by Anne Weale
Anny had mourned the contessa. The loss of Bart went much deeper. But her grief for him was nothing compared to the agony of losing her best friend and her lover.
Her unhappiness made her recognise the same condition in other people. Previously, being young, healthy and happy, she hadn’t fully realised how much pain and desolation was being suffered by people whose outward appearance suggested prosperity and well-being.
Sometimes she saw more quiet anguish in the eyes of matronly shoppers than in the faces of winos and beggars. She could only guess at the cause, but she sensed that, for whatever reason, they felt as she did. As if the world had caved in on them. As if the future was a long dark tunnel with not even a pinpoint of light at the end of it. As if they were trapped in a freezer and were never going to be let out.
Perhaps, from a journalistic point of view, it was useful to go through this; to learn from experience how people felt when life knocked the stuffing out of them.
Many times, in those long sleepless nights which left her feeling washed out, she wondered if she had made the wrong choice, discarding something infinitely precious for something of lesser value.
Night after night she wondered if tomorrow would be the day Van made contact with her. Surely he must be as unhappy as she was? Surely he would change his mind?
At first she had hoped that, as time passed, there would be fewer reminders of him. But it didn’t happen. There was never a day when something didn’t bring to mind a remark he had made, a joke they had shared. She had to stop eating chocolate because the taste conjured up a vivid memory of her first kiss.
She had been working in London for three months, sharing a flat with Jill Carter, a fashion-page writer, when Jill’s brother Jon came back from Holland.
Anny already knew a good deal about him. There were photographs of him and their parents in Jill’s bedroom. When the doorbell rang on an evening when Jill was out, Anny looked through the peep-hole and recognised the man waiting to be admitted.
When she opened the door, he said, ‘Hi! You must be Anny. I’m Jon.’
The day before she had interviewed a dog breeder. With his blond hair, burly build and friendly hazel eyes, Jon made her think of a golden retriever offering a friendly paw.
Finding out that she hadn’t eaten and being hungry himself, he insisted on taking her out to the neighbour-hood pizza parlour. Over supper, he did most of the talking, mainly about his work researching the Dutch bulb trade on a grant from a horticultural organisation.
Anny was always interested in other people’s jobs. For a couple of hours, Jon provided a distraction from her personal problems.
Van was in America. He had spent the day in conference with his small group of associates. Already they were all rich men and steadily getting richer.
He had always been sure Cyberscout would be massively successful but now, because he’d lost Anny, it was a hollow triumph. Without her in his life, there was no real satisfaction in anything.
If she felt the same way—and how could she not after what they had shared?—surely it wouldn’t be long before she changed her mind and came back to him?
It was easy for her to make contact. She knew his E-mail address. Several times a day and sometimes in the small hours of the night he checked to see if there was a message from her.
Wondering what she was doing, who she was with, if she was thinking about him, he sought escape from his thoughts on the Net.
Three months after the funeral and the day Anny and Van shook hands and went their separate ways, Emily Lancaster called her. ‘I’m in London...flew in this morning. Are you free for dinner?’
Anny knew it would be wiser to say no, but was impelled to say yes. They arranged to meet at Emily’s club. As soon as she had rung off, Anny knew she had made a mistake. An evening with Emily would send her right back to square one in her struggle to put the past firmly behind her.
Emily was waiting for her in the club’s drawing room, the only other person there being an elderly man dozing in a deep armchair. She cast aside the magazine she had been reading, embracing Anny as warmly as if they had known each other all their lives.
‘This place is fearfully old-fashioned but I hate staying in hotels,’ she explained, on the way to the bar. ‘I’m the great-great-niece of one of the founders so they give me preferential treatment. Not all the single bedrooms have their own bathrooms, but I always get one that does.’
While they had their pre-dinner drinks, she asked about Anny’s job and talked about Cranmere, her forebears’ estate. ‘If you want a bolt-hole from London, you’re welcome to use my flat there. Why not come down this weekend?’
For a moment Anny’s heart leapt. Could Van be behind this invitation? Had he asked Emily to set up a meeting because he was starting to regret his intransigence?
She said cautiously, ‘It’s kind of you, Emily, but I’m not sure I’ll be free. At this stage of my career, I have to be ready to go wherever I’m sent, often at very short notice.’
Emily looked at her thoughtfully for several moments before she said, ‘I gather that was one of the reasons why you and Van decided to split. Is it working out...being on your own?’
Anny didn’t know how to reply. She decided it was no use pussyfooting. ‘Did Van ask you to check me out?’
Emily shook her head. ‘He doesn’t know I’m in London. We had dinner in New York a couple of weeks ago. He gave me the briefest possible résumé of the situation, then he clammed up and we spent the rest of the evening discussing the Net. Men don’t talk about What Went Wrong the way women do. They can’t verbalise their innermost feelings as easily as we can...although I would have thought Van was more in touch with his emotions than a lot of guys. Do you want to talk about it?’
‘What did he tell you?’
‘That you had different priorities. You want to concentrate on your career. He wants you to concentrate on him and Orengo. Is that a fair summary?’
‘I guess so.’ Anny looked out of the window at a terrace of tall Georgian houses across the street. ‘How does our impasse strike you?’ she asked, returning her gaze to the sympathetic face on the other side of the table.
Emily looked at the lighted candle casting its soft effulgence over the damask napery, the silver and crystal and the small bowl of anemones. She said reflectively, ‘I’ve known and liked Van a long time and I felt an immediate rapport between you and me. I hope you did too. I empathise with both your points of view. When I think what it must have been like for women in the past, their lives controlled by men from the cradle to the grave, I’m thankful I wasn’t born in an earlier era.’
She picked up her glass of the Chablis she had chosen to go with their trout. ‘That said,’ she went on, ‘I know my life isn’t as happy as it would be if I shared it with a man I loved...and also I know that wonderful men aren’t thick on the ground. I can count the ones I’ve met on the fingers of one hand, and they all belonged to other women. So when, if ever, I meet the right man for me, I’ll let him call the shots. Wherever he needs to be, I’ll be right there with him...even if it’s Antarctica or the Andaman Islands.’
A waiter came to remove their plates and ask what puddings they would like.
She waited until he had gone before she resumed the conversation. ‘However...I’m a lot older than you are. For me, freedom has lost its savour. It’s beginning to turn sour on me. So our perspectives are different.’
Without waiting for Anny to comment, she changed the subject.
She returned to it, briefly, when they parted. ‘If you find you aren’t needed this weekend, feel free to come...or any time when you fancy a spell in the country. Here’s my card.’
A taxi, answering her wave, drew up outside the club’s elegant portico. Emily opened the rear door.
Anny said, ‘It’s been a very nice evening. Thank you. Next time you must dine with me.’
‘I’d like that.’ Emily kissed her own fingertips, then pressed them lightly against
Anny’s cheek. ‘Just remember that however much Van loves you, he’s a man with all a man’s needs. He’s not going to live alone in that great house for ever. There will be a lot of women who would like to share it with him.’
‘That cuts both ways,’ said Anny. ‘Women also have needs and I’m working with men who are journalists too. They understand and sympathise if I have to break private engagements.’
Emily sighed and shook her head. ‘Stalemate... deadlock...impasse!’ she said resignedly. ‘Anyway it was great to see you again.’
‘For me too. Thanks again. Bye.’ Anny gave her address to the driver and stepped into the taxi.
As it drew away from the kerb and swung in the tight U-turn for which London taxis were famous, she knew she should have been guided by her instinct to avoid tonight’s meeting. Emily’s final comment about Van had pierced her like a knife.
When she got back to the flat, Jill was out but Jon was there, replacing the flex on the iron which he had noticed was frayed.
Anny was glad to see him. She didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts. She made him some coffee and they talked until Jill came home, an hour later.
Jon had known Anny for five months before he kissed her. It happened while they were spending Christmas with his parents. He and Jill had insisted Anny must join in the family festivities. Having nowhere else to go, she was glad to accept. Mr and Mrs Carter gave her a warm welcome.
On Christmas night, Jon gave her a playful kiss under a bunch of mistletoe. The next afternoon, on a walk, he kissed her more thoroughly. She submitted rather than responded, curious to find out what happened when another man kissed her. Several had made tentative passes but she had fended them off. She knew she wasn’t ready for an affair. The idea repelled her. But Jon was different. He had become a friend, someone she could relax with, someone she trusted.
‘I’ve wanted to do that for ages,’ he said, still holding her close. ‘But I felt it might spoil things between us if I rushed my fences. I had this feeling there must have been someone in Paris...someone important to you.’ ‘There was...but it’s over,’ she told him. ‘At this stage in my life I can’t cope with heavy emotion. I hoped we could stay...just friends.’
To her surprise and relief, he said, ‘OK, let’s do that. Do you want to talk about what happened? Sometimes it helps to unbottle things.’
Anny didn’t want to confide all the details, but she felt it was time to make clear to him the intimate nature of her previous relationship.
Mr and Mrs Carter had been married for thirty-eight years and had obviously instilled their own views in their children. Jon’s eldest sister was married with three children. His other sister was engaged but not living with her fiancé. Compared with most of those Anny mixed with and interviewed, the whole Carter family seemed to exist in a time warp of values and customs discarded by trendier people.
She admired them for resisting ways they weren’t comfortable with, but felt they would disapprove if they knew her background and especially her recent past.
‘There’s not much to tell. I was in love with someone who wanted me to give up my career and be a full-time wife. I wasn’t ready to do that He wasn’t happy with the way we were...so we split.’
‘I had the same sort of problem with my last girlfriend,’ said Jon. ‘She hated my being away so much. I could see her point of view. She wanted a guy who was around all the time. I used to write to her a lot but she hardly ever wrote back and I don’t think what I wrote interested her much. When she told me she’d met someone else, it didn’t break me up. I’d already realised we were heading for the rocks. But it sounds as if what happened with you was a lot more traumatic.’
‘It was,’ she admitted. ‘I still haven’t quite come to terms with it. I suppose I shall eventually. Other people do. Half the people I know are divorced or in second-time-around relationships. Journalism is one of the worst careers for breaking up marriages and partnerships. War correspondents have the highest divorce rate, but even feature writers lead more erratic lives than people in strictly nine-to-five occupations.’
When Anny returned to London, she still half-hoped to find a card from Van among those posted late or delayed. She hadn’t sent one to him but, if she received one, she would respond with a Happy New Year card. There was no card from Van in the scatter of mail she and Jill found on their doormat. But there was one from Emily, a watercolour painting of Cranmere under snow. Inside, she had written, ‘Your piece about being homeless at Christmas was brilliant. I’ll show it to V in February. We’re both bidden to join James and Summer at their ski lodge in Austria.’
This message, no doubt kindly meant, made Anny wonder if the Gardiners were matchmaking. She remembered Emily’s remark about the paucity of wonderful men and how the few she had met belonged to other women. That no longer held true of Van and who could be better qualified than Emily, with her aristocratic background, to help him restore the palazzo? Also she had a far deeper understanding of his work than Anny, for whom a PC was simply the tool of her occupation. The complexities of programming, and the ethical aspects of the Net, were over her head.
The following autumn, she received another envelope with her name and address written in Emily’s elegant hand. The panic she felt as she slit it open showed how vulnerable she still was. She could close her mind to Van, but his hold on her heart was as powerful as ever.
Unfolding the single sheet of paper, she was certain she was going to read that Emily and Van were going to be married. People often married on the rebound. Why shouldn’t he?
Emily’s news—that she was taking a year out to explore India—was a short-lived relief. Enclosed with the letter was a tear sheet from a glossy magazine: a page of photographs taken at a charity dinner in America. One was marked with an asterisk in the sepia ink Emily used for her letters. It showed half a dozen people in evening dress seated at a table. Four of them appeared to be listening to a speech. But one man’s head was inclined to hear a murmured comment from the woman next to him. The caption listed their names. One sprang out from the rest as if the type had been bolded. ‘Mr Giovanni Carlisle and his partner Ms Robina Maxton’.
Since Van kept a very low profile for a man whose company’s rocketing profits made him the subject of widespread interest, Anny was surprised he had allowed himself to be photographed. Then she realised that the page hadn’t been taken from a magazine available to the general public. It was from a prestige brochure put out by the charity. The captions of the other photographs included many well-known names. Van and his partner had been mingling with the sort of super-rich people charities needed to interest She was sure he wouldn’t have attended such a function off his own bat. Someone must have persuaded him. The woman in low-cut black velvet who was smiling as she whispered to him looked as if she would have considerable powers of persuasion.
Jon’s time in Holland was over. Now he was working in Turkey.
Unlike his previous girl, Anny wrote to him regularly. Letter-writing came easily to her and besides she missed his company, especially now that Jill had a serious boyfriend and spent every spare moment with him.
The next time Jon could afford to fly back for a long weekend, Anny went to the airport to meet him. He greeted her with the same affectionate hug he might have given his sisters had they been present. But after a kiss on her cheek, he then kissed her on the mouth in a most unbrotherly fashion. She knew, before he released her, that he had been patient a long time but now needed something more than friendly companionship from her.
As it happened Jill was away that weekend, visiting her boyfriend’s family and hoping that when she came back there would be a ring on her finger.
At Jon’s suggestion they had supper at an Indian restaurant round the corner from where he lived. Then they walked back to her place for coffee.
He was keen for her to write a story alerting gardeners to avoid buying the wild snowdrop bulbs from Georgia being sold by unscrupulous traders. Although sy
mpathetic, Anny felt the story was of limited interest.
Over coffee they talked of other things. She had purposely avoided sharing the sofa with him, but even from a chair a rug’s length from where he was sitting she was aware of the tension in him. Instinct told her he wanted to repeat the second kiss at the airport. She also knew it wasn’t fair to keep him at arm’s length for ever. She had two options. If she wanted to go on keeping her emotions in the freezer, she had to make that clear to him. Or she had to allow him to try to thaw her frozen heart.
Suddenly, Jon took the initiative. He got up from the sofa, came to where she was sitting and drew her up from the chair into his arms.
‘Do you miss me when I’m away?’ he asked quietly, holding her close, but without the possessive assurance of a man who took it for granted that a woman welcomed his embrace.
‘Yes, I do... very much. You and Jill are my closest friends.’
‘I want to be more than a friend, Anny,’ he told her huskily.
She leaned her forehead against his shoulder, torn by contradictory emotions. Part of her longed for what he offered and part of her shrank from it.
Gently, Jon felt for her chin and turned her face up to his. ‘I’d like to stay here tonight. Is that all right with you?’
She knew then that she wasn’t ready, perhaps would never be ready.
Drawing away from him, she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry...I’m very fond of you, but I don’t...I can’t...’
‘It’s all right. Don’t worry about it. We’ll just go on as we are.’
However deep his disappointment, he was too kind and unselfish to press her.
