here left unsaid.
But she had to laugh when he stated, ‘We didn’t have much of a telephone conversation, did we?’ And added, to her startlement, ‘I was afraid if I stayed to say more you might find a reason not to come out with me.
Her eyes widened, she stared at him. ‘I... You... You’ve never been turned down yet, have you?’ she challenged. Forget her accusation that he’d been stood up. She didn’t believe it for a moment.
‘Oh, ye of short memory,’ Farne reproached her. ‘Have you forgotten how, only last Tuesday, you preferred to wash your most remarkable hair rather than go out with me?’
‘Ah!’ she said, and smiled, and looked at him as he, unsmiling, looked back at her.
‘Devastating!’ he murmured.
‘I know,’ she replied, trying to pretend that her backbone hadn’t just turned to so much water. ‘But I do my best. So, you live in London, you work in London, where do you go for holidays?’
‘Holidays? What are those?’
‘It’s tough at the top,’ she offered.
‘Heartless woman. Where do you go?’ he wanted to know.
It was eleven o‘clock before she knew it, and they hadn’t had coffee yet! ‘Can you believe that?’ she gasped.
‘May I hope you’ve enjoyed the evening as much as I?’ he asked, as an attentive waiter appeared just then, bearing the coffee.
‘It’s been wonderful,’ Karrie answered truthfully, and didn’t want it to end.
‘Would you like to go on to a club?’ Farne suggested.
But Karrie, having been quite truthful about the evening being wonderful, suddenly started to feel a little concerned that it should be so. First dates were often stilted, difficult experiences. First dates. Would he ask her out again?—oh, she did hope so. She closed her mind to such thinking. ‘I don’t think so,’ she refused nicely. It had gone eleven now. Farne had to drive her home yet, and then get back to his place. And while, okay, he might be able to cope effortlessly with arriving home with the morning milk delivery, if this evening got any more wonderful she was going to have one dickens of a job keeping her feet down on the ground.
Disappointingly, he did not press her, but accepted her decision without question. Without, she noted, looking in any way disappointed himself.
They drove to her parents’ house in comparative silence—so different from the way they had been tonight—and Karrie started to wonder if maybe she was the only one who thought the whole evening so marvellous.
Farne had seemed to be enjoying himself, though, and, as he’d indicated, he hadn’t hung back from answering anything she wanted to know. She had learned that he was an only child, like herself, and that his parents lived in Dorset. Also that from the age of seven he had been sent to boarding school.
That piece of information had shaken her a little at first. It had somehow seemed quite dreadful to her that anyone should think of packing any child as young as seven off to school and away from home. Although, on thinking about it, thinking about her own childhood, fraught by angry rows and arguments, those times she had put her fingers in her ears hoping not to hear them, she just had to pause to consider which of them had had the happier childhood. Still, all the same—boarding school at the tender age of seven!
‘You’re very quiet, Karrie?’ Farne suddenly broke into her thoughts.
‘You’d hate it if I sang.’
She sensed he was smiling, but because she was suddenly unsure about more or less absolutely everything—very unlike her; perhaps she was going down with something—Karrie said nothing more until Farne had driven up to her door. On detecting movement, the security lights of her home switched on, and as Farne left the driver’s seat so Karrie got out of the car too.
‘Thank you for a very pleasant evening,’ she said sincerely, and, still feeling a mass of uncertainty, she offered her right hand.
Farne glanced down at it but, instead of shaking hands with her, he took hold of her right hand in his left one, and caught hold of her other hand too. ‘It seems,’ he said, holding both her hands in his, his eyes on her face, ‘that I shall have to let you go.’
Karrie opened her mouth to make some kind of comment. But there were no words there, and she closed it again. Farne still had hold of her hands—she was going nowhere.
Then suddenly her heart started to drum, for his head was coming nearer. She stood there, unmoving, as gently Farne touched his lips to hers. It was an exquisite, tender kiss.
And over all too soon. As was the evening over. For a moment she felt his hold on her hands tighten, then he was stepping back and letting go of her. Having already said her thanks for the evening, there was nothing more for her to say. She turned from him, at a total loss to know if she or Farne had been the one to put her door key in the lock.
Without a word, she went in. She closed the door and when, an age later, or so it seemed, she heard his car start up and move off, she moved too. Silently, softly, her head in the clouds, the feel of Farne’s hands still on hers, the feel of his marvellous mouth still on hers, she dreamily started to climb the stairs.
She got ready for bed, touching her fingertips to her mouth where his tender kiss had touched. She got into bed, and closed her eyes. Again, dreamily, she thought of him. Farne Maitland. She had been out for the evening many, many times, but that evening, she had to own, had ranked as extremely special.
Her dreamy mood seemed to extend over into Sunday. Farne Maitland was still in her head as she showered, threw on a pair of trousers and a tee shirt, and went down the stairs. She headed for the kitchen. Her mother had help with the domestic work three mornings a week, but not at the weekend.
‘Good morning!’ she greeted her mother brightly. ‘Need any help?’
Her mother was busy cooking bacon and eggs for her husband, and, as always, she refused any offer of assistance. But her eyes left what she was doing and fastened on her daughter. ‘How did your evening go?’ she asked, and was unsmiling.
Somehow, and Karrie realised it was ridiculous, her evening suddenly seemed very private, and not to be shared with anyone. She gave herself a mental shake. For crying out loud—this was her mother!
‘Fine!’ she understated with a smile, and went on to babble on about where she and Farne had dined and what they had eaten. Her voice tailed off, however, when she became aware that her mother was looking just a mite concerned. ‘What...?’
Margery Dalton began speaking at the same time. ‘He, Farne Maitland, seems—different from your usual boyfriends,’ she said carefully.
He was hardly a ‘boyfriend’, but Karrie had to agree he was certainly different from anyone else she had ever been out with. ‘He is,’ she answered quietly.
‘Oh, Karrie, I fear so for you!’ her mother suddenly cried, every bit as though she had lain awake all night worrying about her.
Karrie was quite taken aback, but attempted to rouse her mother’s sense of humour anyway. ‘That’s your job,’ she teased.
But
