Читать книгу Scandalous Risks - Susan Howatch - Страница 37

As the final chord throbbed and we clutched each other, breathless with laughter, I saw that Primrose and Eddie were standing appalled in the doorway.

‘Honestly!’ said Primrose as I abruptly switched off the radiogram. ‘I’ve never seen anything quite so undignified in all my life!’

‘My dear,’ said her father, ‘you mustn’t be so serious that you forget how to have fun.’

At once Primrose turned her back on us and stalked off across the hall.

‘Leave her to me, Stephen,’ said Eddie. ‘You go on having fun.’ And he too withdrew, closing the door behind him.

‘That’s the nicest thing Eddie’s done in a month of Sundays,’ I said. ‘But why on earth is Prim being so idiotic?’

‘I’m afraid she realised I was cross with her.’

‘Cross? That wasn’t being cross! You should hear my father when he roars like a lion – that’s what being cross is all about!’

‘But Primrose is particularly dependent on me for my love and approval. Ever since her mother died –’

‘But her mother’s been dead for over twenty years – isn’t it time Primrose grew up? God knows, I never thought I’d hear myself say this but sometimes when I see this so-called “dependence” on you I really feel quite sorry for Dido.’

He merely regarded me with grave blue eyes and said nothing.

A panic-stricken remorse assailed me. ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled, furious with myself for plunging around in his family problems like an elephant cavorting among eggshells. ‘Tight as an owl. Rude as hell. Forget I spoke.’

‘My dear Venetia, there’s no need for you to apologise!’ he said at once, sloughing off both my tactlessness and his problems as if they were supremely unimportant. ‘Let’s be tight as owls together and go on having the time of our lives!’ And as he stretched out his hands to me again I was suddenly transported to the very centre of life.

My world turned itself inside out. In a split second of blinding clarity I saw him at last not as the family friend who was always so kind to me, but as the irresistible stranger whose personality, by some great miracle, uniquely complemented my own. My loneliness was annihilated; my despair exploded into a euphoric hope. Knowing I had to withdraw at once before my emotion could utterly overwhelm me, I blundered across the hall to the cloakroom, sagged in tears against the door and mutely contemplated the vastness of my discovery.