with him. The problem is that since he isn’t married, where are we going to seat him?
‘Businesswise, his company is now much bigger than your father’s, and your father won’t want to offend him, but he’s hardly the sort of man one could put on the same table as the Lord Lieutenant, is he?’
Gemma frowned. ‘I’m sorry, Mum, I missed half of that. Who are we talking about?’
‘Oh, Gemma! Luke O’Rourke, of course.’
Luke O’Rourke. Gemma felt the room sway crazily round her, and she gripped hold of the chair back in front of her while her mother carried on, oblivious of her shock.
‘Good heavens, you haven’t met him yet, have you? I’d forgotten that. He was away at Christmas—I think he went to the Caribbean or somewhere on business—but you must have heard me mention him? He owns O’Rourke Construction—they practically built most of the latest stretch of motorway network round here. I’m not really quite sure how he and your father met, but over the last couple of years they’ve worked on several ventures together—those apartments your father’s building in Spain, and the extension to the school. Luke is based in Chester.’
Gemma let her mother rattle on. Luke O’Rourke. It couldn’t be the same man, surely? It had been stupid of her to be so shaken just because of the familiarity of the name. Luke O’Rourke. She closed her eyes unsteadily and then opened them again. It had all been so long ago. Over ten years ago now. She had been what … fourteen, almost fifteen? She shook her head, trying to dispel the images crowding her mind while her mother busily sought a way of dealing with the problem of where to seat Luke O’Rourke.
She could always seat him with Gemma, of course. Although she hated admitting it even to herself, Susan Parish found her daughter disturbing. Why on earth couldn’t Gemma be more like the daughters of her friends, content to marry a nice young man and settle down to be a wife and mother? And if she had to work, to teach, why did she have to work in that awful school with those dreadful children, half of whom couldn’t even speak English? Whenever Gemma was around she was always on tenterhooks, terrified that she would upset her father, or make one of her dreadful sarcastic remarks. She wouldn’t put it past Gemma to say something upsetting or controversial to the Lord Lieutenant, and she had been racking her brains for a way to avoid having the two of them together on the top table. As Sophy’s closest male relative it was of course quite acceptable for him to be there, and even though Gemma had refused to be a bridesmaid, it would still have looked odd to have excluded her from the intimate family group. Now, though, she had the perfect excuse. Luke O’Rourke was definitely not ‘family’ but, as a ‘close friend and her husband’s business partner’, it would be perfectly acceptable to pair him with Gemma, especially since she was not participating in the wedding as a bridesmaid. Breathing a tiny sigh of relief, Susan Parish went back to her mental arrangements, leaving Gemma totally unaware of what was going through her mind.
In the hall the grandfather clock chimed the hour. ‘Oh, my goodness, I promised the vicar I’d see him this afternoon to discuss the final arrangements. Would you like to come with me, darling, or will you be all right here?’
The last thing Gemma felt like doing was joining her mother. Summoning a diplomatic smile, she shook her head.
‘I’m afraid I’m feeling rather tired. Would you mind if I stayed here?’
Relieved, Susan Parish patted her hand. ‘Of course not, darling. You are on holiday, after all. Oh, by the way, did I tell you that Daddy is bringing some people back for dinner tonight? Wear something pretty, won’t you? You know how much Daddy likes to show off his pretty little girl.’
Only by the strongest effort of will was Gemma able to prevent herself from saying that she was neither pretty nor little. She didn’t want to upset her mother, who would quite genuinely not have known why she had been angry.
She hadn’t been lying when she claimed that she was tired. Coming home and living with her parents was always exhausting. There were so many things she wanted to say to them that she couldn’t.
She went upstairs slowly. Her bedroom had been redecorated along with the rest of the house and she had to admit that the coral and grey colour scheme was very attractive. The white furniture with its gilt trim had been a fourteenth birthday present. It was too fussy and frilly for her own taste, and even now she could remember how disappointed her mother had been at her lack of pleasure in the gift.
She looked at herself wryly in the full-length mirror. It was plainly obvious, surely, that she wasn’t the frilly type. As a little girl, her mother had dressed her in frilly pastel dresses and matching pants, tying her strong, dark, remorselessly straight hair into soft bunches.
These days she dressed differently, in comfortable structured clothes that suited her tall narrow frame. She wore her dark hair in a curved bob, and no longer felt awkward or unfeminine because of her height.
At five nine she wasn’t really that tall any more anyway, and she had learned at university that there were just as many men who liked tall slim girls as there were those who preferred small cuddly blondes.
The feeling of inferiority that not being the pretty little blonde daughter her mother had wanted had bred in her had disappeared completely while she was at university, and in its place she had developed a coolly amused distancing technique that held those men who wanted to get closer to her at an acceptable distance. She hadn’t wanted any romantic involvements; marriage wasn’t on her list of priorities. She had seen too much of what it could do to her sex in her own parents’ marriage.
Even so, she hadn’t been short of admirers; there were plenty of young men all too willing to date a girl who made it plain that marriage wasn’t her sole purpose in life. Her mother often bemoaned the fact that she was, in her words, ‘unfeminine’, but there had been many men who had been drawn, rather than repulsed, by her cool indifference. So why, at twenty-five, was she still an inexperienced virgin?
It had been so long since she had given any thought at all to her virgin state that the fact that she should do so now shocked her. She walked from her bed to the window and stared blindly out of it. It had been the sound of the name Luke O’Rourke that had brought on this introspective mood, and she didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell her why.
It had, after all, been Luke O’Rourke who had shattered her childish dreams and shown her the reality of sexual need and desire.
And it had also been Luke O’Rourke who had shown her what she wanted to do with her life, she reminded herself. How ironic it was, then, that she should hear his name mentioned now, when she was once again in a way at a crossroads in her life.
She was going to lose her job. Oh, it wasn’t official yet, but she knew it anyway. The conversation she had had with the head just before the school closed down for the long summer recess had been plain enough. They needed to shed staff; the part-timers wouldn’t be coming back after the holiday, but that wasn’t enough. Government cuts meant that the school still needed to lose one full-time teacher, and, as the head had uncomfortably but quite rightly pointed out, she was in the fortunate position of having parents who were financially both able and willing to support her.
Looking at the position from the head’s point of view, she couldn’t blame him. He was quite right in what he said, after all; if she stayed on at the school now, she would have to do so knowing that she was keeping a job from someone who badly needed the income that teaching brought. She moved restlessly round her room picking things up and then putting them down again. She hated the thought of giving up her job, but what alternative did she really have? It would be morally wrong of
