by Anne Mather
His kiss was hard and passionate, compelling her back against the slippery quilt, its softness cool against her bare back. His fingers had disposed of the other strap of her slip, and his hands found the burgeoning fullness of her breasts, crushed beneath the hair-coarsened muscles of his chest. His shirt was unbuttoned and her palms slid across his back, warm against the dampness of his spine.
‘Carne,’ she breathed, when his mouth released hers to seek the creamy curve of her breast. ‘Carne, it’s time we were going down for dinner …’ but her words had little effect.
‘I’m not hungry,’ he replied huskily, blazing a trail of kisses across her midriff and down to the hollow of her navel. ‘Not for food anyway. Hmm, you smell warm and womanly. Don’t talk about going downstairs … not yet anyway …’
‘Carne, your mother’s going to wonder where we are,’ she persisted, as he spread his length upon her, but her body was already yielding to the thrusting demand of his.
‘Stop worrying about other people,’ he groaned, grasping one of her hands and pressing his lips to her palm. ‘Don’t pretend you really care …’
‘I do, I do,’ she insisted, but the look in his eyes drove all the breath out of her. ‘No, Carne,’ she said again weakly, as his hand sought the buckle of his belt, but it was a token resistance and he knew it.
‘Help me,’ he said hoarsely, and her fingers went automatically to the buckle as a strangled cry arrested them.
‘My God, Carne!’ Mrs Radley choked from the doorway. ‘What in heaven’s name do you think you’re doing?’
Carne lifted his head and looked across at his mother with deadly inplacability. Lesley, shifting in hot embarrassment beneath him, thought she would die if he ever looked at her like that, and his mother was well aware of the cold fury in his eyes.
‘Get out of here, Mother!’ he told her harshly. ‘Get out and stay out!’
Mrs Radley swayed at the force of his rejection but she stood her ground. ‘And—and what shall I tell this man on the telephone?’ she asked tremulously. ‘What shall I say to him?’
‘What man?’
Lesley could feel the force of Carne’s anger rippling through him. Humiliation, and the imprisonment of his weight, kept her where she was, but she dreaded what his mother must be thinking of her.
‘A Mr Petrie,’ Mrs Radley pronounced with evident satisfaction. ‘A Mr Lance Petrie. He says—she works for him.’
‘Lance?’
Lesley’s involuntary echo of the name seemed to cleave a wedge between them, and with a muffled oath Carne swung his legs over the side of the bed and got abruptly to his feet.
‘Petrie, did you say?’ he demanded of his mother, and at her nod, he looked again at his wife.
Lesley was trying, not very successfully, to wriggle her slip back up over her shoulders and seeing the struggle she was having, Carne uttered another curse and jerked her upright, pulling up the straps himself and securing them in place.
‘There!’ he said contemptuously. ‘Now you can go and speak to your employer. Tell him he didn’t interrupt anything very important.’
‘Carne …’ Lesley slid her legs off the bed and looked up at him helplessly, but he turned away. ‘I—well, where shall I take the call?’
‘In the study, where else?’ declared Carne coldly, fastening the buttons of his shirt. ‘Put your clothes on first, will you? I’d prefer it if the men I employ don’t get the chance to see my wife half naked!’
Then he turned to his mother, her eyes wide with indignation as she still hovered in the doorway. ‘You can go,’ he said. ‘I shan’t touch her again. But next time you enter a room, try knocking first.’
‘You should thank me,’ Mrs Radley burst out, refusing to let him have the last word. ‘I’ve probably prevented you from doing something you’d bitterly regret!’
Carne’s mouth twisted. ‘Probably,’ he agreed, as Lesley pushed her arms into the sleeves of her shirt. ‘And don’t misjudge the situation, will you? Lesley would be the first to concede that your arrival was a welcome escape!’
CHAPTER NINE
THE plane was half an hour late landing at Heathrow, and Lesley’s already strained nerves had stretched ominously. Surely it wasn’t too much to expect that the fifty-minute flight from Paris should have been on time, but a lightning strike at the airport had delayed outgoing flights and brought all baggage handling to a standstill. Still, it had been no hardship for Lesley to carry her overnight bag. Only the unwarranted delay had added to her persistent state of tension. Lance was expecting her back in the office by four o’clock at the latest, but now she would be lucky to be there by five, bearing in mind the steadily increasing traffic flow towards the peak periods.
She was lucky enough to get a taxi almost straight away although as they joined the stream of cars making for the city she wondered whether it wouldn’t have been quicker to take the underground. Still, she thought wearily, at least the air was cooler above ground and she was not to suffer the discomfort of being crammed into a metal tube with a crowd of others like so many sardines.
Staring through the taxi windows, however, she could not help but compare her surroundings with the peace and tranquillity of Raventhorpe. She had done that frequently since she came back to town, and she had determinedly put it down to the fact that she needed a holiday. Those few days in the country had been far too brief, and she thought longingly of the two further weeks she was permitted at the end of August. She would get away then, she thought, leave the city altogether; but whether or not she would return to Yorkshire was very much in the balance.
Leaving Jeremy had not been the traumatic experience she had anticipated. Lance’s phone call had had more than one reaction. His request that she should return to town a day earlier than planned had given her a reason for leaving, and Jeremy had accepted without question the suggestion that he should stay on at the farm. Indeed, she remembered with bitterness, he had obviously been relieved when she offered him the opportunity, albeit nominally, and when his father had driven her to York to catch the train to London, he had waved her off without tears. Maybe they would come later, she reflected, at bedtime perhaps, or the next time he fell and injured himself. But she would not wish them on him even though it hurt to feel herself unwanted.
After that scene in the bedroom, Carne had ignored her and as his mother blamed her for what had happened, the atmosphere in the house had not been friendly. But Mrs Radley did not risk her son’s displeasure again by voicing her opinion on the matter, and it was left to Mary to offer the girl her good wishes.
‘Will you be coming back?’ she asked, when Lesley went to say goodbye to her, but Lesley couldn’t answer her.
‘You’ll let me know if—if Jeremy’s unhappy, won’t you?’ she appealed, voicing the fears that haunted her, and Mary nodded.
‘Of course. But then Mr Carne’ll do that, don’t you fret,’ she replied reassuringly. ‘And holidays don’t last for ever.’
‘I know.’ Lesley wished this knowledge set her mind at rest. But it didn’t. There might be a whole new set of problems at the end of the holidays.
The taxi lurched across the over-pass and she fanned herself with the newspaper she had bought in Paris. She had read it from cover to cover in the departure lounge at Charles de Gaulle airport, but she had tucked it into the strap of her briefcase when she boarded the plane and it was still with her. Lance might enjoy reading about the present political unrest in France, she decided. He was fanatically interested in the struggle for power. No doubt that was why he found her association with Carne so interesting.
She caught her lower lip between her teeth and bit hard. Ahead of them in the stream of traffic was a Citroën estate car similar to the one Carne drove, only cleaner. There were three people in the car, a man, a woman and a child, and the significance of their relationship smote her painfully. It could so easily have been herself and Carne and Jeremy instead of which she had opted for a precarious freedom.
But she hadn’t, she told herself severely, her fingers drumming nervously against her briefcase. She was allowing her anxiety for Jeremy to colour her reactions to his father, letting a physical reaction effect a physical change and deluding herself that it was anything more than that. And yet nothing could alter the fact that when something had happened to exclude conclusively the possibility of her being pregnant she had cried herself to sleep …
Lance was in a black mood when she got to the studios, and her tentative account that the European link for his programme about nuclear reactors had been arranged met with only the briefest of approvals.
‘Where the devil have you been?’ he demanded, as soon as she had delivered her report. ‘I expected you back over an hour ago, and that situation has not been improved by your mother ringing me every five minutes to find out where you are.’
‘Mother?’ Lesley stared at him in dismay. ‘Mother’s been ringing here?’
‘Yes. Yes. Haven’t I just said so?’ Lance was not in the mood to be tolerant. ‘Anyway, now that you are here, you can start on that report of Simon’s. About the by-elec—–’
‘But what did she want?’ Lesley was still getting over the shock of her mother ringing the studios. She had never done that before, and visions of her having had a heart attack and being unable to reach help kept rushing through her head.
Lance sighed. ‘How the hell do I know?’ he exclaimed, spreading his hands in a gesture of impatience. ‘I didn’t ask her. She tried to ring you yesterday, too, but I told her you weren’t due back from Paris till today.’
‘But she knows that,’ protested Lesley anxiously. ‘Oh, she wouldn’t have rung unless it was important? Why didn’t you let me know?’
‘In Paris?’ Lance looked scandalised. ‘Look, Lesley, if your mother can’t manage alone for two nights, it’s a bloody bad job!’
Lesley pressed her lips together. ‘Well, I’ll have to ring her now. Before I start anything else.’
Lance contained his anger with evident difficulty. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Ring her. But I expect that report about the by-election on my desk first thing tomorrow morning.’
‘Yes, sir!’ declared Lesley, with cold politeness, and Lance slammed back into his office.
The telephone seemed to ring for a long time before Mrs Matthews answered it, and when she did she sounded almost put out. ‘Lesley!’ she cried. ‘Oh, you would ring right in the middle of the serial, wouldn’t you? You know I’ve watched it right from the beginning, and today is the last episode.’
The sound Lesley made was strangled, but she managed not to sound too angry as she said: ‘Mother, it is only a children’s serial, and may I remind you, you have been trying to get me for the past twenty-four hours?’
‘Oh, I know.’ Mrs Matthews sighed, evidently giving up all hope of seeing the completion of the play. ‘Well, as a matter of fact, it wasn’t that important …’
‘What wasn’t important?’ Lesley’s voice was taut. ‘Mother have you been ill? Has your heart—–’
‘No, no.’ Mrs Matthews sounded almost amused. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with me. It was just a phone call I had from Raventhorpe—–’
‘Raventhorpe?’ Lesley’s mouth went dry. ‘What about? Is it Jeremy? Has something happened? Has he had an accident?’
‘Calm yourself!’ Mrs Matthews clicked her tongue. ‘I’m trying to tell you. Jeremy, it seems, has got measles—–’
‘Measles!’
‘—and so, unfortunately, has Mrs Radley.’
‘Carne’s mother?’
‘Apparently.’ Mrs Matthews sighed. ‘I had this call from someone called Mary, is that right?’
‘Mary?’ Lesley nodded ‘Mary Walker, yes.’ She felt her nails digging into her palms. ‘So what did she suggest?’
‘Suggest?’ Mrs Matthews sounded surprised. ‘She didn’t suggest anything. She just said that you’d probably want to know.’
‘Oh, I do. I do.’ Lesley was already thinking ahead. If Jeremy had measles and his grandmother had measles, Mary was going to have her hands full. And Carne …
‘Is that all, dear?’ Her mother was obviously agitating to get back to the television, and Lesley had to let her go. But when she had replaced the receiver after promising that she would be home in time for supper, she sat staring at the inanimate object with troubled eyes.
How would Carne cope with two invalids on his hands? Mary could handle so much, but with Mrs Radley incapacitated there was bound to be a lot of running up and down stairs to do. As for Jeremy, he would not be at all happy, and her heart ached for him. If he had it badly, he would be terribly distressed, and how could Mary devote enough time to him when she had other chores to attend to?
There was nothing else for it. She would have to ask Lance if she could take her other two weeks’ holiday immediately, instead of at the end of the month. If Carne objected to her arrival, it was just too bad. She could keep out of his way, and maybe she could prove to him, and herself, that she was not the useless ornament Mrs Radley had always thought her.
Lance, however, was not disposed to be generous.
‘Do you realise you’ve already taken ten days at a time that was convenient for you, but not for me, and now you expect me to turn round and say yes, go along, take as much time as you like, when the studios are already understaffed due to holidays, and I’m having to work every hour God sends to keep up to date with the situation.’
‘But Lance, this is an emergency …’
‘How is it? So the kid’s got measles. What of it? Lots of kids get measles. It’s not the end of the world. His father will cope—–’
‘I don’t know that he will.’
‘It’s not as if it was Carne who was begging you to help him out. It’s some girl who works for him, who’s probably scared to death she’s going to have to work a little harder because of it.’
‘That’s not true!’ Lesley’s face was pink. ‘Mary’s not like that.’
Lance took a deep breath, and shuffled the papers on his desk. ‘Well, Lesley,’ he said, and the very quietness of his tone was ominous, ‘let me put it this way: eight years ago, when you took it into your head to walk out on me and all I’d done for you, I gave in gracefully. When your marriage didn’t work out and you came running back, I gave in again. But this time I’m damn sure you’re not going to make a fool out of me!’
Lesley sighed. All he had said was true, but surely as a man who studied people for a living he must know that circumstances altered cases. Her behaviour had been not so much irresponsible as ill-advised, and she had paid for it in so many ways.
‘You won’t try and understand, will you?’ she exclaimed. ‘Of course I’m worried about Jeremy, who wouldn’t be? But it’s not just that. If Mrs Radley is ill as well—–’
‘Lesley, you never learn, do you?’ Lance sounded frustrated. ‘You said yourself when you got back that Carne’s mother still hated the sight of you. Now you’re trying to tell me that you want to go back there to look after her!’ He shook his head. ‘You’re crazy!’
Lesley held up her head. ‘Why do you think I want to go back, then?’ she demanded, and Lance’s mouth curved down.
‘For the same reason you went to Ravensdale in the first place,’ he retorted laconically. ‘Because you’re infatuated with that hunk of skin and muscle you call a husband!’
‘I
nfatuated!’ Lesley’s face burned now. ‘I think you’re the crazy one, Lance.’
‘Do you?’ He shrugged. ‘You’re entitled to your opinion of course. But then I’m entitled to mine, too, aren’t I?’
‘Why would I walk out on Carne if I was infatuated with him!’ she protested.
‘God knows, I don’t.’
‘And in any case, infatuation is a—a fleeting thing. It wouldn’t last—eight years!’
‘That’s your problem, not mine.’ Lance tipped his chair on to its back legs. ‘Well, you’ve heard my ultimatum. What’s yours?’
‘Ultimatum?’ She felt confused. ‘I don’t have an ultimatum.’
‘You do. You have to decide. Carne Radley—or W.L.T.V.’
Lesley stared at him. ‘That’s—that’s blackmail!’
‘Hardly blackmail,’ retorted Lance dryly. ‘If you leave, I’ve got nothing to gain by it.’
Lesley sniffed and he handed her a tissue from the box on his desk without speaking. She blew her nose, and then resumed her consideration of his unyielding features.
‘Just give me a few days,’ she begged. ‘It’s Friday tomorrow. Give me until next Tuesday or Wednesday, just to assure myself that—that Jeremy’s all right.’
Lance’s mouth tightened. ‘Why should I?’
‘Compassion?’ she suggested with an attempt at facetiousness that didn’t quite come off.
‘Three days, eh?’ Lance seemed to be considering it as he reached for a cigar from the box on his desk. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Three days, and three days only. If you’re not back here Wednesday morning, you’re out of a job, right?’
‘Oh, thank you.’ Lesley could have hugged him, and she tackled the report she had to type with renewed confidence. If she left first thing in the morning, she could be there by lunchtime, which would give her three whole days before she had to start back.
Her mother reacted in much the same way as Lance had done.
‘Why on earth should it matter to you if Mrs Radley is ill?’ she exclaimed. ‘She won’t want your help.’
