who had firmly and deliberately avoided what she considered to be the pit-falls of falling in love and committing herself to the kind of marriage she had seen overwhelm so many of her friends.
Maybe in the large cities things were different, but here in this country town—and, she suspected, in others like it—a woman was still expected to be the mainstay of the family in the traditional way.
Oh, perhaps these days a woman had a job as well, but, from what Miranda could see of her friends’ lives, this made things harder for them and not easier. It might give them some financial independence, but in return for that they had to suffer losing the independence of having time to themselves, and to shoulder an extra burden of guilt, especially when they had children.
Most of her friends had married in their early twenties, when the last thing she had wanted had been the constraints of having to put another person’s desires and needs before her own. She liked being free to make her own decisions about how she should spend her life and her time. She knew that in the eyes of many of her friends she was well and truly established as a bachelor girl and a career woman, and originally this hadn’t bothered her, but lately she had begun to undergo some kind of sea change; a totally unexpected sea change, it had to be admitted.
For the first time, she had recently picked up a friend’s new baby, expecting to experience her normal lack of interest but ready to make all the appropriate noises to satisfy the new mother’s pride, and had instead experienced the most peculiar sense of completeness, of wanting to go on holding the small warm body; so much so that when she had handed the baby back to its mother she had actually felt a tiny ache of loss.
She had quickly put the experience behind her, telling herself that it was simply a momentary aberration; something hormonal that was unlikely to happen again. Only she had been wrong.
She hoped she was far too sensible to mistake this unfamiliar yearning for a mate and his offspring for anything other than a probable reaction to too much not-so-subtle pressure from the media to conform to the image of the modern woman, who, according to them, in order to be fulfilled must ‘have it all’. Certainly she had already ruefully decided that the chances of her finding a man with whom she might want to actually spend the rest of her life locally were very small indeed.
She had a large circle of friends, enjoyed their company, both male and female, but none of the men she knew had ever aroused anything more than a mild degree of friendship within her. At least until today …
‘Ah, there you are,’ her father greeted her as she walked into his office. ‘You haven’t forgotten about tonight, have you?’
‘Tonight?’
‘Yes, the dinner dance at the golf club. I told you about it,’ he reminded her. ‘I’ve invited Ben Frobisher, the man who bought the house in the High Street.’
‘The computer man?’ Miranda asked grimly. ‘Oh, you know how I feel about what’s happening to the town … to its buildings. I walked past there this morning. Ralph Charlesworth’s got the contract for the work.’ Her face hardened a little. ‘That building ought to have been listed. We’ve been in touch with the Georgian Society and they confirmed—’
‘Look, Miranda, I know how you feel,’ her father interrupted her patiently, ‘but this man’s an important client. He’ll have employees who will be wanting to relocate in the area. He himself is looking for a house. He’s renting the Elshaw place at the moment.’
‘If he’s as high-profile as you say, I can’t understand why he should want to attend the annual golf club hop,’ Miranda told her father drily.
‘I expect he wants to get to know people. After all, he is going to be a part of the community.’
‘Is he? From what I’ve seen, most of the people who’ve moved down here seem to prefer to form their own small smart cliques rather than try to integrate with the locals. Look at what’s happened at the tennis club.
‘This time last year we had four tatty courts that were only used in the summer and a club-house that was falling down; now, thanks to a small high-pressure group of London wives, we’ve got a building fund going and ambitious plans to build two indoor courts, plus all the facilities of an expensive London gym, complete with swimming pool, bar, and everything that goes with it.’
‘So? What’s wrong with that?’
‘Dad, don’t you see? It’s spoiling the character of the place. Another few years and we’ll just be another dormitory town. The locals won’t be able to afford to live here any more, and during the week it will be a town of too rich, too bored women vying with one another.
‘There won’t be any real life to the town; it will be completely sanitised. There’ll be no children—they’ll all be away at boarding school. There won’t be any old people—they’ll all be packed off to exclusive residential homes.’
‘If that means that we’ll no longer have a dozen or more surly-looking youths hanging round the town square all night, then personally I think it would be a good thing.’
‘But, Dad, those kids belong here, and they’re not surly. They’re just … just young,’ Miranda told him helplessly. One of her extramural activities which gave her the most satisfaction was her work with a local youth club. ‘They need an outlet for their energy, that’s all,’ she told her father. ‘And they won’t find it in some expensive exclusive tennis club.’
He laughed, shook his head and smiled ruefully at her.
‘I think you’re over-reacting a little, Miranda. Don’t forget that people like Ben Frobisher are bringing new life to the area, new jobs … new opportunities.’
‘New architecture,’ Miranda murmured under her breath, unable to resist.
Her father looked at her. ‘You don’t know what he intends to do with that house. He struck me as an eminently sensible man. I’m sure that he—’
‘Sensible? And yet he still employed Ralph Charlesworth?’
Her father sighed. ‘All right. I know you don’t like Ralph Charlesworth; admittedly he isn’t the most prepossessing of men, but he does have a good reputation as a builder. He’s tough and he sticks to his contracts.’
Miranda shook her head, knowing that this was a subject on which she and her father would never agree That was what made her job so enjoyable, though: the fact that they were so different … had views which were sometimes so conflicting. Her father admitted that since she had joined the firm their business had improved dramatically, and equally she was the first to concede that without her father’s experience, his ‘know-how’, his tolerance, she would never have been able to branch out into testing ideas which were innovative and new.
They made a good team, she recognised as she smiled at him.
‘Don’t forget,’ he warned her, ‘about tonight; I’ve arranged for Frobisher to meet us at home, and we’ll all set off from there. It will make things easier.’
‘What time do you want me there?’ Miranda asked him, giving in. She didn’t live with her father, but had her own small cottage several miles outside the town.
‘Half-past seven,’ he told her. ‘Helen is arriving at seven.’
Helen Johnson was a widow some five years
