‘Oh, yes, I ought to have mentioned,’ his companion chipped in, ‘I’m afraid he’s going to be a few minutes late. He suggested that we start without him, as he’s attending the meeting primarily to answer people’s questions about the actual effect of the construction of the road.’
‘Isn’t that rather premature?’ Sage heard herself intervening coolly. Helen Ordman looked coldly at her and waited. ‘You are rather presuming that the road will go ahead, which is by no means certain as yet.’
Stephen Simmonds looked uncomfortable and shuffled his feet, and Sage was surprised to discover how much satisfaction it gave her to see the brunette’s immaculately made-up face darken to a rather unbecoming red.
Sage rather suspected that she was the kind of woman who traded very heavily on her looks, using them to bludgeon those members of her own sex who were less well-favoured into a state of insecurity and those of the opposite sex into helpless submission.
‘Well, the feasibility of the proposed new road is what we have come here to discuss,’ Stephen Simmonds interrupted quickly. ‘Naturally we can understand the fears of the local residents, and, of course, it’s our job to assure them that full consideration has been given to their situation and that the work will be undertaken with as little disruption as possible to their lives.’
‘And after it’s been completed?’ Sage asked drily. ‘Or don’t you consider that having a six-lane motorway virtually cutting the village in half is a disruption to people’s lives? I suppose you could always provide us with a nice concrete bridge or perhaps even a tunnel so that one half of the village can keep in touch with the other without having to drive from here to London and back to reach it—’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! Naturally, provision will be made to allow for normal daily traffic,’ Helen Ordman interrupted acidly, treating Sage to the sort of look that suggested that she thought she was mentally defective.
‘I think we’d better start,’ Anne Henderson whispered on Sage’s left. ‘People are beginning to get restless.’
Sage opened the meeting, introducing the guests and then handing over to Anne Henderson, as she was naturally more familiar with the committee’s running of the affair. From her mother’s meticulous research and the minutes of the earlier meeting, Sage did, however, have a very good idea of what to expect.
This one followed much the same pattern: a calm speech from the man from the Ministry aimed at soothing people’s fears and making the construction of the road appear to be a reasonable and unalterable course of vital importance to the continuing existence of the country.
Anne Henderson gave a far less analytical and logical speech against the road’s construction, and it was plain from the audience’s reaction where their feelings lay.
The questions followed thick and fast, and Sage noted cynically how carefully things were stage-managed so that Helen Ordman always answered the questions from the men in the audience, turning the full wattage of her charm on them, as she skilfully deflected often very viable points with the warmth of her smile and a carefully objective response which never quite answered the question posed.
These were early days, the first of a series of skirmishes to be gone through before real battle was joined, Sage recognised. Having studied her mother’s files, she was well aware of how much help could be gained in such cases from the ability to lobby powerful figures for support.
Was that why her mother had been in London? There had been a time when it had been suggested that she might stand for Parliament, but she had declined, saying that she felt she wasn’t able to give enough time to a political career. Even so, her mother had a wide variety of contacts, some of them extremely influential.
Engrossed in her own thoughts, Sage frowned as the hall door opened and a man walked in.
Tall, dark-haired, wearing the kind of immaculate business suit she had rather expected to see on the man from the Ministry, he nevertheless had an air of latent strength about him that marked him out as someone more used to physical activity than a deskbound lifestyle.
One could almost feel the ripple of feminine interest that followed him, Sage recognised, knowing now why Helen Ordman had dressed so enticingly. Not for her companion but for this man walking towards the stage, this man who had lifted his head and looked not at Helen Ordman but at her. And looked at her with recognition.
Daniel Cavanagh. The room started to spin wildly around her. Sage groped for the support of the desk, gripping it with her fingers as shock ran through her like electricity.
Daniel Cavanagh… How long was it since she had allowed herself to think about him, to remember even that he existed? How long was it since she had even allowed herself to whisper his name?
She felt cold with shock; she was shaking with the force of it, the reality of the reasons for his presence immediately overwhelmed by the churning maelstrom of memories that seeing him again had invoked.
Memories it had taken her years to suppress, to ignore, to deny…memories which even now had the power to make her body move restlessly as she fought to obliterate her own culpability, to ignore her guilt and pain—and yet after that one brief hard look of recognition he seemed so completely oblivious to her that they might have never met.
She heard Anne introducing him, was aware of the low-voiced conversation passing between him and Helen Ordman and, with it, the undercurrent of sexual possessiveness in the other woman’s voice, and bewilderingly a sharp pang of something so unexpected, so shockingly unwanted, so ridiculously unnecessary, stirred inside her that for a moment her whole body tensed with the implausibility of it.
Jealous…jealous of another woman’s relationship with a man she herself had never wanted, had never liked even…a man she had used callously and selfishly in anger and bitterness, and who had then turned those feelings, that selfishness against her so remorselessly that her memories of him were a part of her life she preferred to forget.
So many mistakes…her life was littered with them—she was that kind of person—but Daniel Cavanagh had been more than a mistake…he had been a near-fatal error, showing a dangerous lack of judgement both of herself and of him, a turning-point which had become the axis on which her present life revolved.
He was taking his seat next to her, the economical movements of his body well co-ordinated and efficient, indicative of a man at ease with himself and with his life.
Now, without the softening influence of youth, the bones of his face had hardened, the outline of his body matured. He was three years older than she, which made him about thirty-seven.
A faint ripple of polite applause broke into her thoughts. She watched him stand up and recognised almost resentfully that his suit was hand-tailored, as no doubt were his shirts. He had always been powerfully built, well over six feet and very broad.
She tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but could hear only the crisp cadences of his voice, stirring echoes of another time, another place, when he had been equally concise, equally controlled, equally clinically detached as he had stripped her pride to the bone, ripped her soul into shreds, destroyed the very fabric of her being and then handed the pieces back to her with a cool politeness which had somehow been even more demeaning than all the rest put together.
‘I pity you,’ he had told her, and he had meant it. He, more than anyone else, more than Scott even, had been responsible for the destruction of the hot-headed, headstrong, self-absorbed girl she had been and the creation of the cautious, careful, self-reliant woman she had made herself become.
Perhaps she ought to be grateful to him… Grateful…that was what he had said to her, flinging the words at her like knives.
‘I suppose you think I should be grateful…’
And then he had turned them against her, using them to destroy her.