“Unfinished business never goes away.”

“You never really discussed your past with me all those years ago, did you?” murmured Dominic.

Katherine met his eyes steadily and said with utter truthfulness, “When I met you, I had no past and no future.”

“Tell me,” Dominic said, and there was a latent urgency in his voice that unsettled her.

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me what you’re hiding.”

She lowered her eyes. She could feel the fine prickle of perspiration. Tell him? she thought. The truth? The long, involved truth that had cost her so dear?

CATHY WILLIAMS is Trinidadian and was brought up on the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She was awarded a scholarship to study in Britain, and came to Exeter University in 1975 to continue her studies into the great loves of her life: languages and literature. It was there that Cathy met her husband, Richard. Since they married, Cathy has lived in England, originally in the Thames Valley but now in the Midlands. Cathy and Richard have three daughters.

The Price of Deceit
Cathy Williams

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ONE

SUMMER had arrived. Katherine Lewis sat upright on the grass in Regent’s Park and felt with a sort of desperate anger the tentative rays of warmth hit her skin. The least the weather could have done on this day of all days was to oblige with grey skies and rain. For the past six glorious months it had rained constantly, a never-ending drizzle that seemed to have no beginning and no end.

Everything, though, had a beginning and an end. It was the nature of things.

She shielded her eyes from the glare of the sun and, in that passing moment, she seemed to see everything; she seemed to see her entire life flash in front of her eyes, every detail of it.

Twenty years living at home with her mother in a cramped, unimaginative little terraced house in the middle of a cramped, unimaginative little terraced street in the heart of London, an existence of trying hard not to let the complaining and never-ending criticism wear her into the ground while she ploughed on with her studies and dreamed of the day when she would be free.

Well, she had at last tasted her freedom, hadn’t she? It hadn’t come when her mother had died, all that time ago, quietly over a cup of tea in the small unattractive sitting-room, with the television on. No, that had just been release from a sort of slavery.

Freedom had come only in the past six months.

She closed her eyes briefly and remembered, as though it was yesterday, the first time she had laid eyes on Dominic Duvall. She had stepped into that crowded room, dressed in Emma’s daring clothes, with her hair in a daring style and her heart beating with terror at this new person which she had created for herself, and she had seen him standing across the room from her, tall, dark, commanding, one hand raised as he brought his glass to his lips, his other hand in his trouser pocket. Their eyes had met for a few seconds over the crowd and she had smiled and blushed and trembled in her skimpy outfit which had felt so peculiar because she had never worn anything like it in her life before.

Afterwards, he had told her that it had been the sexiest smile that he had ever seen on a woman’s lips.

She lay back on the grass with her hands clasped behind her head and stared up at the sky. It was a hard blue colour. No clouds. The sort of perfect summer day which seemed designed to remind the British public at large that there was more to the weather than rain and wind.

Dominic would be here any minute.

She had decided to come ahead of him because she had a vague idea that being able to watch him approach in the distance would give her the time she needed to get herself together and do what she had to do.

She had also chosen the spot carefully, describing to him how to find her. Regent’s Park, for some reason, was the one place they had not visited, and she felt that she needed to talk to him somewhere that held no memories for her.

Memories, she realised now, with a sadness that seemed to fill every pore of her body until it obliterated every other emotion, had no respect for time or place. She lay there frowning and trying to think how she would phrase what she had to say to him, and all she could think of was the way he made her feel.

Every word he had uttered to her had been a revelation, every smile a new world opening, a world which she had never even known existed.

As she walked on that tightrope which she had created for herself, he had reached out his hand, and for a while she could fly. The desperate game which had started out six months ago, a game which she knew had to be played before she lost the opportunity forever, had ended with more than she had ever bargained for.

All those people, she thought, sitting up, who said that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, were fools.

She squinted against the sun and saw him approaching in the distance and she felt that familiar wild leap of her senses.

If someone had told her that one man could make colours seem brighter and music seem sweeter, could alter the whole tenor of her life, she would have laughed, but that was what he had done. It was as though her life had been played out in black and white and now everything was in Technicolor.

He was dressed for work. Charcoal trousers, impeccably tailored, as were all his clothes, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and he was holding his jacket over one shoulder.

He was a tall man, over six feet, and with the graceful, hard build of an athlete. The sort of man who walked into a crowded room and instantly became the centre of attention. He had much more than good looks, which were no more than an accident of chance. There was something compelling about the way he carried himself, his movements unwasted and graceful, and something mesmerising about the hard lines of his face with that black hair and sea-green eyes.

In all the months they had gone out together, she had never really recovered from the wonder of knowing that he was attracted to her. Her!

But, she thought now, he wasn’t, was he? He had never been attracted to her. He had been attracted to a vibrant, vivacious girl, a make-believe person who didn’t really exist.

Katherine Lewis, she told herself with a resigned sigh, wasn’t vibrant or vivacious. She was ordinary, reserved, cautious. The persona she had borrowed for the past few months, for reasons which she could never explain to him, belonged to someone else, and now she had to give it back.

She had tasted freedom, but freedom had its price and the piper had to be paid.

As he approached her he smiled, and she saw the dark charm that could entice a response from a block of ice.

‘Katherine,’ he said, when he was still a little way away. ‘So we made it here at last.’

Out of the corner of her eye, Katherine saw the two girls who had been sunbathing a few yards away shield their eyes and covertly look at him from under their lashes. He always had that effect on the opposite sex.

‘I’m sorry if I dragged you away from something important,’ she said, by way of response, as he sprawled down next to her and tossed his jacket on the grass.

She didn’t want to get too close to him. That would be fatal.

‘Are you?’ he asked lazily, turning to face her, and she tried not to succumb to the sexual warmth of his voice. ‘It seems a shame to be confined to an office building when the weather is like this.’

‘Fortunately,’ she said, nervously keeping her distance, ‘you can afford to indulge your desires to be outside, since the office building belongs to you.’

She looked at his long brown fingers and remembered the way they had touched her that first time, slowly, gently, setting her alight, so that her whole body had burned with the thrill of sensations waking for the first time.

He laughed. He had once told her that she was the most forthright person he had ever met.

‘Most people seem to undergo a personality change when they’re with anyone rich or powerful,’ he had said. ‘But you don’t.’

What would he think of her if only he knew?

‘Fortunately,’ he agreed, slanting his eyes across to her.

‘And how is it going with the project?’ she asked, deciding to give herself a bit of time before she plunged into what she had to say. I love you, she told him silently in her head. I love you and I’m sorry.

‘You don’t really want to sit here and discuss work with me,’ he drawled, lying down beside her with his arm behind his head. With a swift movement, he reached out and pulled her down beside him, laughing under his breath at her gasp, then he draped his arm over her, so that she was lying with her head on his shoulder and his hand inches away from her breast.

She felt a momentary panic and had to force herself to relax.

‘I can think,’ he murmured into her ear, ‘of a thousand things I’d rather be doing with you than discussing work. Or at least—’ he laughed, a low, amused sound that invited her to join in ‘—one. Why don’t we go back to my apartment with a couple of bottles of champagne and some smoked salmon and let the day go by?’

‘No, really, Dominic,’ she muttered hurriedly, struggling to sit up.

She drew her knees up and clasped her arms around them, looking down at him. He had his eyes half closed, and his long, thick eyelashes flickered against his cheeks. There should have been something effeminate about him, but there wasn’t. In fact, his face was starkly masculine.

How much you’ve given me, she thought; have I been selfish and cowardly? Or perhaps I have only been human.

‘Yes,’ he said, opening his eyes to look at her. ‘Really too nice to be cooped up anywhere, even in an apartment. How about a drive?’ There was a lazy glitter in his eyes that made the blood rush round her veins like a tidal flood. ‘We could get in my car and just keep driving until we see somewhere we want to stop. I rather like the thought of the seaside.’

‘Seasides here aren’t like the ones you know,’ Katherine told him, propping her chin on her knees. She knew that this aimless conversation wasn’t going to get her anywhere, that she ought to say what she had to say, but now that the moment of truth had arrived she was driven by a desperate need to prolong things, to take in as much of him as she could, while she still could.

‘The sea will probably be grey, the sand will be gritty and there’ll be thousands of people.’

‘Thank God you don’t work for a travel company,’ he said, and she smiled reluctantly.

‘I’ve never been to Scotland—’ you gave my life meaning, she thought. You made it all worthwhile. Have I taken too much? ‘—but I think the beaches up there are different. Wild and isolated.’ She had never actually been anywhere. Her father had walked out on them when she was five, and from that day on her mother had counted pennies, constantly reminding her daughter that they barely had enough to buy a new pair of shoes, never mind traipse away on holidays.

‘Sounds tempting.’ He sat up and cupped her face in his hand. ‘Let’s go to Scotland.’

‘Don’t be foolish,’ she said, reddening. His cool fingers against her skin sent a jolt of alarm through her.

‘Wouldn’t they give you the time off work?’ he asked softly. ‘I’m sure I could persuade them. Or else I could just buy the company and give you the time off.’

‘No!’ She had made sure not to be specific about what she was doing in London. Emma, the friend whose flat she was sharing, had fabricated that little gem to Dominic, and Katherine had consequently found herself enmeshed in a lie which she had found increasingly difficult to untell.

So many half-truths, so much shade between the light, but when you were soaring for the first time in your life it was so hard to face the crash of coming back down.

‘It’s nice now,’ she said weakly. ‘You know what the weather’s like over here. By the time we made it anywhere, the sun would have changed its mind about shining and it’d be raining.’

‘I’ll take you to my place in the Caribbean,’ he murmured. ‘When it rains over there, people breathe a sigh of relief because it’s good to get away from the heat.’

‘Dominic Duvall, you have too much money.’ Let me see you smile like that one last time, she thought, a smile that’s just for me. You’re the only person who did things just for me. Could you blame me for feeling special when I’ve never felt special in my life before?

He was looking at her, his green eyes teasing. ‘Do I hear the tones of someone about to deliver a lecture?’ he asked, his voice a caress, and she looked away abruptly. ‘Tell me why I have too much money for my own good. No one’s ever told me that before.’ He trailed his finger along her arm and she shivered. ‘Least of all a woman.’

‘You don’t know what hardship is,’ Katherine said, ignoring her response to his feathery touch. ‘It’s like living in a bubble.’

‘That makes me sound irresponsible,’ he answered, smiling, ‘but don’t forget that my companies are responsible for the livelihoods of thousands of people.’

‘I suppose so,’ she said, and he sat up.

‘And, believe it or not, I do care about them.’

‘You don’t have to justify your lifestyle to me.’

‘Oh, but I do.’ He stared at her so intently that her head began to swim. ‘Not to anyone else—but you, yes.’

She laughed uneasily, looking away. ‘It’s too hot to be discussing this.’

‘It’s something that has to be discussed. Would you find the sort of life I lead unbearable?’

‘What are you saying to me?’

He didn’t answer. He fished into his jacket pocket and then held out a little box to her, and Katherine stared at it, dumbfounded and horrified.

‘Go on. Take it,’ he said roughly.

She still had her arms around her knees, and her fingers were digging into her skin. How could she take that box? She had known, of course, that their relationship was becoming deeper—it was one of the reasons that she had known that the time had come to break it off—but this she hadn’t foreseen. She knew what was in that box. An unexploded bomb was in that box.

She reached out for it and found that her hand was shaking. Perhaps it’s just a chain, she thought wildly, or a brooch, or something else harmless.

He was looking at her, and she knew that he must be misreading her nerves as excitement.

‘I’m thirty-four years old,’ he said in a husky voice, ‘and I’ve never come close to doing this. Except now.’

She still hadn’t opened the thing. She dropped her knees to sit cross-legged opposite him, and looked down at it in her hands. A warm breeze lifted her brown hair and blew it gently across her face. Forgive me, she thought, one day. She brushed her hair away from her face.

Before, it seemed like a thousand years ago, in another life, she had always worn her hair tied back, pulled away from her face and coiled into the nape of her neck. When she had flown to London, running as fast as her legs would take her, away from the little Midlands town where she had lived and taught, ever since her mother had died, in a little cottage that seemed to satisfy everything and nothing, away from the catastrophe that had shattered her placid existence, the first thing she had done was to unpin her hair. She had been looking for something, an adventure, and adventures did not happen to women who tied their hair at the back of their necks.

‘I’ve known a lot of women, Katherine,’ he said gravely, ‘and they’ve all been like ships that pass in the night.’

‘Surely not.’ She could hardly speak. Was there glass in her throat?

‘Women have always seen me as a good catch. Rich women, women looking for a man with the right-sized bank balance, who thought that if they agreed to everything I asked they could eventually get me to agree to putting that gold band around their finger. I enjoyed their company, but I was never tempted to settle down.’ He paused. ‘Open the box.’

She opened it. There was a ring there, nestled on a bed of black velvet. A gold band with two diamonds entwined on the top. She stared at it, feeling sick, hating herself for what she had to do and hating Fate for giving her this glimpse of happiness which she knew could never be hers.

‘You’re different from the rest of them, Katherine Lewis. You’re genuine.’

No! she wanted to shout at him. No, I’m not!

‘I can’t accept this, Dominic.’ I love you, she thought, and love has made me strong and made me weak at the same time. Will you ever understand that? No, of course you won’t. I can hardly understand it myself. It’s a new world and one with which I’m unfamiliar.

‘You think you need time? Is that it? I feel as though I’ve known you forever.’ He was frowning.

‘That’s not it.’ Her grey eyes were wide and miserable. ‘I just can’t, that’s all.’

‘I don’t accept that,’ he told her, not taking the box, in fact not paying the slightest bit of attention to it whatsoever. ‘You must have known that I was falling in love with you.’

In a perfect world, she thought. But she could hardly complete the thought, because it wasn’t a perfect world. In a perfect world there would be no tears and no regrets, no words to be uttered that were so hard that every syllable tore at your soul.

‘We aren’t meant for each other,’ she whispered.

‘You’re talking rubbish,’ he said tightly, and she could see that he was beginning to get angry, a dark, baffled anger that frightened her.

‘Your world is somewhere else,’ she said, struggling to tell him the truth without telling him all of it. She could tell him that she had been living a lie for the past six months, but then that would drag her down into a quagmire of questions, none of which she could answer. The truth, as it stood, was too awful for words. The truth, as it stood, had given her the wild courage to be someone she never had been, but now it forced her to be a monster.

‘Of course,’ he said, and his expression cleared, ‘my home is in France, but naturally we wouldn’t be living there all year. We could spend six months there and six months in London.’ He threw her a crooked, amused smile. ‘George would be only too grateful. He says that most of the time he feels as though he’s hibernating, looking after an apartment that’s only used a couple of times a year. This problem is not insurmountable.’

Katherine didn’t say anything. The box with the ring was burning her hands.

‘The country has nothing to do with this,’ she told him. ‘I just can’t accept it. I just can’t marry you, Dominic.’

She had never imagined that he would fall in love with her. He was, Emma had told her, a notorious heart-breaker. He would give her a good, uncomplicated time, and Katherine had been so sure that she had not had the where-withal to captivate a man like him that she had closed her eyes and let herself be led. Open me up, she had said, handing him the key, and he had, and it was only in the past few days that she had realised that in turning the key to her heart he had changed himself. Or perhaps she had just been blind all along. Blind and, underneath the glamorous wrapping, still the same insecure person she thought that she had left behind, too insecure to believe that the impossible had happened.

‘I see.’ Coldness was beginning to creep into his voice and she could see the shutter coming down over his eyes.

‘No, you don’t,’ she said pleadingly. She held out the box and he threw it a scathing look.

‘I think I understand perfectly, Katherine,’ he said with glacial politeness. ‘You’ve been having a good time but not quite good enough to warrant a commitment.’ He stood up and began walking away and she followed, half running to keep up with him.

‘Please stop, Dominic,’ she called, trying to keep her voice low and not draw too much attention to what was going on.

He stopped, looked at her and said in a hard voice, ‘Why? So that we can talk? I can’t stand people who waste time performing post-mortems on a relationship.’ Then he moved on, and she walked alongside him, still half running, because his long legs covered the distance so much more easily than hers.

‘I can’t keep this,’ she told him. ‘You must take your ring back. It must have cost you a fortune.’

‘It did,’ he said smoothly, stopping to look down at her. All the warm charm which she had seen in the past had vanished, replaced by a cold calm that terrified her.

She had always known that he was a hard man, that underneath the surface was a layer of steel. She had witnessed it a couple of times, in his dealings with people whom he disliked. He would talk to them, but there would always be something forbidding in his voice, a reminder that there were lines beyond which they were not allowed to step.

‘There’s only one law when it comes to business,’ he had once told her, smilingly serious. ‘It’s the law of the jungle. I play fair, but if someone tries to cross me, it’s only right that I should make it crystal-clear who’s boss.’

‘I have no need for it,’ he said to her now, with a smile on his face that sent a little shiver of apprehension down her spine. ‘Keep it. Let it be a souvenir for you, a scalp to go on your belt.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Katherine mumbled, fidgeting from one foot to the other, unwilling to let him go like this, but equally unwilling to face the truth that she had no choice.

‘I suppose,’ he said, with the same dangerous smile on his face, and choosing to ignore her plea, ‘that I should be grateful. At least you weren’t a gold-digger. You never accepted anything from me. At the time I found that enchanting. There are very few rich men who aren’t beguiled by a woman to whom money apparently means nothing.’

‘No, your money never meant a thing to me.’ There, at least, she could be honest.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked steadily at her. He had amazing eyes. A peculiar, deep shade of green. Eyes that glittered; eyes that could stare at her and through her, down into depths she had never known existed. Or so it had seemed.

‘Were you interested in something else?’ he asked softly. ‘Were you only interested in proving to yourself that you could conquer a man like me?’

‘No, of course not!’ she denied feverishly. ‘How could you think that?’

‘What I’m looking for here, Katherine, are a few answers. Won’t you be a good girl and oblige?’

Her heart was racing inside her. She could feel it. Hammering away like a steam-engine, making her breathless and unsteady. Very slowly she sat down on the nearest bench, partly because she knew that if she didn’t she would collapse, and partly because, if she sat down, she wouldn’t have to look at him. She could focus her attention somewhere else. There was a lake of sorts a few yards away and she concentrated on it.

On the opposite side of the water there was a mother with two young children. The children were having a ball, standing as close to the water as they could feasibly get, and their mother looked on anxiously, ready to leap forward the minute one of them fell in. Katherine watched the antics and didn’t turn when Dominic sat down next to her. She could feel him, though, every vibration emanating from that hard, masculine body.

‘I know you must think that I don’t care, but I do,’ she said, looking straight ahead of her. Care, she thought—what an inappropriate word to describe what I feel for you, every nuance of every emotion which fills me up and makes me whole.

‘How generous of you.’

‘But I still can’t marry you. I shall never be able to marry you. I should never have become involved with you in the first place.’

That was true as well. At the beginning she had been too thrilled to pay much attention to the consequences of her actions. In a dark world he had been a sudden, blinding ray of light, and she had been drawn to the source of the light like a moth to a flame. Everything so new, so wonderful, all happening to her, unextraordinary little her whose plainness had been drummed into her from the time she was old enough to understand.

‘You’ll never amount to anything,’ her mother had used to say to her. ‘You’re too plain, my girl. Like your father. I could have had anyone, but I chose him, and look at what he did to me.’

She had known from a very early age that her resemblance to her father was a crime for which she would never be forgiven, and her mother had reminded her of it so often that eventually Katherine had learnt how to switch off when the subject was raised.

Dominic had brought her alive. He had seen her, and she had blossomed under those clever, sexy, watchful green eyes.

‘Why not?’ he asked sharply. ‘Why shouldn’t you have become involved with me?’

‘I had no right. It was selfish.’

‘Stop talking in riddles. If you have something to say, then why don’t you come right out and say it?’

‘We’re not suited,’ she said helplessly.

‘That’s rubbish.’

‘We’re not alike.’

‘I don’t want a mirror image of myself. I’m not a narcissist.’

‘That’s not what I’m saying!’ She was beginning to lose the thread of her logic now. She should have just let it go, let him walk off, but something in her wanted to leave him with feelings that weren’t all bad. Was that selfish too?

‘I’m not a glamorous person,’ she attempted, meaning it. She wasn’t. She had had her stab at glamour; she had borrowed Emma’s clothes and worn them with her hair down and she had enjoyed it, but it wasn’t her. Her flamboyance was born of fear and desperation, a need to see it all before the opportunity slipped between her fingers. She was the person who squeezed her eyes tightly and then parachuted down to earth. The people below might think her brave and only she would know her private terror.

The woman he had fallen in love with had been a chimera, an illusion, someone she had created for reasons which she could not reveal.

‘You’re an extremely glamorous person, Katherine Lewis,’ he said, turning to face her, and she made sure that she kept her profile firmly averted.

‘You need someone else. What you think you’ve found in me, you haven’t.’ There she went again, she thought, making a muddle of it, trying to say so much but not too much.

‘Stop telling me what sort of woman I want,’ he said, his voice like a whip. ‘I don’t want to sit here and listen to flimsy excuses. You’ve told me that you won’t marry me and what I want to know is why. I don’t want a damned dissertation on compatibility.’

‘Life isn’t black and white!’ she snapped, getting angry. She stopped looking at the two children, whose mother had finally given in to anxiety and was dragging them away from the lake with vague promises about coming back another day.

‘When?’ the older of the two was asking in a high voice. ‘Another day, when?’

‘Another day, some time soon! Now, stop complaining. If you stop complaining, I’ll buy you both an ice-cream.’

They promptly shut up. How wonderful, Katherine thought, to be a child, to have problems sorted out with ice-cream cones.

‘It is,’ Dominic said harshly, ‘when it comes to something like this. I asked you to marry me, you said no, and I want to know why.’

‘Haven’t you ever been refused anything in your life before?’ Katherine threw at him.

‘Not very often and never by a woman.’

‘Well, aren’t you the lucky one?’ She could feel the wall between them getting higher and higher, and she wished that she had chosen the coward’s way out and left him a note. She might have done too, except that she had a suspicion that he would have ripped it into a thousand pieces and hunted her down until he found her. If only to drag answers out of her.

‘Tell me!’ he roared, and Katherine felt passing relief that the two children had vanished. They would have been instantly startled into falling into the lake otherwise.

‘What do you want me to tell you?’ she shouted back angrily.

Anger made it easier. It took over from pain; it took over from fantasising that the truth would make him feel anything other than hatred or pity.

‘I want to know if you’re walking out on me because of another man!’

‘If that’s what you want me to tell you, then I’ll say it!’ she flung back at him, and his face darkened with rage. He gripped her shoulders with his hands, and she could feel his fingers pushing down into her skin, hurting her.

‘Yes!’ he snarled. ‘Let me hear you say it!’

‘All right, then, fine! The reason I can’t marry you is because of another man. Satisfied?’

As soon as the words were out, she regretted saying them. She half opened her mouth to deny it all, but he didn’t give her the opportunity.

‘Eminently satisfied,’ he fired. ‘Did you do it to make him jealous? Did it work, Katherine?’

‘You made me say that,’ she told him, and all the old feelings of hopeless misery were creeping back again. Her anger had dissipated as quickly as dew in the hot sun. She very rarely lost her temper. Living with her mother all those years had built up a layer of silent self-control. Words spoken in the heat of the moment, she had discovered from an early age, were the most wounding and the most difficult to retract.

‘In a way, I’m glad I met you,’ he said, standing up, and there was a stillness about his movements that was as alarming as the black fury on his face had been earlier on. ‘I’ve learnt a valuable lesson from you. Deception isn’t always obvious.’

Katherine scrambled to her feet, and when she met his eyes she saw the scathing dislike there.

Now there was nothing left to say. She had done what she had to do, but, as things had turned out, she had achieved it in the worst possible way.

‘Here,’ she said, handing him the box. ‘Take it. Please.’

He reached out, and for a second his fingers brushed against hers. How painful to think that this, the last time he touched her, it would be with hatred and bitter disillusionment.

His fingers closed around the box and he flung it into the water. There was cold satisfaction on his lips when he looked at her.

‘Some things are better buried, don’t you think?’

Then he turned and walked away. She followed him with her eyes all the way until he disappeared from sight, then she sat back down and stared at the pond. All her dreams were lying there at the bottom. The ring that would never be hers, and, the love which she had been compelled to reject.

She only stirred when it began to get chilly and the park started emptying of people.

Then she made her way back to Emma’s flat, packed her suitcase, left a note and headed for the station. She would call her friend in the morning and explain what had happened, but omitting the details.

Better this way, she kept telling herself. In many ways, better for him. She kept thinking that all the way back to her home town.

Better for him to leave her with an anger he could understand. Nebulous reasons, however true they were for her, would have not been a clean break for him. How would he ever have understood that she wasn’t the woman he thought she was? Would he have accepted it as easily as the thought of another man?

Her house was waiting there for her, patient and faithful. Katherine stood on the path up to the front door and sighed.

I did what I did for myself to start with, she said silently in her head, shutting her eyes. But in the end I did what I did for you.

How could you have coped with the truth? How could you have coped with the fact that I’m dying? Would you have felt betrayed or would you have felt obliged to stay with me through pity? Wouldn’t either have been more destructive than the way I took?

She opened her eyes, raised her hand and, without thinking about it, coiled her hair into a ponytail, then went inside.

CHAPTER TWO

KATHERINE looked around her at the roomful of bright, young faces. Outside, the warm sunshine spilled over the green playing-fields, poured through the open windows and generally helped to propagate the illusion that maybe, this year, winter would hibernate to another country.

September was always lovely. New term, a few new faces, back to work after the long summer holidays. Every year the holidays loomed in front of her, waiting to be filled, threatening to depress if they weren’t, and she was always glad to get back. Back to the sanctuary of her teaching. Away from thoughts of events that had happened six long years ago. Six years! So long ago that she was vaguely ashamed that the memory of them could still plague her with such force, especially when time hung heavy on her hands and there were no demands of work to keep her mind in its harness.

There were two new girls. Victoria, who seemed to have settled in already in the space of a few hours, helped by the fact that she already knew some of the children in the class, and Claire, small, dark-haired, with far too grave an expression on her face for a child of barely five.

Katherine introduced them both to the rest of the class, all girls, and briefly contemplated the dark-haired addition. She would have to take this one under her wing. She could spot at a glance those little pupils who would need over and above the average attention. Usually they were the quiet ones who, left on their own, would easily retreat into their natural shyness.

This little one, she thought, was far too serious, anxious, even, and quite handicapped by the fact that her first language was French, so much of the good-natured chattering of the rest of the girls was literally incomprehensible to her.

The good thing was that the girl would, at least, be at the start of the learning curve, only slightly behind the other girls who were largely au fait with simple reading. She smiled, touched the neat little bun pinned at the back of her neck, and began class.

‘What do you know about her?’ Katherine asked a week later, when she was in the staff-room with Jane Ray, the head of the preparatory school.

Jane Ray was a small, capable woman with short dark hair and darting black eyes, largely hidden behind a pair of spectacles. Katherine found it very easy to talk to her. She and the other teachers appreciated the way they were generally left to their own devices, free to implement their teaching in whatever imaginative methods they found the best.

‘Not a great deal,’ Jane admitted. ‘She came to the open day at Easter, quite desperate for a place here because of a company move of some kind or another, but I couldn’t extract very much background information. She was being dragged from room to room by a young woman, her nanny in France, I gathered, who either didn’t speak any English or, from the looks of it, had decided to conceal the fact that she did. Lived in France all her life, somewhere near Paris, I gather. Never been to school before. Why?’

Katherine shrugged, frowning. ‘She looks as though she’s carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders.’

‘You shouldn’t worry overmuch about that,’ Jane laughed, but her dark eyes rested on Katherine thoughtfully. ‘Children adapt far more easily than adults expect. By next week Claire Laudette will be well on her way to settling in. Even the language barrier will cease to be a problem. Have you ever noticed how children communicate? It’s all hands and expression at that age!’ They laughed, and Jane continued seriously, ‘Your problem will be that you’ll leave this school in the afternoon and you’ll take your worries about Claire home with you, and you mustn’t do that.’

‘I shan’t!’ Katherine protested. ‘I don’t!’

‘I’ll speak honestly, Katherine. I worry about you sometimes.’

There was a little silence. Katherine dreaded it when people decided to speak honestly to her. She knew how her life must appear to outsiders. Calm, placid, a lovely job, but lacking in excitement.

‘Do you mean that I’m not doing my job properly?’ she asked, deliberately misreading the statement, and Jane shook her head.

‘Oh, no, we were delighted when you reapplied for your job here after your six months away. You’re an extremely good teacher. You stimulate the children, get them interested in the basics—no, I can’t fault that.’ She sighed. ‘You know what I mean, don’t you?’

‘I’m happy.’ Katherine looked down at her fingers. Yes, I am happy, she told herself. I have a roof over my head, a job I enjoy, friends—what else could I ask for? In her more optimistic moments, she even tried to convince herself that in time she would be able to put that disastrous episode behind her. It couldn’t haunt her for the rest of her life, could it?

She should, she knew, be grateful that she had been given this second chance at life. She could still remember the private anguish of thinking that she was living on borrowed time, just as clearly as she could remember her dizzy, weak euphoria when she had returned to her cottage all that time ago and found that letter on her doormat, sandwiched between the usual circulars and out-of-date bills. The letter that had informed her politely about the confusion with her notes, apologised courteously for an error of mistaken identity, informed her gaily that she was perfectly healthy. Too late for her, of course, but, yes, she had told herself, I am grateful and I am happy, and she had continued telling herself that as time passed.

‘Perhaps I’ll give little Claire a bit of private tuition. Just a few minutes after class. She isn’t collected until four.’

‘I’m sure that would be very helpful,’ Jane said with a resigned smile, ‘but you mustn’t forget that you have a life of your own to live.’

Have I? Katherine would have liked to ask. Living, she thought, truly living, was something that entailed joy and despair, hopes and dreams and all the ups and downs that gave life its pleasing tempo.

Her life, when she thought about it, was like the flat, undisturbed, glassy surface of a pond. She was content, but she knew that contentment was not what Jane was talking about.

‘I won’t,’ she said dutifully, and that was the end of that. She had become adept at skirting around the details of her private life. She went to the movies, had meals out with her small circle of friends, read a lot, busied herself with her work, but her feelings and emotions she kept to herself.

It was as if, she frequently thought, those heady six months had never really existed. She could hardly believe that she had ever stretched her wings like that and flown free, although she remembered the pain of the landing as bitterly and as clearly as if it had all happened yesterday, and not six long years ago.

She was now no longer a girl. That was something she faced without flinching. She was in her thirties, almost thirty-two, and destined, she knew, to be on her own forever more. That was something she didn’t like to think about too hard. Forever. What a lonely ring that had to it.

The following day she began spending time after school with Claire. In the past week she had discovered that the child’s reserve had nothing to do with her intelligence. Claire Laudette was extremely bright.

They sat side by side in the empty classroom, and it was only when an elderly lady came in that Katherine realised that the few minutes which she had allocated to helping with reading had stretched into a full hour.

I won’t make this a habit, she told herself that evening. I’ll do as much as I can during the school day and then, occasionally, I’ll stay after class until her English has improved.

But there was something curiously vulnerable about the girl, and it touched something equally vulnerable in Katherine.

Little by little, over a period of a few weeks, she also began learning snippets of information about Claire’s home life and, much as she disliked her curiosity, she found herself becoming more and more interested in Claire Laudette as a little person, as opposed to Claire Laudette as a pupil and nothing more.

‘I have no mother and Papa is never at home,’ she would say, apropos nothing in particular. ‘We do not have any pets. He does not allow animals.’ This didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest, but it bothered Katherine.

‘He does not like me to trouble him,’ she would say casually, or, ‘Papa does not have much time for me,’ and the picture that began building in Katherine’s head was so alarming that she began to think about arranging to see him one evening.

She knew all about the damage an uncaring parent could do to a child. Hadn’t she suffered the slings of that when she was young?

‘What about the lady who comes to collect you from school?’ Katherine asked gently. ‘She looks very nice. Is she your aunt, perhaps?’

‘Papa pays her.’ Claire was busy colouring a picture she had drawn, a crooked house with lop-sided windows and disproportionately large flowers huddled on one side. ‘He says that money can buy anything.’

Katherine sent the note home with the child that evening. It was short and to the point. She wanted to see Claire’s father and, rather than leave it to him to arrange a time, she suggested one. That way, he would have to make an effort to cancel the time she suggested or else he would come along. She hadn’t yet worked out what she intended to say to this man, but she would let her intuition guide her. She could usually tell a great deal about the parents from the children, anyway.

The aggressive ones, who were prone to bullying if allowed to get away with it, tended to have socially aggressive parents, mothers who spent a fortune on their clothes and managed to persuade their little angels, without actually saying so in so many words, that they were superior to everyone else.

From what she had seen of Clair Laudette, and from what she had gleaned, she had already formed a very clear impression of her father. A strident man, too selfish to care about his offspring, driven by a need to stack up piles of money, who probably drank. She could imagine him storming through the house, his face ill-tempered, while his daughter cowered away somewhere in a bedroom. A child who seldom laughed, she thought, thinking back to her own silent childhood, rarely had anything to laugh about.

She had arranged to see him that evening at six at the school, and she had persuaded Jane to let her use her office for the meeting.

‘I shall be seeing your daddy this evening,’ she told Claire as the child was getting ready to leave, and the worried look, which had been absent for a while, settled on her face.

‘Why?’ she asked anxiously, chewing on her bottom lip and frowning. ‘You won’t say anything bad about me, will you?’ she asked with a tremor in her voice, and Katherine said huskily,

‘Of course not!’ She gave a bright smile. ‘A bright little thing like you? No, I just want to tell him how wonderfully you’re getting along. I’m sure he wants to know.’

In fact, she had dressed specially for the purpose of telling him just how well his daughter was doing, and dropping a few hints about the importance of parental support in a child’s life.

Warm though it was, she had worn her navy blue suit with a crisp white shirt underneath, and she would make sure that her long hair was pinned very tightly back from her face, no loose strands anywhere.

In six years she had let her hair grow, and it now reached almost to her waist. Soon she would have to have it cut. Long hair at her age was a bit inappropriate, but she didn’t look like a woman in her early thirties. She knew that. She might be plain, but her face was unlined and her grey eyes were clear. Her friends had stopped telling her that the lines would develop quickly enough, just as soon as she had a couple of children. Marriage and children were subjects which they tactfully avoided now that it looked as though neither was on the horizon.

At five to six she began wondering whether she should meander out to the entrance to wait for him. At five past six she decided not to, and at ten past, when she was beginning to wonder whether he would make an appearance at all, she looked up and saw him standing in front of her, his body outlined in the doorway of the office.

And he was precisely as she remembered him. He was even holding his jacket over his shoulder, exactly as he had done all those years ago as he had walked across to her in Regent’s Park.

She opened her mouth in shock and half rose out of the chair, feeling as though at any minute she would faint. The room felt close, as though there wasn’t enough air in it, making her dizzy, disorientated. She had to place her palms on the desk to support herself.

‘You!’ It was the only form of greeting she was capable of. If he was as shocked as she was, then he recovered quickly, moving towards her with the same graceful, economic stride she remembered.

‘Katherine Lewis,’ he said without smiling. His eyes were hard and shuttered.

‘I had no idea that you were Claire’s father,’ she said, finding her voice at last, and not managing to say what she wanted.

‘Nor,’ he said coolly, ‘did I think for a minute that the Miss Lewis whom my daughter talks about incessantly was none other than you.’ He paused, and his eyes raked her up and down with dislike. ‘What an unpleasant surprise for both of us.’

The memories of him were rushing over her, but that dislike in his eyes restored some of her balance, and she sat down again, indicating to him the chair facing her across the desk.

She could feel her heart beating wildly in her chest, like a trapped, fluttering bird wanting escape.

She had collected some of Claire’s work. It lay in front of her in a neat little pile and she rested her hand on it, hoping that it would remind her what the purpose of this meeting was, but she could feel Dominic’s hard eyes straying over her, and she didn’t have to try too hard to imagine what he was thinking.

Was this the same girl he had known all those years ago? This ageing woman with the neatly pinned hair and the severe suit? She felt momentarily unbalanced by the inspection and had to remind herself that this was one of the reasons why she had walked out on him in the first place. Because this was her, the last sort of person he would find attractive. More the sort of woman he would probably pity.

‘Unpleasant or not, the fact stands that I am Claire’s teacher—’ she cleared her throat ‘—and I called you in to see me so that we could discuss what your daughter has been doing.’

She had never really imagined that he would marry. In her mind, he had remained the startlingly attractive bachelor whom she had known, but, really, it would have been unusual if he hadn’t married.

Had he loved his wife? she wondered. What had happened to her? Were they divorced?

‘I have some of Claire’s work here,’ she said, staring down at the little bundle of papers with their childish drawings and round, uneven writing.

‘You’ve changed.’

‘Everyone changes,’ Katherine said sharply, but his words flustered her badly. ‘It’s the effect of time.’

‘So you’re now a teacher, of all things.’

‘That’s right. Now, shall we discuss your daughter or would you like to spend a bit more time denigrating me? I’m a busy woman, Mr Duvall.’

‘Are you? Busy doing what? No wedding-ring on your finger, so I take it that you’re not married?’

She was feeling more and more addled, like a mouse being toyed with by a cat, confusedly running round and round, looking for somewhere to hide.

‘I’ve got some things that your daughter has done.’ She handed the stack of work to him and he took it, flicking through the papers, holding them in different directions so that he could interpret the drawings. Katherine watched his lowered head and thought that, if she had changed, he certainly hadn’t. It hardly seemed fair that six years could have had so little physical impact on him. His dark looks were just as disturbing as they had been, his body still as lithe and hard. Her eyes strayed to his fingers—long, clever fingers. She briefly closed her eyes and tried not to think back to the feel of those fingers on her body.

He had taken her body once, and he had kept it. She had known no other lover but him, although there were men in her life now. Friends. Harmless, good-natured men, who were husbands of her friends, and David, another schoolteacher, though not at her school. David was harmless and good-natured too and, given half a chance, he would have progressed their friendship on to a far more intimate level. But ever since Dominic… It wasn’t fair, she thought with a burst of angry rebellion. His life had moved on—he had married, produced a beautiful child. Emotionally, and this was the first time she had acknowledged this to herself, her life had stagnated, like a clock that had stopped ticking.

He was looking at her, his eyes guarded, watchful, and she forced herself to resume her efficient, businesslike air.

‘What am I supposed to say about these?’ he asked, depositing the stack of papers on the desk and reclining in the chair.

‘Most parents express delight at their children’s efforts,’ Katherine informed him, keeping her voice even. ‘Workwise, Claire has settled very nicely into class. Was she at school before you came here?’

‘No.’ His voice did not encourage interested debate on the subject.

‘I see. She seems to have a very good grasp of English, in that case. Her knowledge of the alphabet is excellent, and she is quite a fluent reader, considering.’

‘Considering what?’

‘Considering,’ she said, with two angry patches of colour on her cheeks, ‘that this is her first brush with school.’

‘Her mother was bilingual.’ His voice was flat and expressionless and gave no insight into what he thought of this bilingual woman.

‘I see.’ She paused, alarmed by his hostility, and nervously touched the tightly coiled bun at the back of her neck. ‘I do feel, however,’ she continued, ‘that children, especially at Claire’s age, need a great deal of parental input. I gather that your wife is not here at the moment?’

‘And from whom have you gleaned that piece of information?’ he asked coldly. ‘I hope you haven’t been quizzing my daughter on her private life, because I can’t say that I see what Claire’s home life has to do with her work, and you tell me that her work is entirely satisfactory.’

‘This is a school, Mr Duvall,’ Katherine informed him with equal coolness. ‘We do not make it a habit to interrogate our pupils. However, what happens in a child’s home has a great deal of bearing on what happens in school. Claire is very reserved, very anxious.’

‘And you’re somehow blaming me for that?’ He shot her a look of scathing dislike.

‘I’m not blaming you for anything,’ she responded acidly. She had never before dealt with a difficult parent. In general, parents who paid for their children’s education took an inordinate delight in their progress. At parent-teacher evenings, they would hang on to her every word.

Dominic Duvall could not have been more unhelpful if he’d tried, and she knew that personal dislike of her would be playing a part in that, though to what extent she had no idea.

‘Let’s get one thing very clear from now,’ he said, leaning forward slightly, and his presence was so overwhelming that she felt herself press back into her chair. ‘Neither you nor anyone else has any business prying into my personal life. Your job here is to educate my daughter, and that’s where your duty ends.’

‘And the fact that we once knew each other has no bearing on what you’re saying now?’ Katherine asked, stirred into making the remark through sheer anger at his attitude. ‘Please don’t let your dislike for me colour your reactions to what I’ve been telling you.’

‘Spare me your schoolmistress speech,’ he snarled, his mouth tight. ‘What happened between us is in the past. If I hadn’t decided to send my daughter to this school, we would never have crossed paths again. The fact that we have, my dear Miss Lewis, is unfortunate, but it’s something we both have to live with. In the meantime, please do not interest yourself in my daughter’s home life.’ He stood up. The meeting, as far as he was concerned, was at an end, and Katherine hastily followed suit, crossly knowing that control had been taken out of her hands.

They went out into the assembly-room, where a group of older children were doing ballet. The piano teacher was banging impatiently on the keys while a handful of girls frowningly concentrated on trying to get their feet into some kind of synchronisation.

Dominic stopped and looked around him with interest, then his eyes flicked across to her.

‘What made you decide to give up your job in advertising?’ he asked, sticking his hands in his pockets and moving on, expecting her to hurry behind him but, she gathered from his attitude, not much caring whether she did or didn’t.

She had to think a bit about what he had said, then she remembered that a job in advertising had all been part of the myth which she had created for herself during those short, heady months of another life.

‘I enjoy teaching,’ she answered awkwardly. ‘And what have you been doing for the past six years?’

They went out into the hall, where some more girls were sitting on the ground, cross-legged, waiting to be collected. Behind them, the wall was one large notice-board—listing school events, displaying paintings done by some of the pupils.

Judith Evans, one of the teachers, was sitting by the doors, trying to keep one eye on the girls while correcting homework. She looked at Katherine, then slid her eyes across to Dominic with great interest.

‘Working,’ he said smoothly, opening the door and stepping outside.

Katherine hesitated, then she stepped out behind him, letting the door shut behind her.

‘Claire mentions that she doesn’t see a great deal of you,’ she began, and he turned on her, his green eyes filled with distaste.

‘I thought that we’d been through all this,’ he said in a hard voice, and Katherine stuck her chin out defensively.

‘You’ve been through all this, Mr Duvall. However, just because you’ve decided on what’s important in Claire’s life and what isn’t, it doesn’t mean that I have agreed.’

He looked her up and down unhurriedly, then said, ‘And you are the final word on what’s best for a child, are you? Tell me, have you any children of your own?’

‘No,’ she admitted in a low voice, lowering her eyes. ‘But I really don’t see what that has to do with it. I have a great deal of experience with children in general.’

‘No children,’ he mused, with enough thick irony in his voice to make her flush with anger. ‘No husband. What happened to the misguided lover?’

She didn’t have to think too hard about that one. She remembered the fictitious lover whom she had hurled at Dominic when he had demanded a reason from her, a reason for leaving.

‘That’s none of your business,’ she muttered, looking away and staring at the playing-fields, where more girls were playing hockey in the distance.

It had never struck her before, but now she thought, how strange, to surround myself with children, children who represent everything that I no longer have—hopes, dreams, a life ahead to be filled with everything I shall never be able to attain.

Would Dominic Duvall ever know just how successfully he had wrecked her life? She would never forgive him for that, even though she knew that the fault for it all lay in her own hands, because she should never have become involved with him in the first place. Not in the way that she had, not fuelled by motives which had seemed so right at the time, but in the end had proved so misguided.

‘Did the grand reconciliation never take place?’ he asked, sarcastic and amused, which made her even angrier. ‘Poor little Katherine Lewis. Or maybe you’re one of those ever-hopeful women, still walking along the garden path, optimistically thinking that she’ll get her man in the end, if only she can hold out for long enough.’ He laughed under his breath, a cruel, jeering sound. ‘Is he still holding out the promises he made to get you back?’ he asked, looking down at her with a smile that was as hard as ice.

‘This is irrelevant,’ Katherine said, trying to sound brisk and instead only managing to sound defensive.

‘Oh, but I’m merely trying to piece you together. Natural human curiosity. You asked me about what I’d been doing over the past six years. Well, I’m merely speculating on what you’ve been doing.’

‘I must get back to the school,’ she said, turning away, but before she could walk off she felt his fingers snap around her arm.

‘What for?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows. ‘To tidy desks?’

‘You may think that what I do is boring,’ she snapped, ‘but teaching is as essential as what you do. A person’s usefulness in life isn’t judged by the amount of money they earn. And kindly remove your hand from me.’

He removed his hand and she drew back, aware with horror that she was shaking like a leaf.

‘Dear me,’ he said, coolly amused, ‘I do hope my questions haven’t upset you.’

‘You hope nothing of the sort, Mr Duvall. And, no, your questions haven’t upset me. They’ve annoyed me.’

She fervently wished that that were the case, but she knew that she was deeply unbalanced by this sudden appearance in her life of the one man whose image she had spent years trying to erase.

‘Do you normally tremble when you’re annoyed?’ he asked, politely curious.

‘No,’ she answered icily, ‘I don’t. Perhaps it’s just that you were the last person in the world I expected or wanted to confront. No one likes to be reminded of past mistakes, do they?’

His lips thinned and she had to steel herself not to take a step backwards. Had she forgotten how threatening he could be? His green eyes could assume the wintry, terrifying depths of the ocean, and that leashed power which always hovered so close to the surface reminded her that he was not a man to be crossed.

‘Least of all when they’ve learnt nothing from them,’ he countered with dangerous calm. ‘Did your lover hold out promises to you on condition that you buried yourself here, teaching? Tell me, what makes a woman give up a life of excitement in exchange for the sedate, the unthreatening?’

Of course, she had always suspected that her real life would arouse only his contempt, but hearing him say so made her stiffen.

‘Is he worth it? You must introduce me to him.’

‘I happen to like it here,’ she said evenly. ‘And since you feel so free to ask me questions about my private life, you won’t mind if I ask you a few about your own? How long did you wait after we broke up before you married?’

‘Would you like to hear that I gave our dead relationship a suitable period of mourning?’ He laughed aloud at that. ‘I met Franise six weeks after I left London and I married her two months later. Disappointed?’

‘What happened to her?’

There was a thick silence, which only lasted seconds but was long enough for her to wonder whether anger had pushed her into asking something which really was none of her business. She wished that she had not asked; she wished that she had simply walked off. The last thing she wanted to do was reveal to him the depth of her interest in his life, reawakened after so long a slumber.

‘Franise was involved in a fatal accident nine months ago,’ he said abruptly.

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘How kind of you,’ he grated.

‘I meant it! It must have been very hard on Claire, and on you as well.’ Was this why he appeared so bitter at the mention of his ex-wife’s name? The deepest pain, she knew, was the pain caused when love was prematurely extinguished. She tried not to contemplate the hurtful fact that that ring, still lying at the bottom of that pond in Regent’s Park for all she knew, had been the mistake which he had rectified.

‘I don’t think that strolling down memory lane is serving any purpose, do you?’ he asked, and the mask of cool self-control had settled back on his face. ‘You say that Claire is doing well, but is she keeping up with the other children?’

Relieved that they were once again back on home ground, she visibly relaxed and began to discuss Claire’s progress.

She was accustomed to talking about children and their performance at school. It was a subject with which she felt comfortable. She only realised that they were strolling back to the car park when she found herself standing next to a black BMW. By which time she had regained all of her lost self-control, and could actually lift her eyes to Dominic’s face without that numbing loss of composure which she had experienced earlier on. She even managed to smile, which was something she considered quite a feat, given the circumstances.

‘I tend to get a little carried away when it comes to discussing the children,’ she heard herself say in a very normal voice, the sort of voice she would have used for any parent, half apologetic, half amused, wholly sincere.

‘So I see.’ There was speculation in his eyes and she wondered uneasily what he was thinking. ‘Your career obviously suits you.’

‘I like children,’ Katherine said, in a voice which did not invite comment. ‘Why did you decide to move to the Midlands?’ she asked, changing the subject.

He pulled open the car door and paused.

‘Because, next to London, Birmingham has the most potential for my company,’ he said, and she could tell from his manner that he was still speculating about her, trying to match up the two halves of the personality which he had seen.

‘All part of the master plan to conquer the world?’ she asked lightly, and for the first time, when he laughed, there was none of that metallic edge to his laughter.

‘I have to fill my time somehow,’ he said, his eyes still intent on her face, and for reasons which she could not explain to herself she felt in real danger now. She didn’t want to be reminded of that lethal charm beneath the aggression. That was even more disturbing than the bitter dislike.

She folded her arms and said nervously, ‘Well, I must get back now. If there’s anything you wish to discuss about Claire’s work, then do feel free to contact me.’ She backed away slightly from the car. ‘After half-term, Mrs Gall, who’s been off with appendicitis, will be returning, and there’ll be a ballet option. You should have received a letter from the school about that.’ He was still staring at her, and she felt herself getting hot and confused all over again.

‘It’s possible,’ he said, with a shrug of his broad shoulders. ‘I’m afraid I don’t manage to keep track of all those letters.’

‘I think she would enjoy it,’ Katherine said lamely. ‘It might do her good to see some of the other children out of the classroom.’

‘Fine.’

‘Well.’ She threw him an efficient smile. ‘I do hope everything goes well with your business. This may not be London, but I’m sure you’ll find the countryside just as pleasant.’ She couldn’t have been more bland if she had tried, even though she was quite sure that there was nothing he would find less appealing than rolling fields. He was not a man who would relish the peace that country life carried with it. He was too restless, too much a city animal. She wondered how long he would stay. Maybe just long enough for the subsidiary to be established, then he would return to the fast pace, the glamour, the constant demands of London or Paris or New York. Poor Claire. Would she become one of those children who were constantly transported around the world, who never tasted the roots of permanence? Or perhaps a lonely little child, sent to boarding-school because her father’s career left no time to play at being a parent?

As she walked back to the school she heard the deep roar of the BMW as he started the engine, and she fought the temptation to look round.

He was back, she thought, but this was no grand reunion. There was too much bitterness, too many unspoken secrets flowing under this bridge.

She stopped to look at the girls playing hockey, remembering most of them from when they had been little four-year-olds, their minds waiting to be shaped, to be taught. This was her life and it had no room to house the past.

She stared at the running figures and wished, with a kind of quiet desperation, that the past had not caught up with her.

CHAPTER THREE

DAVID was saying something about departmental changes because of cut-backs, and at the same time worriedly attacking a piece of fish on his plate, as though it had something to do with what was happening at his school.

Katherine was only half listening to him. She couldn’t really hear what he was saying anyway. The music was a little too insistent and her thoughts were wrapped up somewhere else.

For the past two weeks, ever since seeing Dominic, she had had the unfamiliar feeling of living on a knife’s edge. She kept expecting him to surface at any moment to pick his daughter up, or else to discuss something with her, and every second that she was on the school premises had been spent in an agony of dreaded expectation.

Of course, he hadn’t shown up, and it was only in the last few days that she could feel herself relaxing, although the relief which she should have felt at his non-appearance was not as immense as it should have been, and that in itself frightened her.

She looked down at her half-finished plate of pasta and tried to tune in to what David was telling her. Greg Thompson was going to be in line for assistant headmaster. She didn’t know Greg Thompson, though, so she mumbled something unhelpful, some soothing, nondescript remark which could have been used for any number of conversations.

Poor David, she thought. He was the maths teacher at one of the local comprehensives and he lacked that ambitious edge which would have helped him overcome his deep suspicion that he was somehow unable to control his unruly classes. It constantly nagged away at him.

She looked at his kind, unassuming face, with its carefully cut brown hair and anxious brown eyes, and for the first time in years felt a certain amount of irritation. If the departmental changes bothered him so much, why on earth didn’t he say something about it? But she knew better than to raise the issue with him. He was forever telling her that she had a cushy job, that teaching in a private school was leagues away from teaching in a state school.

‘No get up and go,’ her mother would have said. ‘A born victim, that boy.’ Her mother had been good at classifying people into categories. She used to tell her that she was one of life’s victims, that she was destined to walk on the sidelines, until the day that she rebelled and did something disastrous.

‘Cut in the same mould as your father,’ she would say, with the overlying edge of certainty which did not invite argument. ‘And look at what he did. I did everything for that man. I could have done better, but no, I stuck it out, married to a man who was never going to rise in life, and instead of being grateful, look at what he did—upped and left with a woman almost young enough to be his daughter.’

Was she a victim? She had fallen in love with a man who was too sophisticated for her, had put herself in a situation from which retreat had been painful and inevitable, and in so doing had condemned herself to a lifetime of wondering. What if things had been different? What if she had gone to London and had not been propelled for reasons that had been so complicated? What if she had stayed there? What if she had told him the truth? But no, that had never been an option. She had built their relationship on a personality which she had created, a convincing three-dimensional doll. No, the truth had never been an option, but what if…? What if…? She was here again, wrapped in the security of what she knew, but recently she could feel a disturbing restlessness in herself.

‘You’re not listening to a word I’m saying.’ David pushed his plate aside and looked at her with a certain amount of pique. ‘I’m boring you.’

‘No! I’m very interested in what’s going on at your school.’ She looked at him with affection and applied her mind to the conversation at hand. ‘Perhaps you should leave.’

‘Leave and do what?’ He sighed. ‘Teaching is all that I’m cut out to do. That’s like telling a fish to leave the water and try and make a life in a tree.’

Katherine grinned at him. ‘You can be so descriptive,’ she said. ‘You’re absolutely wasted teaching maths. You should give it all up and write a book.’

‘You’re mad,’ he said, laughing, ‘but maybe you’re right. There’s quite a lot to be said for getting out of school politics.’ He sighed, and she noticed all the tell-tale signs of a man showing his age, even though he was only twenty-nine, younger than she was, in fact. There were small wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, and a sprinkling of grey hair in between the fine brown.

In an attempt to steer him away from more maudlin self-analysis, she began chatting about books, and was relieved when he took the cue.

She didn’t feel that she could cope with David’s problems, or anyone else’s for that matter. She had enough of her own, and for once she decided that she would be selfish and not allow herself to become a never-ending sounding-board for other people. She had spent a lifetime listening to her mother and she had acquired a talent for listening, but the talent, she was discovering over the past few weeks, was not quite as accessible as it used to be. She couldn’t bring herself to discuss her own problems with anyone else, she was too private a person for that, but neither could she bring herself to be the helpful ear that she once was.

It had only struck her recently that friends and colleagues took her availability for granted, and they always had.

They always knew where to find her; they always knew that she would be around if they were at loose ends or else had something to discuss.

Should she be flattered at that? she wondered. Or was it a reflection of some essential lack in her own life?

She frowned, leaving David to hold forth on the pleasant daydream of giving up the orthodox life for something more adventurous, and only snapped back to reality when her eyes, aimlessly drifting around the room, flitted over a tall, dark man standing by the bar with a drink in his hand.

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