The Marriage Resolution

There would be a procession of floats, sponsored in the main these days by corporate bodies, a funfair in the town square, a bonfire and fireworks, and, since she was on the committee planning and co-ordinating the whole affair, Dee knew that she was going to be busy.

Amusingly, she had been shown an old document recently, listing the rules which applied to anyone bringing sheep, cattle or other livestock into the town on May Day. The modern-day equivalent was making rules for the extra volume of traffic the Fair caused.

Babies were still on Dee’s mind when she eventually got home. A second cousin on her mother’s side had recently had twins, and Dee made a mental note to buy them something special. She had heard on the family grapevine that she was going to be asked to be their godmother. It was a wonderful compliment, Dee knew, but, oh, how it made her heart ache. Just the mere act of holding those precious little bundles of love would make her whole body ache so!

In an effort to give her mind a different and more appropriate turn of direction, she decided that she ought to do some work. Strength of will and the ability to follow through on one’s personal plans were, her father had always told her, very positive assets, and to be admired. Perhaps they were, but over the years Dee had become slightly cynically aware that so far as the male sex was concerned a strong-minded woman was often someone to be feared rather than admired, and resented rather than loved.

Dee switched on her computer, telling herself firmly that it was silly to pursue such unprofitable thoughts. But it was true, a rebellious part of her brain insisted on continuing, that men liked women who were illogical, women who were vulnerable, women who were feminine and needed them to help and protect them. She was not like that, at least not outwardly. For a start she was tall—elegantly so, her female friends often told her enviously. Her body was slim and supple, she enjoyed walking and swimming—and dancing—and she was always the first one her younger nieces and nephews wanted to join in their energetic games whenever there was a family get-together.

She wore her thick honey-coloured straight hair long, primarily because she found it easier to manage that way, often coiling it up in the nape of her neck in a style which complemented her classically elegant bone structure. Whilst she had been at university she had been approached in the street by the owner of an up-market model agency who had told her that she had all the potential to become a model, but Dee had simply laughed at her, totally unaware of the dramatic impact of her timeless elegance.

Over the years, if anything that impact had heightened, rather than lessened, and although Dee herself was unaware of it she was now a woman whom others paused to glance at discreetly a second time in the street. The reason so many men appeared to be intimidated by her was not, as she herself imagined, her strength of will, but in actual fact the way she looked. That look combined with the classically stylish clothes she tended to favour meant that in most men’s eyes Dee was a woman they considered to be out of their league.

Dee frowned as she studied the screen in front of her. One of the new small charities she had taken under her wing was not attracting the kind of public support it needed. She would have to see if there was some way they could give it a higher profile. Somewhere for teenagers to meet, listen to their music and dance might not have the appeal of helping to provide for the more obviously needy, but it was still a cause which, in Dee’s opinion, was very deserving.

Perhaps she should speak to Peter Macauley about it. Her father’s old friend and her own retired university tutor shared her father’s philanthropic beliefs and ideals. A bachelor, and wealthy, having inherited family money, he had already asked Dee to be one of the executors of his will because he knew that she would see that his wishes and bequests were carried out just as he would want them to be. He was on the main committee appointed by her father to control the funds he had bequested to finance his charities.

Thinking of Peter Macauley caused Dee to pause in what she was doing. He was not recovering from the operation he had had some months ago as quickly as he should have been, and the last time Dee had driven to Lexminster to see him she had been upset to see how frail he was looking.

He had lived in the university town all his adult life, and Dee knew how strenuously he would resist any attempt on her part to cajole him into moving to Rye-on-Averton, where she could keep a closer eye on him, never mind how he would react to any suggestion that he should move in with her. But the four-storey house he occupied in the shelter of the town’s ancient university was far too large for him to manage, especially with its steep flights of stairs. He had friends in the town, but, like him, they were in the main elderly. Lexminster wasn’t very far away, a couple of hours’ drive, that was all…

It had been Dee’s first choice of university, since it had offered the courses she’d wanted to take, and, more importantly, had meant that she wouldn’t have to move too far away from her father. In those days the new motorway which now linked the university town to Rye had not been built, and the drive had taken closer on four hours than two, which had meant that she had had to live in student digs rather than commute from home.

Those days…How long ago those words made it seem, and yet, in actual fact, it had only been a mere ten years. Ten years…a different life, a lifetime away in terms of the girl she had been and the woman she was now. Ten years. It was also ten years since her father’s unexpected death.

Her father’s death. Dee knew how surprised those who considered themselves to be her closest friends would be if they knew just how profoundly and deeply she still felt the pain of losing her father. The pain—and the guilt?

Abruptly she switched off her computer and got up.

Seeing Anna had done more than reawaken her own secret longing for a child. It had brought into focus things she would far rather not dwell on. What was the point? What was the point in dwelling on past heartaches, past heartbreaks? There wasn’t one. No, she would be far better employed doing something productive. Absently—betrayingly—she touched the bare flesh of her ring finger, slightly thinner at its base than the others. Other things—such as what?

Such as driving over to Lexminster and visiting Peter, she told herself firmly. It was a couple of weeks since she had last seen him, and she tried to get over at least once a fortnight, making her visits seem spur-of-the-moment and accidental, or prompted by the need for his advice on some aspect of her charity work so as to ensure that his sense of pride wasn’t hurt and that he didn’t guess how anxious she had become about his failing health.

Her sleek car, all discreet elegance, just as discreetly elegant as she was herself, ate up the motorway miles to Lexminster, the journey so familiar to her that Dee was free to allow her thoughts to drift a little.

How excited she had been the first time she had driven into the town as a new student, excited, nervous, and unhappy too, at leaving her father.

She could still vividly remember that day, the warm, mellow late-September sunshine turning the town’s ancient stone buildings a honey-gold. She had parked her little second-hand car—an eighteenth-birthday present from her father—with such care and pride. Her father might have been an extremely wealthy man, but he had taught her that love and loyalty were more important than money, that the truly worthwhile things in life could never be bought.

She had spent her first few weeks at university living in hall and then moved into a small terraced property, which she had co-bought with her father and shared with two other female students. She could still remember how firm her father had been as he’d gone over the figures she had prepared to show him the benefits of him helping her to buy the cottage. He had known all the time, of course, the benefits of doing so, but he had made her sell the idea to him, and she had had to work too, to provide her share of the small mortgage payments. Those had been good years: the best years of her life—and the worst. To have gone from the heights she had known to the depths she had plummeted to so shockingly had had the kind of effect on her that no doubt today would have been classed as highly traumatic. And she had suffered not one but two equally devastating blows, each of which…

The town was busy; it was filled with tourists as well as students. All that now remained of the fortified castle around which the town had been built were certain sections of carefully preserved walls and one solitary tower, an intensely cold and damp place that had made Dee shiver not just with cold but with the weight of its history on the only occasion on which she had visited it.

Economics had been her subject at university, and one which she had originally chosen to equip her to work with her father. But there had always co-existed within her, alongside her acutely financially perceptive brain, a strong streak of idealism—also inherited from her parents—and even before she had finished her first university term she had known that once she had obtained her degree her first choice of career would be one which involved her in using her talents to help those in need. A year’s work in the field, physically assisting on an aid programme in one of the Third World countries, and then progressing to an administrative post where her skills could be best employed, had been Dee’s career plan. Now, the closest she got to helping with Third World aid programmes was via the donations she made to their charities.

Her father’s untimely death had made it impossible for her to carry on with her own plans—for more than one reason. Early on, in the days when she had dutifully taken over the control of his business affairs, there had been a spate of television programmes focusing on the work of some of the large Third World aid organisations. She had watched them with a mixture of anguish and envy, searching the lean, tanned faces hungrily, starving for the sight of a certain familiar face. She had never seen him, which was perhaps just as well. If she had…

Dee bit her bottom lip. What on earth was she doing? Her thoughts already knew that that was a strictly cordoned-off and prohibited area of her past, an area they were simply not allowed to stray into. What was the point? Faced with a choice, a decision, she had made the only one she could make. She could still remember the nightmare journey she had made back to Rye-on-Averton after the policeman had broken the news to her of her father’s death—‘a tragic accident,’ he had called it, awkwardly. He had only been young himself, perhaps a couple of years older than her, his eyes avoiding hers as she’d opened the door to his knock and he’d asked if she was Andrea Lawson.

‘Yes,’ she had answered, puzzled at first, assuming that he was calling about some minor misdemeanour such as a parking fine.

It had only been when he’d mentioned her father’s name that she had started to feel that cold flooding of icy dread rising numbingly through her body.

He had driven her back to Rye. The family doctor had already identified her father’s body, so she had been spared that horrendous task, but of course there had been questions, talk, gossip, and despite the mainly solicitous concern of everyone who’d spoken with her Dee had been angrily conscious of her own shocking secret fear.

Abruptly Dee’s thoughts skidded to a halt. She could feel the anger and tension building up inside her body. Carefully she took a deep breath and started to release it, and then just as carefully slid her car into a convenient parking spot.

Now that the initial agonising sharpness of losing her father had eased Dee wanted to do something beyond renovating Lawson House to commemorate his name and what he had done for his town. As yet she was not quite sure what format this commemoration would take, but what she did know was that it would be something that would highlight her father’s generosity and add an even deeper lustre to his already golden reputation. He had been such a proud man, proud in the very best sense of the word, and it had hurt him unbearably, immeasurably, when…

She was, Dee discovered, starting to grind her teeth. Automatically she took another deep breath and then got out of her car.

In the wake of the arrival of the town’s new motorway bypass there had also arrived new modern industry. Locally, the town was getting a reputation as the county’s equivalent to America’s silicone valley. The terrace of sturdy early Victorian four-storey houses where Peter lived had become a highly covetable and expensive residential area for the young, thrusting executive types who had moved into the area via working in the new electronics industries, and in a row of shiny and immaculately painted front doors Peter’s immediately stuck out as the only shabby and slightly peeling one.

Dee raised the knocker and rapped loudly twice. Peter was slightly deaf, and she knew that it would take him several minutes to reach the door, but to her surprise she had barely released the knocker when the door was pulled open. Automatically she stepped inside and began, ‘Goodness, Peter, that was quick. I didn’t expect—’

‘Peter’s upstairs—in bed—he collapsed earlier.’

Even without its harshly disapproving tone the familiarity of the male voice, so very, very little changed despite the ten-year gap since she had last heard it, would have been more than enough to stop her dead in her tracks.

‘Hugo…what…what are you doing here?’

As she heard the trembling stammer in her own voice Dee cursed herself mentally. Damn! Damn! Did she have to act like an awestruck seventeen-year-old? Did she have to betray…?

She stopped speaking as Hugo started to shake his head warningly at her. He pushed open the old-fashioned front-parlour door and indicated that she was to go in.

Obediently Dee did so. She was still in shock, still grappling to come to terms with his unexpected presence. It was years since she had last seen him.

When they had first met he had been a graduate whilst she had still been a first year student. He had been working towards his Ph.D., a tall, quixotically romantic figure with whom all her fellow female students had seemed to be more than half in love. Even in a crowd as diverse and individual as his peers had been, Hugo had immediately stood out—literally so. At six foot three he had easily been one of the tallest and, it had to be said, one of the best-looking men on the campus, so strikingly and malely attractive that he would have automatically merited a second and a third look from any woman, even without his signature mane of shoulder-length thick dark hair.

Add to the attributes of his height and male physique—tautly muscled from playing several sports—the additional allure of shockingly sensual aquamarine eyes and a mouth with the kind of bottom lip that just automatically made a woman know how good it would be to be kissed by him, and it was no wonder that Hugo had been the openly discussed subject of nearly every female undergraduate’s not-so-secret fantasies.

Dee had quite literally run into him as he was rushing to one of Peter’s meetings one day.

Dee, who had heard about Hugo from the female grapevine, and who had glimpsed him to heart-stopping effect in and around the campus, had been astounded to discover that Hugo was a leading activist in Peter’s small army of idealists and helpers.

‘What do you mean, what am I doing here?’ Hugo was challenging her now curtly. ‘Peter and I go back a long way and—’

‘Yes, yes, I know that,’ Dee acknowledged. ‘I just thought…’

She was in shock; she knew that. Her body felt icy cold, and yet at the same time as sticky and uncomfortable as though she was drenched in perspiration. Her heart was hammering frantically to a disjointed and dangerously discordant rhythm, and she suspected that she was actually in danger of hyperventilating as she tried to force some air into her tense lungs.

‘You just thought what?’ Hugo demanded tauntingly. ‘That I was still carrying a torch for you? That I just couldn’t go on living without you any longer…that my feelings for you, my love for you, was so strong that I just had to come looking for you…?’

Dee blenched beneath the witheringly sardonic tone of his voice. Was it really unbearably cold in this room or was it her…? She could feel herself starting to tremble. Only inwardly and invisibly at first, and then with increasing intensity until…

‘How are your husband and your daughter?’ Hugo asked her with obvious indifference. ‘She must be…how old now…nine…?’

Dee stared at him. Her husband…her daughter…What husband…what daughter…?