In the hall the grandfather clock chimed the hour. ‘Oh, my goodness, I promised the vicar I’d see him this afternoon to discuss the final arrangements. Would you like to come with me, darling, or will you be all right here?’
The last thing Gemma felt like doing was joining her mother. Summoning a diplomatic smile, she shook her head.
‘I’m afraid I’m feeling rather tired. Would you mind if I stayed here?’
Relieved, Susan Parish patted her hand. ‘Of course not, darling. You are on holiday, after all. Oh, by the way, did I tell you that Daddy is bringing some people back for dinner tonight? Wear something pretty, won’t you? You know how much Daddy likes to show off his pretty little girl.’
Only by the strongest effort of will was Gemma able to prevent herself from saying that she was neither pretty nor little. She didn’t want to upset her mother, who would quite genuinely not have known why she had been angry.
She hadn’t been lying when she claimed that she was tired. Coming home and living with her parents was always exhausting. There were so many things she wanted to say to them that she couldn’t.
She went upstairs slowly. Her bedroom had been redecorated along with the rest of the house and she had to admit that the coral and grey colour scheme was very attractive. The white furniture with its gilt trim had been a fourteenth birthday present. It was too fussy and frilly for her own taste, and even now she could remember how disappointed her mother had been at her lack of pleasure in the gift.
She looked at herself wryly in the full-length mirror. It was plainly obvious, surely, that she wasn’t the frilly type. As a little girl, her mother had dressed her in frilly pastel dresses and matching pants, tying her strong, dark, remorselessly straight hair into soft bunches.
These days she dressed differently, in comfortable structured clothes that suited her tall narrow frame. She wore her dark hair in a curved bob, and no longer felt awkward or unfeminine because of her height.
At five nine she wasn’t really that tall any more anyway, and she had learned at university that there were just as many men who liked tall slim girls as there were those who preferred small cuddly blondes.
The feeling of inferiority that not being the pretty little blonde daughter her mother had wanted had bred in her had disappeared completely while she was at university, and in its place she had developed a coolly amused distancing technique that held those men who wanted to get closer to her at an acceptable distance. She hadn’t wanted any romantic involvements; marriage wasn’t on her list of priorities. She had seen too much of what it could do to her sex in her own parents’ marriage.
Even so, she hadn’t been short of admirers; there were plenty of young men all too willing to date a girl who made it plain that marriage wasn’t her sole purpose in life. Her mother often bemoaned the fact that she was, in her words, ‘unfeminine’, but there had been many men who had been drawn, rather than repulsed, by her cool indifference. So why, at twenty-five, was she still an inexperienced virgin?
It had been so long since she had given any thought at all to her virgin state that the fact that she should do so now shocked her. She walked from her bed to the window and stared blindly out of it. It had been the sound of the name Luke O’Rourke that had brought on this introspective mood, and she didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell her why.
It had, after all, been Luke O’Rourke who had shattered her childish dreams and shown her the reality of sexual need and desire.
And it had also been Luke O’Rourke who had shown her what she wanted to do with her life, she reminded herself. How ironic it was, then, that she should hear his name mentioned now, when she was once again in a way at a crossroads in her life.
She was going to lose her job. Oh, it wasn’t official yet, but she knew it anyway. The conversation she had had with the head just before the school closed down for the long summer recess had been plain enough. They needed to shed staff; the part-timers wouldn’t be coming back after the holiday, but that wasn’t enough. Government cuts meant that the school still needed to lose one full-time teacher, and, as the head had uncomfortably but quite rightly pointed out, she was in the fortunate position of having parents who were financially both able and willing to support her.
Looking at the position from the head’s point of view, she couldn’t blame him. He was quite right in what he said, after all; if she stayed on at the school now, she would have to do so knowing that she was keeping a job from someone who badly needed the income that teaching brought. She moved restlessly round her room picking things up and then putting them down again. She hated the thought of giving up her job, but what alternative did she really have? It would be morally wrong of her to stay, knowing that in doing so she was depriving someone else of their living.
It was a similar dilemma to the one she had experienced in a much milder form when she first started teaching, and she had long ago decided that, when it came to her own background, her father’s wealth and her mother’s snobbery, she must just accept that these were things she could not change and must go on to live her own life, by her own rules.
She knew why Angus MacPherson had sent for her and talked to her as he had. He was counting on her doing the right thing, on her handing in her notice, and discreetly solving his over-staffing and financial problems for him, and she knew as well that she would. But knowing that she would be doing the right thing didn’t ease the pain of knowing how much she would lose. She would have a period of notice to work—that was written into her contract—but it wouldn’t be more than a month. The man who would take over her classes, would he sense the same burning desire to learn that she had seen beneath Johnny Bate’s truculence? Would he see behind the wide blue eyes of Laura Holmes, with her already almost too-developed body, to the sharply incisive mind that Gemma had seen? There was no reason why he shouldn’t, but so many of her colleagues had been ground down by their own problems and by the depressing poverty of the area they lived and worked in that they often no longer saw their pupils as individuals.
Unlike the majority of them, Gemma was single. She had the time to devote to her class outside the schoolroom. It wasn’t just a job to her, and yet to use the word ‘vocation,’ even if only to herself, made her feel acutely uncomfortable.
Even so, she knew that it gave her a tremendous thrill to be able to impart knowledge to another mind, to witness its awakening and growth, and she had Luke O’Rourke to thank for that.
Luke O’Rourke. Of course it couldn’t be the same man. The coincidence of the Luke O’Rourke she had known and her father’s new business acquiantance both being in the construction industry was no more than just that. The Luke she had known had been nothing more than a labourer working as part of a gang of itinerants. She moved slowly round her bedroom, drifting back to her bed and sitting down on it, letting her mind take her back. Her fingers absently touched the bedspread that was now shiny and tailored in deep coral, but had once been soft baby pink, frilled and flounced.
It had been a hot dry summer that year, and she had been bored and restless, impatient of and embarrassed by her mother’s petty snobbishness, and resentful of her father’s masculine condescension. She had come home from school with high marks in all her classes, only to be told rather reprovingly by her father that girls didn’t need to be clever and that they should certainly never be competitive, this