Power Play

She had a quick intelligence and had soon realised that she could never be content with the goals Bernadette and the other girls set themselves. They were happy to drift from day to day, spending their wages on new clothes, dating a different boy every night. They were like the poppies that bloomed in the cornfields in the summer, Rachel thought wryly—pretty and giddy, blowing this way and then that at the will of the wind, but once summer was gone they wilted and died; they could not survive without the sun, without warmth.

“Think you can get me up the stairs?”

Rachel frowned and looked consideringly at him. He wasn’t the first student who had shown an interest in her, and caution warned her to tread carefully.

“I have to get back,” she told him. “I should be at work.”

“You work?”

He said it with such amused condescension that Rachel could feel her skin flushing with resentment.

“Yes,” she told him curtly, “at the King’s Arms.”

“Ah…Yes. I see.”

He was looking at her differently now, consideringly; and Rachel knew what was going through his mind. In her almost teenage uniform of jeans and cotton peasant blouse, her long hair down on her shoulders, he had mistaken her for a fellow student. Now that he knew she was not, he was looking at her in much the same way the village children had regarded her and her contemporaries when they camped near their homes. Only the suspicion was absent from his eyes, and in its place was an intense glitter of sexual speculation.

“So you’re not a student.”

Her head lifted, her eyes coolly meeting his and dismissing the look of desire he gave her.

“No.”

“What’s your name? Mine’s Tim…Tim Wilding.”

His abrupt change of tack caught her off guard, and unwillingly Rachel found herself telling him,

“Rachel.”

The blue eyes laughed down into hers. “I don’t like it…it’s far too biblical for you! I shall call you Gypsy…it suits you far more.”