‘Maybe I’ll see you there,’ James added.
‘I rather doubt it.’ Her tone was friendly, touched with amusement, but with a hint of underlying granite; she kept from her voice any lingering echo of old sentiment. She had known James before she met Matthew, she had encountered him in the same way, through her fundraising activities. If James had not been a married man with two young sons, a man still moving up the ladder, careful not to blot his copybook in any way, Nina would in all probability at this moment have been Mrs James Milroy instead of Mrs Matthew Dalton.
Nina glanced round at the sound of the door opening. A woman came into the room, a voluntary worker with a problem to be solved. Nina brought the conversation with James to a rapid conclusion.
Shortly after the woman left, Nina had another caller: a publican with a handsome cheque from various fundraising activities organized among his customers. Nina thanked him warmly and wrote him out an official receipt. His eyes rested on the elegant gold pen she used, an engraved inscription discernible along the barrel; he made an admiring comment. Nina smiled and held out the pen for him to read the inscription. The pen had been presented to her a few years ago after she had worked night and day to raise money for a local day centre, threatened with closure, for handicapped and disabled youngsters. The pen hadn’t been bought out of the money raised for the centre but by a private whip-round the youngsters’ parents had made among themselves, in appreciation of Nina’s prodigious – and wholly successful – efforts.
After the publican had departed, Nina rang Matthew, as she always did, to ask what his plans were for the evening, what he wanted her to do about a meal. He told her he’d be staying on at his office again, he’d be home around eight.
‘That’ll be fine,’ she assured him. She didn’t stay chatting, she knew how busy he was these days. She could now work on at her desk a little longer, there were still matters to attend to. She made a number of phone calls, checking and finalizing arrangements for a sponsored half marathon to be run shortly by older pupils from local schools. Then she sat considering the merits of making another round of all the business premises in town, deciding at length in favour of it. It could be carried out this time by a team of pretty girls; that would surely bring in a worthwhile sum. She could get Verity Thorburn to round up a decorative bunch from among her fellow students.
Verity was a connection of Nina’s by marriage, a great niece of Nina’s father-in-law, Bernard Dalton. Over the years, Bernard had gathered more than one stray chick under his wing. As an orphan and a relative, Verity had had a double claim to his protection. She was at present taking a course at the Brentworth College of Further Education. She was always ready to assist Nina, always willing to do what she could for the hospice appeal.
Nina looked at her watch. Too early to ring Verity now, she would still be at the college; she had a late class on Fridays. She would ring her at her flat later this evening.
The college was a large building, put up after the Second World War. Verity was taking a two-year course, begun shortly after her seventeenth birthday, eighteen months ago. She had chosen a somewhat unusual combination of subjects: secretarial skills, cordon bleu cookery and art. She enjoyed them all and was doing well.
At a few minutes after seven she came out of the college, bound for the little basement flat where she lived alone. She had moved there six months ago from the larger flat she had shared with two other girls, both students at the college.
She was slightly built, not very tall, with an elfin face, big brown eyes, a vulnerable look. Her long dark hair hung straight and heavy. Her temperament was highly mercurial; she harboured deep feelings of insecurity, due in no small measure to the abrupt and brutal fashion in which she had been orphaned at the age of nine.
Her parents and maternal grandparents had all been medical missionaries in Africa; the grandmother was a sister of Bernard Dalton. When the grandparents were retiring, they decided to spend a month at the mission station run by Verity’s parents before returning to England for good.
In the middle of their visit, Verity attended a birthday party given for the daughter of friends living some distance away; she was to stay overnight. In the early hours of the morning the mission station was attacked by a roving band of marauders who had slipped over the border from a neighbouring territory under cover of darkness. The buildings were looted and burned, every man, woman and child – black or white – savagely butchered.
A week later, Verity was sent home to England, into the care of her great uncle, Bernard Dalton, and his second wife, Grace.
Now, on this fine February evening, as she set off for her flat, she caught sight of someone standing by the entrance gates, looking across at her. Her heart gave a wild leap of joy. It was Ned Hooper; it was more than a week since she’d set eyes on him.
Then her heart sank. He didn’t come forward to meet her but remained unsmiling by the gates, waiting for her to reach him. It didn’t augur well.
Ned was eighteen years older than Verity. Tall and strongly built, good-looking in a very English way, with fair hair and blue eyes, an open expression. He had studied art at the college and now did occasional supply teaching in the art department, to eke out the exceedingly slender living he contrived to make as an artist.
‘Are you coming along to the flat?’ Verity wanted to know, the moment she had greeted him. Her manner was intense and eager. Her main reason for moving to a flat of her own was so that the pair of them could be together without the knowledge of her flatmates – or her relatives and guardians.
Ned shook his head with resolution. He knew once they were indoors she’d try every trick in the book to get round him. Or else she’d set about creating the kind of scene he couldn’t stomach. He gestured in the direction of a small public garden near by. ‘We can talk over there.’
They walked side by side, in silence, not touching, till they reached the garden. At this time of evening there were few strollers along the gravel paths. They found a seat beside the beds of winter heather; in silence they sat down, a little apart. She sat stiffly upright, gazing straight ahead, waiting for him to begin.
‘We’ve had some good times,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t forget them. But they’re over now, it’s definitely finished.’ Her head came sharply round, she darted a beseeching look at him from her great dark eyes. It was those eyes he had first noticed, fixed on him in class, with that intense, searching gaze, the gaze he had once found so intriguing.
‘It doesn’t have to be finished,’ she declared vehemently.
He didn’t waver. ‘I’m afraid it does. It really is over. You’ll meet someone else, someone your own age. You’ll forget about me in no time at all.’
She clenched her fists. ‘I don’t want anyone else. I want you.’
‘I’m afraid you can’t have me,’ he threw back at her with asperity. ‘I’m bowing out for good.’ With an effort he softened his tone again. ‘You must accept it’s over. It does no good trying to argue about it.’
‘It’s Mrs Bradshaw,’ she said with sudden ferocity. ‘You’re moving in with her, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I am moving in with her,’ he replied brusquely. ‘I’m a free agent.’
Her voice rose. ‘You don’t love her! You can’t! She’s old and fat.’
‘She’s neither old nor fat,’ he retorted. Mrs Freda Bradshaw was in fact forty-two years old. She might carry a little more flesh than was currently fashionable, but it was certainly no hardship to look at her. She had been a good-looking girl and was still an attractive woman. She was the widow of a man more than thirty years her senior, the owner of a chain of cut-price clothing stores up north. She had started out at sixteen as a sales assistant in one of his stores and had early taken his eye. When his wife died, Freda lost no time in stepping into her shoes.
She had played fair throughout the years that followed. She had been genuinely fond of her husband,