by June Gadsby
“Ah, well, I didn’t say I particularly liked all wildlife,” I said, and he laughed back at me.
“Right. While I see if I can get the old tractor-mower working, you tidy up the pots around the terrace, and there are one or two flower beds that need a good weeding, if you’re game?”
“I’m game.” I told him, and it wasn’t a lie. I have always found that gardening is such therapeutic work. I spent hours in my own garden back in England. Greg always sneered at me when he found me working there, getting my fingers dirty.
“Yes, you are, aren’t you?” Callum was staring at me with new respect, I felt. “Well, you’d better change into something you won’t mind ruining.”
“Don’t worry. Weeding isn’t such a dirty job.”
I had reason, an hour later to change my mind. I had finished tidying the big terracotta flowerpots on the terrace and I wandered around the back of the house to escape the heat of the midday sun. I spotted a large patch of tall weeds and attacked them enthusiastically. In the background, I could hear Callum riding around on his tractor-mower. The air was full of the smell of newly mown grass, lilac and a variety of other perfumes all mingling together.
A few minutes later I heard Callum’s shout, but it was already too late. I was falling. Suddenly, the ground was no longer there beneath my feet and I was tumbling headfirst in mid-air, not knowing where I would land.
I landed with a splash in two feet of muddy water. I was struggling to get out, slithering and crawling my way back up the bank, spluttering and spitting out foul tasting mud when Callum appeared looking terribly worried.
“God, I’m sorry,” he exclaimed as he hauled me out of the mire I was sinking back into knee deep. “I forgot to warn you that the pond got a bit overgrown at this time of year.”
“A bit!” I gulped and spat out another mouthful of dirty brown gunge. “Ugh! I must look an awful mess!”
No sooner had I got the words out than something moved inside my tee-shirt. Something cold and slimy. I gave a shout and pulled out the neck of the shirt, so I could look down inside. Between my breasts there was a fish squirming about, its eyes ogling me, its mouth opening and shutting. Of course, I screamed. I screamed and danced about and tugged at the soaking wet tee-shirt until the fish finally flopped to the ground and lay twitching on the grass at my feet. While all this was happening, Callum was watching me in fascination, then he started to laugh and went on laughing until I had to join in, once the initial shock of the event had passed.
“Oh, God! How awful! Throw the poor thing back in the water before it suffocates,” I managed to shout through my laughter.
“You throw it back in,” Callum snorted and wiped tears from his eyes. “You fished him out.”
“I did not He was an unwelcome passenger” Nevertheless, I tried to show bravado and picked the fish up, but the minute I had it in my hands it writhed about so much that I ended up throwing it in the air and squealing once more, which started Callum off laughing yet again. He finally managed to get hold of the thing and returned it to the pond. I suspected, from the twisted grimace on his face, that he didn’t care to handle it any more than I did.
“Come on,” he stifled his laughter and grabbed my hand, pulling me after him, my clothes dripping, my feet squelching in my sodden shoes. “Let’s get you back to the house. Thank heavens modern plumbing has finally found its way to this part of the world. You’ll need plenty of hot water to get rid of all that muck. There’s no telling what else you’ll find lurking in your clothes.”
“Oh, please…don’t.” I shuddered and gave a girlish giggle when he grinned at me. “It’s not funny, Callum.”
But it was, and we were still laughing when we left a damp and muddy trail through the hall and I wondered what Madame Sabatier would think if she saw it before I had time to clean it up.
“Here, give me your shoes,” Callum bent and before I knew what he was doing he had grabbed my ankle and was pulling at one soggy shoe while I wobbled on one leg.
“I can’t believe that I could do something so stupid,” I said, and he looked up at me, but before he could speak the telephone rang and he looked sharply over his shoulder. “Go and answer it. I can manage. I’ll try not to leave too much muddy water on the way to my room.”
As soon as he was out of sight, I stood in the hall and stripped most of my clothes off, dropping them in an oozing pile on the hall floor where I could pick them up later and wash them. Or burn them if need be. I could still hear the laughter in Callum’s voice when he spoke into the phone.
“Yes? Oh, Hilary, it’s you. What? Well, yes, I was laughing…yes…something very amusing just happened. Poor Megan fell into the pond…yes, all the way…face down. She got soaked to the skin and tried to smuggle out one of my prize Koi carp under her tee-shirt. Sorry? Yes, she did make a bit of a fuss. It was a lively little devil. No, of course she’s not hurt. Just a little embarrassed, that’s all. I should have warned her that the pond was there. What’s that….?”
I was at the top of the stairs, shivering with cold, having taken my time because I wanted to listen in to Callum’s conversation. Silly, but the fact that he was talking to his wife made me feel incredibly resentful and wary.
There had been a long silence as Callum listened to what Hilary had to tell him and I gathered from his stunned response that it wasn’t good news.
“But that’s awful…I just don’t believe it. Oh, well, yes, of course I believe it. I didn’t mean that I thought you were telling lies, for goodness sake. So, what’s happening?” Another long silence. I peered over the balustrade and I could just see Callum rubbing a hand over a face suddenly gone weary, all humour faded away. “So…what do we do now? It’s just so damned annoying, Hilary….!”
I left him to it at that point and hurried to my room to have a hot shower and wash the mud out of my hair. Half an hour later, clean and changed, I found Callum setting out a cold chicken and salad lunch on the terrace. He looked up and gave a strained smile when he saw me.
“Ah, that’s better,” he said, pouring me a glass of chilled Jurancon wine and handing it to me. I noticed he had already had one and was refilling his glass. “No leeches, I take it, otherwise I might have been summoned?”
“No leeches,” I assured him with a smile and waited, but he didn’t mention the phone call from Hilary and I didn’t like to ask about it.
However, he seemed nervous and preoccupied throughout the meal and, in the afternoon, he made a point of staying out of my way. Not overtly so, but with tactical evasion, which made me wonder even more what that phone call had been about.
I went for a walk after we’d cleared away the lunch things. Callum said he had some work to attend to and would be in his tower for a while. When I came back I was surprised to find him relaxing on the terrace in a sun-lounger. His eyes were closed behind his sunglasses and the book he had been reading was lying open and face down on his chest.
For a moment, thinking he was asleep, I stood over him looking down at his face, so youthful in repose. My shadow, falling over him, must have disturbed him, because he opened his eyes, took off his sunglasses and squinted up at me.
“I wasn’t asleep,” he said, as if he felt the need to excuse himself. I waited for his smile, but it wasn’t forthcoming. “Did you enjoy your walk?”
“Yes, it was very pleasant. The countryside is superb. I met an old man on a bike and he kept me talking for at least five minutes.”
“Oh? What did you talk about?”
“I have no idea, but he seemed happy with my responses, so I must have nodded and shaken my head in the right places.” He still didn’t smile. Something was amiss. “What’s wrong, Callum? You seem distracted. Has something happened?”
He sat upright, put his book to one side and gazed up at me, his eyes troubled.
“Just about everything has gone wrong,” he groaned. “That phone call earlier. It was from Hilary. Stuart and Pamela aren’t coming. The children have come d
own with measles, of all things.”
“Oh, goodness, I’m sorry.” My response was genuine, then I realised what it meant. Greg would have said you just couldn’t have coincidences like this. Not in real life. But this was real life and I was right in the middle of it. And so was Callum. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know.” He looked away, chewed on his mouth, then glanced up at me again, judging my reaction, I thought. “But that’s not all.”
“There’s more?”
“Oh, there’s more all right.” He stood up and flexed himself stiffly, so I got the impression that he had not been in his tower at all but had spent the last couple of hours sitting there ruminating, perhaps wondering what to do, what to say to me. He walked to the edge of the terrace and leaned against the balustrade which ran the entire length of it. “There was another call. Madame Sabatier. She can’t come back this evening. Her daughter’s given birth. She’s at home. They still do that here. Madame Sabatier is staying to help Sevrine with the new baby. She was full of apologies, but I couldn’t have persuaded her to change her mind, even if I wanted to. It’s her first grandchild.”
“I see.” I didn’t quite know how I was supposed to feel, but a strange dullness settled inside me.
“What a bloody business.” Callum beat his fist on the balustrade. His back was still to me, so I couldn’t see his expression, but judging from the tautness of his muscles which stretched against the fine silk of his dark blue shirt, I knew how angry he was. “It’s a conspiracy of sorts. What the hell are we going to do, Megan?”
“What do you mean?” It was a naïve question. I’m sure we both knew at the bottom of us what Callum meant.
“I wish to goodness I knew.” Then he turned to face me, and I saw the anger and the boiling emotion as his eyes burned into mine. “Tell me, Megan. Tell me honestly. Do you want to go back to England? You know why I’m asking that, don’t you?”
“Yes…yes, I think I do,” I replied, my throat tightening.
“Well? Do you? Want to go back?”
“No,” I shook my head and felt my mouth quiver. Oh, please God, don’t let me cry. “No, Callum, I don’t.”
“Thank God, because neither do I.”
He came towards me, came so close that I could feel the heat of him. His hands reached out, slipped up my bare arms. I closed my eyes and leaned into him. And then he kissed me. Sweet and gentle at first, a little unsure. I moulded myself to his body, giving him no doubt as to how I felt.
Suddenly, he crushed me to him, his arms like steel bands. He gave a sobbing gasp and murmured my name against my hair before his lips found mine again, this time in an explosion of passion that seemed to electrify the very air around us.
Chapter Thirty
“Oh, my dearest, darling Megan.” Callum’s voice was thick with passion. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve wanted to take you in my arms and tell you that I loved you?”
“About as many times as I wanted you to,” I replied, whispering my words into his neck, inhaling the warm, fresh, manly scent of his skin.
“I tried not to love you, but I failed miserably. Every time I thought about you I told myself that I was an old fool going through a mid-life crisis. I even convinced myself that you would only laugh if you knew how I felt. I laughed at myself.”
“I couldn’t believe that a happily married man would see anything in me,” I told him, my voice muffled against his chest. “I hated myself for falling in love with you, for wishing that you didn’t have a wife who loved you.”
“I know, I know. Oh, Megan, what have we got ourselves into?”
“I don’t know. I only know that I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you and if this is all we have…these two weeks alone together…I’ll make it last the rest of my life.”
He was silent for a few moments. I felt his chest heave, heard his long unsteady sigh. “In that case,” he said, his voice cracked, broken, shattered. “In that case, my love, we must make the most of our time here together.”
Gently, he pushed me away from him until we were looking at one another, frankly, our souls bared. I saw the pain in my heart reflected in his eyes alongside our shared love.
“Megan, I want to make love to you,” he said, slowly, deliberately. “I want our bodies, as well as our minds and our hearts, to be joined as one. You can refuse me if you want to. I’ll understand. You have a husband who, God forbid, needs you. And then there’s Hilary. Ours is no more than a marriage of convenience, but she adores me. I’m like a son to her. The marriage is a sham. I was a young, struggling pianist when she took me under her wing. She had money and influence. When I agreed to marry her, she was under no illusion that it had anything to do with love. I’m very fond of her, but Hilary’s feelings for me go a lot deeper. I don’t want to hurt her. Do you understand, Megan?”
“Yes, Callum,” I nodded dumbly.
He took my hand and led me gently up the stairs. He closed the door of my suite behind us and again took me in his arms, crushing me, his heart beating and thudding wildly against my breasts. Our mutual desire rose to such a height that I wasn’t sure I could stand it without first exploding and then fading away into eternity.
His lips brushed my neck as his hands pressed into the curve of my spine and his strong, muscular thighs carved themselves against me. I prayed that this overture to love would never end, while also longing for the climax of our liaison.
With deliberate slowness and serious concentration, he undressed me. Then he picked me up as if I weighed no more than a sack of feathers and laid me on the bed. He stripped off his own clothes, unhurriedly. By the time he lowered himself on top of me, entering me with bittersweet slowness that drove my senses right out the top of my head, there was no more time to think. Our mutual climax exploded all around us and we floated together in a sea of satiated desire that could never be repeated. Not in one lifetime. Of that I was very sure.
There were no words and I thanked God for this gentle, quiet lover who did not dole out stock phrases by rote that meant so little, either to him or to me. Between us there were sighs, muted groans and delighted gasps. And then silence when he rolled to the side and cradled me in his arms, holding me close, kissing the side of my head and stroking my cheek. I found myself praying that this moment would never end yet knowing that it must, and that life had to go on for both of us. But I also knew that our lives would never again be the same.
Eventually, we slept, locked together in that wonderful embrace. Our mutual love had been consummated. If I never loved again, I would remember and treasure this moment; and survive all that Fate had in store for me.
When the morning light filtered through the half-closed shutters and the blackbird sang his song, I stirred, warm and cosy, tucked tightly against Callum’s side my head on his shoulder. My eyelids fluttered open and I found him awake, looking down on me, smiling.
He kissed my forehead, then his lips trailed over my sleepy eyelids, my flushed cheeks and finally found my mouth. His renewed arousal pressed against me and I turned into him, clutching him, wanting him. He held off valiantly, but then gave vent to his passion and I welcomed it jubilantly as we soared like people on a giant Catherine wheel as they spilled over the top in a shower of bright sparks, and then plunged down the other side. Love had never been like this and never would be again.
***
We had five glorious days together when we unashamedly enjoyed each other. Then Madame Sabatier reappeared, and we were forced back into discretion, though it hardly made any difference. We found pockets of time in the day to hide ourselves away. Our lovemaking became a game of hide and seek from the old French housekeeper.
Judging from the looks Madame Sabatier gave us at mealtimes, I guessed that she knew what was going on. Strangely enough, I think she approved.
“Monsieur Andrews, he is happy,” she muttered to me confidentially one day when she caught me on my own. “I no see him this happy. Is good. You are good
with him. Not like the other one. It is nice lady, Madame Hilary, but…ouf! She not for him. She live in one world…the monsieur in another. You come again, I hope?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Madame Sabatier,” my heart sinking as I realised that my time with Callum was all but ended. We were due to return to England the day after tomorrow.
“Oui.” The Frenchwoman nodded her head vigorously. “You come again. Is in les étoiles…how you say…into the stars. Oui, c’est ça! I feel it here.” She beat a fist against her chest, then gently touched my cheek and nodded. “You see. C’est le destin.”
Destiny! Could she be right? I prayed to God that she was.
***
We tried to save our last day at Labagnac for ourselves, but as soon as the locals got wind of our leaving, they took it upon themselves to visit, bringing with them wine and food for a picnic lunch in the grounds of Le Manoir. It was a heart-warming gesture, which Callum appreciated, but I knew he also felt, as I did, robbed of a few hours more of our precious love.
Neither of us ate much, but we did drink perhaps a little too much of the rough red local wine. As the last of the French farmers and their wives wished us bon voyage and left in high spirits, Callum said his goodbyes to Madame Sabatier. She turned to me and without warning flung her scrawny arms about me and planted a kiss on both my cheeks. Her eyes met mine in a silent message that spoke volumes. Then she gave a brief, almost tearful nod and hurried off, her bicycle kicking up a cloud of dust in her wake.
“Let’s walk,” Callum suggested, nodding down a narrow, leafy lane. We only had half an hour before leaving Le Manoir and I knew, like me, he was reluctant to go back inside. Our cases were already packed and waiting on the terrace.
His hand clasped mine so tightly that it hurt. I didn’t mind the pain. In fact, I welcomed it, because I was otherwise quite numb. After five minutes or so we came to an old orchard and running along one edge of it there was a huge, glass greenhouse, obviously overgrown and untended.
