Worthy Of Marriage

She wondered why he wasn’t married. The possibility that he might not be heterosexual had occurred to her but been dismissed. In her working life, as a commercial artist, she had met a lot of gay men. Sometimes it was difficult, on slight acquaintance, to tell their orientation. But none gave off the kind of vibes that Grey did. She was certain all his sexual relationships were with women, and that they had been and would always be the most gorgeous chicks available. With his looks and position and money, why would he ever settle for anything less than a combination of glamour and intelligence?

On Sunday morning Rosemary went to church in the nearby village. She asked if Lucia would like to go with her but did not appear to mind when she declined. Although it was unlikely that anyone attending morning service in the small parish church would recognise her from newspaper pictures published months ago, Lucia wasn’t ready to face the world yet. The family lunch party was enough of an ordeal for one day.

Since her arrival she had washed and ironed the jeans, shirt and sweater she had worn to come here. Today she was wearing her own things in preference to those that Rosemary kindly lent her. Her other clothes, like the rest of her possessions, were in storage. Not that she had a lot of stuff. Only clothes and books and her painting things.

Mrs Calderwood had not returned from church and Lucia was in the dining room, making herself useful by laying the table according to Mrs Bradley’s directions, when she saw a car in the drive. As it drew up in front of the house, she recognised it as a Jaguar, the make her father would have liked to own had he had enough money. The driver was Grey.

He got out but instead of turning towards the house, he stood facing the garden, stretching his arms and then flexing his broad shoulders. Today he was casually dressed in chinos and a blue shirt with the sleeves folded to mid-forearm.

Before he could turn and catch her watching him, she withdrew to the inner end of the room where he wouldn’t see her.

Instead of heading for the front door, he went round the side of the house and a short time later she heard him speaking to the housekeeper on the other side of the door that led to the kitchen. It was a thick door and she couldn’t hear their conversation, only the two voices, one deeper and more resonant than the other.

Then the connecting door opened and he walked into the dining room, making her spine prickle with apprehension.

Mustering her self-possession, she said politely, ‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning. When you’ve finished in here, I’d like to talk to you. Braddy’s making me some coffee. I’ll be on the terrace.’

Taking her compliance for granted, he withdrew.

Wondering what she was going to hear, Lucia completed her task. She had chosen and arranged the flowers in containers from a large selection on the shelves of what had once been a scullery.

‘Small, low arrangements please, Lucia,’ Mrs Calderwood had said, before leaving for church. ‘We want to be able to see each other.’

From a variety of possibilities, Lucia had chosen hem-stitched linen place mats in a colour to tone with the flowers. Beneath them were heat-proof pads and, on three sides, mellow Georgian silver knives, forks and spoons. The side plates were antique Spode bone china, the large folded napkins linen in a colour to tone with the mats. The fine sheen of the table’s surface reflected everything on it in a way that made her long to paint it.

Grey was standing up, drinking coffee from a yellow mug, when she joined him.

‘Have you had coffee?’ he asked.

‘Yes, thank you…earlier.’

He gestured for her to sit down then seated himself in a chair at right angles to hers.

‘Where would you have gone if my mother hadn’t intervened? Presumably they don’t release you without checking that you have somewhere to go or money for food and lodging?’

‘I was planning to collect one of my suitcases and find a bed-and-breakfast place. The flat I was living in before was only rented.’

‘Where is your suitcase?’

‘There are two, but I would only have needed the one with my clothes and hair dryer and so on. I packed them and put them in storage while I was out on bail, between being arrested and sentenced. My lawyer expected a suspended sentence but I thought it was best to prepare for the worst.’

‘What does “in storage” mean?’

‘They’re in a furniture repository near where I used to live.’

He raised a dark eyebrow. ‘Why not with friends or relations?’

‘I don’t have any close relations. Both my parents were only children. Two cases aren’t the sort of thing you dump on people unless they have a lot more room than any of the people I knew did. Your living quarters are probably much more spacious than most people’s, but would you want to be encumbered by someone else’s suitcases?’

He thought about that for a moment. ‘It would depend on the strength of the friendship.’

‘My two closest friends weren’t around. One of them works in New York and the other is married to an Italian. They live in Milan.’

‘So you’re on your own?’

‘Yes, but that’s no big deal. Most people are on their own these days, Mr Calderwood. Large, close families like yours aren’t the norm any more. It’s mostly a “singles” world now.’

‘I know and I wish it weren’t,’ he said frowning. ‘The way things are going isn’t good for anyone. It’s not good for society as a whole and it plays hell with children’s lives. But it’s not my sex that’s to blame for the breakdown of family life. That’s down to your sex. It may still be a man’s world—just—but the direction it’s taking is a consequence of women’s initiatives.’

‘What do you mean?’

Before he could answer, the sound of the front bell could be heard through the open door that led from the terrace to the hall.

‘That’ll be my sister and her husband.’ He rose to go and let them in.

Wondering if Rosemary had told them her history, Lucia picked up his empty mug and took it to the kitchen. She would have liked to know what Grey would have replied if they hadn’t been interrupted, but it was unlikely he would resume the topic in the presence of the others and it wasn’t likely she would be alone with him again today.

She had rinsed out the mug and was drying it when Mrs Calderwood came through the dining room door. ‘I’m back. How are things going, Braddy?’

‘Everything’s under control.’

‘Good: I’ll get you your drink, introduce Lucia, and come back and make my special dressing for the starter.’ Beckoning Lucia to accompany her, Rosemary headed for the door leading to the rear of the hall.

As she had put on a dress to go to church, Lucia had worried that her jeans might be too informal for today’s lunch. To her relief, her benefactor’s daughter was also wearing jeans, though her top was recognisably one of a famous designer’s expensively beautiful knits and Lucia’s was a schoolboy-sized shirt she had found on the men’s rail in a charity shop.

Before Rosemary could introduce them, her daughter jumped up, put out her hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m Jenny…and you’re Mum’s unlikely-looking jailbird. Nice to meet you. This is my husband Tom.’

A thickset man with a receding hairline and kind blue eyes offered his hand. ‘Hello, Lucia. I’m an architect…married to a woman who prides herself on her outspokenness which is why some people cross the road when they see us coming. The first time we met she told me I stank of garlic.’

‘But I liked him so much that, despite the garlic, I kissed him goodnight…and he came back for more and here we are twenty years later,’ said Jenny, laughing. ‘What are you going to drink, Lucia? White wine?’—with a flourish of her own glass.

‘Yes, please.’

Grey was in the act of handing a Campari and soda to his mother. He glanced at Lucia. ‘Jenny likes her wine sweet. Would you rather have something dryer?’

At first she had been taken aback by Jenny’s immediate reference to her imprisonment. Now she was grateful to her for bringing it into the open so quickly, and to Tom for picking up what some would regard as his wife’s indiscretion and capping it in an amusing way. It was immediately obvious that they were very happy together.

‘What Jenny is drinking will be fine.’ Smiling at his sister, she said, ‘Drinking anything alcoholic is a major treat for me. There was some illicit alcohol available in prison—at a price—but I wasn’t desperate enough to risk it.’

‘Was there anyone like yourself in there? Anyone you could be friendly with?’

‘In prison, you’re grateful if anyone will be friendly with you,’ Lucia said quietly. But she knew it was next to impossible to make people who had never been there understand how it was ‘inside’.

Jenny started to ask something else but was stopped by her brother saying, ‘Don’t start grilling her, Jen.’ Putting a glass of wine into Lucia’s hand, he said, ‘My sister was once a journalist…more precisely a junior reporter on a small town weekly. It was going to lead to a glittering career in London, but she met Tom and changed her mind.’

‘And have never regretted it,’ said Jenny. ‘I enjoyed my three years on the Gazette, but I like being my own boss better. Now that the children are launched, I may try a spot of freelancing.’

‘Did you read the article in yesterday’s paper…?’ Tom took charge of the conversation and steered it in a more general direction.

CHAPTER FOUR

HALF an hour later, starting to eat his lunch, Grey wondered why, when he had engineered his sister’s presence here in order for her to exercise her canny judgment of character on the interloper in their midst, he had chosen to intervene when she started questioning Lucia.

Something in Lucia’s face as she answered Jenny’s first question had stirred a curious sense of compunction in him. Logically it was she who should be feeling that reaction.

He looked up from the grilled courgettes dressed with a special apple and caper mixture of his mother’s and glanced across the table. Today his mother was at the head of it, with Tom and himself on either side of her and Lucia on the left of his brother-in-law. They seemed to be getting on well while Jenny talked across him to their mother.

He watched Lucia laughing at something Tom had said to her. With him, she seemed wholly relaxed. With himself she was tense and guarded. As she bloody well should be, he thought, remembering that she had cost him a very large sum of money, not to mention considerable loss of face. He could live with that aspect of the affair rather better than the fine art auctioneers from whom he had bought the fake painting they had authenticated as a genuine pencil and watercolour drawing by Joseph Edward Southall.

Their reputation was in shreds, his own only dented. That the prime mover of the scam was the guy who was still in prison, and who would remain there for several years, was beside the point. Without Lucia’s skill he could not have carried out the operation.

Grey wondered if their relationship had gone beyond business dealings. Later on he would ask her. Or perhaps ask Jenny to find out. With his sister’s gift for winning people’s confidence, she was more likely to elicit the truth than he was.

Lucia did not give the impression of being a woman of considerable sexual experience. There was nothing bold or even confident about her. Her reaction to his invasion of the bathroom the other day had been almost virginal. But she could be and probably was putting on an act. Like a cat, she had fallen on her feet and was far too astute to muff this unexpected opportunity to enjoy the good life at someone else’s expense.

On the other side of the table, Lucia was aware of being under surveillance. It made it difficult for her to give Tom her full attention. He was telling her about a Scottish architect who had set up his practice in 1848 and, designing houses for newly-rich Glasgow merchants and factory owners, had evolved a style that was now regarded as the finest neo-classical urban design anywhere.

‘The tragedy is that until quite recently Thomson’s buildings were being demolished,’ Tom told her. ‘One of his best buildings, with black marble fireplaces and fine ceiling decorations, was sledge-hammered into rubble.’

‘What a shame.’ Lucia was sincere in deploring the destruction, but try as she might she could not switch off her awareness of the cold gaze she knew was focussed on her.

If Grey hadn’t been present she could have enjoyed herself. The courgettes and their sauce were delicious. Tom and his wife seemed willing to take it on trust that she had paid for her misdemeanours and would not repeat them.

Only Grey seemed determined to distrust her. Was that only because he was the only person here who had been directly affected by the fraud in which she had conspired, if not knowingly and directly then at least by refusing to listen to the questions asked by her conscience?

Or did Grey have other reasons for being wary, not just of her but of the whole female sex? The remark he had made before his sister’s arrival—about the direction the world was taking being a consequence of women’s initiatives—hinted at some kind of hang-up connected with feminist issues.

Lucia belonged to the post-feminist generation. She knew Grey was thirty-six, twelve years older than herself, because his mother, now seventy, had told her he was born when she was thirty-four. Probably, when he was twenty, more vulnerable than he was now, he would have encountered some feminist extremists and attitudes far more hostile than those that were prevalent now.

After lunch they all went for a walk, setting out in a group but gradually separating into a threesome and a twosome, the latter being herself and Jenny bringing up the rear while the two men walked on either side of Rosemary.

‘Now I can grill you about the prison,’ said Jenny, with a sideways grin. ‘I must admit I’m madly curious…who wouldn’t be? Do you mind if I ask you questions? If you really don’t want to talk about it, I’ll shut up.’

‘I don’t mind—but first I’d like to ask you something,’ said Lucia.

‘Fair enough…go ahead.’

‘How do you feel about my being your mother’s painting companion on these trips that she’s planning? I know Grey isn’t happy with the arrangement. Do you share his reservations?’

As she spoke she looked at the three people strolling ahead of them along the grassy ride through an area of private woodland whose owner had given Mrs Calderwood permission to walk there.

She was a tallish woman, about five-eight to Lucia’s five-six. Tom was probably five-ten and Grey topped him by two or three inches. Had she known nothing about him, from the way he carried himself she might have surmised that he was a professional soldier. He looked like an off-duty army colonel rather than a fat-cat businessman.

At that moment he broke his stride to put his foot on a felled tree at the side of the ride and retie the lace of his shoe. As the movement pulled the seat of his chinos tight across his backside and outlined the muscular thigh of the leg he had raised, she felt a stirring inside her that she recognised as desire.

It annoyed her that the physical appeal of a man who didn’t like her, and who she had no reason to like, could affect her so strongly. It was not as if she had had an active sex life before being imprisoned and was impatient to resume it. The months of nursing her father had cut her off from most social contacts. Even before that, when she was working at the agency, she had never been comfortable with the casual relationships that some of her colleagues and contacts regarded as normal.

To Lucia, sex was meaningless unless it was accompanied, at the very least, by some warmth and tenderness. Which made it all the more annoying that a man who didn’t like her and whom she had no reason to like could arouse these disturbing feelings in her.

‘There’s a lot of my father in Grey,’ said Jenny, after giving Lucia’s question some thought. ‘I loved Dad, although it has to be said that he was a prime example of a male supremacist. But then most of his generation were. I’m certain that, once he was married, he was totally faithful to Mum. But it wouldn’t have occurred to him that she needed something more than to be his adoring slave. He would have given his life for her…but he didn’t want her to have any life of her own that wasn’t centred around him. Grey has inherited that protective instinct—at least with women related to him,’ she added, in a dry tone. ‘I have more confidence in Mum’s ability to look out for herself. Do you have any ulterior motives?’ she added bluntly.

‘How could I have? I didn’t know I was coming here until I arrived. I still feel I’m going to wake up and find I’ve been dreaming. After all, she has more reason than most to dislike me. Her son was one of the people who got hurt.’

‘Only in his pocket,’ said Jenny. ‘My impression, from reading the evidence, is that you were a victim yourself. The guy who’s still in clink…were you and he an item?’

Lucia remembered the day Alec had made a pass at her. Knowing that he was only trying it on because every halfway presentable woman was a challenge to him, she had forced herself to rebuff him. But she hadn’t wanted to. In a flashy way, he was attractive, and she was lonely and hungry for the love that was a long time coming.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It was strictly a business relationship.’

‘And none of your pre-prison boyfriends was close enough to be waiting outside the gates when they let you out?’

‘No.’

‘I could be wrong, but I’m inclined to take you at your face value,’ said Jenny. ‘You look to me like a person I’d trust to keep an eye on my luggage while I went to the loo on a train. Not, come to think of it, that that’s taking a huge risk,’ she added, smiling. ‘At least not on a train in this country. According to our backpacking children, there are countries where you need to hang onto your stuff every single second or someone will swipe it from under your very nose.’

She began to tell Lucia some of her children’s adventures.

At the end of the ride there was another five-barred gate to climb. Grey swung himself over it in one easy moment and stood ready to put out a steadying hand while his mother, who had changed into trousers before coming out, climbed over. Still slim and agile, she needed no more assistance than Jenny did.

Lucia too, despite the months of confinement with limited opportunities to exercise, was not so out of condition that she couldn’t get over a gate. It was bad luck that she went over at the place where the top bar had been clouted by something heavy, perhaps by a piece of log-moving equipment. The impact had left the wood bruised and her hand was snagged by a splinter.

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