From time to time she fantasized about seducing him, but she was not a conceited girl and she never assumed that if she made a serious attempt she would necessarily succeed. There was so little flirtation in his manner toward her that she suspected it was more than professionalism that kept their relationship platonic. Perhaps she was too young for him.
Despite her attempts to be dispassionate toward Rob, however, she felt her primordial female hackles rise when the buxom and scantily clad figure of Crumpet appeared at the opposite end of the terrace and began to saunter in their direction.
“Hello, Meg. Hello, Manuscript Man.”
At the age of ten, Meg had begged the then twenty-one-year-old Crumpet, who seemed the epitome of everything jolly, to stop calling her “Miss Meg” and use only her Christian name. Meg wasn’t sure how long it had been since she began to regret this democratic impulse.
Crumpet gave Rob a private little smile as she greeted him, unaware that its effect was the precise opposite of what she intended. “So what’s new with the manuscripts?”
Rob summoned up his manners and told her he’d found a lovely fragment from a sort of prayer book and he was thinking of taking it to Oxford to show it to his old tutor, as it might turn out to be quite valuable. Crumpet listened to this brief report with an interest both Meg and Rob found surprising, until Rob found himself being given a spectacular close-up view of Crumpet’s breasts as she cooed, “Oooooo, that sounds lovely! Can I come and look at it?”
He fobbed her off as best he could without being ruthlessly rude. When she finally turned and ambled off, he turned to Meg and asked, “How on earth did anybody as decent as Crumper turn out a piece of trailer trash like that?”
Meg emitted a whoop of joy. “Trailer trash! What a wonderful term! But as for your question, God knows. None of us has ever been able to figure it out, though a couple of people claim she’s a throwback to Crumper’s mother, who was apparently the worst mistake Crumper’s father ever made.”
“The thought of Crumper having a father seems strange. I suppose I assumed that he sprang, fully grown, from the mind of Oscar Wilde or Bernard Shaw or somebody of that ilk.”
“Oh, no, we’ve all got revoltingly real parents around here. Crumper’s dad, now officially designated Old Crumper, is still to be seen about the place, popping up here and there where you least expect him.”
“Retired, I gather?”
“Very. And more than a bit potty. Always muttering about what her ladyship needs, but the last ladyship around here was my Aunt Sophy, and she’s been dead for years. Alas. I believe Uncle Greg would be better, physically I mean, if she were still around.”
“Death of a spouse is the number one trauma, according to the experts. But even love can’t keep one young forever. And your uncle is getting on a bit.”
“How old do you think my uncle is?”
Slightly taken aback by the direct question, Rob hemmed and hawed a little and finally ventured, “Late eighties?”
“Seventy-three.”
“You’re joking.”
“No. It isn’t his age, you see, it’s his rotten health.”
“Crikey,” Rob uttered, at his most English. “I hope for your sake rotten health doesn’t run in the family.”
“It doesn’t appear to. Derek and I rarely even catch colds. And Uncle Greg’s sister, my great-grandmother, is as healthy as the proverbial horse, which goes to show there’s no justice in the world.”
“How’s that?”
“Poor Uncle Greg is the nicest person you could ever hope to meet, but his sister my great-gran is the Arch Bitch. Her name’s Clarissa, but when Derek and I were younger we used to call her Cruella.”
“Sounds charming. Do you have to put up with her presence very often?”
“Not at all in recent years, thank God. She’s locked away somewhere in the wilds of Hampshire.”
“Locked away?” Rob echoed in surprise.
“Yes,” said Meg, rather enjoying the effect she was about to cause. “In what they call a ‘secure facility,’ which as far as I can make out is simply a very posh term for ‘home for the criminally insane.’ ”
Chapter 15
JULY 1963
Thirty-four Years Before Rob Hillman’s Death
She had never before known power. It was amazing, intoxicating. Champagne was nothing to it. Perhaps that was why, despite her once-burnt-twice-cautious approach to men, she took such a reckless plunge. Her total alcohol intake at the time was only three sips of port. But she was wildly, instantly drunk on power.
There was a good reason for the paucity of alcohol. She hadn’t touched a drop since that never-to-be sufficiently-regretted night when she and Nigel Daventry had created the baby that had ruined her life. The very sight or smell of liquor now seemed distasteful if not positively revolting.
Ellie, her roommate-cum-hostess, seemed to understand; she never pressed Clare to take a drink, and when friends came to visit their flat Ellie wouldn’t allow them to tease Clare about being a teetotaler. “Leave the girl alone,” she’d tell them. “It’s none of your sodding business what she chooses to do or not do.”
But after four months of this splendid support, Ellie was now telling Clare it was time to break the rules and break out the bottle. “Hooper Van Buren’s got a first, and we’re invited to help him celebrate it.”
Clare’s parents had not thought it important for a girl to develop her mind, so they had sent her to a school more interested in turning out debutantes than scholars. When she had run away from Banner House after the birth of her baby, she had sought refuge with a school friend who had managed, despite a similar handicap, to make it into Oxford. Since March she had absorbed enough of the university culture to know that a first-class degree called for a first-class party.
“I’m happy for him, I’ll be delighted to go, but I don’t need to drink to celebrate.”
“Darling Clare, you don’t need to drink to celebrate, you need to drink to survive the beastly party.”
“What’s going to be beastly about the party?”
“Oh, Hooper’s gone all Labour on us, didn’t I tell you? So God knows what sort of people will be there. Probably half the Junior Common Room of Bloody Balliol. The half that are on scholarships. We’ll be up to our arses in communists.”
“I’ve never met a communist. Are they interesting?”
Ellie laughed derisively. “Dearest Clare, they are the most boring people on earth. Soooo earnest. So good, you want to throw something at them.”
It did not occur to Clare at that moment that the most entertaining thing to throw at the communists would be herself. That discovery she made that evening, an hour or so into the beastly party. Since she was neither cold nor calculating by nature, she would not have set out deliberately to entice a man for the merry hell of it. But of all the boredoms in the world, the worst is the boredom of the nondrinker at a party where everyone else is loudly and rapidly becoming pie-eyed.
So when Hooper caught her hand and cried, “Clare! I say, just the girl!” and began to drag her through the crowd toward “my friend Shy,” Clare decided, on impulse, that she would give this oddly named bloke the full treatment. Then possibly something remotely interesting would happen.
“Shy” turned out to be “Shai,” short for Shailendra. He had the mahogany skin and raven hair of the Indian subcontinent, but he greeted her in the flawless accents of Eton. The contrast was highly appealing, as was his exotically beautiful face.
Clare was a pretty good flirt when she had some recently imbibed alcohol on which to float her shaky self-esteem. The steady gaze in Shai’s black eyes, however, was too much for her in her present state of sobriety, and she overdid it. As she chatted with him, she began to pat her blond curls, purse her perfect lips, and flutter the augmented eyelashes over her china blue eyes.
He said gently, “Don’t do that.”
Puzzlement froze the affectations for a moment. “Don’t do what?”<
br />
“All that phony stuff. You don’t need any of it.”
The phony stuff melted into honest surprise. “I don’t, uh, understand—”
“You are one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life. You shouldn’t spoil the effect with that—that—” Finding no words, he mimicked, perching a hand coyly behind his ear, tilting his head, fluttering his eyelashes and pouting.
Clare burst out laughing, not in a simpering giggle, but in honest whoops of merriment, too loud to be ladylike.
“That’s better,” he nodded with the smallest of smiles.
Clare studied him a second and asked, “Are you a communist?”
It was his turn to laugh. “What on earth makes you ask that?”
She related the warning she’d received about the party.
“Stuff and nonsense,” he replied. “World of difference between Labour and Communist. You’ve been listening to some Tory talking out his backside.”
“Careful!” she warned him, with an accusatory finger. “It’s a her, not a him, and she’s my best friend.”
He surprised her again. “What makes her your best friend?”
“What? Why, she, she, saved my life. She gave me a place to live when I ran away from home. She let me stay in her flat without paying rent.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“Why should that make you glad?”
“She’s been kind to you and you are loyal to her. I like that. Also—” he hesitated, then continued, “I am glad that you call her your best friend because of the kindness, not because the two of you think alike.”
“Whaaa—?”
“She appears—please don’t be offended—she appears to classify people she knows nothing about on a rather superficial basis.”
By this time Clare had gotten her jaw closed, and she shot back: “And what makes you think I wouldn’t do the same?”
“Because your bubbly Blond Bombshell routine is such an obvious fake. There is a brain behind those baby blues, but you’ve been told from your cradle that men don’t like smart women, so you hide it.”
Clare felt as stunned as the woman at the well when Jesus told her everything she’d been doing all her life. But she made a swift recovery. “Do you like smart women?”
“Oh, yes,” Shai whispered. In the din of the party she couldn’t hear the words, but it was obvious what the lips had said.
She was used to being called beautiful. But this man had called her a beautiful woman; everyone else had said “girl.”
He had rejected the usual flirtatious games, informed her that her act was phony, and somehow made it sound like a compliment. And he had said she had a brain.
She would have gone with him anywhere.
Where she went with him was back to Ellie’s flat; Ellie would be at Hooper’s till dawn. There would be hours to talk. And talk, honestly, was all either of them intended. Clare was accustomed to boys. She now realized she had met a man. The difference was devastating; all her defenses were blown away. He was at Balliol, for heaven’s sake, and true to her flat-mate’s prediction, he was on scholarship. That meant he was probably brilliant. But he credited her with intelligence, an attitude unprecedented in her experience. The questions he asked her in the taxi indicated he was more interested in getting into her mind than into her bra. Again, unprecedented.
By the time she turned the key in the lock of Ellie’s flat, she was both elated and apprehensive almost beyond bearing. Never in her life had she been so desperate to attract a member of the opposite sex, and never had she been less confident of her chances. Clare was afraid he’d think she was a lightweight, a Debbie Debutante. She was afraid she’d say something stupid and he would revise his opinion of her intelligence. But more than anything else she was afraid he’d find out she was married and had had a baby.
She was not alone, either in her excitement or in her apprehension. Shailendra Tandulkar was finding it difficult to believe that this ravishing English rose could be as drawn to him as he was to her. His mother had always told him he was the handsomest young man she’d ever seen, but he had always assumed that that was what all mothers said to their sons as a matter of course. At Oxford the girls hadn’t exactly flocked to him. His Balliol mates would try to set him up with their girlfriend’s girl-friends, but their efforts had never yet led beyond initial dates into anything like a relationship. Sometimes he thought he was just too damn dark. Over in the States the civil rights movement was declaring “Black is Beautiful,” and the young liberal ladies of the Oxford women’s colleges gave enthusiastic lip service to this ideal. But after one or two dates they all just wanted to be friends. He knew, however, that he couldn’t blame it all on covert racism. His best mates, splendidly color-blind, frequently accused him of being a dull stick. Shai sometimes suspected that he had as much sex appeal as a dictionary.
Dark-skinned, serious, and impatient of the frivolity that his peers spent their leisure time pursuing, he feared he was doomed to be lonely. He did not yet realize that Providence had presented to him a girl whose parents’ genteel snobberies had spurred her to find the forbidden faces, the dark faces, attractive; and who had, furthermore, found no real or lasting satisfaction in the superficial (and only) lifestyle that had been offered to her. They looked like a ridiculous mismatch. They were made for each other.
That incredible truth had been stealing into both their brains for some time when he reached for the port bottle Clare had set out for him and poured himself a scant second glass. “You’re sure you won’t join me? Ginger ale’s a bit puritanical once exams are over.”
After a moment’s consideration she agreed. “Just a finger,” she cautioned, determined not to get tipsy, now that being sober had gotten so enjoyable.
He poured, set the bottle down on the table, and sat back in his chair. “I have a confession to make.”
Her heart leapt. Something about her?
“I told you I saw intelligence in you. Oh, by the way, this conversation has confirmed that opinion.”
She was deliriously pleased, but murmured merely, “I’m glad.”
“But that wasn’t all,” he continued. “I saw something else that made you different from all the rest of them. But I was afraid to tell you. I was afraid you’d run away.”
“I won’t run away.”
“I know that now.” He turned his glass slowly as though to study the ruby liquid in it.
Her mind urged, Tell me! But she said nothing. Knowing it would come, she waited for it. (He was right; she was different from the rest of them.)
Finally he looked up at her. “I saw pain.”
Her eyes widened and her mouth opened, but still she remained silent and waited for him to say it in his own time.
“You’ve suffered,” he said softly. “It shows in your eyes, but not everybody can see it. It takes someone else who has also suffered, I think.”
And slowly, slowly, he began to tell her of his childhood. His parents had moved from India to Uganda before he was born. His father had been a pharmacist; he had owned his own shop. But he had become involved in some sort of underground political movement, native Ugandans who were working against Idi Amin. Shai told her about his growing childhood awareness that his mother was frightened. He told her more, he told her all of it, and as Clare sat motionless and listened to the horror, she understood that he was telling the full, ghastly story for the first time.
On the morning that his mother opened their front door to find her husband’s right hand and testicles on the concrete step, she had controlled her hysterics, swooped up her young son, and carried him out the back door to their neighbor’s house. Three days later they were in England. The neighbor, who was devoutly unpolitical, had done what he could to keep the shop going. From time to time he had sent them some money. They had survived.
Shai, who had told most of the story to his port glass, finally looked up. Clare was sitting across from him, still as stone, tears running silent
ly down her face.
“I’m sorry. I’ve made you cry.”
She shook her head. “No. That is, of course I’m crying for you. That was—I’m so—you’ve been—” She gave up, knowing there were no words to respond adequately to such a tale. “But I’m also crying for myself. Because now—” She faltered. Like her, he waited for the words to come at their own pace. They came: “Now I have to tell you my story. Don’t I?”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
She looked at him steadily and said, “That’s not true.”
He looked back. He nodded. “You’re right. It’s not true. You do have to tell me.” But she knew he wasn’t making a demand; he was acknowledging a reality that neither of them could challenge. Like gravity.
So she told him.
By the end, the dawn escape from Banner House, she could hardly speak for sobbing. He left his chair and went to sit beside her, holding and rocking her gently like the baby she had abandoned.
At last she stopped crying, blew her nose once more on the handkerchief he had given her, and braced herself for the terrifying task of looking him in the eye. “Do you think,” she gulped, “that I am completely contemptible?”
He took her face between his hands and tried to tell her what he felt, but his shaking voice failed him. So he kissed her.
The kiss was an astonishment to both of them. The unexpected sweetness of the port they tasted on each other’s lips was delicious. But it wasn’t just that. Blue eyes met black ones. By one accord they closed in another kiss. Gentle like the first, it became hesitant, tremulous, as their lips parted and their tongues moved tentatively to touch each other. Soon it was no longer hesitant.
Five minutes later he broke from her with something like a cry.
“Clare!” he gasped. “Darling Clare! Wonderful woman! I will not do this to you. I will not take advantage of you like that stupid bastard did. You are magnificent, and you deserve better than this.”
Thieves Break In Page 13
