dog-in-themanger.
‘Oh, I see,’ he drawled sarcastically. ‘You picked him up inside, did you?
‘“Picked him up”?’ she repeated, very flushed. ‘I did nothing of the kind!’
He looked at her with a curling lip, contempt in his eyes, in his voice.
‘What on earth’s the matter with you? Don’t you realise that a woman of your age is taking a stupid risk talking to a strange man in a cinema—especially if it’s someone much younger than you? Mrs Walton said she was sure he wasn’t even forty yet!’
Indignantly Kit said, ‘Well, Mrs Walton’s as wrong about his age as she is about most things! You’d think a vicar’s wife would have more to do with her time than spread gossip. Joe’s forty-two, as it happens! Not that much younger than me!’ She had told Joe that she was much older than he was, but she didn’t enjoy knowing that other people had thought the same thing.
Liam faced her, his eyes narrowed and hostile. ‘Ten years younger, Kit! If it was the other way around, if you were ten years younger than him, it wouldn’t matter so much but—’
‘Why is it OK for a man to go out with a much younger woman but not the other way around?’ she seethed, remembering the beautiful redhead he had been talking to—apparently it was OK for him to ask her out although she was twenty years younger than he was. ‘If Joe doesn’t mind me being older, what business is it of yours?’
His hard grey eyes glittered. ‘You seem to know a lot about him. He wasn’t a stranger, then? You’d met him before? How long have you known him?’
‘What is this—the Spanish Inquisition?’
Liam coldly demanded, ‘Why don’t you want to talk about him? What have you got to hide?’
‘I just don’t like being grilled as if I were a murder suspect! As it happens, Joe lives in my apartment block.’ She wasn’t telling him the absolute truthnot because she was ashamed of it but because with Liam in his present mood she wasn’t going to admit that she had let Joe pick her up in the cinema. She still couldn’t believe it herself; even as a teenager she had never been one to strike up instant relationships.
But so what? It wasn’t a crime, and Joe had been nice; she had been in no danger from him. She had known that from the minute they had got into conversation.
‘He’s a neighbour of yours?’ Liam repeated, his frown etching heavy lines in his forehead. ‘Have I seen him?’
‘No, I don’t think so. He’s just moved here.’
‘Where from?’
‘Well…London, I suppose.’
‘You suppose? You mean you don’t know where he came from?’
‘He seems to have lived all over the world, but I think he was based in London.’
‘You think? Well, what does he do for a living?’
‘He retired recently—’
‘Been sacked, you mean!’ interrupted Liam roughly. ‘If he’s only forty he can hardly have retired! He’s lost his job—and he’s lying about it. I don’t like the sound of that.’
Kit was getting angrier. ‘Don’t make such snap judgements! You’ve never even set eyes on him. He used to be a photographer on an international magazine, covering wars and revolutions, but he got tired of the life and gave up his job. He wasn’t sacked or made redundant. He wanted to stop travelling, settle down somewhere; he’s writing his autobiography.’
Liam’s brows shot up. ‘He’s what? Writing his autobiography? He has to be kidding. You’re very naïve if you swallowed that! Only famous people write their autobiographies—is he famous?’ His voice was hard with sarcasm. ‘What did you say his name was?’
‘Joe Ingram.’
‘Joe Ingram?’ Liam’s face changed, his eyes surprised. After a moment he said roughly, ‘Well, I’ve heard of him. He got some sort of award last year for a photo of a dying soldier in an African street. It was a damned good picture—black and white. I saw it in an exhibition in London.’ There was a pause, then he reluctantly muttered, ‘I must say I was impressed.’ He looked as if he hated to admit it.
Kit wished that she had seen it; it must have been good if it had impressed Liam; it wasn’t easy to impress him. She wasn’t surprised to hear that Joe had been very successful in his job, though—not only because he had told her that he was writing his autobiography but because there had been something assured and confident about the man himself. Joe was easy in his own skin; he had done a great deal, seen a lot of the world and found out about himself too, she suspected; found out enough to know what he wanted from life.
So many people led blinkered lives, blind to what they were doing or why—lives of fantasy, unaware of themselves or conscious of making the wrong choices. Discovering that you had taken a wrong turning in your life and firmly changing course was the act of an adult in touch with his own inner self.
That was what Hugh had done when he’d met Tina. He had turned his back on his entire existence until that moment and gone off bravely to a new life. Kit admired her ex-husband for that and didn’t blame him. You only had one life. You had to live it for yourself, not other people; it did nobody any good if you wasted your entire life being unhappy. In fact, your unhappiness seeped into the lives of those around you and made them unhappy too.
‘Joe’s publishing a series of photos in his book; maybe that will be one of them,’ she thought aloud.
‘You’ve never mentioned him before,’ Liam said slowly, watching her. ‘How long have you known him?’
She gave him a quick, evasive glance and shrugged. ‘Oh, not long.’
Her mind raced feverishly—what was going on? Why was Liam so angry? Why all these hostile questions? She had known him most of her life, just as she had her husband. Kit’s world was a small one; the people in it rarely altered year by year, day by day, and she liked it like that. She was comfortable with herself and her world.
Yet Liam was still mysterious to her, his re sponses and emotions as indecipherable as some ancient script scratched on a primitive artefact. You could sometimes make out a line here or there, but the meaning of the whole defeated you. In fact she was sure that he did not want her to know too much about him; sometimes she even thought that he was afraid of her getting too close. But why?
Paddy and Fred came back and began setting out the furniture they had just carried into the hall. Paddy set to work, energetically giving a plainly decorated eighteenth-century country linen chest a final polish to make it shine under the strong lights of the hall. Fred checked that each item was marked with the price, to forestall arguments with customers, and made sure that the more expensive pieces were placed well to the back of the stall for safety’s sake. You often got light-fingered customers looking for small, portable objects to walk off with while your attention was distracted by someone else. You had to have your wits about you, working in an antiques market.
‘Paddy, look after the stall; we’re going for a cup of coffee,’ Liam said brusquely, grabbing Kit’s arm as she opened her mouth to argue.
A moment
