A Man Possessed

Kate could tell that her friend was hurt and hurriedly made amends.

‘To be honest with you, Sue, until Harry mentioned us going into partnership last week, I hadn’t thought of what I was doing as anything other than an enjoyable hobby, but now that he has mentioned it, I really feel that it’s something I want to do. Of course we’re only talking about it at this stage, but Harry’s very enthusiastic. He likes my designs and he’s keen for me to develop that side of my work.’

Sue sat down in a chair and stared up at her. ‘Kate, I’m so pleased. This is just what you need to take you out of yourself. I’m sorry you’ve got to sell the house, of course, but it’s time you had a fresh start.’

‘Mmm … maybe. But keep it to yourself, would you, Sue? My plans are far too tentative at the moment to become the subject of village gossip.’ Kate made a rueful moue. ‘You know what this place is like.’

‘Only too well! Don’t worry, I shan’t breathe a word.’

The grandfather clock in the hall suddenly struck the hour and Sue jumped up, grimacing. ‘God, is it that time? I’ve got to pick the kids up from school in half an hour. I’d better go … but before I do, I want your promise that you’ll come to my dinner party.’

‘You’ve got it.’

‘Good, because I meant what I said, you know. I’ll come and drag you away from this place forcibly if you try and wriggle out of it now.’

‘Oh, yeah!’ Glancing from the vantage point of her five-feet-eight to her friend’s petite five-foot-nothing, Kate grinned, reviving a taunt from their mutual schooldays as she teased, ‘You and whose army?’

Ten minutes later, bowling down the lane in her small car heading in the direction of the village, Sue reflected warmly that at long last Kate was showing some signs of rejoining the human race. She couldn’t wait to get home and share her pleasure with her family. Her husband was almost as fond of Kate as she was herself, and her widowed mother loved Kate almost as a second daughter. It was so good to see her smiling again; reverting to the lovely laughing girl she had been before her father’s death, and then again, if only briefly, in those weeks before her marriage. How long after that marriage had it been before she stopped smiling? A month … six weeks? Over and over again Kate had denied that her unhappiness was Ricky’s fault, but in the shocked aftermath of his death she had broken down completely and admitted to her what a travesty their marriage had been.

Sexually Ricky had been completely indifferent to her; had made love to her less than half a dozen times, always perfunctorily, from what Sue had been able to gather from Kate’s weepy outpourings; and then once they had been married a couple of months, never touching her, but turning instead for sexual pleasure to a succession of girl-friends. He had been with one of them when he died in a horrifying head-on crash with another car. Kate had wanted to divorce him, she had confided, but she had been too ashamed of admitting to anyone what a travesty their marriage was to do anything about it.

What her friend had experienced would be enough to put any woman off the male sex for life, Sue admitted, but although Ricky had apparently constantly jeered at her for being sexually cold, that was not how Sue saw her friend. On the contrary, she had always thought there was an aura of warm sensuality about Kate … an air of womanliness and warmth, spiced with sexuality, and she knew that her husband John agreed with her. Even so … physical rejection from one’s husband must be a terrible burden to carry …

Although she wasn’t aware of it, as she stood by the drawing-room window looking out on to the mellow countryside Kate’s thoughts were following a similar path to her friend’s, although it was not the bitterness of the burden of her husband’s rejection that was occupying her thoughts, but that of another man.

Strange how, even now, after all this time, eight years in fact, that memory still had the power to torment her. She sighed, and tried to push it away, turning her back on the scenery outside and turning instead to survey the familiar surroundings of her home, but that was a mistake.

Nothing had changed in this room in over ten years. It was still the same now as it had been when she came to the house as a new bride. Although she hadn’t known it at the time, the décor had been chosen by one of Ricky’s girl-friends. Whoever she was, she had had excellent taste, Kate mused, her glance taking in the soft lemony-gold washed walls and ceiling; the dark stained beams which were part of the original Elizabethan house. From the parish records they knew that this house had once belonged to a prosperous buccaneer, who had made his money with Drake, and who had bought this land with the Queen’s goodwill, building a home on it for the bride he had brought here from London.

A soft blue-grey velvety carpet covered the floor, the cottagey atmosphere of the drawing-room reinforced by the two large sofas upholstered in a beautiful Colefax and Fowler print of blues and greys on a soft yellow background. An antique ladies’ writing desk was set against one wall beneath an attractive group of prints. The room retained an open fireplace and was large enough to take a collection of antique occasional tables, and a couple of easy chairs upholstered in soft yellow fabric to contrast slightly with the florals of the sofas. Matching curtains hung at the windows at either end of the room, the whole effect a careful blending of colours that harmonised, seemingly casual and slightly shabby and yet epitomising a country house style of furnishing that was wholly English. Which made it all the more disruptive that she should be able to so easily imagine standing within this background a man who was most definitely not the slightest bit English—at least not in looks—and one, moreover, who had spent no more than a mere weekend at most here. And yet it was easier to recapture his image than it was to recapture Ricky’s. But then, of course, the rejection she had suffered at Dominic Harland’s hands had been far more savagely painful than that she had known with Ricky.

She shivered, suddenly cold despite the afternoon sun pouring into the room. Even now she couldn’t bear to think about that weekend.

But perhaps she should, she told herself hardily; perhaps it was time she stopped hiding away from the past and faced up to it. She was after all about to make a new start in life … a fitting point at which to give one final look at the past and then shut it away for ever.

Almost dreamily she walked into the large hall, glancing automatically up to what had originally been the minstrels’ gallery and what was now the landing. He had been standing up there the first time she saw him. She had been in bed when he arrived … had known nothing about him until Ricky, whom she had not expected home that weekend, told her that he was an old friend whom he had met in London and invited down for the weekend.

Numbly Kate tore her attention away from the gallery, shocked by the unexpected pallor of her own face as she caught sight of it in the mirror hanging on the hall wall. She looked drained of all colour, her hair stark black, although in reality it was very dark brown, the curling thick mass of it in stark contrast to her face, as though somehow her hair had drained all the colour and energy from her skin. Even her mouth looked pale, almost bloodless, only her eyes possessing colour.

Her colouring was Irish, her father had once told her, which was why he had chosen to call her Kate, but Kate could see no beauty in her vibrantly sensual colouring; she would have preferred to have been blonde like her mother. Ricky had always preferred blondes too. The girl he had died with had been blonde … bleached apparently, but blonde nevertheless.

Slowly Kate went upstairs, her feet automatically finding the shallow indentations on the stairs made by the feet of many generations. One of the things she loved most about the house was its age.

She found it soothing to remind herself that these walls and rooms had seen every facet of human life both happy and miserable, and in the past it had often given her a sense of perspective on her own problems to think of this.

Once upstairs she made for her bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. It was not the room she had shared with Ricky during their marriage. She went in there these days only when she had to. Ricky had insisted that she continue to share the huge fourposter with him even when he had made it plain that he had no interest in her as a woman—how galling that had been, to know that her husband, who would turn in the street and look lustfully at almost every girl who walked past him, had absolutely no sexual interest in her.

She closed her eyes, automatically letting the past wash over her, remembering how confused and uncertain she had been after her father’s death. Her mother might have pushed her into Ricky’s arms, but she hadn’t had to push too hard. The trouble was that she had been in desperate need of someone to love and be loved by in return. Ricky had been attractive enough to make any naïve girl’s heart beat faster; tall, fair-haired, and indolently languid in a way which Kate had misinterpreted as being sophisticatedly exciting—she had been all too eager to believe herself in love with him.

Her full lips twisted slightly. God, what a fool she had been! Well, she had soon learned the truth. Ricky had refused to take her away on honeymoon, claiming that he was too busy, but she soon realised that Ricky used those words to cloak his heavy gambling. He had gone gaming the night they were married, leaving her alone in the house after the few guests who had attended their register office wedding had gone. He had come back late—and drunk. Weeks later when she had accused him of this he had sneered at her in open contempt and told her that that was the only way he had been able to bring himself to make love to her. Although she hadn’t known it when they married he had been heavily involved with someone else, a woman whose tastes were much more in accord with his than her own.

It was when, after a tearful fight, she had accused him of not loving her that he had told her this, and much more besides, jeering at her for ever believing he might have done.

He had never wanted her, he told her then, and never would; she was too cold … too inexperienced. No, the reason he had married her was because the addition of her father’s land to his own had made it much easier for him to raise a mortgage on the land, and that plus the fact that her mother had been willing to pay him to take her off her hands had made marriage to her an attractive proposition.

They had been married exactly two months when he told her that, and at first she had been too shocked to take it in.

Convinced that his hurtful words were just born out of temper, she had made several clumsy attempts to approach him and to bridge the gap between them, but he had rebuffed her so callously that she was soon forced to realise what he had said was the truth and that he did not desire her as his wife in any physical sense at all.

At first she had been too shocked to think of divorce; to do anything other than live through each agonising day as best she could. The discovery that he did not love her, coming so soon after the blow of her father’s death, numbed her to such an extent that for months she had simply drifted through life.

But then two years after she and Ricky were married had come that dreadful, fateful weekend when she had met Dominic Harland.

Ricky had arrived home late one Friday evening with him.

Kate had been in bed when they arrived. The sound of Ricky’s car had woken her and she had gone out on to the landing in just her cotton nightdress, not expecting Ricky to have anyone with him. He had not been home at all the previous night and she was rigid with tension and anguish, only registering the other man’s presence when he stepped out from behind her husband. The light on the landing threw his profile into strong relief and she had literally gasped out loud, stunned by the masculine perfection of his features. Honey-gold skin stretched tautly over strong bones, tawny-gold eyes, the colour of a lion’s pelt, stared mockingly into her own, thick black hair curling down over the collar of his shirt.

Even in her ignorance and innocence Kate had recognised the powerful sexual aura of the man, and a curious, twisting sensation curled through her body, making her eyes widen and her lips part as she stared down into his face like someone possessed. Her heartbeat quickened, her whole body pulsing with a deep, aching sensation hard to define. As she watched, transfixed, the hard male mouth twisted, the golden eyes narrowing, hardening, disengaging from her own with cool indifference making her uncomfortably aware of the long schoolgirlish plait of her hair, and the little girlish cotton nightdress she was wearing. No doubt his women wore silks and satins to bed; their appearance as sophisticated as his own. As she stumbled back to the bedroom she had a momentary and tormenting mental picture of his naked body, tanned and hard; very sure and knowing as it reached out to claim the filmy image of a woman, in the act of love.

Her skin hot with shame, Kate dived into bed and curled up beneath the bedclothes. There must be something wrong with her, thinking like that about a complete stranger. There was something wrong with her, she decided distractedly minutes later as an uncomfortable heat pervaded her body, followed by a tight, coiling tension. She could hear the two men moving about in the adjacent bedroom. The door opened and closed, she heard footsteps along the landing and then her door opened and Ricky came in.

She knew better now than to make any approach to him. He undressed quickly, throwing his clothes on to the floor before heading for their bathroom. He was gone for over half an hour, but when he returned Kate was still awake. She felt the bed depress as he got in beside her, turning his back on her. She closed her eyes, but it was not her husband’s image that danced tormentingly behind her shuttered lids. It was Dominic Harland’s.

And that was how it had begun, Kate thought wryly, shaking herself free of the past and opening her eyes, knowing that she did not have the courage to take herself back through that entire weekend. God, the humiliation of what had heppened! It scorched and burned her even now, far, far more than any rejection she had endured at Ricky’s hands. Of course, it had all been her own fault. She ought to have realised the moment she set eyes on him what manner of man he was. Certainly not the type who could ever be interested in a shy, naïve girl such as she had been. But she had been so desperate then to prove that she was a woman that she had not seen that. She had only seen that he was a man who aroused within her desire and in whose arms she could wipe out the humiliation of her husband’s lack of interest in her.

She laughed bitterly. Heavens, how stupid she had been! But that was all in the past now. The grandfather clock struck four, and she remembered that she had promised to telephone Harry and give him her decision about going into partnership with him.

It was only this afternoon talking to Sue that she had realised what she intended to do. Squaring her shoulders slightly, she went downstairs. It was time she made a fresh start, put the past behind her once and for all and what better way could there be to do that than to embark on a new career?

As she dialled the number of Harry’s workshop, she smiled slightly to herself. It was almost two years since they had first met now. She had gone to London on business to see Ricky’s solicitor. Following her husband’s death she had discovered that he had considerable debts outstanding to various gambling establishments, and although the solicitor had advised her that she was under no legal obligation to clear them, she had insisted that she wanted to do so. With the sale of what had been her father’s land, she had been able to clear the last of these outstanding amounts, and it had been that that took her to London.

With a free afternoon at her disposal she had wandered through Covent Garden, pausing to study the goods on sale on the wide variety of stalls, and it was there that her interest in stained glass had been rekindled when she spotted an attractive selection of window ornaments on sale on one of the stalls.

Seeing her interest, the girl who ran the stall had told her about the artisans’ workshop which had recently been established in London’s dockland to give craftsmen an opportunity to develop their work, and she had gone on to invite Kate to go back there with her to see the workshops for herself.

Normally very reticent about involving herself with strangers, on impulse Kate had accepted her invitation, and it had been at the workshop that she first met Harry. Harry was their mentor and teacher; Lucy, the girl who had invited Kate back with her, explained that it was Harry who taught them the intricacies and skills of working in stained glass, and on hearing his name, the tall, bearded man had ambled over to introduce himself and to chat to Kate.

Other craftsmen besides the glass workers shared the same premises, and Harry had elected to take Kate on a brief tour. She had watched fascinated as she saw her contemporaries engrossed in such traditional skills as gilding, marbling, marquetry and a wide variety of other crafts, but it was the glass work that fired her imagination.

What she had intended to be a brief courtesy visit in response to Lucy’s invitation lasted well into the late afternoon. They were a very friendly crowd, most of them around her own age or younger, with a smattering of much older tutors, who like Harry were keen to pass on their own skills to a younger generation.

‘It’s their interpretation of the skills we teach them that we find so stimulating,’ Harry told her enthusiastically. ‘They’re young and their ideas are fresh. It’s fascinating, and an education for us to see what they can do.’

While he was talking Kate was absorbed in watching a young man deftly shaping the lead to hold the glass he was working on, and seeing her, Harry smiled, touching her arm to say disarmingly, ‘You’re dying to try it for yourself, aren’t you?’

‘It fascinates me,’ she admitted. ‘We touched on the subject very briefly on the arts course I took, but I hadn’t thought of it as having any modern application.’

‘Mmm … you thought of it as being applicable only to church windows, that sort of thing. Well, it’s a common enough mistake, although nowadays many young architects and designers are becoming far more aware of its possibilities. Only the other week young Rob over there finished a commission for a renovated Victorian conservatory. It really was beautiful, a trail of climbing roses all along one glass wall. The small bits and pieces, the window hangings, plant containers, that sort of thing, they’re the bread and butter, but the jam is in the new commissions we’re getting, and we’re getting more and more all the time.’ He paused and looked at her consideringly. ‘If you’re really interested, why don’t you come to my classes?’