Читать книгу Mistaken Adversary - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 7

‘ROSES—oh, Georgy, you shouldn’t have! They must have been so expensive.’

Georgia looked at her aunt’s downbent head as she breathed in the perfume of the opening buds, and told her quietly, ‘No, I picked them from the garden, from the roses we planted last autumn. I meant to make a note of which bush they were from, but M...someone interrupted me and I forgot.’

‘From the garden...’

Her aunt put down the roses and turned to look at her. There was such an expression of love and understanding in her eyes that Georgia felt her own fill with tears. Holding out her arms to her, her aunt said gently, ‘Oh, Georgia, darling. I know how you must feel, but you mustn’t...you really mustn’t... We’ve so little time left, you and I, and I want us to share it, not to—’

She stopped as she heard the anguished sound Georgia made.

‘No! That isn’t true!’ Georgia protested. ‘You are going to get better. I—’

‘No, Georgia, I am not going to get better,’ her aunt corrected her, holding her tightly, her voice steady as she lifted her hand to push the hair back off Georgia’s face. ‘Please try to understand and accept that. I have, and I can’t tell you how much peace, how great a sense of awareness of all the good things I’ve enjoyed about my life...how deep a feeling of being at one with the rest of the world it has brought me. Of course there are times when I feel despair...fear, when I want to deny what’s happening—to protest that it’s too soon—but those feelings are fleeting, a bit like the tantrums of a child, who doesn’t really know why it protests—only that it feels it must. My one great fear has been for you. My poor Georgia... You’ve fought so hard to ignore what we both know to be the truth. I’ve watched you and hurt for you, and yet, at the same time as I’ve wanted to protect you from what must happen, I’ve wanted to share it with you—to show you how easy, how very natural what’s happening to me is. That’s one of the things they teach us here: to let go of our fear, to share what we’re experiencing, to accept its—’

‘Its inevitability?’ Georgia questioned her brokenly, struggling with her tears and with the turbulent anger of her emotions, knowing she wanted to deny what her aunt was saying—to tell her that she must not give up, that she must continue to fight—and yet conscious at the same time of her aunt’s need to talk about what was happening to her and to share it with her. They talked for a long time, her aunt’s awareness and acceptance of what lay ahead of her both humbling Georgia and causing her the most intense fear and grief.

‘Thank you for sharing this with me, Georgy,’ her aunt said softly to her, when she finally admitted how exhausted their talk had left her. ‘So many people find that long, long after they have come to accept that their lives are drawing to a close, and that death can be something they can accept without fear, their relief in discovering this is offset by their family’s and friends’ refusal or inability to share that knowledge with them. It is a very natural fear after all, the fear of death, and in western civilisations it’s a fear that is strengthened by the taboo surrounding the whole subject of death. I want to share this with you, Georgy. Selfishly, perhaps. I know what you went through when you lost your parents...’

‘I’m afraid of losing you,’ Georgia admitted. ‘Afraid of being alone...’ As she spoke the words, the emotions she had been fighting so hard to control overwhelmed her, and with them came the tears she had not previously allowed herself to cry, seeing them as a sign of weakness, of defeat.

When she finally left her aunt’s bedside, she told herself that she was finally coming to accept that her aunt’s life was drawing to its end, and yet she knew that, deep within her, one stubborn childish part of her was still protesting, objecting, begging fate to intervene and to arrange a miracle for her. For her, she noted inwardly—not for her aunt, but for her.

She had spent far longer than usual at the hospice and, when she finally got back to the cottage in the middle of the afternoon, the first thing she saw was Mitch Fletcher’s car parked outside. He himself was seated inside it, a briefcase on the seat beside him, while he was apparently engrossed in some paperwork.

‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised shortly. ‘I...I was delayed.’ The trauma of the morning had made her virtually forget that she had agreed he could move in earlier than they had originally arranged, her guilt adding to the already heavy burden of negative feelings he seemed to arouse inside her.

‘No problem,’ he told her easily. ‘As you can see, I’ve managed to keep myself fairly well occupied. That was something I ought to have asked you, by the way: I do tend to bring work home with me—something they weren’t too keen on in the hotel. Do you mind?’

Georgia started to shake her head, knowing that, the more time he spent occupied with his business affairs, the less she was likely to see of him. ‘As you know, I work at home myself, sometimes in the evening as well as during the day.’

He paused in the act of getting out of his car, giving her a thoughtful, ironic look, which immediately changed to a frown as he focused properly on her. ‘Been giving you a bad time, has he?’ he asked her drily.