the bell.
‘I persuaded Christy that we’d be better off eating in the kitchen. Our dining-room faces north and it’s freezing in there at this time of the year. Come on in, and sit down.’
Christy gnawed anxiously at her bottom lip as she followed them. The very last thing she had wanted was to have Dominic sharing the warm intimacy of the kitchen with them, watching her while she worked … it made no difference that there had once been a time when her parents’ kitchen had been as familiar to him as his own, and she resented his easy assumption that all was as it had once been. Surely he must be aware how hard it was for her to have to face him like this, but he was behaving as though nothing had happened, as though he had never humiliated and hurt her in a way that was branded into her heart for all time.
While she busied herself putting the finishing touches to their supper, Christy could hear her father and Dominic chatting, and yet she was also conscious, every time she happened to glance at him, that Dominic was also watching her. Watching her, she thought shakily, not just simply looking at her. What was he watching her for? Did he think she was going to fling herself at him and beg him to make love to her? Did he think that she was still suffering from that dreadful teenage crush?
‘Ragout. My favourite.’ Dominic smiled at her as she served out the meal, but she refused to smile back.
‘Your mother tells me that you’ve given up your job in London.’
‘The man I worked for is going out to Hollywood.’ Although it was impossible to refuse to answer Dominic’s questions with her father smiling benignly at them, she kept her answers as curt and clipped as possible, and after several attempts at conversation with her, all of which she blocked, she saw his mouth compress into a hard line and a steely glint darken his eyes.
The phone rang in the hall, and her father got up to answer it. While he was gone Dominic took advantage of his absence to say curtly, ‘What’s wrong, Christy?’
That he should actually need to ask her robbed her of the breath with which to answer him, and by the time she had recovered her wits, her father was back in the kitchen.
For the rest of the meal Dominic directed his conversation almost exclusively towards her father. Eight years ago she would have felt hurt and left out and would have made a childish attempt to break into their discussions, but now she was glad to be left alone.
After supper, her father’s suggestion that he and Dominic play a game of chess left Christy free to clear up the kitchen and then go upstairs to check on her mother.
‘You needn’t sit up here with me, dear,’ Sarah Marsden told her. ‘I’m perfectly all right. In fact, I was just thinking I’d like to go to sleep. Why don’t you go back downstairs and join your father and Dominic?’
‘They’re playing chess.’
Her mother laughed. ‘Oh dear, I remember how you always used to resent that. Dominic tried to teach you to play several times, didn’t he?’
Memories she didn’t want to acknowledge surged over her; an image of her petulant sixteen-year-old face pouting protestingly as she tried to divert Dominic’s attention from his game to herself. That had been in the days before she had realised the true nature of the strange restlessness that seemed to possess her.
‘You were always far too restless to concentrate,’ her mother added fondly. ‘I remember one Sunday afternoon, you picked up the board and threw all the pieces on to the floor.’
‘The year I took my O-levels. Dominic threatened to wallop me for it.’
‘Yes, I remember.’ Her mother laughed, and Christy wondered if she also remembered how that miserable afternoon had ended. She certainly did.
For weeks she had been troubled by a vague but persistent feeling of restlessness; she wanted to be with Dominic, but when she was, she wasn’t satisfied with their old comfortable friendship. Too young and inexperienced to be able to analyse her own feelings, she had taken refuge in fits of sulks alternated with bursts of temper. Dominic’s threat to put her over his knee and administer the punishment he thought she deserved had acted like a shock of cold water on her newly emerging feminine feelings, and she had retreated from him to the sanctuary of her bedroom, in floods of tears.
The next day he had been waiting for her when she came out of school. He had driven her half-way home and had then stopped the car on a secluded piece of road.
‘I’m sorry about last night, infant,’ he had said softly. ‘I forget sometimes that you’re not a little girl any more.’
She had burst into tears again, but this time there had been nowhere to run and she had sobbed out her misery and confusion against the hard warmth of his shoulder, even in her anguish conscious of the pleasure of his body close to her own and his arms wrapped round her.
He had kissed her briefly on the forehead as he released her, offering his handkerchief so that she could dry her eyes. That had been the day she knew she had fallen in love with him.
‘Come back, Christy …’
Her mother’s teasing voice jolted her back to the present and reality, and although she listened to her chatter as she smoothed her pillows and checked that she had everything she needed, Christy was wondering what her mother would say if she told her that now she could play chess. Meryl had taught her. Meryl, whose patience made her an admirable teacher; Meryl, whose patience allowed her to turn a blind eye to a husband to whom a continuous string of brief sexual affairs seemed to be as necessary as the air he breathed. And yet without Meryl, David would be very unhappy. She was his wife, and in his way he loved her. He also loved their children. Sighing faintly, Christy walked towards the door. Adult relationships were very complex things. As a teenager she had daydreamed about the perfect life she would have with Dominic if he loved her; she had imagined that love alone was enough, that nothing else mattered, but different people had different needs.
She herself was too old-fashioned in her moral outlook to involve herself in an affair with a married man, especially a married man whose wife she knew and liked.
No matter how awkward and unsettling it was discovering that Dominic had come back to Setondale, she knew that she had made the right decision in refusing to accompany David to Hollywood. Already, the effect of his sexual magnetism was beginning to fade now that he was no longer there to generate it. Maybe even the desire she had felt clawing so sharply within her had really been the desire of an inexperienced woman for experience rather than a particular desire for David himself.
Ever since the humiliation of her rejection by Dominic, Christy had kept the sexual side of her nature firmly under control. She was not and never had been the sort of woman to whom sex could be sufficient in itself, but there were times, increasingly so these days, when she saw lovers embracing, couples together, when she was pierced by an intense need, coupled with sadness for all that she had lost in not having a lover of her own.
And that was Dominic’s fault; his strictures, his contempt had made it impossible for her to be open and honest in her dealings with his sex; she was quite frankly terrified of misinterpreting a man’s feelings and suffering once again the savage rejection which still haunted her.
She went downstairs and started to make a tray of coffee for her father and Dominic. It was gone ten o’clock and, as Dominic no doubt remembered, her parents preferred early nights.
When she took the tray in it was obvious that Dominic was winning
