isolated little place on the outskirts of Barbridge. If she’d still been in the modern flat she occupied during her first six months at Alpha Fabrics, it was highly doubtful that he would have risked embarking on the affair at all. The Chairman at Alpha was a formidable Scot of sixty, bristling with rectitude; he most emphatically would not look with favour on an employee he even suspected of harbouring dubious moral principles. And these days Stephen considered himself in line for a seat on the Board.
He reached the garden gate and walked up the narrow path. The situation was getting a bit tricky, to put it mildly. Fiona was twenty-eight. She very definitely intended to get married and she wasn’t going to wait for ever. Stephen didn’t in the least resent the core of steel running through the centre of Fiona’s backbone. Sixteen years of living with a wife who saw life as a succession of trivia and expressed her views in a stream of banalities had left him more than ready to admire a woman who took a purposeful view of her own existence.
He raised a hand and pressed the bell. Fiona threw open the door almost at once. ‘You certainly don’t believe in losing time,’ she said as the grandfather clock in the hall began to chime the hour.
She didn’t look overjoyed to see him, but then she never did. Her habitual manner was cool and composed. One of the things that fascinated him about her was the way in which the surface coolness would gradually fade, disclosing a temperament of a very different kind. Lately though, the coolness had tended to persist longer and return earlier. He knew the reasons well enough. She wasn’t a woman to hold a gun to his head in any brash or vulgar way but she was sounding all the same a warning signal, strong and clear.
He waited till the door was safely closed before he slipped an arm round her waist and kissed her gently on the cheek. She was wearing a trimly tailored summer dress; through the open door of the sitting room he could see a handbag and parcels lying on the table. She had spent the afternoon shopping then, and – even more important – she would have spent it alone. He felt a strong sense of relief as he registered the fact, he was sharply aware these days of time gathering speed, beginning to press in on him, forcing on him the necessity for decision. Fiona was an elegant, striking-looking woman with intelligence and personality. More than one man at Alpha – to say nothing of the wide world beyond its gates – would be only too delighted to slip a ring on her finger. Whenever he stood back and took a cold, level look at the whole situation he experienced a powerful feeling of danger and exhilaration.
‘You must be tired,’ he said lightly. ‘Shall we bother to go out?’ He tried this one fairly regularly; it hardly ever succeeded.
She smiled, put up a finger and ran it across his lips. ‘I want a very good dinner and I most certainly don’t intend to cook it myself.’ She was an excellent cook. He saw himself living with style and elegance in a house presided over by Fiona, his entire existence lifted on to another, altogether more harmonious plane. She put her arm through his. ‘I was in the kitchen, putting things away. I’d better finish it.’
He followed her into the tiny well-ordered room and helped her to unpack the groceries. He watched her movements with pleasure. She was tall, handsome rather than pretty, with a smooth white skin, very finely moulded cheekbones and straight black hair, very long and thick, taken up in a casual knot on top of her head. He wasn’t a man to be ceaselessly infatuated with the same type of beauty; he had in fact fallen in love this time with a woman about as different in appearance from Marion as it was possible to discover within the confines of Barbridge.
It won’t last, he thought with sudden piercing sorrow as she smiled at something he had said. I’ll marry her – I’ll manage it one way or another – and in fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years we will look at each other with indifference or hatred. But I won’t mind by then, he told himself with force, by then I will no longer be young enough to care. If he could bargain with the Fates for a limited span of happiness he’d be satisfied, he wouldn’t complain.
‘Did you have anywhere special in mind for this evening?’ he asked as he put the butter, the cream, the cottage cheese in the fridge. They always drove a good thirty or forty miles out of Barbridge; he usually took a discreet look round the bar and the dining room first. Just in case. So far they’d been lucky.
When they’d settled on a place she went upstairs to change, leaving him to mix himself a drink in the sitting room. He sat down on the sofa and switched on the radio. A powerful sweep of music, some classical symphony he couldn’t identify. He settled back and let the tide wash over him, strong, insistent, filled with yearning. He saw for an instant the dark face of depression that had looked out at him with increasing frequency in recent years. An only child, born to the astonishment of his parents in their middle age, doted on from the day of his birth, he had been the object of all his mother’s obsessive love after the death of his father. His mother also had been dead now these five years or more. It was since her passing that he had begun to be afflicted by this terrible sense of aloneness. It would come on him sometimes at strange moments, in a train, walking along a gleaming corridor at work, waiting for a drink in a crowded bar. He had to stiffen himself to resist the compulsion to reach out and touch a hand, any hand. And when the irrational moment passed he would be left with a black surge of depression that might take hours to fade.
He took a long drink from his glass. Above the sound of the music he heard a cupboard door close sharply upstairs. He tilted back his head and glanced up, thinking of Fiona moving about the bedroom. With Fiona he was able to forget depression. In her company he felt himself years younger than the set-faced husband of Marion; gayer, livelier, farther distanced from the arid shores of middle age.
He drained his glass and set it down. Our emotional needs are programmed in the cradle, he thought with resignation, we are stuck with them for the rest of our days. For me it is a deeply loving woman currently wearing the face of Fiona Brooke. And whatever it is for Fiona, he added with a wry smile, I can only hope it continues to be moulded in the image of Stephen Lockwood.
He picked up the heavy table lighter and idly studied it. Silver, good quality, graceful design, set in a base of onyx. Fiona had expensive tastes. He ran a finger over the chilly smoothness of the stone. In a divorce settlement Marion would certainly get the house. And a substantial slice of his salary. He would very probably have to take out a large insurance policy for her benefit. He wouldn’t be left with an income of very impressive proportions. Hardly sufficient to create – let alone maintain – the elegant dream world he was to share with Fiona. He let out a long sigh . . . Love might begin with I will give you the moon and the stars, but it not infrequently ended in front of a judge with a vicious wrangle about ten pounds a week.
He clicked the lighter switch, he frowned at the yellow flame. What would the fading, suburban Marion do with her share of the spoils, with that house, far too large for a woman on her own? He extinguished the lighter and set it down with a little bang. Why should an able-bodied, childless woman of thirty-six have to be supported in idleness till the end of her life?
A bedroom door opened and Fiona’s steps sounded on the landing. He jumped to his feet, smiling, eager; he switched off the radio and went out into the hall.
‘By the way,’ he said a few minutes later as they came out into the bright evening, ‘I may be taking a little leave shortly. A few days or a week perhaps. I’ll let you know when it’s definite.’ Under no circumstances whatever did he allow the name of his wife to pass his lips when he was with Fiona. She knew, and accepted, that there was no question – as yet – of their going off together for a holiday.
He walked beside her to the car. She turned her head and gave him a brief cool glance but she said nothing. Again he had a strong sensation of time pressing relentlessly on behind him, hurrying him forward to an objective that seemed to glitter with the promise of joy but sometimes, disconcertingly, fleetingly, impelled towards him a sense of some obscurely chilling presence waiting for him at the end of the
