this afternoon—I was going to spend a couple of hours doing the books…’
Jenneth knew when she was being backed into a corner. And, realistically, she could hardly not go to the wedding. Louise would be hurt, and since Luke was not going to be there…Not for the first time, Jenneth wished that fate had seen fit to bestow upon her a nature that was less vulnerable.
‘Petrol tank’s full, tyres and oil are checked…Your suitcase is in the back…’
Jenneth raised her eyes heavenwards as Nick calmly ticked these items off on his fingers. Anyone listening would have thought that she was the twins’ junior and not the other way around. She wasn’t travelling south in the outfit Eleanor had bullied her into buying for the wedding. Instead she had allowed herself sufficient time to go to the Feathers beforehand and get changed.
It was barely seven o’clock on a Saturday morning, the sky a soft blue, hazed over with a mist that promised heat for later in the day. A perfect late June day…
In Little Compton, Louise, who had decided to spend several days at home before the wedding, would probably just be waking up. She had confessed to Jenneth over the telephone that she had succumbed to persuasion and temptation and had bought herself a wedding dress that bid to outshine anything that Scarlett O’Hara might ever have worn…
‘Cream and not white,’ Louise had told her, with her rich, unabashed chuckle.
George was far from being the first man in her friend’s life; Louise wasn’t promiscuous, but there had been several men with whom she had fallen in love, several lovers in her life from whom she had always managed to part on good terms, and it was obvious from what she had said to Jenneth that neither she nor George regretted those previous relationships.
It was going to be a long drive south, and Jenneth had decided to ignore the motorways because of the number of roadworks causing major delays.
By the twins’ reckoning she would reach Little Compton by twelve o’clock at the latest. Louise was getting married at three, and she had promised to be at the house to help her friend get ready beforehand and then afterwards to help her get changed before she and George left for their honeymoon.
‘A kind of unofficial bridesmaid,’ Louise had told her, and Jenneth had winced, remembering how once she had eagerly made Louise promise to perform that office for her.
The drive south was without incident, the roads, although busy, not oppressively so.
She reached the familiar countryside east of Bath just before eleven o’clock. Outwardly very little had changed in the seven years since she had left, although the large number of German marque cars bore witness to the fact that the new motorway was making this part of the country more accessible to those who earned their living in London.
Little Compton itself was just far away enough from the motorway to be unaffected by these changes. As she crested one of the gentle hills that surrounded it, Jenneth slowed down to look down on the untidy straggle of cottages that marked its one main road, the Feathers at one end of it, and the church at the other.
She suppressed the memories that threatened to come storming back…long, lazy summer afternoons spent with Luke, the young Jenneth bemused and thrilled by the almost magical way he had suddenly realised that she was no longer just a friend of his cousin’s but a person in her own right. Down there where the river meandered its lazy course, a glistening, fluid ribbon shadowed by willows, Luke had kissed her for the first time. Without wanting to, Jenneth remembered how her whole body had responded to that kiss, almost vibrating with shocked pleasure like a highly tuned instrument. He had laughed tenderly against her mouth and asked her if she knew what it did to him to feel that kind of response. It had been in that same spot only three months later that he had proposed to her, saying tersely that he knew he was rushing her, but that he was leaving to work in California at the end of the summer and that he wanted to take with him her promise to wait for him.
Later, when she had given him her breathless, almost incredulous answer, he had taken her in his arms and kissed her with a fierce passion that had set her heart pounding and made her totally unable to resist when he had laid her down on the soft grass beneath the trees and, between kisses that turned her bones to liquid, gently unfastened the shirt she was wearing to bare her breasts first to his eyes, then to his hands and, finally, shockingly and blissfully, to his mouth.
If he had pressed her then, they would have been lovers, but he hadn’t and, once the announcement of their engagement had been made, their time alone together had seemed to diminish, mainly because Luke’s mother’s health had started to deteriorate, and Jenneth had fully understood and backed his need to put his mother first.
Shaking her head to dispel the unwanted images shimmering just below the surface of her mind, she put her foot on the accelerator and turned firmly away, driving towards the village.
The landlady of the Feathers welcomed her warmly, and showed her immediately to her room, a comfortably furnished attic with a dormer window, and its own private bathroom…The Feathers had once, long ago in the days of coach travel, been a posting house, and Jenneth’s bedroom overlooked the enclosed courtyard to the rear of the village street.
‘Louise said you’d prefer to be in here,’ the landlady told her cheerfully, and as Jenneth agreed with her calm, slightly remote smile she reflected that it was typical of Louise that she should be known to everyone in the village by her Christian name, even though her visits home were these days limited to flying half-day stays at Christmas and other anniversaries.
The Feathers had changed hands since Jenneth’s day, and the landlady was more interested in talking about the wedding and the amazement it had caused in the village than displaying curiosity about Jenneth herself. Her indifference released some of Jenneth’s tension, and as the landlady left, promising to send someone up with a light salad lunch and a pot of coffee, Jenneth reflected ruefully that she had probably blown people’s reaction to her appearance at the wedding totally out of proportion. This realisation helped to steady her nerves, and when a shy waitress came upstairs with the promised lunch Jenneth felt relaxed enough to pick up the telephone and dial the familiar number of Louise’s family home.
Louise’s mother answered the telephone, recognising Jenneth’s voice immediately and responding warmly to her hesitant enquiries as to the state of the bride-to-be.
By the time Louise herself picked up the receiver, she was ready to dismiss all her fears as simply the working of her own self-indulgent imagination, and agreed readily to go straight round to the house immediately she had changed.
She chose not to drive her car to Louise’s parents’ home, but to walk there instead, not down the main street of the village, but along the path that ran behind the cottages and then skirted the churchyard.
Jenneth had always found it slightly surprising that her outspoken, very modern-minded friend should be the daughter of a vicar, and she knew that, to David Simmonds’ credit, he had never tried to impose his own religious beliefs on his daughter.
He greeted Jenneth warmly as, through habit, she walked round to the back door of the vicarage and he opened it to her knock. Louise’s mother bustled into the kitchen and kissed Jenneth affectionately. A tall, dark-haired woman, she betrayed her physical relationship to Luke’s father and to Luke himself, having the same strong bone-structure and thick, dark hair. Louise, she had always insisted, was a throwback, and certainly her friend’s vivid red hair and pale, creamy skin bore no resemblance to either of her parents’ colouring.
Jenneth was told to go straight upstairs, and found her friend sitting
