Power Games

‘But you haven’t finished your meal,’ Bram protested.

‘I…I’m not very hungry,’ he heard Taylor reply. ‘And besides, it’s…it’s getting dark and…’

Had she been another woman, a different woman, he might have been tempted to tease her a little about her reaction—an overreaction—but because he could sense how genuinely agitated and upset she was, Bram held his tongue.

‘Let me at least get you a taxi,’ he offered quietly. ‘As you say, it is getting dark. My fault, I’m afraid. I was enjoying the self-indulgence of talking about myself so much that I hadn’t realised the time. You’re a very good listener,’ he added warmly.

‘I…I really must go.’

She was avoiding looking directly at him, Bram recognised.

‘And…I prefer to use my own taxi firm, if you don’t mind. The drivers are all women…and…’

It was obvious to Bram that she didn’t like having to disclose even little pieces of personal information. But why? Did she feel that he would mock her, make fun of her for her obvious fear? Did she really think he was that kind of man, so crass and insensitive?

Of course, he could understand how any woman might feel wary of entrusting herself to an unknown man. You only had to listen to the news, read the papers….

But Taylor’s fear was more specific than that, he was sure of it. It wasn’t the tentative unknowing fear of a sexually naïve, inexperienced woman, the old-fashioned ‘spinster’ beloved of satirists of another age. No, Taylor’s fear was more specific, more acute than that.

‘Well, let me at least get the maître d’ to call the taxi firm for you,’ Bram suggested gently.

Reluctantly Taylor gave him the number. She knew that he was only trying to be kind…to be helpful; that with Bram, in Bram, she had nothing to fear. But old habits die hard and old fears even harder.

She had let her guard down much too far when she had been listening to him talking about his life. She had been unprepared for his question about the fact that she had left university with her course unfinished.

‘It must have been very hard for you, losing your parents like that,’ he was saying to her now as he walked with her towards the door. ‘I know how badly the deaths of his mother and grandparents affected Jay, although, of course, he was—’

‘Only a child, while I was practically an adult,’ Taylor supplied harshly for him.

‘None of us is ever so mature that we don’t suffer when we lose people we love,’ Bram contradicted her gently. ‘And if you had no other close family to turn to, to share your grief with, then—’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

Bram could hear the panic in her voice, feel it in her tense body as she stood by the door, scanning the traffic for her taxi, desperate to escape from him.

‘You might enjoy dwelling on the past,’ she added fiercely, ‘but I don’t. Nothing can change what happened. Nothing.’

She was perilously close to tears, Bram recognised in concern. He reached out his hand to touch her, to assure her that the last thing he had intended to do was to upset her, but she was already stepping away from him, exclaiming in patent relief, ‘My taxi’s here…I must go….’

A little later, as he made his own way home, Bram pondered on the events of the evening. He hadn’t been lying or exaggerating when he had said to Taylor that she was easy to talk to. She was. When she allowed herself to drop her guard and relax, there was something about her, an air of gentleness, of tranquillity, that invited confidences.

He only wished that he had been able to make her feel as secure and content in his company as he had felt in hers.

Careful, he warned himself. The pendulum that hung so delicately between his sexual desire for her and his emotions, was beginning to swing way, way too far into the emotional sector.

Desiring Taylor physically was something he could control and contain. Loving her…loving her? He started to frown. Now where had that idea…that word with all its connotations come from? He’d have to be a fool to go and let himself do something like loving Taylor. And he wasn’t that…was he?

‘Oh, no. Bram, come and take a look at this. Isn’t it the most garish display you’ve ever seen? Who on earth would ever want to plant anything like that?’ Helena demanded as she drew Bram’s attention to a brilliantly coloured, tightly planted bed of modern annuals.

‘It’s certainly rather colourful,’ Bram agreed mildly.

It had become an annual event, this visit of his and Helena’s to the Chelsea Flower Show, something they had done together ever since their first years as friends. Neither of Helena’s husbands had been interested in horticulture, unlike Bram, who had thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity his fen cottage garden had given him to have a vegetable and salad plot.

Neither the size of his London garden nor the size of his commitment to his business, permitted him that kind of self-indulgence any longer, but he still enjoyed his annual pilgrimage to the mecca, the Holy Grail as it were, of all things horticultural—although, unlike Helena, he chose not to slavishly follow the gardening fads touted by the more up-market papers and magazines.

He had seen gardens filled to the brim with clashing, brilliant colours which had pleased the eye and gladdened the soul in their own ways, just as much as a garden laid out on all the meticulous principles of planting and taste. It all depended upon how you looked at it, Bram mused. On whether one saw the miraculous bounty of a living, growing plant as just that, or felt and saw it as something that had to be rigidly selected and sited. Or whether it was simply nature’s design that filled one with pleasure, or one’s own.

However, he was far too kind to say as much to Helena, who seemed to take it as a personal insult if any of the exhibitors failed to meet her rigorous standards of what was and what was not good taste.

Bram watched her affectionately as she moved forward to examine one of the exhibits more closely, and then, out of the corner of his eye, a familiar face caught his attention. His voice warmed with pleasure and something else that made Helena turn her head and focus in surprise on him as he exclaimed, ‘Taylor!’ Then, ‘Excuse me a moment, would you, Helena, I’ve just seen someone I know.’

Following him as he made his way through the crowd to the tall, red-haired woman who was standing alone, transfixed almost, the expression in her eyes both guarded and anxious as she watched him, Helena started to frown as she realised that Bram’s quarry must be the woman Plum had described to her.

‘She’s far too old for Bram,’ Plum had protested, ‘and not at all pretty.’

Her daughter had been wrong on both counts, Helena recognised, although pretty was perhaps not the best word to describe Taylor. It didn’t do her justice, for one thing. She was beautiful, Helena thought, or rather she had the potential to be, and there was no doubt what Bram thought about her. His pleasure in seeing her was there for all to notice.

After two marriages and a friendship of more than twenty years, Helena had thought that she had finally grown out of her old infatuation with Bram. She had grown out of it, she told herself sternly. Bram was her friend, that was all, and if she did feel slightly wary, slightly suspicious and very cross about the woman he was now talking to, her feelings were merely those of a friend, a concerned and very old friend…that was all.

As she reached Bram’s side, Helena could hear him saying, ‘Look, since you’re obviously here on your own, why don’t you join us. Helena and I were just about to go and have a cup of coffee in the members’ enclosure, weren’t we, Helena?’

Loyally, Helena confirmed this statement, at the same time wondering why on earth Bram was having to work so hard to get the other woman to join them. Normally her sex was the one issuing invitations to Bram, not the other way around. But while she envied Taylor Bram’s obvious interest in her, at the same time she grudgingly approved of the other woman’s demeanour.

Whatever the relationship between them, it obviously wasn’t Taylor who had been pursuing Bram, Helena acknowledged, as Taylor fell reluctantly into step beside her. Beside her, Helena noticed, and not beside Bram.

‘I didn’t realise you were a gardener,’ Bram told Taylor, outmanoeuvring her tactic to avoid being too close to him by changing direction so that he could walk on the other side of her.

‘I’m not,’ Taylor responded shortly. ‘I just like looking….’

Visiting the show was one of her small, very special treats, an annual event she always looked forward to. As a flat dweller she had no garden, and her parents hadn’t been the type to encourage a small child’s enjoyment of growing things, disapproving of the disruption and mess it caused.

‘Which is your favourite stand?’ she heard Bram asking her, his voice taking on a teasing warmth as he coaxed. ‘Come on, it’s all right, you can tell us. I promise we won’t tell if you admit to a predilection for something that isn’t socially acceptable and fashionable.’

‘He’s only saying that because he loves the most appalling displays of overplanted annuals.’ Helena sniffed disparagingly.

‘While you won’t look at anything that isn’t filled with dank, dark topiary and insipid white flowers,’ Bram teased back.

‘I…I like the physic garden,’ Taylor heard herself admitting, ‘and…and the herbs…they’re so…so…’

‘So soothing and healing,’ Bram suggested gently for her.

Taylor gave him a wary look.

‘Yes. That’s part of it…but it’s also the fact that they’ve been grown and used for so many centuries. They’re timeless, eternal. When you think that people, civilisations, were cultivating and using them hundreds upon hundreds of years ago…’ She gave a small expressive shrug.

‘Come on, the members’ enclosure is just over here,’ Bram told them, turning towards Taylor and touching her lightly on the arm as he indicated the direction.

It was the briefest, the most fleeting of touches imaginable, but Helena could see how highly charged with physical and emotional tension it was—both Bram’s and Taylor’s. They weren’t already lovers, she decided intuitively, but if Bram had his way it wouldn’t be long before they were. And Taylor…did she reciprocate his feelings…his desire?