by CL Skelton
‘What?’
‘The other bathroom.’
‘There are eight, my dear, I’m sure I’ll find one.’
He grinned, and she said, ‘Do you live here, then? You know your way around, I mean?’
He shook his head. ‘I did. I have a flat in Bridlington. That’s on the seaside. I lived here most of my childhood.’
She nodded, obviously trying to sort out the tangle of Hardacre family ties.
She said suddenly, ‘It must have been nice, being a kid here.’ He paused, reassessing her. She looked wistful.
‘It was,’ he said, remembering his lost twinned past.
‘I spent my childhood in a theatrical trunk,’ she said, laughing, realizing she’d touched something deep and offering a helping hand. ‘Very romantic and all, traipsing from town to town with Mother and Father. All I wanted, all my life, was a house.’ He smiled.
‘Great-grandmother was like that. And this was what she got in the end. She hated it, of course.’
Janet grinned, ruefully. She said, ‘Were you very alike?’
He knew at once she meant himself and Terry and smiled, and shrugged. ‘Exactly alike. Of course.’
‘I’m sorry, Sam. I really am.’ She reached up and kissed his dirty and unshaven cheek. ‘I’ll meet you here in half an hour, and we’ll go to dinner, okay?’
‘Okay.’ She smiled again.
‘Truce?’ she said.
‘Truce.’ He stood watching as she slipped back into her room and closed the door. He went off down the corridor to the room that had always been his. Harry kept it for his use whenever he wanted it, unchanged. An easy thing to do; there were more rooms in the old place than any of them had ever known what to do with. The bedroom shared a bathroom with the next, which had always been Terry’s. He went in, switched on a light, and drew the curtains. He went through into the bathroom and turned on the taps, hearing the familiar protest of the ancient pipes. Distantly he thought the whole place would need replumbing and probably rewiring as well, in the near future. He added that potential expense without hesitation to the hefty rates bill, the staff wages, and everything else that he automatically paid for. He no longer even thought about it. He searched about the room for clothes, finding underwear and a reasonable shirt in a chest of drawers, and a lounge suit in the wardrobe. No dinner-suit. He shrugged. No one was likely to fuss much, if he just managed to get himself and Janet Chandler down there in reasonable order. He found a silk dressing-gown hanging in the wardrobe and brought it into the bathroom, where he undressed, dropping his oily clothes in a heap in a corner. The bathroom, like all in the house, was huge and antique in its fittings. He lay for a long while in the blissfully hot water, thinking about Janet Chandler, uncertain what he was to make of her. Gradually the ache in his back eased and he managed to scrub some of the pervasive scent of engine oil from his body. He felt sleepy and was half of a mind to go back into the bedroom and stretch out on the bed and forget dinner, but the thought of Janet awaiting him dissuaded him. Besides, the family would be less than pleased. He dried himself, wrapped himself in the dressing-gown and then, on impulse, went through the second connecting door to Terry’s room, rather than his own. It was dark, but he knew his way around it, and found the wardrobe easily. He did not want to see the room, and felt about inside the wardrobe without the benefit of a light. He found what he knew to be Terry’s dinner-suit and took it out, still on its hanger. They’d always swapped clothes; in fact, between them they had never really had separate wardrobes. He took the dinner-suit back to his own bedroom and hung it on the door. It was a bit old-fashioned, mid-forties and pre-monastic, so to speak, but naturally it fitted perfectly. It felt comforting.
He went back into the bathroom and stood before the long, free-standing mirror, tying his black bow tie. He glanced in the mirror and then over his shoulder to the door to Terry’s darkened room that he had left open. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said, and went out, switching off the lights behind him.
She was waiting patiently beside her door.
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘I almost fell asleep in the bath.’
She nodded. ‘You look nice,’ she said. He looked at her. She was wearing the sort of gown that only movie stars wore; strapless, pale yellow satin, with a tight sheath skirt, and a sweep of fabric asymmetrically over one hip, so that a graceful, sexy ruffling fell all the way to her ankles. Around her throat was a wispy draping of pale yellow chiffon. Her hair was done in a smooth golden bun at the back, and she wore earrings that danced and glittered with a sparkle of diamonds when she turned her head.
His appreciation, he knew, was written on his face, but he said only, ‘If that’s what working at being Janet Chandler means, you’re doing a frightfully good job.’ She smiled, a short quick smile, and licked her glistening lips. He realized suddenly she was intensely nervous. She leaned towards him and said quickly, ‘Just wait a moment, please.’ He caught her arm as she turned back to her bedroom door, assessing her shrewdly. ‘Just a moment,’ she said urgently.
‘You’re going for a drink,’ he said.
‘Oh boy, here comes the lecture.’
‘So you are.’
‘Oh, don’t be so damned pompous. Come and have one with me, for God’s sake,’ she laughed, trying to be light, but he kept his hand on her arm, restraining her, and she tugged nervously to be free.
‘You’ve had enough,’ he said.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’ve agreed to be friends, but that doesn’t mean you can start running my life.’ He shook his head. ‘I need a drink,’ she said urgently.
‘No, you don’t.’ He paused. ‘You know, madam, I’ve never seen you sober.’
‘Big deal,’ she snapped. ‘I’ve never seen you civil.’
‘You should cut it out. Right out,’ he said. ‘You’re in trouble.’
‘And you should fucking well cut out telling people what to do,’ she returned, her voice rising. Then she stopped, waving her hand in the air, as if pushing anger away and said, ‘Hey, look. Let’s not fight. We had a truce, remember?’
‘I remember.’
She looked at him, suddenly a frightened little girl. ‘Jesus Christ, I can’t face all those people down there. Please, Sam, let me have a drink.’
‘You?’ he asked, amazed. ‘Face them?’ She shrugged. He said, ‘They’re in awe of you.’ She shrugged again. Then he said quickly, ‘Anyhow, they’re just our family. Just our family. You can’t be scared of them.’ He saw at once that she was. He took her arm again and said, very gently, ‘Would you like to hear about the time Terry and I flew Uncle Harry’s drawers at half-mast from the roof?’
Her eyes opened wide, and she squealed with childish glee. ‘Tell me,’ she shrieked.
‘Okay. While we go downstairs.’ She looked up at him, and then longingly back at the door to her bedroom. Then she nodded, leaning trustingly on his arm as he led the way.
He bent over and whispered softly, ‘You are so incredibly beautiful.’ She smiled, and leaned closer, the fear leaving her eyes. They came down the sweeping curve of the main stairway, with Janet on Sam’s arm, her pale dress and pale hair in sharp contrast to his black dinner-suit and dark handsomeness. The assembled company, having heard them laughing on the stairs, rushed to see and stood staring. Janet was animated and smiling, looking up gaily at her companion and turning once to bend her marvellous, intense smile on the audience below. Albert Chandler put down his drink and stared. ‘How the hell did he do that?’ he said. No one had an answer. Sam and Janet made their way leisurely down the stairs and through the assembled company to the dining-room.
They made a stunning couple.
Chapter Nineteen
They made a stunning couple at Covent Garden, the next week. And at Simpson’s the night after. They probably would have made a stunning couple at the new Riccardo’s in Earls Court, but Sam, much to Riccardo Cirillo’s annoyance, would not take Janet Chandler there.
‘But, Miss
Chandler, she is how-you-say, good publicity, she is good for the business,’ he protested. Sam didn’t care. Riccardo’s wasn’t good enough for her, even though he owned it. Business had no place in Sam’s courtship of Janet Chandler. Except that he pursued her with the single-minded intensity that he always pursued anything in his life that he really wanted. And there was no doubt that he wanted her.
He won her as his lover within the month, not as soon, perhaps, as her vamping flirtation might have indicated, but sooner than he had seriously thought. Sam was a rather wise man where women were concerned, wiser than his bachelor life, and relative youth, inferred. He had been raised among women; his widowed mother, his much loved great-aunt Jane, his great-grandmother, Mary Hardacre, all had their influence. He liked and respected them, and in some ways understood them better than many men; such was the inheritance of his fatherless childhood. He had known, with no need to be told, that that high-pitched, sharp-witted flirtation that Janet so often displayed hid a nervous uncertainty about sex, the tense, prickly resentment of a sensual woman too often in the wrong male hands. He knew she wasn’t going to be easy, and she never was.
He made no attempt to seduce, but played her game of frivolous teasing intermixed with moments of sudden passion. It was a not unpleasing game. When not tired out beyond all reason, as he was on the day they met at Hardacres, he was happily capable of being teased and played around by that lovely young woman, who brought nothing so much to mind as a frisking young filly running for company and, in a moment, kicking up nervous heels and galloping away. He was patient and willing, and able to wait. Years of religious celibacy had taught a surprising amount of control, though at the time he’d not expected to put that control to such use. He was also utterly determined.
He was pleased, in the end, that when he did win her at last, it was not in some gorgeous and anonymous hotel suite in London but at Hardacres, which was his home. Not that he flagrantly tumbled her into the feather bed of the master bedroom, more or less over the head of his unsuspecting uncle. Hardly. Harry Hardacre, in spite of the long years of his own infidelity, if that lifelong affair with Sam’s mother could really be termed that, was not sexually liberal. It would not be fair to say he was old-fashioned. He was simply old. In the years of his youth, young unmarried women were not even informed of what was to become of them one day in the marriage bed, much less invited to partake of its pleasures in advance. If gentlemen found such pleasures themselves, it was only with ladies of a totally different class. Harry’s older brother Joe, Sam’s grandfather, had been such a young gentleman, and had begun his sexual career surprisingly enough with the youthful and randy wife of the headmaster of the run-down public school which Old Sam had bought to gain his sons places. He had begun it right here, in the Mews of Hardacres, actually, not that anyone, least of all his grandson, knew that. His grandson was about to follow him, however.
Harry would not know. He had been a virgin on the day of his wedding to Judith Winstanley, and to this day he held that such a state of affairs was not only right but wise. But he was not an idiot, and did not imagine his example to be much followed today. Besides, although Noel’s romantic activities, if they ever existed, were indeed a mystery, the reputations of his twin nephews had been, before their monastic era, quite legendary in that regard. Harry had then turned a blind eye and turned one now. But he would have been grievously offended if the decency of his household were presumed upon in such a way. Sam would not have dreamed of it, any more than he would have thought to accuse his great-uncle of the hypocrisy one could read into such an attitude. For it was not that. It was not his reputation he sought to protect, but that of the gracious brick walls of which he was guardian.
‘We can’t,’ Sam said to Janet at the door of her bedroom.
‘What?’ she demanded, blinking.
‘We can’t. Not here. I’m sorry.’
‘Look pal, we damn nearly did. Or have you forgotten?’
‘No. I haven’t forgotten. But I was very tired and I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Damn right you weren’t thinking,’ she murmured, grazing him with her bony and sensual hip. ‘What are you thinking now?’ she whispered in her lowest, most provocative voice. Sam stepped back. ‘Look, I want it!’ she declared, loudly and indignantly.
‘Shush,’ he said, turning to look briefly over his shoulder. He kissed her. ‘And you always get what you want,’ he grinned.
‘Not me,’ she said shrewdly. ‘But you do, don’t you?’
He shrugged and smiled. Her eyes flared with anger. Nothing much had changed in the last month. Their romance continued precisely as it started. There were no miracle transformations. She was highly-strung and she drank too much. He was hot-tempered and very strong-willed. It was never peaceful between them, right from the start, and it never changed.
The Mews was the first place he thought of and, gently taking her arm, and thanking the vagaries of English weather for granting them a night of rare, gentle warmth, he led her from the bedroom doorway, through the maze of corridors along which he had played as a boy, and down the back kitchen stairs. In the empty, late-night kitchen he paused once to kiss her again, with slight lingering attentiveness, and she squirmed and wriggled, and suggested they use the kitchen table. ‘Mrs Dobson wouldn’t like it,’ he said.
‘Mrs Dobson isn’t going to get it,’ she whispered breathily. Then she looked at him warily and said, ‘She’d better damned not, anyhow.’
‘She’s sixty-five,’ he said, taking her hand. He led her out of the back door.
‘Sam,’ she moaned. ‘It’s outside. Your shittin’ awful weather, it’ll rain. I’ll freeze.’
He kissed her again. ‘I promise you’ll not freeze. And one more four-letter word and I go back to Mrs Dobson.’
‘Sorry,’ she said morosely. She’d come to understand that he really didn’t like the language but the habit, which was what it had become from the affectation which had begun it, was hard to break. Also, she wasn’t all that pleased about changing to please him. Curbing her drinking was one thing. Turning into an English lady was another.
The cobbled courtyard was silent and dark and smelling of honeysuckle. They crept across it, hoping the three Labrador dogs in their kennels would not wake. She giggled, enjoying the secrecy and he had to cover her mouth with his hand as they crept by the rear windows of the house, which belonged to Vanessa and Rodney’s self-contained flat, overlooking the Mews. They made it into the shadow of the low, slate-roofed building, and Sam cautiously pushed open the door. Inside the air was warm with the breaths of horses, and there was a rich tang of manure and hay.
‘Yeeuk,’ said Janet.
‘Joys of the country,’ said Sam. There was a ladder into the hay-loft and he was considering how he’d get Janet, in her high-heels and long gown, up it when the dog began to bark. It was a loud, furious yapping, a non-Labrador bark, and he remembered with a groan Vanessa’s shaggy little black and white sheepdog that slept, not in lordly style in kennels, but here, in the Mews.
‘Tramp,’ he called softly, ‘hush, Tramp.’
‘Oh, he’s sweet,’ Janet breathed, crouching down and extending a hand in the dim moonlight. But the dog kept yapping, and suddenly the pale light was deeply brightened, as lights switched on in the house.
‘Trampsie?’ shouted Vanessa’s ringing animal-greeting voice. ‘Trampsie? Mummy’s coming.’ And then an aside, ‘Rodney, old thing, we’ve intruders!’
‘Good Christ,’ Sam said, grabbing Janet’s hand and retreating rapidly through the heavy Mews door. ‘Run.’
‘Where?’
He knew where. The summer-house. It stood at the foot of the lawn, where the beech wood swept closest, by the small ornamental pond full of carp. He had played with Terry there, as a child, and he remembered the fascination of its viney darkness, hung heavily with wisteria. But that was years past. No one used it now, and the carp, too, were left to their own devices, to live out their golden lives in secret
. There were so many other works to be done, and expenses to be met; repairing the summer-house and maintaining its vines was low on the list. Noel used it now as a hay store, convenient to his bottom field.
‘Oh, Sam, I can’t,’ she gasped, but she was laughing with the delight of running with the dog yapping behind them, and lights coming on in the Mews. She kicked off her shoes and he carried them as she ran in her stockinged feet. The door, a trellis construction of ancient rotting rustic wood, was off its hinges, leaning against the jamb. He slid it aside and stepped up on to the softness of scattered hay, among the stacks of bales. He reached a hand to her and she came after. The light within the summer-house was dappled through its thick clothing of vine leaves. The wisteria, heavily in bloom, trailed clusters of blossom, like grapes, casting lumpy shadows. The dim few lights of the house, over the tops of a line of elms, were remote and peaceful. He felt her tense against his body as he held her in that silent place.
‘We don’t have to,’ he said.
‘I want to,’ she whispered, but her voice was frightened. He knew she wanted a drink, and was torn between exasperation and sympathy. At least she did not ask.
She sat down, cross-legged in the hay. He could only just see her and the glow of her pale hair in the soft light. He sat down as well, and leaned against the rough wall of the old building. Even the scent of it was powerfully evocative of the past. He suddenly began to laugh and she, tentatively hurt, asked why.
‘I’ve never taken a girl here before,’ he said, still laughing. ‘It’s the first place anyone thinks of, and I’ve never done it until now. I’m almost forty.’
‘I’m glad you’ve never had anyone else here,’ she said. She huddled closer to him and put her chin on his shoulder. ‘You must think I’m awful stupid,’ she said. ‘All my wiseassin’ around and I’m as scared as a half-assed virgin.’
‘Why not?’ he said, stroking her hair. ‘We’re all a little bit virgins again, with a new lover.’
