Mistaken Adversary

When she returned to the kitchen for a pair of scissors and a basket and carefully cut a half-dozen or so buds, it was an impulse decision, and one which made her hands shake with emotion when she carefully placed the buds into the basket. Why was she picking them when surely her aunt would soon be able to come home and see them for herself? What was her subconscious mind trying to tell her? For a moment she was almost tempted to destroy the buds, to trample them into the ground, so that she could forget that strong current of awareness that had compelled her to cut them; as though some deep part of her was already acknowledging that her aunt would never see them blooming in their natural setting. A sharp, agonising dart of pain shivered through her. No...that wasn’t true! As she tensed her whole body, bracing it to reject the strong current of her own thoughts, she saw someone walking across the grass towards her.

It took her several seconds to recognise Mitch Fletcher, and then several more to pull herself together sufficiently to wonder what he was doing. She hadn’t been expecting to see him until this evening.

He, like her, was wearing a pair of trainers, hence his unheralded approach. He was also wearing a dark-coloured tracksuit, and he explained briefly, ‘I run this way most mornings, and when I saw you were in the garden I thought I’d stop to ask you if you minded if I brought my stuff round this afternoon instead of this evening? The hotel need my bedroom and they’d like me to check out before lunch...’

As she mentally calculated the distance from the town’s one decent hotel to the cottage, Georgia reflected that it was no wonder he looked so tautly muscled and fit if he ran that kind of distance most mornings.

A lot of people used the footpath that went past the cottage to the farm, both for walking and running, and she had become so used to them going past that she scarcely noticed them now, hence the reason she had not spotted him before. His abrupt intrusion into her sombre and painfully reflective mood left her feeling jarred and on edge, exposed somehow, and anxious for him to go, and yet somehow still too saddened by what she had been thinking to make a snappy quick response to his question.

There was no reason why he shouldn’t move in during the afternoon: she would be at home after all, working, and yet she wanted to say no to him. Did she want him lodging with her? She had no option now, and it would be stupid to allow her own emotions to cut her off from such a valuable source of much-needed income. She had kept from her aunt her worries about their financial resources, wanting the older woman to concentrate all her mental energy on fighting her cancer, not worrying about her niece.

‘Old-fashioned shrub roses. My grandmother used to grow them.’ The bleak, almost hard comment broke through her guard. She focused on Mitchell Fletcher as he leaned forward to examine the nearest bush.

Something in his voice made her question, ‘You didn’t get on with her?’

The look he gave her was sharp and prolonged. ‘On the contrary,’ he told her, ‘she was the one source of stability during my childhood. Her home, her garden were always somewhere I could escape to when things at home got out of hand. She was my father’s mother, and yet she never took his side. I think in many ways she blamed herself for his promiscuity, his lack of loyalty. She had brought him up alone, you see: her husband, my grandfather, had been killed in action during the war. She found great solace in her garden, both for the loss of her husband, and for the faults of her son. She died when I was fourteen...’

Unwillingly, Georgia felt her emotions responding to all that he had not said, to the pain she could tell was cloaked by the flat hardness of his voice. ‘You must have missed her dreadfully.’

There was a long pause, so long that she thought he must not have heard her, and then he said even more flatly, ‘Yes, indeed. So much so that I destroyed her entire rose garden... A stupid, pointless act of vandalism which incurred my father’s wrath because by doing so I had seriously brought down the value of the house, which was by then up for sale, and caused another row between my parents.

‘My father was in mid-affair at the time—never a good point at which to annoy him. We could chart the progress of his affairs by his moods, my mother and I. When a new one started, there was a general air of bonhomie and cheerfulness about him. As the chase hotted up and the affair began to develop, he would become euphoric—almost ecstatically so when the affair eventually became a physical reality. After that would follow a period when he was like someone high on drugs, and woe betide anyone who in any way, however inadvertently, came between him and his need to concentrate exclusively on the object of his desire. Later, in the cooling-off period, he would be more approachable, less obsessed. That was always a good time to get his attention.’

Georgia listened in silent horror, wanting to reject the unpleasantness of the words being delivered in that flat, emotionless voice, knowing how much pain, how much anguish they must cover, unwillingly finding herself in sympathy with him.

Abruptly he shrugged, a brief flexing of his shoulders as though he was actually throwing off some burden, his voice lighter and far more cynical as he added, ‘Of course, as an adult, one realises that no one partner alone is responsible for all the ills in a marriage. I dare say my mother played her part in the destruction of their relationship, even though as a child I was not aware of it. Certainly what I do know is that my father should never really have married. He was the kind of man who could never wholly commit himself to one single woman...’

He leaned forward and looked into her basket. ‘Roses... A gift for your lover?’ His smile was very cynical. ‘Haven’t you got it the wrong way round? Shouldn’t he be the one giving you roses, strewing them dew-fresh across your pillow in the best of romantic traditions? But then of course I was forgetting he can never be here for you in the morning, can he? He has to return to the matrimonial pillow. I’m not surprised you want to keep this place. It’s ideal as a lovers’ retreat: tucked away here, cut off from the rest of the world, a secret, secluded, private paradise. Do you ever ask yourself about her—about his other life, his wife? Yes, of course you do, don’t you? You couldn’t not do. Do you pray for him to be free, or do you pretend that you’re content with things as they are, gratefully taking the small part of his time that is all he can give you, believing that one day it will be different—that one day he will be free?’

‘It isn’t like that,’ Georgia protested angrily. ‘You don’t—

‘I don’t what?’ he interrupted her. ‘I don’t understand? Like his wife? How your sex does love to delude itself!’ He turned away from her. ‘Will it be all right if I come round this afternoon with my stuff, or will it interfere with...with your private life?’

‘No, it won’t,’ Georgia told him furiously. ‘In fact—’

‘Fine. I’ll be here about three,’ he told her, already starting to lope away towards the gate, with the easy movement of a natural athlete.

Impotently, Georgia stared after him, wondering why on earth she hadn’t acted when she had had the opportunity and told him not only just how wrong he was in his assumptions but also that she had changed her mind and that she was no longer willing to have him as a lodger. Too late to wish her reactions had been faster now. He had gone.

The perfume of the roses wafted poignantly around her. She touched one of the buds tenderly. Poor boy, he must have been devastated when he lost his grandmother. She could well understand the emotions which must have led him to destroying her roses...the grief and frustration. He must have felt so alone, so deserted. It was so easy for her to understand how he must have felt. Too easy, she warned herself as she walked towards the house, reminding herself that it wasn’t the boy she was going to deal with but the man, and that that man had leapt to the most erroneous and unfair assumptions about her, based on the most tenuous of links and such scant knowledge of her.

Later, as she showered and prepared for her visit to her aunt, her conscience pricked her, reminding her that she needed only to have stopped Mitch Fletcher when he first mentioned her supposed lover and that she ought to have corrected him then. Why hadn’t she done so? Not because she was the kind of person who enjoyed allowing others to misjudge her so that she could wallow in self-pity and then enjoy their embarrassment once the truth was ultimately revealed. No, it wasn’t that. It was because...because she was afraid of discussing her aunt’s condition with anyone, afraid...afraid of what? Of what she might be forced to confront in doing so?

Her heart had started to hammer, the familiar feeling of panic, despair and anger flooding through her, the sense of outrage and helplessness... Abruptly she switched off, refusing to allow her thoughts to charge heedlessly down the road they were heading—down a road she could not allow them to go. Why? Because she knew that road led nowhere other than to an empty wasteland of anguish and pain. She had, after all, already travelled down it once when her parents died. Then there had been Aunt May to help her, to hold her, to comfort her. Now there was no one. No, she would be completely on her own...

She could feel the panic building up inside her, the rejection of what her mind was trying to tell her, the impotent rage and misery.

As she went downstairs she saw the roses she had cut, and for a moment she was tempted to pick them up and throw them into the dustbin. Then she remembered Mitch Fletcher’s flat and yet extraordinarily graphic description of his destruction of his grandmother’s rose bushes and she quelled the impulse.

CHAPTER THREE

‘ROSES—oh, Georgy, you shouldn’t have! They must have been so expensive.’

Georgia looked at her aunt’s downbent head as she breathed in the perfume of the opening buds, and told her quietly, ‘No, I picked them from the garden, from the roses we planted last autumn. I meant to make a note of which bush they were from, but M...someone interrupted me and I forgot.’

‘From the garden...’

Her aunt put down the roses and turned to look at her. There was such an expression of love and understanding in her eyes that Georgia felt her own fill with tears. Holding out her arms to her, her aunt said gently, ‘Oh, Georgia, darling. I know how you must feel, but you mustn’t...you really mustn’t... We’ve so little time left, you and I, and I want us to share it, not to—’

She stopped as she heard the anguished sound Georgia made.

‘No! That isn’t true!’ Georgia protested. ‘You are going to get better. I—’

‘No, Georgia, I am not going to get better,’ her aunt corrected her, holding her tightly, her voice steady as she lifted her hand to push the hair back off Georgia’s face. ‘Please try to understand and accept that. I have, and I can’t tell you how much peace, how great a sense of awareness of all the good things I’ve enjoyed about my life...how deep a feeling of being at one with the rest of the world it has brought me. Of course there are times when I feel despair...fear, when I want to deny what’s happening—to protest that it’s too soon—but those feelings are fleeting, a bit like the tantrums of a child, who doesn’t really know why it protests—only that it feels it must. My one great fear has been for you. My poor Georgia... You’ve fought so hard to ignore what we both know to be the truth. I’ve watched you and hurt for you, and yet, at the same time as I’ve wanted to protect you from what must happen, I’ve wanted to share it with you—to show you how easy, how very natural what’s happening to me is. That’s one of the things they teach us here: to let go of our fear, to share what we’re experiencing, to accept its—’

‘Its inevitability?’ Georgia questioned her brokenly, struggling with her tears and with the turbulent anger of her emotions, knowing she wanted to deny what her aunt was saying—to tell her that she must not give up, that she must continue to fight—and yet conscious at the same time of her aunt’s need to talk about what was happening to her and to share it with her. They talked for a long time, her aunt’s awareness and acceptance of what lay ahead of her both humbling Georgia and causing her the most intense fear and grief.

‘Thank you for sharing this with me, Georgy,’ her aunt said softly to her, when she finally admitted how exhausted their talk had left her. ‘So many people find that long, long after they have come to accept that their lives are drawing to a close, and that death can be something they can accept without fear, their relief in discovering this is offset by their family’s and friends’ refusal or inability to share that knowledge with them. It is a very natural fear after all, the fear of death, and in western civilisations it’s a fear that is strengthened by the taboo surrounding the whole subject of death. I want to share this with you, Georgy. Selfishly, perhaps. I know what you went through when you lost your parents...’

‘I’m afraid of losing you,’ Georgia admitted. ‘Afraid of being alone...’ As she spoke the words, the emotions she had been fighting so hard to control overwhelmed her, and with them came the tears she had not previously allowed herself to cry, seeing them as a sign of weakness, of defeat.

When she finally left her aunt’s bedside, she told herself that she was finally coming to accept that her aunt’s life was drawing to its end, and yet she knew that, deep within her, one stubborn childish part of her was still protesting, objecting, begging fate to intervene and to arrange a miracle for her. For her, she noted inwardly—not for her aunt, but for her.

She had spent far longer than usual at the hospice and, when she finally got back to the cottage in the middle of the afternoon, the first thing she saw was Mitch Fletcher’s car parked outside. He himself was seated inside it, a briefcase on the seat beside him, while he was apparently engrossed in some paperwork.

‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised shortly. ‘I...I was delayed.’ The trauma of the morning had made her virtually forget that she had agreed he could move in earlier than they had originally arranged, her guilt adding to the already heavy burden of negative feelings he seemed to arouse inside her.

‘No problem,’ he told her easily. ‘As you can see, I’ve managed to keep myself fairly well occupied. That was something I ought to have asked you, by the way: I do tend to bring work home with me—something they weren’t too keen on in the hotel. Do you mind?’

Georgia started to shake her head, knowing that, the more time he spent occupied with his business affairs, the less she was likely to see of him. ‘As you know, I work at home myself, sometimes in the evening as well as during the day.’

He paused in the act of getting out of his car, giving her a thoughtful, ironic look, which immediately changed to a frown as he focused properly on her. ‘Been giving you a bad time, has he?’ he asked her drily.