‘Chilford,’ he said aloud into that treacherous vision from the past, astounded yet again by the way the glorious romance he had grasped at had turned into this sterile union stapled now chiefly by custom and notions of respectability.
‘Funny you should mention Chilford,’ Marion said amicably. ‘I was only thinking the other day I wouldn’t mind running down there again.’
She was just a small-souled, small-minded, small-town girl, he said dismissingly in his mind. But she had been so lovely, so breathtakingly beautiful. He closed his eyes. How much our lives are ruled by chance, he thought with recurrent wonder. But was that after all the case? Didn’t every action spring from character seizing and moulding chance to its own purposes?
‘I don’t suppose Pauline will be all that keen to see us,’ Marion said ruminatively. ‘I dare say she’s very well in with Aunt Elinor by this time. I wouldn’t be surprised if Aunt Elinor didn’t leave her most of her money. Not that she has much to leave.’ I bet you’d have trotted down to Chilford fast enough and often enough if the old girl had a fortune to leave, Stephen thought sourly. But a moment later honesty compelled him to admit, No, that isn’t altogether true, she isn’t passionately interested in money. What she likes is for one day to follow another in cosy, reassuring succession, with just enough excitement to dimple the surface of living. Money was useful to pad the sharp corners of existence, she wasn’t really concerned with it for its own sake.
‘Elinor might take it into her head to leave the lot to Theresa,’ he said with idle malice.
‘Oh, Theresa.’ Marion’s lower lip pouted, a habit left over from her radiant girlhood when there had always been a dozen admirers to find the expression delightful but now somewhat less than entrancing. ‘I wouldn’t trust Theresa any farther than I could see her.’
Stephen glanced at the clock and saw with relief that it was ten minutes to seven. If he drove very slowly he could leave now. He got to his feet.
‘What about it?’ Marion said. ‘We could use some of your two weeks now, we could have a few days in Chilford. Then we could go to Italy or Spain in October.’
‘Please yourself,’ Stephen said shortly, conscious now only of Fiona a few minutes’ drive away.
‘It would be all right then as far as your work is concerned?’ Marion persisted.
Stephen raised his shoulders. Not the busiest of times at Alpha, the middle of the summer. ‘If you like to fix it,’ he said with one hand on the door, ‘I dare say it will be all right.’ If he was going to be compelled to spend a few days with Marion he didn’t much care where it was, and at least Chilford would require less effort from him than a trip to the Continent. He opened the door and paused suddenly as a fresh vista of thought opened up. ‘Actually,’ he said on a warmer note, ‘Chilford isn’t at all a bad idea.’ He turned and looked at his wife, his eyes had a bright, friendly look. ‘Yes, you arrange it. Make it a week if you like.’ He paused again. ‘Or even ten days.’
Marion was still wrinkling her brows over the pages of her diary when the phone rang a few minutes later.
‘Why, Pauline!’ she cried as soon as she recognized her sister’s voice. ‘If this isn’t a coincidence! Stephen and I were just talking about you—’
Stephen parked his car in the shade of a clump of trees that screened it from the road, and walked swiftly towards Fiona’s cottage. It really was the sheerest piece of luck that she was currently renting this conveniently isolated little place on the outskirts of Barbridge. If she’d still been in the modern flat she occupied during her first six months at Alpha Fabrics, it was highly doubtful that he would have risked embarking on the affair at all. The Chairman at Alpha was a formidable Scot of sixty, bristling with rectitude; he most emphatically would not look with favour on an employee he even suspected of harbouring dubious moral principles. And these days Stephen considered himself in line for a seat on the Board.
He reached the garden gate and walked up the narrow path. The situation was getting a bit tricky, to put it mildly. Fiona was twenty-eight. She very definitely intended to get married and she wasn’t going to wait for ever. Stephen didn’t in the least resent the core of steel running through the centre of Fiona’s backbone. Sixteen years of living with a wife who saw life as a succession of trivia and expressed her views in a stream of banalities had left him more than ready to admire a woman who took a purposeful view of her own existence.
He raised a hand and pressed the bell. Fiona threw open the door almost at once. ‘You certainly don’t believe in losing time,’ she said as the grandfather clock in the hall began to chime the hour.
She didn’t look overjoyed to see him, but then she never did. Her habitual manner was cool and composed. One of the things that fascinated him about her was the way in which the surface coolness would gradually fade, disclosing a temperament of a very different kind. Lately though, the coolness had tended to persist longer and return earlier. He knew the reasons well enough. She wasn’t a woman to hold a gun to his head in any brash or vulgar way but she was sounding all the same a warning signal, strong and clear.
He waited till the door was safely closed before he slipped an arm round her waist and kissed her gently on the cheek. She was wearing a trimly tailored summer dress; through the open door of the sitting room he could see a handbag and parcels lying on the table. She had spent the afternoon shopping then, and – even more important – she would have spent it alone. He felt a strong sense of relief as he registered the fact, he was sharply aware these days of time gathering speed, beginning to press in on him, forcing on him the necessity for decision. Fiona was an elegant, striking-looking woman with intelligence and personality. More than one man at Alpha – to say nothing of the wide world beyond its gates – would be only too delighted to slip a ring on her finger. Whenever he stood back and took a cold, level look at the whole situation he experienced a powerful feeling of danger and exhilaration.
‘You must be tired,’ he said lightly. ‘Shall we bother to go out?’ He tried this one fairly regularly; it hardly ever succeeded.
She smiled, put up a finger and ran it across his lips. ‘I want a very good dinner and I most certainly don’t intend to cook it myself.’ She was an excellent cook. He saw himself living with style and elegance in a house presided over by Fiona, his entire existence lifted on to another, altogether more harmonious plane. She put her arm through his. ‘I was in the kitchen, putting things away. I’d better finish it.’
He followed her into the tiny well-ordered room and helped her to unpack the groceries. He watched her movements with pleasure. She was tall, handsome rather than pretty, with a smooth white skin, very finely moulded cheekbones and straight black hair, very long and thick, taken up in a casual knot on top of her head. He wasn’t a man to be ceaselessly infatuated with the same type of beauty; he had in fact fallen in love this time with a woman about as different in appearance from Marion as it was possible to discover within the confines of Barbridge.
It won’t last, he thought with sudden piercing sorrow as she smiled at something he had said. I’ll marry her – I’ll manage it one way or another – and in fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years we will look at each other with indifference or hatred. But I won’t mind by then, he told himself with force, by then I will no longer be young enough to care. If he could bargain with the Fates for a limited span of happiness he’d be satisfied, he wouldn’t complain.
‘Did you have anywhere special in mind for this evening?’ he asked as he put the butter, the cream, the cottage cheese in the fridge. They always drove a good thirty or forty miles out of Barbridge; he usually took a discreet look round the bar and the dining room first. Just in case. So far they’d been lucky.
When they’d settled on a place she went upstairs to change, leaving him to mix himself a drink in the sitting room. He sat down on the sofa and switched on the radio. A powerful