Naive Awakening

‘Stop being so miserable,’ Freddie said, turning to her with a frown.

‘I’m not being miserable. I just miss all the open space.’

‘I don’t.’

‘I know you don’t. You’re like a little boy at Christmas-time!’

They laughed and she put her arm around him, noticing with amusement how he edged out of her embrace. Sisterly cuddles were taboo with him, especially sisterly cuddles administered in public.

She was looking around for Nicholas, when she heard his deep voice from behind her.

‘So I see you managed to find your way here all right.’

She swung around, blushing as the grey eyes ran over her, feeling oddly as though his scrutiny was stripping her of her clothing.

‘Yes. No problem at all.’ She was here now, and she would be polite, but there was no reason why she should be friendly. She couldn’t forget those thinly veiled insinuations that she was irresponsible when it came to Freddie, and a potential gold-digger who would be given a job if the alternative was her sponging off their hospitality.

‘Good.’ He picked up the cases as though they weighed nothing at all and began striding away. Leigh hurried behind him, clutching her hat, oddly mesmerised by his easy, graceful walk. There was nothing clumsy or cumbersome about him. In fact, from behind, he could well pass for an athlete of some kind.

He was chatting to Freddie, answering all his excited questions, getting along with him as though they had known each other for years. Obviously his hostility did not extend to her brother.

She would, she thought, have to have a serious word with him about being careful not to let London go to his head, and to remember that he was a country lad at heart. The last thing she wanted was for him to change.

The gleaming Jaguar seemed to fill Freddie with as much reverential awe as it had the last time he had seen it.

‘It’s just a car, Freddie,’ Leigh commented, halting his monologue on its engine capacity in mid-flow, and missing Nicholas’s raised eyebrow. ‘Metal on four wheels, designed to get you from A to B.’ She slid into the front seat and strapped herself in, inwardly admiring the walnut dashboard and the deep, luxurious seats.

‘A lot of women would be very impressed by this particular piece of metal on four wheels,’ Nicholas murmured, as he started the engine. His eyes slid along to her face, and Leigh purposefully ignored both him and the little leap of her pulse.

‘Really?’ she said, gazing with mixed feelings through the window. ‘I can’t see why. As far as I’m concerned, the last thing that would impress me about a man would be his car. Or, for that matter, the sort of house he lived in, or the kind of clothes he wore. All that’s superficial and doesn’t say a thing about the kind of person he is.’ So, she wanted to add, you needn’t worry that I’m after your money.

‘And have you been impressed by any men?’

Leigh frowned and didn’t answer, because as far as she was concerned it was none of his business whatsoever.

‘No,’ Freddie chipped in from the back seat, ‘she hasn’t had a boyfriend for ages, since she broke up with Dean Stanley, in fact.’

‘I’ll thank you to not go broadcasting my private affairs to all and sundry,’ she snapped. ‘You’re not too old to rediscover the meaning of punishment.’

Freddie made a face at her and resumed his attention to what they were passing, and Nicholas, she was annoyed to see, was looking vaguely amused by the interchange.

‘Anyway,’ she said in a honeyed voice, ‘is that why you drive this? So that you can impress girls?’

‘I don’t go out with girls,’ he replied, not at all disconcerted by her sarcasm, ‘I go out with women. And I don’t need to impress them with a car.’

Leigh refused to ask him what sort of things he used to impress them. There was an intonation to his voice, something soft and insinuating, that sent her mind racing and she firmly slapped it right back into place.

He took them a circuitous route, on Freddie’s pleading, pointing out all the sights to them, and still with that very slight edge of amusement to his voice, which went completely over Freddie’s head, but didn’t go over hers one bit.

After a while, though, she found herself listening to what he was saying, and actually enjoying his amusing descriptions of the buildings and landmarks. He had a dry wit which made her chuckle on a couple of occasions, even though she reminded herself that she didn’t care for him, or, for that matter, what he represented.

It was slightly over an hour later when the car pulled through the heavy gates which led on to the small courtyard in front of the house. The gardens were not massive—Leigh supposed that in London land was at a premium—but the house made up for that. It was enormous, the impressive frontage studded with numerous leaded windows.

Freddie whistled under his breath, and she said wryly, ‘I can see that there won’t be a shortage of space here. Do you realise that your house is bigger than the one hotel in our village?’

‘I thought you weren’t impressed by outward trappings.’

‘I’m not,’ she retorted, rising to his bait, ‘I’m merely stating a fact. Do you and your grandfather live here alone?’

‘Most of the year. My parents come over for two months every winter, and there are several people who help look after the house and garden.’

The Jaguar pulled up outside the front door, and Leigh stepped outside, her hat clutched firmly in both hands, her head thrown back as she studied the grandeur of the place. She had not bothered to tie her hair back and it fell down her back, silken copper set ablaze by the sun.

Nicholas had stopped a few feet behind her. He shook his head, as if clearing it of some niggling thought, and brushed past her, opening the front door which had been double locked.

At once there was an oldish man there, waiting to take their cases, and another middle-aged woman hovering in the background, waiting to show them to their re-spective bedrooms.

Leigh would have preferred to stay where she was for a while, and admire the house, if house was the right word. The décor was impeccable, all shades of white and cream, with just enough colour from the pictures on the walls and the huge pots of flowering plants to stop it from sliding into blandness.

A huge winding staircase, stripped with deep burgundy carpeting, ran to the upstairs bedrooms, and probably continued further. She knew, from the outside of the house, that there were three floors. Three floors of rooms all sumptuously decorated.

Freddie had snatched up his two cases and was taking the stairs two by two, overtaking the maid. He disappeared from sight, and Leigh turned to Nicholas, who had been observing her from a distance.

‘I don’t think I’ve managed,’ she almost choked on the words, ‘to thank you and of course your grandfather for kindly asking us here. Freddie’s delighted at the prospect of going to college for his course.’

‘And I gather from your tone of voice that you still haven’t worked yourself up to sharing his enthusiasm?’

‘No,’ she replied stiffly, thinking that it was difficult to become excited over emotional blackmail.

‘You could always have stayed in Yorkshire, you know, and made do with your rambling cottage which would have progressively eaten up more and more of your money, and your job at the library which just paid enough to keep the food on the table.’

‘You might as well know, I wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for Freddie.’

‘But you are, aren’t you?’ he countered smoothly. The grey eyes swept over her with cool calculation. ‘And you can stop acting as though you’re the only one who’s suffering a change of lifestyle. As I said, the only reason I bailed your brother out was because of my grandfather.’

‘Are you trying to say that you don’t want us around?’

‘I’m trying to say that you’ve been rescued from a difficult situation, and…’

‘I should be grateful,’ she finished for him. She felt all her good intentions to be polite with this man draining away from her. Yet again.

‘Shouldn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said tightly. Grateful, she added silently, for being in a gilded cage, because she was caged—trapped by a situation over which all control had been removed from her.

‘I don’t expect gratitude, Leigh,’ he said in a hard voice, ‘but I do expect you to stop acting like a martyr all of the time. Now perhaps you’d like to go upstairs and freshen up?’

‘Perhaps I would,’ she agreed, stinging from his reprimand, but knowing that she had more less provoked him into it. ‘Where is my room?’