Midnight Wedding Page 15

  Now, of course, she knew. He had bought it for Susana. And she had never lived there.

  Now Holly surveyed the high-ceilinged hall ironically. She had even wondered if it was some inherited pile. She remembered asking him.

  He had grinned. Oh, how she loved that look, when his eyes danced. ‘Not me. I’m a thorough mongrel. My mother was Ecuadorean, my father American military. But when you get to my grandparents and beyond it’s real soup.’

  She had laughed. She had been beginning to think they would be friends. And her instincts, though she had not realised it, had been beginning to tell her they would be a great deal more than friends.

  ‘And how many of them were medieval barons?’ she had teased him.

  He had laughed and led her into what was clearly a drawing room of sorts. Holly wandered there now. It looked the same. She could almost feel his warm presence at her shoulder.

  There were brilliant-coloured rugs on the floor but they could not completely hide the grey stone flags underneath. Add to that a couple of tall-backed Jacobean chairs, their wood black with age, and a fireplace big enough to roast an ox in, and you had a seriously antique ambience. Cold, under-furnished and inhuman; but as authentic as a museum.

  It had seemed odd then and it still seemed odd now. Nothing she knew of Jack—and she knew him pretty well by now, Holly thought drily—suggested he would enjoy this arid magnificence. Or that he would fall unalterably in love with a woman who would.

  ‘Of course, he’s not exactly into cosy,’ she reminded herself, as she trailed her old roll bag upstairs.

  The bedrooms were not much better. Holly took possession of a four-poster with green velvet hangings. When she pulled back the coverlet, the smell of dust was overpowering. There was blanket chest under the small window and a huge polished cupboard to hang her clothes. But no cushions, no ornaments, no books. Even in her Montmartre garret she had made room for her books.

  She unzipped her bag and put Jane Eyre and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory defiantly on the window chest. Bending, she peered out and saw a tangled garden leading down to what was probably a stream under the weeds. Further away, towards the distant hills, there were houses and a church spire, neat as a child’s toy, but the garden was a wilderness. In the spring dusk, it was full of shadows.

  Holly shivered and drew back. She had lived all her life in the anonymous bustle of cities or Lansing Mills where she could not go to the gas station without people asking after her family or her school results. Isolation was going to be a new experience.

  It would be heaven, if only Jack were here too. Why didn’t I realise that last time we were here? If only…

  Holly gave an exclamation of annoyance. Betrayed by her wayward memory again!

  But she could not help it. If only I had realised I was in love with him then. If only I had told him.

  Abruptly, she turned away from the window and stamped downstairs, furious with herself.

  ‘If only, nothing!’ she lectured herself. ‘Susana was the love of his life. He told you that. There’s nothing you could ever have done about it. Think! He kept telling you how young you are. He just doesn’t see you as a woman.’

  But he made love to me as a woman. No doubt about that.

  Tears pricked Holly’s eyes. She dashed them away angrily.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it? He doesn’t love you! Hang on to that, Holly and don’t be a fool.’

  She made her way into the kitchen. Its size and equipment would have had Chef Pierre dancing with delight but there was a distinct absence of food. The fridge stood empty. The freezer was turned off. The old-fashioned larder offered only a box of candles and some matches. This barrenness made her realise that she had not eaten since she bought a croissant at a city sandwich bar for breakfast.

  Last time, Holly remembered, Jack had taken them to a pub to eat. She tried to remember where it was. Of course, last time there had been his rented car. She began to realise why the taxi driver who had brought her from the station had pressed his business card on her. Thank heavens the lawyer had given her all that cash. She was going to need it!

  She went out to eat. The landlord recognised her.

  Holly was taken aback.

  ‘Only a couple of weeks since the last time,’ the man reminded her, putting a substantial plate in front of her. ‘You were with your husband. From the castle, isn’t it?’

  Husband! That was what he had said the last time. And made her feel as if she had fallen off a cliff.

  Jack had noticed.

  ‘He called me your husband,’ he repeated calmly. ‘Which is what I will be in three days’ time. You’d better get used to it.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You can’t faint every time somebody refers to our marriage,’ he had said crisply. ‘It will give the game away. Besides, it’s not flattering.’

  Holly had shut her eyes. ‘I never thought…All of a sudden it seemed so real.’

  ‘It is real,’ Jack had said, losing his amusement. ‘Unless you want to forget the whole thing?’

  Panic brushed its moth wing up her spine. Why, oh why, had she not known then that she was falling in love with him?

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then practise saying “my husband Jack” twenty times every morning before breakfast. You’ll soon get the hang of it.’

  But of course she hadn’t. So now, when the expansive landlord said, so casually, ‘You were with your husband,’ she went cold.

  The landlord peered at her. ‘You all right, Mrs Armour?’

  Mrs Armour! Oh, Lord, how words could turn the knife in the wound. It was as bad as when the Sugar Islanders had called her the bride. She hadn’t been a bride, not really. Any more than she was really Mrs Armour. And yet…And yet…

  She looked down at her rings: the heavy diamond she had not expected and didn’t want; the plain gold band. They both felt like props in some play that she did not really want to be in. It was like a nightmare. Except that it was going to take more escaping from than the simple effort of waking. And she could not do a thing about it until the lawyer told her she was free.

  She said with an effort, ‘I’m fine. Jet-lag catching up with me, I guess.’

  Free? Who was she fooling? She was in love with Jack. How did you get free of that? Oh, she could run away again, make sure she never saw him again. It wouldn’t make any difference. She would carry this love with her until somehow, please God, it would wear itself out.

  She paid the bill and called the village taxi to take her home again.

  In the next few weeks she learned to think of the gloomy castle as ‘home’ indeed. Tentatively at first, then with more assurance, she moved furniture round. She opened the windows, tumbled curtains, bought cushions. Eventually, she applied herself to finding out what was in the garden and what it needed to come back to life.

  She opened her bank account, started driving lessons and slowly began to build a life for herself. She found a chamber group who welcomed her flute. She helped out at the village school with reading groups and began to make friends.

  Her life was punctuated by supportive phone calls from her lawyer and slightly more distant ones from Jack’s London colleagues. Jack himself called once, on a line that broke up badly. The only thing that was clear was his urgency that she should stay in Shropshire.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Holly wryly. ‘My lawyer has laid it on the line for me.’

  ‘I’ll see you…’ But that was when the line broke up terminally.

  His office, when she rang them, had no news that he was coming to the UK.

  ‘But since you called, Mrs Armour—’

  That name again! Holly was glad that the woman could not see her wince. The London office manager was devastatingly pretty and clearly thought Jack was a hero.

  ‘We’ve had a request for an interview from Elegance magazine. I explained Jack was still away but their columnist said she’d be really interested to meet you. I know Jack saw her in
Ignaz—’

  It hung in the air.

  ‘I don’t know anything about talking to journalists,’ protested Holly.

  ‘We’ll do the serious briefing here.’ In addition to being pretty and star-struck, the office manager was comprehensively patronising.

  So it was a matter of pride to agree.

  Pride faltered a bit when Rita Caruso arrived, however. Confronted with a frighteningly fashionable brunette, Holly silently cursed her own unwariness. But she put a good face on it and invited the woman to look round.

  ‘What a pile!’ said Rita Caruso, pointing her camera at an arched window. ‘Haven’t been married long, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  Rita moved round to the Jacobean table, its dark polish now reflecting a bowl of early roses. Holly had found them struggling through the brambles at the end of the garden and hadn’t been able to resist picking a few. They smelled of honey and pepper and long summer evenings and their perfume filled the cool room.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Rita. ‘I hear you were with him at Ignaz for a while. I suppose he shipped you out when the storm warning hit?’

  Holly did not say she had no idea there had been a storm warning. Instead she said evasively, ‘There was a lot to do here.’

  ‘I can see.’

  Rita made her way confidently through the house. Holly followed.

  ‘Been together long?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You and Jack Armour. God, that man is a hunk!’

  ‘Er—yes,’ said Holly disconcerted.

  Rita misunderstood her. ‘I knew he was too tasty to be on his own, even though he said he didn’t have a wife,’ she said philosophically. She let her camera fall for a moment, took Holly’s arm and walked her out through a French window onto the reclaimed terrace. ‘Now, tell me what it’s like to be married to a Hercules.’

  Holly gave a choke of laughter, quickly suppressed.

  ‘I suppose I don’t see him quite like that,’ she murmured.

  Rita gave her an engaging smile. ‘You will. By the time I’ve finished you will see that devastating husband of yours the way every sane woman sees him.’ She gave an eloquent shimmy of pure lust. ‘Brrr. Our readers are gonna love it.’

  Holly could not dislike her. After all, Holly had fallen for the Gorgeous Jack effect herself, hadn’t she?

  She said, ‘Let me give you some coffee and you can tell me exactly what you want to know. I’ll help if I can. But you must realise that I can’t betray Jack’s confidence.’

  ‘Just tell me how you met and fell in love,’ said Rita. ‘That’ll do it for me.’

  ‘But I thought it was a profile.’

  ‘Yeah, in a way. I’m thinking of a series on men of action. Contrast their work with the private man at home. I thought of it when I saw the stuff I got in Ignaz. Oh boy, you wait till you see those pictures.’

  ‘Has Jack seen them?’ Holly asked with misgiving.

  Rita shrugged. ‘He signed the release,’ she said airily. ‘This is going to be hot.’

  So Holly made her coffee and gave her a carefully edited account of their meeting in Paris. Rita drew all the wrong conclusions and was enchanted.

  ‘So you’d only known each other a week when you married? What a story! I knew the guy had to be a romantic at heart.’

  And she was off. Too late, Holly realised the trap she had walked into. Anything that she said now either sounded coy or betrayed the true nature of their marriage to an interested world. She had an obscure feeling that it would let Jack down, somehow. Quite apart from the fact that it would give Brendan Sugrue exactly the evidence he was no doubt looking for.

  The moment Rita Caruso left, she rushed to the bathroom and was violently sick.

  She tried to ring Jack to warn him. None of the numbers she had produced any result. So she called the London office.

  ‘I think I ought to speak to him. I talked to that journalist.’

  ‘We know, Mrs Armour,’ said the odiously patient office manager, Louise. ‘We set it up. I assure you the interview had Jack’s approval.’

  Holly was desperate. ‘But you don’t know what I said.’

  ‘Don’t worry. We did a full technical briefing; that’s what’s important. Jack won’t care about the personal stuff.’

  And that, thought Holly, was probably true. It depressed her so much she was sick again.

  She flung herself into a fever of gardening. She was outside every morning as soon as the silvery sun was up and stayed there until it was dark. She hacked down layer upon layer of undergrowth to reveal a forest of neglected rose bushes under-planted with lavender. The detritus made several cheering bonfires and the garden began to look like the rose paradise it had clearly been designed to be.

  Holly developed muscles she hadn’t known she had, an ache in the small of her back and a veritable craving for lemon barley water. Her primary school class came for tea. It became common for cars to make their way up the overgrown drive. She was—nearly—happy.

  One perfect evening the music group rehearsed on the mossy lawn. They were pacing through a stately Purcell ‘Chaconne’ when a car drew up. Quietly, its lone passenger made his way through the vividly untidy house to the terrace.

  He stood there unobserved for a moment. In the evening sun the garden was bathed in apricot light. Flowers he had not known were there nodded in the slight breeze. Bees buzzed. The chamber group sawed and blew and nodded through music that spiralled and fell in measured waves. And in the middle, her face absorbed, was Holly.

  Jack watched her. She had scooped her hair back untidily and the sun refracted off escaping fronds to turn the harvest-brown into gold lit by rainbows. Her days in the open air had given her a faint golden tan and a dusting of freckles. She wore a skimpy cotton top and an expression of intense concentration. She looked happy.

  And very young, he thought. His hand clenched on the door frame until the knuckles showed white.

  The ‘Chaconne’ finished. Jack unclenched his fingers and strolled forward.

  ‘Beautiful.’

  Holly looked up. Startled, she gave him a blindingly brilliant smile. He went very still. Her smile died.

  For a moment she did not move. Everyone else around her was getting up and greeting him a little nervously, because he had been a formidable absent figure in the village for a long time. But she could not move.

  He shook hands with their lead violin and the music group’s director.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind—’ the latter said.

  ‘Not at all. Just the right music for an English garden,’ Jack said easily. He watched Holly out of the corner of his eye. ‘Idyllic homecoming.’

  She seemed to come to herself at that. Carefully she put her flute down on the grass and got up.

  ‘How are you, Jack?’ She did not offer to kiss him or come close enough for an embrace. ‘I didn’t know you were back.’

  ‘Flew in this afternoon. Drove straight here.’

  Her eyes lifted swiftly. He caught puzzlement in them before they fell.

  ‘Then you’ll be tired. Perhaps we’d better stop.’

  ‘No. Carry on with your rehearsal. I could do with a shower, anyway. Afterwards I’ll come and listen if you’re still playing.’

  But he did not.

  They wound up at nine-thirty. Holly, normally the most hospitable hostess, did not offer them coffee and they, understanding, did not delay their departure. She went upstairs, her heart beating hard.

  Jack had had his shower; and fallen asleep.

  He was face down on the green-hung four-poster, slumbering deeply. He was naked except for a towel round his waist and the window was open. Holly went over softly and closed it.

  The sound must have disturbed him. He stirred, murmuring. She went to the bed.

  ‘Yes?’ she said softly.

  He opened his eyes and stared up at her as if he did not know who she was or where he was.

  Holly could not help herself.
She reached out and laid her hand against the familiar cheek. It was cool and unexpectedly smooth. He must have shaved, she thought, surprised.

  And then he took hold of her hand and pulled her down on top of him. Her senses leaped in answer.

  Wordless, he slid his hands under her skirt, moulding her naked thighs with exquisite precision until she writhed restlessly against him. Wordless, she flung off her clothes and kissed the length of his body in feverish longing, heightened by weeks of absence. Fierce and silent, they took hold of each other and drove and tumbled and gripped until he gave a harsh cry and collapsed, still holding her like a vice.

  Holly lay panting. Her head whirled. Her body throbbed with a thirst only partly slaked. She was stunned. How could she behave like that? What had happened to her?

  Almost at once, Jack fell asleep. Holly made quite certain that he was unconscious before she eased gently out of his embrace. Even in sleep, though, his arms tightened possessively for a moment before she managed to extract herself.

  Her legs unsteady, Holly made her way along the hall to the bathroom. She thought she would get fresh linen from the airing cupboard to make up another bed. But when she get there she sank down onto the side of the bath, shaking.

  What was wrong with her? She put a hand over her mouth. Her lips were trembling. Her whole body was trembling. She felt weak as water, vulnerable and shattered to the core.

  Of course, Jack might not even have known it was her. He had not once called her by her name. He was exhausted, jet-lagged, and the summer dusk was a disguise he might have been glad to be deceived by. Maybe subconsciously he had pretended he was making love to Susana. Maybe even believed it. It had certainly felt like love.

  Holly turned and rested her forehead against the cool bathroom tiles. She hurt so much she could not cry. It was as if all the tears had been burned out of her.

  She heard a noise and looked up. Jack was standing in the doorway. His body seemed to be poised for something, like a physical question mark. In the full dark he was no more than a shadow but she knew the expression on his face as well as if she had seen it in a spotlight. Horror.