She nodded, too confounded by desire to speak, and as he reached out for her she went willingly into his arms, her hands sliding up into the springy coarseness of his hair, her lips parting as his mouth came down on hers, hard and hot and insistent.
Rose came to such an abrupt halt that she nearly fell. In her first serve to Lottie she had broken the strings of her racket and had run after Harry in order to ask if she could borrow his. Now she stood wide-eyed at the entrance to the winter garden, transfixed by the sight of Harry and Nina’s passionate embrace.
They were kissing in a way she had never seen people kiss before, not even her parents. With one hand Harry was holding Nina indecently close and with the other he was caressing one of her breasts, his sun-tanned hand dark against the pristine snowiness of her tennis shirt.
They were utterly unaware of her presence; unaware of anything and everything but each other.
As shock froze Rose into immobility she heard Harry groan; heard Nina make a whimpering noise, as if she were in pain. Only she wasn’t in pain. She was experiencing an emotion and a sensation way beyond Rose’s fifteen-year-old understanding, and Rose knew it.
Clumsily, half-falling, she turned on her heel, not wanting them to know that she had seen them; not knowing which of her violent, conflicting, disturbing reactions was uppermost.
Harry was her friend. He had been her friend right from the very beginning of their family reconciliation. There had always been understanding between them – an understanding so complete words were often unnecessary. He knew, for instance, and totally empathized with, her reasons for remaining with her parents in Beck-Side Street instead of moving into Crag-Side. He understood her loyalty to Jenny and Micky. When Lottie was being particularly bossy, or when Nina was being irritatingly pretentious, his eyes would meet hers in shared, exasperated, amusement.
And now Harry was kissing Nina! And Nina, who had never made any secret of her hopes where William was concerned, was allowing him to kiss her – and allowing him other, even more shocking liberties as well!
Tears she didn’t understand scalded her cheeks as she ran, not knowing where she was running to, only knowing that she wanted to put as much distance between herself and the winter garden as possible.
The ornate iron gates at the end of Crag-Side’s lavish driveway opened onto a road that climbed steeply up to Ilkley Moor. Rose, unable to run to her much-loved Beck for comfort, headed like an arrow from a bow for the moor’s soothing, cleansing, vastness.
By the time she reached its bracken covered fringe she was panting and exhausted. More confused and unhappy than she could ever remember feeling she threw herself down on springy turf and, staring down towards the distant rooftops of Ilkley, tried to reason out why the sight of Nina, in Harry’s arms, had so distressed her.
Was it simply because it was so unexpected? Nina had, after all, never expressed the slightest romantic interest in Harry. It had been William she had so hopefully been setting her cap at. Or was it the sheer passion of their embrace which was so disturbing her?
She circled her knees with her arms. There was no real reason why she should feel so disturbed. Even though she was only fifteen, life in Beck-Side Street had ensured she wasn’t a complete innocent. She, too, had been kissed, though not in the way Harry had been kissing Nina. And whereas Nina had obviously been enjoying the experience, she hadn’t liked it at all and had told Micky so in no uncertain terms.
She rested her chin on her knees. It was an incident that had nearly brought her friendship with him to an end, only his brusque, not very gracious apology, preserving it.
Her interlinked fingers tightened on each other. She still didn’t understand why he should have acted so extraordinarily, nor why Jenny had been so odd with her when she had told her of it. And she certainly didn’t understand why Harry, who so often exchanged amused glances with her whenever Nina began talking grandly about St Martin’s and London, should now be in love with her. And he quite obviously was in love with her, or he wouldn’t have been kissing her in such a passionate way.
A bee had begun to circle uncomfortably close to her head and she unclasped her hands, swatting it away. She didn’t want Harry to be in love with Nina because … because …
She tried to bring her thoughts to a logical conclusion and found she couldn’t do so.
The bee alighted on a harebell. Two small birds flew, wrangling, into a nearby gorse bush.
Why couldn’t she do so? Was it because she didn’t want to do so? Was it because she was afraid of doing so?
The answer came back almost instantly. She was afraid. And in a moment of stunning self-knowledge, she knew the reason why.
Time seemed to waver and halt. The bee skimmed away. The birds in the gorse bush fell silent.
Clumsily she stumbled to her feet. How could she not have known before? How could she ever have classed her friendship with Harry as being the same as her friendship with Micky, or her friendship with Jenny or Lottie?.
Dazedly she stared down at Ilkley’s distant rooftops, knowing that even if she had been aware of her feelings, it would have made no difference. Young men as heart-stoppingly handsome as Harry didn’t fall in love with girls with ginger hair and Pekingese eyes. They fell in love with girls like Nina. Girls who were head-turningly beautiful and graceful.
She tilted her chin, the sun hot on her upturned face, knowing that Nina would never again be able to accuse her of being too young to understand things. She wondered how long it would be before Nina noticed the change that had taken place in her, and, when she did notice, what her reaction would be.
Somewhere, far distant, a church clock struck the hour, though what hour she had no idea. Slowly she began to walk back towards the road. Lottie would still be waiting for her, and she wouldn’t be waiting patiently. She would be cross; very cross indeed.
“Of course I’m not cross,” Lottie said to Noel, kneeling on the grass a few feet away from him. William had sloped off on some mysterious errand of his own and she was feeling far too pleased at having Noel all to herself to feel anything like crossness. “I only said I’d give Rose a game because she missed out when the rest of us played doubles.”
Noel, still lying flat on his back, made a disbelieving sound. Lottie was a lot of things, many of them exceedingly entertaining, but she wasn’t known for being generously unselfish. If she wasn’t miffed that Rose hadn’t returned to play their intended game of tennis, it was because it suited her that Rose hadn’t done so. Idly, he wondered why. He wasn’t left to wonder long.
“Papa says you’ve been invited to a reception at Leeds Town Hall tonight,” she said with typical forthrightness. “I’ve met the Lord Mayor lots of times when I’ve been to functions with Papa, and he’s a pet. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you took me with you this evening.”
Noel rolled over on to his side, resting his weight on his arm. “It’s an Art and Artists jamboree,” he said dryly. “I’ve been invited because my work is currently on show in Leeds. Why would you be interested in being there?”
Lottie took a heather-blue ribbon out of her tennis shirt pocket and began anchoring back the long, satin-smooth fall of her hair. She wanted to be there because he would be there; because if would be fun basking in his reflected glory. ‘An amazing talent’, the arts editor of the Yorkshire Observer had written about him. ‘A young man whose work shows exciting expressiveness’.
“Because I’m more experienced at stuffy public social occasions than you are,” she said starkly. “Since Mama died I’ve often accompanied Papa to functions. He says it makes them less boring.”
Noel’s grey-green eyes flashed with amusement. Lottie had only been eight when her mother had died. If his Uncle Walter had indeed begun taking her to grand dinners and soirées at such a ridiculously early age it was no wonder she was now so bossy and precocious.
“I dare say you did make them less boring,” he said amenably, “but tonight’s function is arts orientated. There
’ll be art buyers and dealers there and it won’t be in the least boring. At least not to me.”
Her eyes held his. They were exceptional eyes: a light, clear grey, the irises lamp-black.
“Then take me because I’m interested in art,” she said stubbornly.
He grinned, his amusement deepening. If Lottie was interested in art, it was a relatively new interest for what she knew about it could be written on the back of a postage stamp.
“No,” he said, well aware that he was the only person in the family who did say no to her. “If I was going to take anyone, I’d take Nina. Have you looked through her portfolio case recently? All her sketched figures look remarkably like you.”
Lottie blinked, so surprised she temporarily abandoned her efforts to persuade him to take her with him that evening. “Me? But why would she be doing that?” She frowned, bewildered. She and Nina had never hit if off in the totally committed, whole-hearted way she and Rose had done. She had resented the way that Nina, on her first visit to Crag-Side, had refused to be overawed by it, behaving instead as if she were accustomed to such a house when in reality she was accustomed only to a Bradford mill cottage. And she resented the fact that though Nina was only a little over a year her senior, she was allowed to live virtually unchaperoned in London enjoying freedoms she, still under her father’s eagle eye, could only dream about.
Her frown deepened. Was Nina making fun of her in some way? The figures Noel was referring to were sticklike clothes-horses for Nina’s dress designs, and though Noel seemed to think otherwise, there was really nothing very flattering about having one’s likeness used as a clothes-horse. However, if Noel was to try and capture her likeness, that would be a very different matter!
She settled herself into a more comfortable position, sitting back on her heels. “Papa would like you to paint me,” she said, knowing that though her father had never expressed such a wish, he would do once the idea was put into his head.
Noel fell back onto his back, groaning in mock despair. Lottie, aware that her flash of inspiration was going to put him exactly where she wanted him for weeks, possibly months, surveyed him complacently with a pussy cat smile. He would be able to start the portrait tomorrow and would hopefully work on it every day for the rest of his, and Nina’s, stay. Then, when the rest of them visited London for the Coronation, she could ask her father if she, too, could stay in the house in Battersea. Not for good, of course – he would never allow that – but just until the portrait was finished.
A flash of movement caught her eyes as someone turned into the distant entrance of the drive. She squinted her eyes against the sun and saw that it was Rose. Without even pausing to wonder where on earth Rose could have been she sprang to her feet, waving both arms in enthusiastic greeting, calling out sunnily, “Come on! We’ve a tennis match to play! We can have it finished before teatime if we make a start now!
Chapter Nine
Sarah Thorpe free-wheeled her bicycle to a halt at the entrance to one of the narrow paths that led from the Allerton side of Chellow Dene woods through to the top end of Haworth Road. It was her’s and William’s regular meeting place, for it was the nearest thing to secluded countryside west Bradford possessed. It took her twenty minutes of pleasant cycling to reach it from the mill where she worked and once she and William had walked slowly through the woods and reluctantly said goodbye at the other end of them, her way home, down Haworth Road and into Toller Lane, was all downhill.
A smile curved her lips as she slid from the high bicycle saddle. William had obviously slipped away from a posh tennis party in order to drive to meet her for he was dressed in a sports blazer and white tennis flannels.
“Hello love, have you been waiting long?” she asked fondly as he stepped from the shade of the tree he had been leaning against. “I got here as soon as I could but I had to go on an errand for Pa first.”
He covered the distance between them swiftly, his arms closing lovingly around her waist. “I’ve been waiting ten minutes,” he said, breathing in the faint fragrance of rose water that emanated from her hair, savouring a moment of close physical contact that his respect for her ensured would be all too brief. “It felt like ten hours.”
She pressed her hands against his chest, pushing herself a little away from him so that she could look up into his face. “I have to be home by six,” she said gently, knowing how intensely disappointed he would be. “Pa is preaching at Little Horton tonight and he wants me to go with him.”
William wondered whether to suggest he, too, went to Little Horton to hear her lay-preacher father orate, and then thought better of it. It would cause the kind of gossip they desperately wished to avoid and besides, he could hardly go into a Methodist chapel dressed in a sports blazer and tennis flannels.
Reluctantly he removed his hands from around her waist, knowing that if he held her close a second longer he would kiss her; knowing that if he once began kissing her he would never be able to stop.
“Then it doesn’t give us much time to talk, love,” he said, taking one of her hands in his and, as they began walking along the narrow pathway, pushing her bicycle along with the other. “And there’s a lot we have to talk about.”
Sarah’s hand tightened in his. Whenever William spoke in the tone of voice he was now using, it meant only one thing. He was again tussling with the problem of how to tell his father that he loved her and intended marrying her. A slight shadow touched her eyes. Every moment they shared together was precious and she hated it when, instead of simply taking pleasure in each other’s company, they ended up discussing what his father’s reaction to her as a daughter-in-law might, or might not be.
It wasn’t as if it was an anxiety she shared. Tranquil and serene by nature and possessing a firm belief in her own self-worth, she regarded any difficulty William’s father had about her as being his problem, not hers.
“You said you weren’t going to worry about it anymore,” she reminded him patiently. “You said you were simply going to tell him when you were twenty-one.”
“I’m twenty-one in four weeks time,” he said wryly. “Which is why we have to talk, Sarah. I want you with me when I break the news. And I want you to meet the rest of my family before I break the news.”
She looked across at him, her eyes widening. “Your brother and sister? I thought you said your sister would be no help at all – that she’d hate the idea of you marrying a mill girl?”
A slight smile touched his narrow, well-shaped mouth. “So I did – but that was before our Sugden cousins came into our lives. I told you my aunt and uncle live in a street quite near to your own street, didn’t I? My father said Rose, my youngest cousin, was more than welcome to come and live at Crag-Side but she turned the offer down. Much as she loves Crag-Side, and I sometimes thinks she loves it more than any of us, she also values her Beck-Side Street friends and is in no hurry to leave them.”
“And?” Sarah prompted, liking the sound of Rose Sugden.
“And Lottie regards Rose more as a sister than a cousin. And as Rose lives in a mill cottage, she’s had to revise her snobbish way of thinking quite a lot.”
Sarah remained tactfully silent. She knew that however much Lottie Rimmington’s attitudes had changed, they hadn’t changed sufficiently enough for her to be happy about her father’s romantic friendship with one of the Sugden’s neighbours.
The bicycle wheels scrunched over a scattering of loose pebbles. A squirrel, disturbed by the noise, scampered for cover up a nearby tree.
They continued walking, hands tightly clasped, neither of them speaking. William was deep in thought as to how best to introduce Sarah to Harry and Lottie and Rose. Should he do so before Noel and Nina arrived at Crag-Side for his twenty-first birthday party? Or should he wait until he could introduce her to everyone at once?
Sarah’s thoughts were equally confused. Why, when William’s father was romantically friendly with a Beck-Side Street widow, should he disapprove of her and William’s r
elationship? Apart from age there was, after all, very little difference between herself and Mrs Wilkinson. They both lived in the same working-class neighbourhood; they both worked in local mills. Surely, under the circumstances, William’s father would be understanding when William spoke to him, not disapproving?
“I think a Saturday afternoon picnic on Ilkley Moor would be the best idea,” William said, putting an end to her puzzled train of thought. “Harry can drive Lottie and Rose up there and I’ll come for you in Minerva.”
Minerva was the brand name of the imported motorcar he had bought for himself with money left him by his grandfather. He never referred to it as the Minerva, however, only Minerva, as though the motorcar were a person.
“Can we meet where we met today?” Sarah had surprisingly few qualms about meeting Harry and Lottie and Rose for the first time, but she did have qualms where Minerva was concerned. Until now, on the few occasions when William had visited her home, staying for a family high tea of tripe and onions, or black pudding and peas, he had always bicycled there. In her little cul-de-sac a bicycle, even a strange bicycle, attracted little attention. Minerva attracted attention even in the poshest streets of Ilkley and Harrogate.
He nodded, having too much respect for Sarah’s parents to even consider the idea of trundling Minerva over their cobbles.
Mr and Mrs Thorpe knew, of course, who he was and were unimpressed. “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,” Mr Thorpe had said to him, quoting from Proverbs in the gentle, musing manner that made his lay-preacher delivery so oddly effective and so distinctively different to the hell-fire approach of many of his colleagues. “And a good name, and good character, is what matters in this house, lad,” he had added with true Bradfordian bluntness. “If your intentions are as honourable as we understand them to be, then you’re as welcome to court Sarah as any other fine upstanding young man would be. If they’re not, then no amount of mill-owning brass’ll make you welcome. You’d best be gone, and gone sharp.”
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