and regarded her over the crown that he had made.

  “How do you propose to do that, without cheating on your employer – and requiring me to cheat on mine?” he enquired severely.

  “I’ll ask the board of the Archaeological Society to approve our taking a sample of uncategorised artefacts. We can try to attribute them to the correct period by working after hours. I’ll say that you are willing to help. We can present it as a pilot study, to see if a full classification project is achievable and then suggest that the work is put out to tender after the pilot is successful – which it will be, if what you’re telling me is correct.” She shot him a challenging smile.

  “Not a bad idea,” he said, his words belying the eagerness with which he spoke, “but what if the tender process produces a better offer than ours?”

  Alex let out a peal of laughter, entirely genuine this time.

  “You don’t know them as well as I do! There’s no way that they’ll want to go out to tender if a viable proposal is put on the table in front of them – especially if I’m the person who is suggesting a way of getting the classification work done. I can just envisage the board meeting at which it will be discussed. It will be a time for courteous speeches and fulsome compliments – and probably a suggestion that I continue to work part-time as the secretary. They hate change so much that I’m convinced that this is how they’ll react.”

  “But that isn’t what you want, is it? To work part-time, I mean. I thought that you wanted to concentrate on building the business and especially on making this project successful so that we can offer our services to other societies and museums.”

  “That is what I want, in the long run; but you’re absolutely right to suggest that we should minimise the risks if we can. This means steering a middle course until we are sure that the business can be made to work. That would be the time to consider resigning altogether.”

  Edmund nodded slowly. He still seemed to be testing what she had said in his mind; yet she also sensed that he was relieved to hear her words.

  “Alex?” he said, taking her hand again.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think that they will allow us to remove some of the boxes from Broad Street? To work on them, I mean?”

  “Gosh, you are good at jumping from the general to the particular! I don’t see why not. We should have to ask them, of course, and we may have to guarantee the safety of the boxes by taking out insurance. But none of the items has much intrinsic value, especially in their unclassified state. Their value is bound up with the Society’s own reputation as an able curator of the region’s prehistory. So I’m guessing that the answer will be ‘yes’.”

  “That’s wonderful!” said Edmund, his expression suddenly his hallmark beatific. He picked up the half-bottle of wine that remained, and waved it.

  “Shall we adjourn?”

  Alex nodded . . . and lowered her eyes.

  “Your room or mine?” she asked quietly.

  “Oh, yours, I think,” said Edmund. “It wouldn’t be very gentlemanly to let a lady go creeping around the corridors in the middle of the night, would it?”

  Alex did not reflect at the time that this was a very Edwardian way of conducting a love affair, but when she awoke the next morning to find herself alone, she realised that it had its advantages, especially as her mobile phone began to ring almost as soon as she had opened her eyes. She hauled herself out of bed and retrieved it from her handbag, which was lying on the floor among her discarded clothes. She pressed the green button with some trepidation, but it wasn’t Tom: jus
t someone from the garage calling about her car.

  She looked at her watch. It was almost 7.30 a.m. The conference didn’t start for another two hours, but now that she was awake she didn’t feel like going back to bed. She decided to take a quick shower and go for a brisk walk. She had a lot to think about.

  It was a beautiful clear frosty morning. Quickly she walked beyond the perimeter of the park and golf course to the fields beyond. She wanted to get away from the immediate vicinity of the hotel because she suspected that Edmund might also plan an early morning stroll. Despite the cold, the sheep were grazing on the sparse grass in the fields. Out of sight, further down the valley, she could hear a cowman whistling to his herd.

  She had been walking at speed. The moment that she paused to take in the view, she realised how fierce the cold was. She had forgotten her hat, so she pulled up the hood of her duffle-coat and curled her hands within her woollen mittens so that her fingers gained warmth from her palms. She didn’t have a hangover, but her head felt woolly with that curious half-absent sensation that drinking too much often causes. She was also shivery and extremely hungry. She removed one of her mittens and fished in her pocket. She found half of a Bounty bar and sucked on it, trying to make it last.

  She needed to confront herself before she could face the day – indeed, before she could either face Edmund or speak to Tom. Her mother’s voice rose unbidden in her imagination: “Just what do you think you are doing, young lady?”

  What was she doing? Last night had been pleasant – perhaps more pleasant than she had anticipated. Edmund had been a considerate and tender lover, anxious to please and receptive to her demands. He had been neither boisterous nor perfunctory, either of which would have made her feel cheap. He had also not been madly passionate – but neither had she. She knew that neither of them could claim the excuse of having been overtaken by the throes of a passion beyond their control. It had been pleasant – she returned to the word. But more fulfilling or more enjoyable than sleeping with Tom? That depended. Tom, absent-minded and arousing himself from the toils of sleep, could be a trial; but Tom at his best, engaged and focused? No. Tom was the better lover: more sensitive, more imaginative and, most importantly, an infinite extension of herself.