Encounters

‘You are on another planet?’

‘Oh, I see!’ Embarrassed, Annette looked back at Celia, still standing near the door, the child in the crook of her arm. Then she laughed. ‘I’m sorry. I was thinking about the baby.’

‘Very appropriate at a christening.’ He smiled again. ‘I’m Rick Jefferson; your colleague in the godparent stakes.’ He captured her empty wine glass and filled it from the bottle in his hand, expertly fielding the slopping liquid as someone jostled him from behind.

Suddenly she felt more cheerful; she smiled. ‘Of course. I’m sorry. I’m being very rude, I’m Annette.’

He grinned again. ‘Can I fetch you something to eat? Say yes. Then I can put down this bottle and pick up a glass of my own when I go to the table.’

He wasn’t very tall; not much taller than she. But his shoulders were broad and his frame solid. She found herself giggling at his pantomime of self starvation. ‘I’d love something to eat. Thank you.’

‘And you won’t fly back to Mars or Venus or wherever?’

‘Promise.’

She watched him thread his way across the room towards the long table. He paused near Celia and she saw him smile and touch the baby’s hand – then he moved on. He collected a glass and two plates of food, and she saw him turning back in her direction.

‘All alone?’

Suddenly Duncan was standing in front of her. She felt her throat contract a little as she looked up at his face. Could she have so soon forgotten how tall he was?

‘Rick is fetching me something to eat. She’s a lovely baby, Duncan.’

He was looking down at her intently. ‘Annette. You really didn’t mind us asking you to be godmother? It was Celia’s idea –’

‘Of course not.’ She forced herself to smile. ‘I’m honoured.’ And she turned to Rick, reaching with relief for the plate he offered her. For a moment the three of them stood there in silence. Then Duncan smiled and shrugged and walked away …

Later, as she and Rick let themselves out of the French window, there was a breath of summer in the garden and a soft evening shimmer in the air.

Annette shivered, her coat around her shoulders as they slipped out of the hot noisy room.

Rick grinned at her. ‘Are you sure you want to go out?’

Nodding she sipped her wine and stepped onto the grass. ‘I get claustrophobia at parties.’

‘Me too.’ He followed her, leaving his glass balanced carefully on the head of a lichen-covered statue at the edge of the steps. ‘Are you going to tell me about it?’

‘What?’

‘You and Duncan. There was a “you and Duncan” wasn’t there?’

She nodded, suddenly not minding his knowing. ‘Oh yes. There was a me and Duncan.’

The scent of flowers was almost overwhelming. It had been summer then too. The first time she had come to this house …

Her office door was permanently open, so people walked through it. That was the idea, Annette’s boss said with a laugh and Duncan was the third person to walk through it that morning. By mistake.

He was tall, lean and untidy, wearing a cotton sweatshirt and jeans and quite obviously not in the right place.

He leaned on her desk, towering over her, his hair tousled. He was grinning broadly.

‘I’m on the wrong floor, right?’

She found herself smiling back, drawn irresistibly by the smile.

‘Right. Wrong floor. You’ll be wanting …’ She hesitated, looking him up and down, her head on one side. ‘The architect upstairs?’

He grinned. ‘Try again.’

‘The accountant?’

‘No.’

‘Then it must be the Inland Revenue.’

‘As a humble supplicant and blood donor? No.’

‘But that only leaves the dress designer.’ She collapsed in sudden irreverent giggles.

‘At last, you guessed my secret.’ His solemn expression was belied by the laughing eyes. ‘Don’t I look like a potential customer for a dress designer?’

She shook her head, intrigued and disbelieving. But he did not explain. Not then. He did that over lunch.

‘Black sheep?’ She put down her knife and fork, her voice sliding up into a squeak.

‘Five hundred of them.’

‘And Kevin Spiggs uses your wool?’

‘That’s right. His dusky dream range!’

She was very late back to the office.

‘Can you believe it, Meg? He breeds black sheep. And Kevin upstairs is going to take all his wool for a season to make sweaters and dresses and sell them for hundreds of pounds each!’

Meg raised her eyes to the concealed lighting of the low ceiling above the desk. ‘Only you, Annette, could meet a sheep breeder here in St James’s! And I suppose you are going to see him again?’

She was.

Two weeks later he took her to the farm. It was a long drive and she was tired but the countryside enchanted her. Soft rolling hills, stands of oak and birch, green and silver in the sunlight and then the sheep – not black so much as chocolate and mocha in the soft meadows.

‘I can’t get involved, Annette. I’m sorry.’ The boyish grin, the rumpled hair as he strode at her side through the mud beneath the trees cushioned the words and made them light and easy to ignore. They laughed together so much, finished sentences for each other without even realizing it, liked the same music in the evening as they sat together on the sofa hearing the distant fluting of an owl above the soft notes of the woodwind.

His arm was around her shoulders, drawing her to him; he was solid and warm and reassuring and she was already half-way to being in love. Later, upstairs on the landing, he kissed her goodnight outside her bedroom door, then placed his finger against her lips as she tried to speak. ‘No, Annette. I told you. Sleep well, my love.’ And he was gone, leaving her lonely and disappointed as she let herself into the dark room and groped for the unaccustomed light switch.

They began to make it a pattern. Duncan would come up to Kevin’s office on a Friday, fill in time until five o’clock then together they would climb into his car and wend the long agonizing route through the heavy traffic towards the west. Sometimes they bought chips on the way; sometimes she made sandwiches. Once in a while they listened to the car radio but more often they talked. They talked about everything. Life. Work. Holidays; and sheep. But never about love.

Yet she knew he loved her. It showed in his eyes; in his hesitant glances when he thought she wasn’t looking. In the deep, lasting kisses when they lay together on the sofa, listening to the records they had brought with them from town, and finally and ecstatically in his tender lovemaking when at last he followed her into the now familiar bedroom and took her in his arms …