Worthy of Marriage

by Anne Weale

  She had started out speaking calmly and reasonably. Then, suddenly, had lost patience with him and ended by snapping the questions in an openly hostile manner.

  What happened then was as unexpected as a roll of thunder on a sunny afternoon.

  In two strides he crossed the space between them, clamped his hands on her shoulders in a very different way from Julian’s parting gesture, and leaned down to plant a rough hard kiss on her mouth.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE motive was so obviously punitive that she was almost as shocked as if he had struck her. And then, with a sound like a groan, he moved his hands outwards, over the ends of her shoulders and down her upper arms, before pulling her hard against him and continuing to kiss her but with rather more finesse.

  Lucia was lost as soon as he touched her. She wanted to resist, to fend him off, to declare herself outraged and repelled. But she couldn’t because, deep down, those reactions were not what she really felt.

  Nothing she had read, or seen on a screen, or experienced, had prepared her for this overwhelming hurricane of profound life-changing sensations. All her normal controls evaporated. There was only one thought in her mind: that this was what she had been waiting for all her life; this man, this moment, this wildly passionate kiss.

  When, finally, he let her go, the world had changed and would never be the same again. Trembling, breathless, dizzy, amazed, Lucia stayed where she was while Grey stepped back a pace.

  ‘I didn’t intend that to happen,’ he said, his voice thick.

  She could think of nothing to say. All she wanted was to be back in his arms, her mouth parted under his, her nerves like live wires transmitting erotic sensations to every part of her body.

  ‘You said you wanted some tea,’ he reminded her.

  He moved away to where the electric kettle stood on a tray alongside lidded glass jars of coffee powder, Indian tea bags and herbal tea bags. After checking the water level, he took the kettle to the flagon and filled it.

  Lucia was astonished he could function normally. She still felt like someone in shock. Surely it couldn’t be his intention to behave as if nothing had happened?

  ‘Grey…’ she began huskily, what she wanted to say eluding her but knowing something must be said. They couldn’t possibly go back to the way they had been before.

  He plugged in the kettle, glanced at her over his shoulder. ‘Yes?’

  She braced herself. ‘Why did you do it?’

  Slowly, he turned to face her, placing the heels of his hands on the veined rose marble worktop behind him, his long fingers loosely hooked over the edge of it.

  ‘I lost my temper…lost control. I’m not going to apologise for it. You’re not a fool. You know how things stand between us. You challenged me. I reacted. It won’t happen again.’ He pushed himself away from the counter. ‘Goodnight.’ He walked out of the kitchen, closing the door quietly behind him.

  Lucia heard the church clock strike one, two, three and four o’clock, with a single chime marking the half-hours. Probably people who lived here slept through the chimes undisturbed.

  She wondered if Grey was asleep. Perhaps he had lain awake for a little while, annoyed with himself and even more annoyed with her for causing him to lose control. But she doubted if he were tossing and turning like she was. It would take something far more serious, such as a stock market crash, to keep him awake all night.

  Buzzing around in her brain, like a wasp that refused to be waved away, was that enigmatic remark ‘You know how things stand between us.’

  What had he meant by it? How, seen from his perspective, did things stand between them?

  She did not hear half past four strike and when she awoke the starry sky had been replaced by a blue one and the mountains were bathed in bright sunshine instead of being only dimly visible by moonlight.

  To her dismay she discovered that, in the emotional confusion and shock of last night, she had neglected to set her alarm clock. It was now long past the time when they usually had breakfast.

  Fifteen minutes later, after a quick shower to pull her together, she went downstairs to find Mrs Calderwood still at the breakfast table, reading a magazine.

  ‘Good morning. I’m sorry I’m late down,’ said Lucia.

  ‘Good morning. It doesn’t matter. Did you have a nice evening?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, very nice.’ Lucia wondered if Grey was round the corner in the sitting area, but did not look to see. She took an orange from the basket on the worktop and went to the sink to peel it.

  ‘We’ll be on our own from now on,’ said Rosemary. ‘Grey is on his way to the airport.’

  Lucia swung round. ‘He’s gone?’

  ‘He had an e-mail from London. Something important has come up. He needs to be there to deal with it. As he felt it would be a bore for us to run him to the airport, he organised a taxi.’

  ‘I see…what a shame,’ said Lucia. Had he told his mother the truth? she wondered. Or was the crisis at the office merely a pretext to remove himself from an embarrassing situation? Somehow, from what she knew of him, it didn’t seem like him to chicken out of any situation, however awkward.

  ‘Will he be coming back?’

  ‘Probably not, he said. I think we’ve reassured him that we can cope on our own. Though it was lovely having him here. I expect you’ll think me very silly and feeble, but I always feel more comfortable when there’s a man around to deal with emergencies. Not, hopefully, that there will be any emergencies. But somehow I feel more at ease when Grey, or one of my sons-in-law, is on hand. Don’t take that as a lack of confidence in you, my dear. That’s not what I mean at all. It’s an instinctive thing built-in with all, or most of, my generation…probably because the majority of us have never been as competent to manage our lives as your generation is.’

  ‘You would never have made the hash of your life that I have,’ said Lucia.

  All the time she had been washing and dressing, she had been dreading confronting Grey again. But, in a curious way, his abrupt departure, for a reason she wasn’t sure she believed, was even more upsetting.

  Rosemary jumped up from the table and came to stand beside her, putting an arm round her shoulders. ‘I thought you were starting to get over all that you’ve been through. You’ve looked so much better recently, Lucia. But this morning it’s obvious you haven’t had a good night. Did you have bad dreams…a nightmare?’

  ‘I didn’t sleep very well,’ Lucia admitted. ‘That’s why I overslept. But please don’t worry about me. Thanks to you I am getting over it. Even when it’s your own fault, it’s hard to come to terms with the fact that you can’t ever wipe the slate really clean.’ On impulse, she added, ‘I think you believe how much I regret what I did, but I don’t think Grey is convinced.’

  ‘My dear child, what makes you think that? I know he didn’t approve of this arrangement at first, but I’m sure he’s changed his mind since then. What has he said to make you think otherwise?’

  ‘Nothing explicit…but it’s there in his manner. He doesn’t trust me. He will never trust me.’ Even as she spoke, Lucia knew it was probably a mistake to confide these feelings to his mother.

  ‘I think, next time you see him, you should have it out with him,’ said Rosemary. ‘Grey is usually very direct himself, and he respects directness in others. My own feeling is that you’ve gone up in his estimation very significantly since that unfortunate scene on the day you arrived. You mustn’t become over-sensitive, Lucia. If, at times, Grey has seemed distant or unfriendly, it’s most likely because he has something to do with the business on his mind. Now: have your breakfast and let’s plan our day. Shall we go to the market again and do some more sketching there?’

  By way of the autopista, the run to the airport took a little over an hour. Grey passed the time chatting to the taxi-driver, partly to exercise his Spanish and partly to put off examining his reasons for fabricating an excuse to return to London when he would have preferred to stay i
n Spain.

  Knowing that the charter flights from Alicante were subject to tedious delays, he had used his computer to book himself a first-class seat on a scheduled flight. But there was an hour to wait before it took off and, although the battery in his notebook was fully charged and he had the notes for a speech to knock into shape, he found it hard to concentrate.

  The events of last night would not be dismissed from his thoughts. He could not rid himself of the memory of how Lucia had felt in his arms, how difficult it had been to stop kissing her.

  He wondered what she had thought when she came down and found him gone. Her primary reaction had probably been relief. To have met at the breakfast table would have been embarrassing to them both. That she was physically drawn to him had been proved by her eager response. But it was her body, not her mind, that had betrayed her. How could she ever really warm to him when, effectively, it was his evidence that had put her behind bars?

  That she had responded to him proved nothing except that she had recovered her natural vitality and, with it, the need for sexual fulfilment felt by any normal woman of her age. The irony was that while she obviously thought he indulged his appetite for sex on a regular basis, in fact this was not the case. For some time now he had found casual relationships increasingly unsatisfying. He wanted what his three sisters had; a stable relationship with a permanent partner. But first he had to find a way out of the impasse that was his present life. And there wasn’t a way out.

  The morning after Grey left, Julian rang up to ask if they would like to join him and Mrs Henderson on a picnic outing to a picturesque village further inland.

  ‘He says it’s tremendously paintable,’ said Rosemary, who had taken his call and accepted the invitation.

  The expedition proved to be most enjoyable. For an hour before lunch Rosemary and Lucia sketched a fine bronze moor’s head fountain in the main square, while Alice pottered about, chatting to the locals in fluent Valenciano, the language spoken in the home. Julian took photographs with the latest thing in digital cameras.

  After lunch, by a river that actually had a flow of water in it, Alice announced, ‘I’m going to have a siesta for half an hour.’

  ‘I think I’ll join you,’ said Rosemary. ‘All that champagne is very sleepy-making’—with a smile at Julian, the provider of the cava and the picnic food.

  ‘Lucia and I will stretch our legs along the river walk,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to nap, do you, Lucia?’

  She shook her head and, dusting crumbs from her cotton skirt, scrambled up from the rug, one of two he had spread on the ground for them.

  On the opposite side of the stream at the centre of the riverbed a pastor was watching his mixed flock of sheep and goats grazing on the rough grass in a grove of almond trees.

  ‘I wonder what he thinks about all day?’ said Julian. ‘I’d be bored out of my mind, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I can think of worse forms of boredom.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Oh…being stuck in an office typing all day,’ she said. She couldn’t tell him about the very worst boredom: being shut in a cell without enough books to fill the interminable hours.

  Evidently this was not a topic Julian wished to pursue. He changed it by saying, ‘So your watchdog has gone back to London, leaving you free to dine with me again tonight.’

  ‘Thank you, but I can’t leave Rosemary on her own.’

  ‘She won’t be alone. There’s an English-language movie showing at Calpe that will please both our old ladies. We’ll drop them off and pick them up later. There’s a good seafood restaurant down by the harbour. They can have supper beforehand. Better for their digestions.’

  Lucia couldn’t help laughing at the way he had everything planned. She wished she could feel as relaxed with Grey as she did with Julian.

  Suddenly he seized her hands and swung her to face him. ‘When you laugh like that I’m in danger of falling in love with you. But I think I had better not do that. My instinct tells me you like me, but only as a friend. Am I right?’

  ‘Julian, we’ve only just met. How could we possibly be more than friends at this stage?’

  ‘Many people go to bed with each other in less time than we’ve spent together,’ he said, caressing her palms with his thumbs.

  The sensuous touch had an effect on her, but not the one he intended. Immediately she remembered the sensations aroused by Grey the night before last.

  She withdrew her hands. ‘Please don’t…let’s keep it friendly.’

  ‘OK…if you insist. Too bad I didn’t meet you before he did. You’re in love with him, aren’t you?’

  She thought of denying it, but suddenly the need to confide in someone was overwhelming. ‘Yes…but I know it can never work out.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘There are…reasons why Grey could never return my feelings. Insuperable reasons.’

  ‘One of the maxims Nanny drummed into me as a small boy was “Nothing is impossible if you really want to do it.” It’s true: very few things are insuperable. What’s the brick wall you think can’t be climbed between you and him?’

  ‘It’s a long and complicated story that would probably put you off me too. I’d rather keep your good opinion.’ But even as she said it, she knew she wanted to tell him. She needed to talk to someone and, once this trip was over, it was unlikely that her path and Julian’s would cross again.

  ‘Take a chance. Try me. Maybe I’ll see a way to break down the wall that you’ve missed. At least I can give you a man’s perspective on the situation, which is usually a whole lot different from a woman’s.’

  Lucia drew a deep breath. ‘OK, I’ll risk it. Three months ago I was in prison for fraud.’

  As Julian’s eyebrows shot up, she went on, ‘Grey was one of the people I defrauded.’

  As briefly as possible, she explained all the circumstances leading to her presence in Spain as Mrs Calderwood’s painting companion.

  ‘Hombre!’ Julian was sufficiently astonished to revert to his native language.

  ‘Now you can see why this particular barrier really is insuperable,’ Lucia said, with a sigh.

  For several minutes they walked in silence, Julian looking at the ground and chewing his upper lip, a mannerism she hadn’t seen before and one that perhaps was reserved for situations he didn’t quite know how to handle.

  Finally he broke the silence by saying, ‘If Grey is a just man, I think by now he will have realised that most people, if the pressure is strong enough, will do things outside their normal range of behaviour. You stifled your conscience because someone you loved needed expensive treatment that wasn’t available unless you paid for it. What you did was totally out of character. If Grey really can’t find it in his heart to forgive you, then I think you’re better off without him. But have you talked to him about it?’

  ‘There’s no point,’ she said. ‘All the extenuating circumstances were emphasised by my defence lawyer. Grey wasn’t in court when the lawyer made his appeal that I should be let off lightly, but I’m sure he read the newspaper report.’

  ‘But he didn’t know you then,’ said Julian. ‘Now he does. If I were you, I would have it out with him…ask him to forgive you. He’d have to be very hard-hearted to resist a direct appeal. For all you know, he may be waiting for you to approach him. What have you got to lose?’

  It was Lucia’s turn to bite her lip. Julian made it sound easy, but he was judging Grey’s reaction by his own much more tolerant standards. The two men differed from each other in many ways. Grey was a harder, tougher, more commanding presence than the laid-back, easy-going Spaniard.

  She said, ‘Only my pride, I suppose—if he tells me he’ll always despise me.’

  ‘I don’t think he will. If he despised you, he wouldn’t have looked annoyed when I made a date with you.’

  ‘Perhaps he was concerned that you didn’t know the truth about me,’ she suggested. ‘Perhaps he was debating whethe
r he ought to tell you.’

  ‘I don’t think it was my welfare he was thinking about. The vibes I was getting were more like the threatening signals made by the dominant male in a herd of animals when an outsider appears and looks lustfully at a pleasing young female,’ Julian said, laughing. ‘I think your misfortunes have depleted your confidence. You’re extremely attractive. Do you think he doesn’t see that?’

  ‘You can be attracted to people without liking them,’ she pointed out, remembering what had happened in the kitchen.

  ‘True,’ he conceded. ‘But you’re overlooking one important factor. Grey would never guess from your manner that you feel the way you do about him. He could be excused for thinking you were indifferent to him.’

  ‘There have been occasions when I’ve shown that I liked him,’ she said, turning her head away to hide the heightened colour that came when she remembered her unequivocal response to Grey’s kiss. She hadn’t made even a token resistance. He had touched her and all her defences had melted like snow in the sun.

  ‘You may have thought so, but perhaps he didn’t get the message. Next time you see him, try being really warm and open with him. Like you are with me. What is it about him that turns you on while all my best efforts to charm you leave you cold?’

  ‘I don’t know what it is about him,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I think, when I saw him in court, I was impressed by him…even though it was mainly his evidence that led to my sentence.’

  ‘Poor girl. I hate to think of you being shut up with real criminals. They should have put you in one of those open prisons you have in England.’

  ‘I was a “real” criminal…with less excuse than some of the others whose backgrounds gave them no chance to become decent, law-abiding people. It opened my eyes to what awful lives some people have.’

  He said briskly, ‘I’m sure you don’t want to talk about it, or even think about it. We had better be getting back or the old ducks may think we are lost.’