Читать книгу A Kind Of Madness - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 6

‘SO YOU’RE leaving for Cheshire this evening. Exactly when do your parents sail?’ Peter asked.

They were having lunch at their usual restaurant, equidistant from Elspeth’s bank and Peter’s chambers. Both of them had agreed early on in their relationship that it made much more sense for them to fix a couple of days per week when they could lunch together, rather than committing too many of their precious busy evenings to developing their relationship.

That was one of the things that made their relationship so harmonious: they both had the same goals, the same outlook on life—the same firm and practical outlook. Not for them the heady, and so often destructive and exhausting passion of others. Which made it all the more difficult to understand why her parents, instead of approving of Peter, seemed almost to treat their relationship as a joke.

Of course, her parents and Peter were worlds apart; her parents were her parents, but one had to admit they were a trifle unorthodox in their attitude to the things that Peter considered important—one could almost say a little careless and feckless in their outlook on life, never treating it with the seriousness they should. Look at the way now that her father, having sold the farm and bought a smallholding, instead of investing the remainder of the money in some safe manner which would give them a good income, was insisting on taking her mother off to Egypt and then the Greek islands for a two-month holiday.

Really, the pair of them could be as irrational and as irresponsible as a pair of children at times. It was a good job that she was around to keep an eye on them. When her father had first sold the farm, she had heaved a small sigh of relief. She loved her parents, of course, but the farm and its demands had sometimes proved to be a small bone of contention between Peter and herself. The very first time she had introduced him to her parents, he had generously tried to point out to her father how foolish he was in trying to continue farming in the outdated traditional method her father had favoured, when he could have made the farm so much more profitable by using modern intensive methods. Peter had only been trying to help, and it had been unfortunate that her father felt so strongly about retaining the traditional methods of agriculture, and that Peter hadn’t realised that he had been treading almost on hallowed ground by arguing against them.

When her mother had first told her they were selling the farm, she had been pleased, envisaging a safe, comfortable life for them in a pleasant, easily run house in one of the very attractive local Cheshire villages, but to her shock what her parents had bought was a small and extremely run-down smallholding, which they had told her with enthusiasm and excitement they intended to use to raise organically grown vegetable crops.

Her mother, Elspeth remembered, had been bubbling over with eagerness for the project, explaining that they had already canvassed the very popular local restaurants, with which Cheshire was well supplied, to ensure that there was a ready market for their produce.

Elspeth had been dragged down to view the appalling wreck of a cottage, which looked fit only for demolition, and the flat, overgrown paddock that went with it.

She had tried to talk her parents out of such a crazy venture, her heart sinking when she’d realised they had made up their minds. The frustration of not being able to make them see that their money would give them a far better return if it was invested had sent her to live in London with a pounding headache, and the unpleasant sinking sensation that Peter would consider her to have failed in not persuading them to change their minds. Why couldn’t her parents be more like Peter’s? His father and mother had retired to a small south coast town, where they played golf and bridge. They had an immaculate detached bungalow with smooth green lawns and well-disciplined flower-beds. No pets were allowed in the Holmes household, no cats with unexpected litters of kittens, no rough stray dogs with large muddy paws and hairy coats…no parrots who called out the most appallingly rude things when one was least expecting it. She still blushed to remember how, the first time she had taken Peter home, the parrot which her mother had originally been taking care of for a friend, and which had somehow or other lingered on to become a permanent house guest, had flown on to Peter’s shoulder and bitten quite sharply at his ear before remarking in a voice which sounded uncomfortably like her mother’s, ‘Oh, dear, such a shame. Pious Peter…Pious Peter…’

‘Well, perhaps once they get back from this holiday they’ll come to see sense and sell up. I must say, Elspeth, I do find your parents rather…’ Peter frowned and studied his plate as though unable to find the words to describe his reaction to her family, while Elspeth hung her head in acknowledgement of his criticism.

It wasn’t until she had come to live in London that she had realised how eccentric and unusual her home life was. Having a father who was a farmer had caused a few amused raised eyebrows, but not too much other comment in the high-powered world of merchant banking. It was only after she’d made the mistake of taking a colleague home with her one Christmas that she’d made the humiliating discovery of how very odd and amusing her family was to others.

She had reacted instinctively on learning that Sophy, the other girl, had had nowhere to spend Christmas, inviting her to return to Cheshire with her, knowing quite well that another body would hardly be noticed in the crowd that her mother always drew around her. Having produced only one child, her mother had gone on to make up for this by maternally adopting every chance waif and stray she could, both of the human and animal varieties, and so it was that the farm had abounded with pet lambs turned aggressive and demanding sheep, goats who could never be milked, chickens too old to lay but whose necks could never be wrung, sheep-dogs who only dreamed lazily of sheep in their old age as they huddled up to the Aga, a collection of barn cats who never hunted—although thankfully in those days the parrot had not been in evidence.

Sophy had seemed to fit in so well with her family that it had come as a double shock to walk into the staff-room behind her and discover her entertaining a crowd of their fellow employees by telling them in her high-pitched Sloane Ranger voice about the chaos of the Turner household.

Elspeth had never felt so humiliated in her life. She had resolved there and then that, in the future, no one would ever be able to humiliate her or laugh at her in that kind of way again.

When her mother had asked gently why she no longer brought any friends home with her when she came back from London, she had quietly and firmly avoided a direct answer. From then on her home life and her career were two separate things.

After that she had been cautious about where and with whom she made friends. She had swapped her room at the small, crowded flat she’d shared with four other girls and had found herself a lone bedsitter.

Having more time to spend on her own had given her the opportunity to concentrate on her exams, so that when Sophy had been simpering over the engagement ring she had managed to extract from an up-and-coming bank clerk, she, Elspeth, had been quietly receiving the congratulations of her management on the excellence of her exam results.

While her colleagues had opted for the glamour and high-powered pressure of the dealing-room, she had set her sights in a different direction, cautiously looking ahead to the future, and equally cautiously deciding to leave the world of mainstream banking for the more specialised arena of merchant banking.

Here it seemed she had found her niche. She loved the meticulous, quiet, thoughtful concentration needed for such work; she liked being out of the public eye, working behind the scenes; and she was rewarded for her diligence with a good salary which had enabled her to buy her own small dockside apartment and to run a neat, economical car.

She had met Peter when he’d moved into an adjoining apartment. They had soon discovered how much they had in common. Unlike other couples, they had decided against moving into one shared apartment. After all, when they eventually decided to marry, by selling the two apartments they would have sufficient profit to enable them to buy a sensible London house which would be convenient for both their offices.

Later, when they had children, they might decide to move a little way out of London, somewhere convenient for the M4 and healthy for bringing up children. Yes, she and Peter had their lives all properly planned…Not for her the careless insouciance of her parents, who always left so much to chance.

When she had once gently chided her mother for this, the latter had replied firmly, ‘Elspeth, we like surprises, even the bad ones. I can’t understand how you can bear to have your life so carefully mapped out, every move planned. My dear, think how boring it will be…’

She had subdued the small, rebellious voice inside her which had found astoundingly that her mother had been right, reminding herself of her humiliation at the hands of the insufferable Sophy. That was never going to happen to her again—nor to her children. They would have parents whom they would know would never do anything to embarrass them. She would never forget the awful humiliation of that day…the mockery and laughter of her colleagues…the cruelty of Sophy, who had exaggerated her parents’ soft Cheshire accents just sufficiently to make them sound almost unbelievably bucolic, who had described in loving, cruel detail the plethora of cats, dogs and livestock that had run riot in and around the old farmhouse, who had mocked her mother’s somewhat casual attitude to the kind of housework that involved having a home in which nothing looked as though it was ever out of place. Even now it made her squirm to remember…

‘I’ll try to drive up to Cheshire for your second weekend there,’ she heard Peter saying, and automatically switched her thoughts from the past and back to the present.

Three weeks ago, just before her mother had telephoned and dropped her bombshell that she and Elspeth’s father had decided more or less on the spur of the moment to take a long holiday, Elspeth’s boss had sent for her, and had told her almost severely that it was time she used some of the eight weeks of leave that was due to her.

Thoroughly alarmed that he might have been suggesting a fall in the standard of her work, Elspeth had protested that she didn’t need a holiday, that she enjoyed her work so much.

‘Yes, Elspeth, I know and I do sympathise, but the board has issued instructions that, praiseworthy though they consider it that our staff are so conscientious, in this day and age with so many stress-related illnesses their staff must take their due allocation of holiday leave. Our personnel department tell me that it is over two years since you had a break of longer than three or four days.

‘The board has asked me to provide them with a list of all those members of staff who have more than one year’s allocation of leave built up.

‘The view of the board is that a healthy staff member with a well-rounded attitude to life will in the long run serve the bank better than, to use a current term, a “workaholic”.

‘I think you will agree that, in these circumstances, it might be as well if you could find a way of using up some of your built-up leave. I do sympathise, Elspeth, but the Livingstone contract is all but wound up, and unless you have something very pressing to attend to…’

Elspeth had shaken her head, her heart sinking, knowing that she had had no possible excuse for not taking her boss’s advice.

When he had added a further blow, telling her that he expected her to take at least four weeks’ leave, she had left his office feeling almost as sick with shock as she had done on that never to be forgotten occasion when she had overheard Sophy’s malicious description of her parents and home.

Had anyone told Elspeth that she was an extremely sensitive, almost over-sensitive young woman, whose emotions and self-confidence were easily bruised, she would have reacted with astonishment and dismissal. She considered herself to be one of that new breed of women who had managed to tame and control all those dangerously subversive feminine traits which had told so badly against her sex in the past.

Not for her sentimentality and the weakness of allowing her emotions to rule her head; not for her the folly of falling in love, of submitting herself to the pain of allowing another human being to become so important to her that he was the focus of her whole world. No, she preferred to put her faith, her trust in something far more dependable—like her work. Of course she wanted to marry, to have children, and in Peter she considered she had found the perfect mate: someone who felt about life exactly as she did.

They considered themselves an established couple, even though she wasn’t wearing an engagement ring, even though they were not as yet lovers. Peter was old-fashioned in such things, and she was glad of it. These days, when one heard and read of the appalling consequences of sexual freedom and promiscuity, it was reassuring to meet a man who considered his health more important than the satisfaction of physical desire. There had been one previous serious relationship in Peter’s life, a girl at university, but that was in the past. And as for her…

Elspeth moved uncomfortably in her chair. Her virginity was something she preferred not to dwell on. It had been the source of enough mirth among the other girls she had flat-shared with when the local office of her bank had first transferred her to London, and she had been too hurt and too proud to explain to the others that it was very difficult to enter into a purely physical fling with the careless abandon they seemed to favour when one lived and worked in a small country town, where everyone knew everyone else, and where at the first sign of her attempting to do any such thing the gossips would be having a field day.

And then by the time she had moved to London she had felt too shy, too self-conscious to remedy things. After Sophy—strange how she always thought of her life as before Sophy and after Sophy—she had curled up into herself, not trusting herself to form any new relationships with anyone, male or female.

But now there was Peter, and if she sometimes found his insistence that they did not sleep together, his reluctance to touch her at all except to give her the odd very chaste and brief kiss, somewhat lacking in passion, she comforted herself with the knowledge that she would have found a man who was far more openly and demandingly sexual very off-putting indeed.

No, Peter was right for her, and once they were married of course things would be different. As it was, their careers took up so much of their time that it was hardly surprising that Peter wasn’t keen to rush on their marriage. After all, as he had pointed out to her recently, the terrible events of the autumn of ‘87, when the markets had fallen so drastically and so many of their peers had lost their jobs, had had a disastrous effect on the property market, which had still not recovered, and it would be foolish for them to make marriage plans and to sell their flats until it had done so.

She had agreed wholeheartedly with him, but it had niggled her none the less the last time her mother had rung up to have had to explain that no, she and Peter had not made any wedding arrangements as yet.

It was the purpose of that phone call which was the subject of their lunchtime discussion today.

Her mother had been thrilled about the planned holiday, but she had been concerned about leaving her menagerie. ‘Fortunately, Carter has offered to take over and look after things for us…You remember Carter, don’t you, Elspeth?’

She did, but wished she did not. Carter MacDonald was her aunt’s stepson, but he had already been an adult when her aunt had married his father, and his visits to the farmhouse had consequently been very rare. What she did remember about him was that she had found him rather overpowering. Almost eight years her senior, she had first met him the summer her aunt had married his father. He had just finished university at the time and had been waiting to hear if his application to work in scientific crop research for Third World countries had been successful. Her feelings towards him had been so ambiguous that when her mother had mentioned his name alarm bells had started to ring wildly in her cautious brain, especially when she couldn’t seem to explain what Carter was doing in Cheshire when he was supposed to be working in America.

Gently she had tried to caution her mother against leaving a man who was after all almost a stranger to them in charge of the smallholding because, for all her own objections and fears, she had had to admit that her parents were making an outstanding success of their venture, with the vegetables they produced being in constant demand from prestigious local restaurants and hotels. Indeed, so successful was it becoming that they were being pressed to expand, to erect more greenhouse tunnels and to buy more land. Their accounts, when they had proudly shown them to her, had stunned her. She had had no idea it was possible to make so much money from producing organically grown food.

When she had said as much to Peter he had lectured her reprovingly, pointing out that with the move to a far more ‘green’ environment it was obvious that her parents’produce would sell well.

And now they were jeopardising the whole thing by lightheartedly taking off for two months and leaving their precious business in the hands of a man about whom they knew virtually nothing at all.

Not so, her mother had objected when she had pointed these facts out to her. In the past few months they had got to know Carter very well indeed. It was true that initially he had merely been looking them up out of good manners, having returned to England after a spell working in America. But it seemed that now for some reason he was seriously considering settling in Cheshire and that, moreover, he had plans to enter a similar line of business to her parents’, so that he had both the experience and the inclination to take over the running of the business while they were away.

Elspeth had found all this highly suspicious. Her memories of Carter were of a tall, thin male with a shock of overlong dark hair who had seemed very adult to her teenage self, someone who had made her very aware of her own immaturity. Her mother was even talking enthusiastically about him buying a small farm due to come up for sale next to their own land, so that the two ventures could be run as one, but her parents were so innocent…so naïve. They couldn’t see what Peter had been quick to point out to her—something she had not realised at first herself—that it might well be that Carter did intend to start up a business, a business which would be in direct competition to their own—and what better way to get a head start than by destroying their business while they were away and he was in charge?

Of course, she had known immediately it would be useless to point this out to her mother. For one thing, she knew that her mother would only laugh and dismiss Peter’s suspicions as unthinkable.

She had talked the whole thing over with him and he had pointed out further aspects of the situation which had not occurred to her: namely, that not only might Carter not take adequate care of her parents’ venture, but that he might actually deliberately try to undermine everything they had built up. ‘After all, if he is serious about setting up in competition to them…’ he had gone on.

Shocked, Elspeth had initially demurred, but Peter had insisted he was right. She had immediately wanted to warn her parents, but had known that they would not take her warning seriously. They seemed to have taken Carter to their hearts, almost as though he were a long-lost son, not someone who was barely related to them at all if one discounted her aunt’s marriage to his father.

A sensation which she had refused to admit as jealousy had struggled for life inside her—a sensation which she had immediately squashed. But then had come her boss’s announcement that she must take some leave, and she had immediately suggested to Peter that it might be as well for her to kill two birds with one stone by taking her leave and by spending it in Cheshire, where she could keep a firm eye on any Machiavellian attempts by Carter to undermine her parents’ business.

Peter had immediately agreed with her decision. She had rung her parents that evening, announcing that she had some leave due and that she was free to stand in for them while she was on holiday.

At first her mother had seemed surprisingly unenthusiastic, almost as though she didn’t want her at home, and her ire and suspicions had grown when she had later learned that it was Carter who had told her parents that that kind of sacrifice on her part was unnecessary, and that he was sure she would much prefer to spend her leave with Peter.

Not so, she had returned firmly. And in the end her mother had thanked her and accepted her decision, although even then she had not seemed very confident of Elspeth’s ability to take charge. Which was foolish, surely. After all, her parents had a small staff who did the day-to-day routine work. Elspeth was used to dealing with underlings, having a small department under her at the bank, and surely a well-educated, mature woman of twenty-seven would have no trouble at all in running one very small small-holding for a period of one month.

And so she had planned everything. She would drive down to Cheshire three days ahead of her parents’ departure so that she could familiarise herself with their routine, and make sure that Carter knew that any interference on his part would not be welcome.

It was a pity that he was living in the area while he looked around for a suitable property of his own, but if he turned up at her parents’ smallholding she would make it more than plain to him that, in their absence, he was not a welcome guest.

As she listened to Peter telling her about his latest case, she smothered the uncomfortable feeling that if her parents had made Carter welcome in their home as a member of the family, they would be highly embarrassed if she refused to do the same. She reflected crossly that it was high time she overcame these rebellious and unwanted weaknesses which more properly she ought to have left behind her when she’d left home.

Her parents were a warm-hearted couple, whose naïveté about the realities of life and the human race were all very well in the context of a small rural village where they had been known all their lives, but the world had changed dramatically since her parents were young, and it frightened her sometimes how little they seemed to realise that fact.

Take the time she had got off the London train in Chester, only to discover that her mother had befriended a solitary and extremely hairy young man who had got off an earlier train, and even worse that she had practically invited him home for the weekend. One only had to pick up a paper to realise the danger of befriending strangers.

Not that Carter was a stranger precisely, but his motives were very suspect, as Peter had wisely pointed out to her. In fact Peter had rather chided her because she herself had not seen that danger immediately.

Truth to tell, she had been inclined to become more indignant about the way Carter seemed to have wormed his way into her parents’ affections and become an established part of their lives—so much so that the last time she had gone home, when mercifully he had been away visiting friends for the weekend, the parrot had shrieked unrelentingly, ‘Where’s Carter? I want Carter. Now there’s a man,’ accompanying this statement with a barrage of wolf-whistles and other equally unsavoury remarks.

It was not Jasper’s fault, her mother had apologised. The parrot had had three homes before being dumped on her parents; one of these being a Manchester pub, no doubt frequented by the kind of men who thought nothing of whistling at women and making fulsome remarks about their physical endowments.

Peter had remarked on their return drive to London that he sincerely hoped the bird would have met its demise by the time their children came along. ‘It’s that kind of thing that exerts the worst possible influence on young children,’ he had informed Elspeth.

Even worse, as she cringingly remembered, had been the reaction of Peter’s mother when he had described the parrot’s excesses to her the following weekend.

Peter was scrupulous about making sure that they never visited one set of parents without visiting the other, and if sometimes she had the unnerving feeling that he was doling out these duty visits with more parsimony than real emotion, she kept these unwanted thoughts firmly subdued.

Peter’s parents were nothing like her own. Peter’s mother was a wonderful housewife. Her furniture gleamed with polish, her kitchen floor could literally be dined off, and if Elspeth sometimes noticed the stiff formality of her visits there, the immaculate tidiness of the small sitting-room with its furniture that was both uncomfortable and almost too tidily arranged, she smothered her feelings and concentrated instead on reminding herself that once they were married Peter would no doubt expect her to maintain the same high standards attained by his mother.

That would be a challenge, but Elspeth reminded herself that the modern career woman thrived on such challenges, skilfully balancing the needs of career, home and family, and in doing so winning the admiration of everyone around her.

Mrs Holmes did not really approve of wives who worked. In her day making a home had been enough to keep any woman contented, but on the other hand she agreed with Peter that the additional income Elspeth earned would contribute welcomely to the family budget. There had even been a moment when Peter’s mother had suggested that when their children came along it might not be unfeasible for her and Mr Holmes to move to London, so that she might be on hand to take charge of her grandchildren’s upbringing.

For no good reason she could understand, Elspeth had experienced a very fierce and surprising shock of dislike for that suggestion. Into her mind had come mental images of her own childhood, of the farmyard and its inhabitants, of her mother’s kitchen with its good smells and its untidy bustle, of laughter and sunshine, of love and warmth, and she had known instinctively that she would never ever allow her prospective mother-in-law to bring up her own children.

Disturbing though these thoughts were she had managed to subdue them, chiding herself for being over-sentimental, reminding herself of how ill-equipped her own childhood had left her for the hard realities of life and people. And yet…

‘Elspeth, you aren’t listening to a word I’m saying. Really, I don’t know what it is about your family, but they do seem to have the most unsettling effect on you. If it weren’t for the fact that someone ought to check up on what this man is planning, I’d have serious doubts about the wisdom of your spending so much time in Cheshire. Both apartments need decorating. You could have made a start on the painting while you were off.’

Elspeth focused on him, wondering why she didn’t feel more enthusiastic about his suggestion, why she felt an almost sneaking sense of relief that she was committed to going home.

For no reason that she could readily discern, over these last six months she had experienced more and more rebellious moments of startling clarity, during which she had had the unnerving sensation that her relationship with Peter, her life here in London, her work, her scrupulous re-tailoring of her personality, her appearance, even her thoughts, were not an escape from the old childish, trusting Elspeth and her naïve country ways, but a trap—a trap which was gradually but inexorably closing around her.

Which was totally ridiculous, and fostered, she was sure, in some odd and indefinable way by her parents. Not that they would be liable to make those oh, so casual, but nevertheless pointed remarks about Peter this time. At least, not after the first three days, and she suspected they would be far too excited about their holiday to even think of remarking on how odd it was that she should choose to marry such a man.

Elspeth had never quite dared ask what they meant. She preferred to assume that they were simply marvelling at her good fortune rather than criticising Peter.

At precisely one-thirty, Peter summoned the waiter and paid the bill. At the end of the month they would scrupulously divide up the total cost of their total outings for that month, to make sure that such costs had been shared equally between them.

And if just occasionally Elspeth wondered what it would be like if Peter suddenly lavished her with expensive flowers or bought her handmade chocolates, she told herself severely that she was not that kind of dependent, childish woman, who needed to be bought such treats by a man; that if she wanted flowers she could buy her own. But something inside her refused to be totally convinced, making her cross with herself for yearning for such outdated, meaningless gestures.

‘Time to go,’ Peter informed her, standing up.

He said exactly the same thing every time they lunched together. Previously she had always found his predictability soothing, reassuring—but for some reason today it grated on her. She wondered what it would feel like if Peter suddenly behaved like her father, and announced that he had booked them both a surprise holiday, that he was taking her away to somewhere she had always wanted to go. She told herself severely that he would never do anything so thoughtless, that he would realise that it would not be possible for her to drop everything to go to the other end of the world with him. No, if—when she and Peter took a holiday together, it would be one that was meticulously planned and organised, which was just what she would want. She could think of nothing worse than being told that she had less than three weeks in which to prepare for a two-month trip abroad.

Of course her mother thrived on such announcements, throwing herself into them with enthusiasm and as much excitement as a small child. But she was not her mother…No. She had recognised, the day when she’d stood in the doorway to the staff-room of the bank listening to Sophy, that for the rest of her life she would have to protect her parents from people like that. That she must never again subject them to the kind of cruel mimicry employed by her supposed friend.

Just before they parted outside the restaurant, acting on some impulse she couldn’t understand, she leaned towards Peter, inviting him to kiss her.

A look of shock crossed his face. He drew back from her immediately, glancing hurriedly over his shoulder as though to make sure no one had witnessed her lack of self-control. He cleared his throat, avoiding looking at her. He was embarrassed, she recognised, flushing hotly, and no wonder. What on earth had possessed her? She knew quite well that Peter hated public demonstrations of affection.

‘Er—I’m afraid I shall be late in tonight—I’m seeing a client. I’ll ring you at the weekend. When would be a good time?’

Still flushed and angry with herself, Elspeth made an automatic reply, and then, having exchanged slightly guarded smiles, they both went their separate ways.

What a stupid thing for her to have done! No wonder Peter had looked so put out. They simply weren’t the sort of couple to indulge in that sort of thing. Really, she didn’t know what had got into her…

It must be because she was feeling a little edgy about confronting Carter. She had no real fears that she would be able to handle the situation and ensure that he understood that she was well aware of what he was up to—thanks to Peter. Nevertheless—nevertheless, half of her wished rather weakly that Peter were going with her, that perhaps…Not to deal with Carter for her—no, of course not—but just to be there as a sort of back-up—or just to be there full stop, she realised suddenly and rather disconcertingly, as the traitorous thought slid into her mind that for Peter to have parted from her so unemotionally and casually did not really suggest that his feelings for her were particularly lover-like.

But how ridiculous. What did she expect? A passionate embrace in the middle of the street? Of course not. Their relationship wasn’t like that. They were far too sensible for that kind of thing. Their relationship was built of mutual aims, mutual respect, mutual goals. Rather disconcertingly as she headed back to the bank she remembered her mother once telling her nostalgically that she had fallen in love with her father the moment she’d set eyes on him; that she had known he was the one for her when he had rushed out into the road to rescue a kitten from under the hooves of the milk-man’s pony, daring both the milkman’s fury and the amusement of onlookers when he’d presented the rescued kitten to her with a courtly bow of his head and a whispered confession that he rather suspected he had split his jeans during his heroic dive to rescue the kitten, and would she please go and stand behind him so that he could get to his feet without completely losing his dignity.

To envisage Peter in such a situation was beyond the power of the most inventive type of imagination. Peter would have ignored the cat. He never liked getting involved in things which did not concern him. He would certainly never have bandied words with the milkman, and as for wearing old and worn jeans in danger of bursting their seams…A complete and utter impossibility—thank goodness. She would have been mortified in her mother’s shoes, to be aware of being the cynosure of all eyes…She shuddered and closed her eyes. She and Peter were perfect for one another—perfect. She was a very lucky woman—very lucky indeed.

So why did she feel so…so on edge?

It was Carter’s fault, of course. If he hadn’t come back into their lives, inveigling his way into her parents’ affections…She had disliked him even as a teenager, feeling intimidated by him. He had teased her, she remembered, making fun of her braced teeth and pulling at her plaits. She at fourteen had been mortified by his reaction to her, and had retaliated by whisking herself out of the room whenever he had walked into it, and refusing to address more than half a dozen words to him during his entire visit.

‘Not like your ma and pa, are you, cuckoo?’ he had tormented her, she recalled.

She had been hurt by that comment…hurt and confused, although she had not let him see it.

Well, this time it would be different. This time she was an adult with no need to feel intimidated. This time he would see how very different indeed she was from her foolish, too trusting parents.