A Suitable Mistress

‘I thought you were working with that firm of accountants in the town,’ he said, and she shrugged and looked away.

‘I packed it in when Dad died.’ She had been so utterly miserable, and studying to qualify as an accountant—something of which her father had been so proud—had suddenly seemed trivial and meaningless. She had never been entirely sure that that was what she had wanted to do, and without her father’s encouragement she had been gripped by the thought that it was a career which had found her rather than the other way around. She had always been clever with figures and she had settled into accountancy the way that some people settle into marriage—because it was convenient.

‘Why?’

‘Because I wanted to leave the area. Is that a good enough explanation for you? Or would you like to pursue it further?’ She had had a plan, she thought defensively. Where had it gone? How could it have evaporated so quickly, like mist? How could she have ended up like a lost soul wandering in a fog, when she had started out with such determination?

‘And you think that he would have been happy to see you living like this?’ He looked around him at the scrappy room, with its sad, faded rug in front of the fireplace and skirting-boards which were in desperate need of a lick of paint. The bare essentials were so in need of repair that they sabotaged her every effort to make the bedsit into something warm and comfortable. The most she could achieve was neatness.

‘What have you come here for?’ she asked abruptly.

‘I wanted to offer my condolences personally to you, and I admit I was worried when they told me that you had walked out of the company.’

‘So you decided to fit me into your schedule. Big of you,’ she said acidly. Shame, she thought, that he had never been big enough to see that her father got a fair deal working for his stepmother. Shame that he hadn’t been big enough to listen to her father when he’d started getting tired for no reason. Shame that he hadn’t been big enough to let him retire in that cottage, instead of allowing his stepmother to imply that once the old man could no longer function he would have to move out and make way for someone who could.

The threat of having nowhere to live had been enough to keep her father on his toes, when in fact he should have been resting far more than he had been.

She swallowed down the great lump of resentment in her and stared down into the cup of lukewarm tea. The milk was gathering itself into a fine brown film. She inspected the film with minute concentration.

‘Shall I continue to ignore your acid little rejoinders, Suzie, or would you be happier if I gave in and indulged your desire to have a blazing row over nothing?’

‘Nothing!’ Her head shot up at that one and she looked at him with savage dislike. ‘How dare you sit here and say that? I’ve lost the only person in my life who has ever meant anything to me and you call that nothing? That stepmother of yours treated him like a workhorse and you call that nothing? He was old and frail and he should have had the dignity of being able to enjoy the rest of his days in that cottage of yours, without thinking that if he stopped lugging ladders and walking poodles he would no longer have a roof over his head.’

He stood up and walked across to the window and stared out, and although she couldn’t see the set of his face she could tell by the rigidity of his shoulders that he was angry.

‘I don’t like what you’re implying here,’ he said with disarming softness, turning round to face her. The light behind him threw his face into shadows and lent it an air of dark menace.

‘Then you’re free to leave.’ She nodded in the direction of the door and she was perversely pleased when he remained where he was, because, for the first time in the six months since her father had died, she was shouting, and glad to be shouting.

‘He loved your father,’ she threw at him. ‘Why do you think he continued working there, even when your father remarried three years ago? Why do you think he stayed there after your father died?’

‘I have been out of the country for nearly three years,’ Dane said in a controlled voice that didn’t quite manage to hide the undercurrent of anger and impatience at her accusations. ‘I had it on my stepmother’s word that everything at the house was fine.’

‘And that was the extent of your interest in the place?’ she asked bitterly. ‘And how thrilled your dad would have been with that!’

He moved more quickly than she could have expected. One minute he was standing there at the window, and the next minute he was leaning over her, his hands resting on either side of the chair.

‘Now you listen to me, my girl,’ he said tersely. ‘I haven’t come here to have an argument with you. Nor have I come here to be attacked for things I knew nothing of.’

‘In three years you never returned once to see for yourself how everything was, to check and make sure that people were happy!’

‘I had my reasons,’ he said grimly, still leaning over her, so that she began to feel something else mingling with her anger—something faint and disturbing which made her even more angry because she didn’t want to feel it.

She had been through that childish, excited infatuation with Dane Sutherland, and she had been disabused of it in no uncertain terms. She had no intention of letting dead embers re-ignite.

He might stand there and plead innocence to everything she said, but he must have known what was going on at Chadwick House. He must have known about the loyal help who had been sacked virtually the day after his father had died. He must have known of the promises made by his father to his workers, which had never been kept.

Old Mr Sutherland had promised her father the cottage. A gentleman’s agreement, because although her father had been his employee the two had been comrades—old friends who would sit and have a cup of tea and lament the passing of time with the shared memories of old men.

Dane must have known that his stepmother had put paid to any such agreement not five months after her husband had died. He must have known because Dane Sutherland was an intelligent man, frighteningly intelligent, and, after all, the house was his. She couldn’t believe, whatever he said, that he had cut himself off so completely from his past.

‘What the hell are you doing here, Suzie?’ he asked, straightening up and giving her time to compose her face and get her nervous system back in order again.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ he said, sitting down on the sofa and crossing his legs, one ankle over his knee, ‘you’re a highly intelligent girl. You could have gone to university, but you chose to stay close to your father and apprentice in a company instead. You were doing damned well at it. So why did you throw it all in and move to London?’

‘You forget,’ she replied coolly, ‘that I no longer had a roof over my head. Your stepmother made it crystal-clear that she wanted the cottage back and the sooner I cleared out of it the better.’

‘Dammit, Suzie, you should have written to me in New York.’ He raked his fingers through his hair—a restless, impatient gesture that she could remember him making even as a teenager. Whenever he was angry over something. Her brother had tried to cultivate it, but somehow he had never managed to convey the same magnetic, effortless charm.

‘Thank you,’ she said politely, ‘but I haven’t resorted to asking for charity as yet. Besides, I couldn’t honestly imagine a worse hell than living in the vicinity of your stepmother.’

She thought of Martha Sutherland with distaste. Brassy blonde and, at thirty-two, less than half the age of the man she had married. She was the sort of woman whose nails were always impeccably varnished in red, and who never set foot out of the house without being sure that everything about her co-ordinated.

‘So you threw away your future and moved into a grimy bedsit in London instead.’

‘You don’t understand,’ she snapped.

‘I understand better than you think.’

‘After seeing me for the first time in years and after only forty-five minutes. What a genius you must be at reading other people’s characters.’

She hated this conversation and she wished that she could just take refuge in some of that uneaten chocolate lying in her bag. Then, for the first time since he had entered the room, she wondered what he must think, seeing her now. Seeing how much she had changed physically. She knew that he had never found her attractive; she just wasn’t his type—too tall, too gauche, too dark-haired—but what must he think of her now? Overweight, hair unflatteringly pulled back, dressed in dark colours which she knew did nothing for her—somehow she had lost the will to dress with any attempt at style.

She shoved aside the temptation to reach for her bag and extract the chocolate and contented herself with glaring at him.

‘What are you doing for money?’ he asked, looking at her with lazy speculation.

‘I have a job,’ she said sullenly. ‘I’ve been temping since I moved down here.’ She linked her fingers on her lap and frowned. Now that she had begun thinking about the changes he must see in her—all for the worse—she found that she couldn’t stop herself. She was acutely aware that her once flat stomach was not so flat as it had been, that her legs and thighs were filling out her trousers in a way that implied that if she continued snacking off bars of chocolate she would soon find herself moving up a size in clothes. Again.

‘Doing what, exactly?’

‘Doing whatever pays the rent. Exactly.’

‘But nothing to do with accountancy.’

‘I resent your criticisms,’ she told him resentfully. ‘You have no right to march in here and start telling me what I’m doing wrong with my life. Your zeal to do good would have been far more useful a year ago. In fact, it might have saved my father’s life.’

A heavy silence greeted this, but he was saved from having to say anything because someone knocked at the door and she leapt to her feet, carefully keeping her eyes firmly averted from his face.

It never paid to antagonise Dane Sutherland too much. He was a controlled person but when he was angry he could be immensely frightening. Once, when Dane was fifteen, the school bully had made the mistake, never again repeated, of making some sly, sneering remark about old Mr Sutherland. Dane hadn’t raised a finger. He hadn’t had to. He had just gone very close to him and said something which, hovering on the sidelines with two of her friends, she had not heard, but which had been enough to scare Tim Chapman into complete silence.

Thinking about it, she realised that he hadn’t bullied anyone again after that. In fact, when she’d last laid eyes on him he’d been a rather harassed father of four working at the garage outside town. Rumour had it that his wife took his money off him as soon as it landed in his hands and then doled it out to him as she saw fit.

She was almost relieved to see her landlady standing outside with her hands on her hips and a belligerent expression on her face. Almost, but not quite. The rent was, for once, late and money was, as always, thin on the ground.

‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you for the past four days,’ Mrs Gentry said, in that voice of hers which sent shivers of apprehension down her tenants’ spines, even when they had done nothing wrong.