Naive Awakening

‘I’ll show you up.’ He started up the stairs, and Leigh followed him.

Everything about him, his movements, his speech, that watchful, cool air about him, spelt power and self-assurance, and just a hint of arrogance. He was so totally different from all those boys she had been out with in the past. So totally different from her, she conceded. She would do well to remember that.

He began talking to her about his grandfather, telling her how much he had changed after the death of his wife years ago. ‘He hardly ever leaves the house,’ Nicholas said. ‘He says that he’s simply counting down to the day when he’ll no longer be around. He comes down for meals, and he uses the library on the ground floor a lot, and that’s really about it.’

Leigh thought that it was a shame. Her own grand-father had been full of beans right up to the end. Even in those last few weeks, when his illness had made getting around difficult, he had still insisted on taking his walks, on keeping as active as he possibly could.

Her bedroom was on the top floor, along with Freddie’s. Nicholas pushed open the door, and she stepped inside. Her bags had been brought up and were on the floor next to the gigantic old wardrobe. All the furniture in the bedroom, in fact, was old, from the dressing-table and chairs, to the bureau sitting next to the tall, leaded window, and, of course, the four-poster bed.

‘It’s wonderful,’ she breathed, forgetting his presence temporarily and padding across the floor, her hands trailing along the furniture, her eyes taking in absolutely everything. A small en-suite bathroom had been added at some later stage, and had been fitted out in colours of apricot and green, with matching bath towels.

Nicholas had been lounging by the door, and now he walked into the room and looked around it briefly.

‘It’s home.’ He shrugged and walked across to the window. ‘I suppose I’ve become used to it.’

‘I suppose you would,’ Leigh said drily, ‘although you wouldn’t, if you had any inkling of the hardship that a lot of people have to endure. I know some people who have slaved all their lives, working the pits, or toiling in factories, and for all their hard work they will never be able to know what it is to have this sort of comfort. The problem with wealth is that it cushions you against all of life’s unpleasantness, doesn’t it?’

‘Does it? Don’t you think that that’s a little bit of a generalisation? Why don’t you stop dividing people into categories, and start realising that everyone has something to offer?’

‘That’s unfair! I don’t divide people into categories.’

Nicholas moved to where she was, and before she could escape to some other, safer part of the room he was standing next to her, far too close for comfort.

‘You,’ he said, coiling his fingers into her long, unruly hair and tilting her head to face him, ‘have got to be the most argumentative, stubborn woman I have ever met in my life. And I’ve met my fair share of women.’

Leigh stared at his dark, handsome face in silence. She wanted to fire back with a retort. In normal circumstances she could hold her own in any argument, was rarely at a loss for words, but somehow her mouth had managed to go dry and wouldn’t do what she wanted it to.

She had a swift feeling of giddiness, and then she blinked and reality returned.

‘Believe me, the last thing I’m interested in is the number of women in your life!’

Her heart was beating heavily, and she could feel her hands clammy and tightly clenched at her sides. She just wanted to get away from this man. He was overpowering her.

There was a knock on the door, and Freddie bounded in. Nicholas released her abruptly, and her moment of confusion and alarm was over.

She retreated to her suitcases, which she began dumping on the bed, and chatted to Freddie, her words spilling over each other as she tried to shove the effect that Nicholas had had on her to the back of her mind.

Freddie was in high spirits. He wanted to do everything, see everything, yesterday. He had already unpacked, which meant that he had thrown all his clothes into the nearest available drawers and cupboards, and was now raring to go. He somehow managed to persuade Nicholas to take him to Piccadilly Circus, which he had heard about, on the Underground of course, and Leigh couldn’t resist a grin as she tried to picture Nicholas squashed in the middle of a crowded train.

‘Nicholas probably has to return to work,’ she said, trying to wipe the smile off her face.

This thought had obviously not crossed Freddie’s mind. ‘Oh,’ he said, deflated, ‘can’t you take the day off?’

‘Freddie!’

‘It’s all right, Freddie. I already have, and it’s just as well that you become acquainted with London as soon as possible.’

Freddie bounded back out of the room, an excitable puppy whose energy left Leigh feeling exhausted, and Nicholas turned to her.

‘I don’t suppose you’ll share the joke with me?’

‘Joke? What joke?’

‘The one you were grinning at a few minutes ago.’

Leigh blew a strand of her hair from her face, and said obligingly, ‘I will, actually. I was trying to imagine you on the Underground, with elbows and newspapers sticking into you, like a sardine in a tin.’

‘I see,’ Nicholas said thoughtfully. ‘Well, I find it equally hilarious to picture you on the Underground, sticky and uncomfortable and moaning about how much you’d wished you’d stayed in Yorkshire.’

‘Just as well as I’m not coming with you, then, isn’t it,’ she replied tartly, ‘so you’ll have to forgo the opportunity to laugh at me?’

Once he was out of the room, she ran a hot bath and settled into the suds with delicious enjoyment.

Over the past fortnight, she had barely had time to think, and now, in the silence of the room, her mind played around all the quickfire sequence of events that had occurred recently. It was unbelievable. Plucked from her rural home town and catapulted into London, and not just London, but the London champagne set, because she knew without being told that that was where Nicholas belonged.

It was like Cinderella at the ball, she thought, but an unwilling Cinderella without the fancy dress. She was the plain-clothed, plain-speaking rustic in a world which no doubt operated on various levels of innuendo and subterfuge.

She had as yet met none of his friends, and it was an experience which she was not looking forward to.

She wondered whether they would all be like Nicholas. The men all tall, and debonair, and the women sophisticated and bursting with savoir faire.

It was hard to imagine anyone quite like him, but maybe that was simply because she had never moved in this sort of world.

A sudden thought struck her: had she brought the right sort of clothes? Flowered print dresses, sandals and jeans might be all right in her small home town, but would they look out of place here? She mentally shrugged and decided that people could take her as they found her; she certainly didn’t intend losing much sleep over it.

Later on, when she was dressing for dinner, she looked dubiously at her wardrobe once again, finding it slightly more difficult this time to dismiss the thought that the things she had brought with her really were a bit on the well-worn side.

She had somehow not managed to do any shopping for the past few months, none at all in fact since the death of her grandfather, and a lot of her stuff seemed that touch faded. Of course, it didn’t matter one jot, she told herself defiantly, choosing a green uncluttered dress to wear that evening. She was meeting Sir John and she wanted to look just right.

Nicholas was eating out, and wasn’t going to be in until later, probably when they were having coffee.

Just as well, she thought, staring at her face in the mirror, wondering whether to put on any make-up and deciding against it. She was too sensitive to his presence to really relax with him.

Sir John was waiting for her in the sitting-room when she went down a few minutes later. Leigh introduced Freddie, and as the old man chatted to him she took the opportunity to observe him.

She barely remembered him. He couldn’t have been much older than her grandfather, but he certainly looked it. There were lines of resignation and disappointment around his mouth and his eyes were faded and blue as though he had spent years looking at things that he found depressing.

He turned to her and began talking.

Even his voice, she thought ruefully, was thin and strained. He apologised for not meeting them sooner, ‘But my doctor doesn’t like me exerting myself. I tend to spend a lot of time reading, or resting.’

It didn’t sound like a very healthy lifestyle to her, but she nodded politely and moved the conversation on to other things. She chatted about her grandfather, with Freddie butting in every two minutes with anecdotes which were only just on the right side of risqué, and after a while the old man began to look slightly more animated.

‘He was a rogue in his youth, that old Jacob,’ Sir John said whimsically.

Leigh laughed, throwing her head back, ‘He was a rogue in his maturity as well, Sir John, believe me.’

‘He drove the women crazy,’ Freddie said with a grin.