Worthy Of Marriage

Grey moved to an antique cupboard, the upper half containing glasses and bottles, the lower concealing a small fridge. He brought her a crystal goblet with ice cubes floating in the fruit juice. Rather than handing it to her, he placed it on the end table of the sofa which his mother had indicated her guest should share with her.

‘Thank you.’ Lucia wondered if he felt that physical contact with her, even of the most fleeting kind, might contaminate him. He had probably never had to socialise with an ex-prisoner before.

She had always known there would be people who would consider her unfit to mix in polite society. That was inevitable. She just hadn’t expected to encounter that attitude on her first day outside.

‘What were the meals like in prison?’ Rosemary Calderwood asked. ‘Like boarding school food, I imagine…lots of stodge and over-cooked vegetables.’

Lucia nodded. ‘Chips with everything and not enough salad. But then prison isn’t supposed to be like a pleasure cruise.’

‘No, but they should feed people properly. You look as if you’re several pounds under your proper weight. We’ll soon put that right. Both Braddy and I are excellent cooks and we have a big kitchen garden so our vegetables haven’t been grown under plastic and spent days being transported to a supermarket. I’m a bit of a health freak. My children tease me about it, but I do most strongly believe we are what we eat.’

Obviously aware of the antagonism between her son and her protégée, Rosemary kept a conversation going with the skill of an accomplished hostess. From time to time she forced her son to take part with a question or comment that he was obliged to respond to. Lucia was glad to pick up the cues she gave her. If it hadn’t been for Grey’s presence, she would have been in heaven.

The elegant room, with its paintings, antiques, oriental rugs and bowls of freshly-cut flowers from the garden outside was balm to her beauty-starved senses.

Presently they moved to the dining room where three places had been laid at the end of a long polished table.

Grey drew out the chair at the end for his mother. Lucia seated herself. Then Mrs Bradley came in with the first course, a dish of grilled aubergines garnished with chopped herbs and crumbled feta cheese.

‘Will you have some wine?’ Grey asked, after pouring a pale golden liquid into his mother’s glass.

Lucia decided one glass would be OK. ‘Yes, please.’

He moved round the table, standing close to her chair, making her strangely conscious of his nearness, his masculinity. Was it only because she was used to an almost exclusively female environment? The prison doctor and the chaplain were the only men she had seen during her time inside.

Compared with the fare provided since her arrest, the aubergines were almost unbearably delicious. Then came the cutlets, decorated with strips of red pepper and served with a bulghur wheat salad containing diced cucumber, chopped spring onions, toasted pine nuts and fresh mint. The tapenade mentioned earlier turned out to be the black olive paste smeared on the cutlets.

While they were eating, Grey suddenly asked her, ‘Are you wearing a PID?’

Before Lucia, startled by this abrupt return to hostilities, could answer him, his mother said, ‘What is a PID?’

‘Ms Graham will explain,’ said Grey, eyeing her with undisguised dislike.

‘PID stands for Personal Identification Device,’ Lucia said evenly. ‘It’s about the size of a diver’s watch, but it can be attached to the ankle as well as the wrist. It sends a signal to a radio receiver called a Home Monitoring Unit. If the monitor can’t detect the signal, it sends a message to the Monitoring Centre where records are kept of offenders and their curfew orders. It’s a way of keeping a check on people who, like me, have been released early.’

She had been speaking to Mrs Calderwood, but now looked directly at her son. ‘But I’m not wearing one, Mr Calderwood. They must have thought it wasn’t necessary. I haven’t been given any curfew instructions.’

‘Possibly not, but I think you will find that you’re not completely at liberty,’ he said sternly. ‘It’s unlikely the conditions of your release will permit you to leave the country. If you can’t go abroad, you’re of little use to my mother.’

This was an aspect of the situation that Lucia hadn’t considered. She had a sinking feeling he might be right.

‘That point was raised by Miss Harris when we discussed Lucia’s case,’ said Mrs Calderwood. ‘Luckily I have a friend at court, as they say. Or, rather more usefully in this instance, at the Home Office. He kindly pulled some strings for me. In view of the fact that I was a magistrate for twenty years, it was decided I was a suitable person to supervise Lucia’s life until she is free to go where she pleases. As long as she is with me, there are no restrictions on her movements.’

This announcement made Grey look even more forbidding. Clearly, he had thought he was playing a trump card and was furious to find himself trumped.

Lucia wondered if he also had friends in high places whose influence he could bring to bear. He struck her as a man who, once he had put his mind to something, would not easily be defeated. There was obstinacy, even ruthlessness, in the jut of his jaw.

The meal ended with a rhubarb compote served with whipped cream.

Forgetting for a moment the constraint imposed by the man on the other side of the table, Lucia said to her hostess, ‘I shall remember this lunch all my life. It was a lovely meal by any standards, but for me…’ She made an expressive gesture.

‘Good: I’m glad you enjoyed it. As it’s such a warm day, let’s have coffee on the terrace, shall we? Then I’ll take you round the garden. Since all the children left home, gardening has been my principal occupation,’ Rosemary told her. ‘But now I’m beginning to find that I can’t kneel and bend as comfortably as I used to. So I’m turning more and more to painting. The wheel is turning full circle.’

‘After coffee I must be off. I shouldn’t really have skived off,’ said Grey.

Just as Lucia was thinking that the slang expression for evading one’s responsibilities or duties sounded odd coming from him, he glanced at her and she knew he was thinking, But it’s fortunate that I did or I wouldn’t have known about you.

‘You work too hard,’ said his mother. ‘Don’t become like your father…a workaholic. There is more to life than doing business.’

Lucia wasn’t sure what Grey did for his living. It must be something highly profitable if he could afford to spend six-figure sums of money on paintings. At the time of the trial, the tabloids had described him as a ‘tycoon and art connoisseur’ always giving his age, thirty-six, after his name.

As almost the only people who had made vast fortunes at his age were the Internet billionaires, and somehow he didn’t look like Britain’s answer to Bill Gates, it seemed likely he had inherited the fruits of his father’s workaholicism.

The opulence of his parents’ house, and the fact that his mother had spent her life being a homemaker, indicated that Calderwood Senior had been a man of substantial means.

Grey made no comment on his mother’s admonition. Perhaps it was one he had heard many times before and didn’t take seriously. He gave the impression of being a man who would always do what he thought best, regardless of advice.

He was one of those people—Lucia had met a few others—who came over as being propelled by a strong driving force. But what form his took and where it was driving him, she didn’t yet know. Most likely it was money or power, or both. Those seemed to be the two most common motivations among the male sex. She preferred creative people…artists, musicians, poets. Grey probably looked at paintings as investments rather than food for the spirit.

The stone-flagged terrace on the south side of the house was furnished with comfortable cane chairs and loungers. As she sipped her coffee, Lucia would have liked to lie back and snooze.

It had been a taxing day: being released, then being whisked away on a magical mystery tour, then crossing swords with Grey had made it stressful as well as memorable. She had hardly slept last night. Now she was finding it hard to keep her eyes open…

Driving back to London, Grey blamed himself for not foreseeing and averting his mother’s ill-conceived plan to help the Graham girl find her feet.

His part in bringing the fraudsters to justice had worried her. He loved his mother and his sisters, but they were all the same; sentimental liberal do-gooders who could find excuses for everything except cruelty to animals and children and crimes against humanity. And even in those cases they were inclined to look for reasons why the perpetrators had done what they’d done.

Grey didn’t belong to the pity-the-victims-of-society brigade. He didn’t regard himself a hard man, but he was a realist. At the time of the trial he had felt no regret for being instrumental in exposing a scam, helping to stop it and seeing the culprits suitably punished.

Now, having met Lucia, he was a good deal less comfortable with the thought of what she had been through.

He remembered how she had looked in the bath and how, to increase his annoyance, he had found himself aroused by the sight of her breasts. At first, as she lay submerged, they had floated like two pale islands with rose-coloured crests. Then, as she sat up in a hurry, they had changed shape and, for a fleeting moment before she concealed them with her forearms and the sponge, formed two exquisite half-spheres that had instantly triggered a strong reaction in his groin.

Perversely, the fact that her body excited him had made him snarl at her even more fiercely than he had intended. Had her alluring looks made her the target for advances from the tough, amoral, sexually frustrated women who were bound to be found among any prison’s inmates and possibly among those who ran such places?

The fact that Lucia was what his mother’s peer group called ‘a lady’ would have made her even more of a target for the kind of prisoner or warder who resented people whose lives had been more privileged than theirs.

He had an unpleasant vision of Lucia being locked up in a cell with hardened and unscrupulous criminals from whom she would have no escape. The picture revolted and enraged him to the extent that, several minutes later, he realised he had unconsciously increased his pressure on the throttle to the extent that the car was streaking down the overtaking lane at well beyond the motorway limit.

Reducing speed, he switched his mind to matters that had nothing to do with the girl who, when last seen, had fallen into a deep sleep.

‘She’s exhausted, poor child. Let’s leave her and go for a stroll,’ his mother had whispered.

Later, saying goodbye to him, she had said, ‘You aren’t cross with me for putting you down before lunch, are you? Your father would have been furious, but I don’t think your ego is quite as large or as sensitive as his was, thank goodness. Although I loved him, I didn’t always like him, you know. We were never the friends and equals that married people should be…that I hope you and your wife, when you find her, will be.’

The truth, though he hadn’t admitted it, was that he had been angry when, in front of the two other women, she had told him off for being dictatorial. But he could never be angry with her for long. Many times, when he was feeling his oats and before he had learnt how to handle his domineering father, she had averted clashes between them. He knew she had paid a high price for loving a man who, though he claimed to worship her, had expected her to conform to his idea of the perfect wife and never allowed her the freedom to adapt that role to her own needs.

Grey knew she was longing for him to emulate his sisters by marrying and starting a family. He didn’t think that was going to happen. He had enjoyed a number of relationships with women, but he had never met one who tempted him to give up his freedom. He didn’t think he ever would.