Force Of Feeling

‘I don’t want a secretary!’ Campion exploded now. ‘I just want to be left alone to get on with my work.’

‘Well, tell Guy that,’ Lucy suggested reasonably.

‘I have, and he won’t listen. He’s insisting that I must have someone to work for me. It’s almost as though he thinks I need a gaoler, someone to keep me at work. And then there’s this tour coming up,’ she added angrily.

‘Tour?’

‘Oh, you remember. I told you about it. A small publicity tour for that book I did about Cornwall. Guy seems to think that if I can have a secretary, I can somehow manage to dictate huge chunks of the new book in between signing sessions, and she can then presumably type them up while I’m signing.’

Lucy sighed and reached out across the table to take her hand. ‘Campion, be honest, if Helena had suggested this, and not Guy, would you feel quite so strongly?’

Campion frowned and then admitted huskily, ‘I don’t know. There’s something about him that rubs me up the wrong way. I feel as edgy as a cat walking on too hot sand whenever he comes near me …’ She rubbed tiredly at her eyes. ‘I don’t like him,’ she added childishly, ‘but I don’t know why I react so strongly to him.’

I do, Lucy thought achingly, and it’s called sexual awareness, but she knew that there was no way she could say that to Campion.

Instead, she asked carefully, ‘So what do you intend to do?’

‘What can I do?’ Campion asked her bitterly, revealing how much she resented what was happening to her. ‘I have to go along with what Guy’s saying. I don’t have any option. Do you know what he told me?’ She took a deep breath, fighting for self-control as she leaned across the table, her eyes flashing fiercely, ‘He actually admitted that he was the one who advised the publishers to reject my first draft. He had the utter gall to tell me that he thought it wasn’t worthy of me—that he had seen more emotion in the writings of a seven-year-old! He told me my book was flat and boring, and that my characters, especially Lynsey, had about as much reality as cardboard cut-outs!’ Suddenly the fight left her and her eyes dulled. ‘And the worst thing is that I know he’s right. Oh, God, Lucy, why on earth did I ever take on this commission?’

‘Because it’s giving you an opportunity to stretch yourself,’ Lucy reminded her gently. ‘You wanted to do it, Campion,’ she told her.

Opposite her, Campion groaned. ‘Don’t remind me. I must have been mad! I can’t do it, Lucy. I know that I can’t.’

‘Have you told Guy this?’

Immediately her eyes darkened with anger. ‘Throw myself on his mercy? Never!’

‘Then what are you going to do?’

‘Get back to work—not here in London. Helena has a small cottage she lets her writers use. I’m going to go there … that way, Guy won’t be able to force me to have a secretary,’ she added childishly. ‘I’m going tonight. It’s in Pembroke.’

‘Wales, at this time of the year?’ Lucy shuddered. ‘We’re already into November … Which reminds me, have you any plans for Christmas? Howard and I will be going to Dorset as usual, and of course we’d love you to join us.’

Lucy had inherited, from her grandfather, a very lovely small manor house in Dorset, and she and Howard spent every Christmas there, and as much time as they could during the rest of the year.

‘Please do,’ she coaxed. ‘I’m going to need your help this year. I think I’m pregnant.’

Shortly after their marriage Lucy had suffered a very traumatic miscarriage, and since then Howard had flatly refused to even consider the idea of them trying for another child, but now it seemed he had relented.

‘Dr Harrison has finally persuaded Howard that what happened before won’t happen again, and I’m giving you fair warning here and now that I’m going to ask you to be godmother.’

Just after three, they left the restaurant, Lucy to go shopping and Campion to go back to her flat to pack for her trip to Wales.

She had been to Helena’s cottage several times before, but never to work, only as a visitor. She had never before needed the solitude it offered. Writing had always come so easily to her—writing still did, it was the emotions of her characters she was having problems with.

She packed carefully and frugally: a couple of pairs of jeans, seldom worn these days, but they would still fit her, plenty of bulky sweaters, and a set of thermal underwear, just in case. Some socks, her portable typewriter, just in case the generator broke down and the electric machine Helena had installed at the cottage didn’t work.

She would need wellingtons, she reminded herself; she would have to buy some before she left. And food, which meant a trip to her local supermarket. Plenty of typing paper, her notes—the list was endless, and all the time she was getting ready her conversation with Guy French kept going round and round in her mind.

He had the reputation of having a very acid tongue, but he had never used it on her. And yet, this morning, he had virtually torn her apart with what he had said; all of it in that calm, even, logical voice of his, which stated his assembled facts as though they were incontrovertible truths. And the worst of it was that they very probably were. Her heroine did lack emotional depth. Campion sat down wearily, too tired to hide from the truth any longer. She had no idea what she was going to do about Lynsey.

When she had tried to deflect Guy, by reminding him that her heroine was a young girl of sixteen, he had calmly countered by saying that in that age girls of sixteen were often wives and mothers and that, since she herself had described her heroine as being spirited and passionate, couldn’t she see that it just wasn’t in character for her to calmly accept King Henry’s edict that she marry a man she had never seen before, especially not when, according to his notes, she had already hinted that Lynsey considered herself to be in love with her cousin?

‘Wouldn’t she at least have tried to see Francis? Think of it—a beautiful young girl of sixteen, rich and wilful, condemned by the King’s will to marry a man to whom he owes a favour, a man moreover who has the reputation of procuring for that same king women with whom he amuses himself behind his wife’s back. Surely she would be angry and disgusted at such a proposed marriage? Surely she would be desperate enough to make a rash attempt to stop it? Allowing herself to be compromised by another man would be one way. And surely she would choose that man to be her cousin, the boy whom she thinks she loves?’

It all made sense, but for some reason Campion just could not breathe life into her heroine. She just could not even mentally visualise Lynsey doing what Guy suggested, even though she knew what he was saying was perfectly true.

She had told him as much, adding defiantly that the publishers could sue her if they wished, but she was not going to change a word of her manuscript.

He had looked at her then, his grey eyes focusing on her and turning smokily dark.

For a moment she had actually expected him to get up from behind his desk and seize hold of her and shake her. No small task, even for a man of his height and build, because she was well over five foot eight and, despite her fragile frame, no lightweight either. But instead he had controlled himself and said icily, ‘Quitting, Campion? You surprise me. What is it you’re so afraid of?’

‘Nothing. I’m not afraid of anything,’ she had flung at him, and somehow, before she knew where she was, he had tricked her into committing herself to the re-writes.

And now she had to do them. But her way, and not his—and without a secretary.

All this burning of adrenalin had left her feeling oddly tired. She looked at her watch. An hour’s sleep before she left would do her good. Sleep was something that often evaded her during the night, and she had to take brief catnaps during the day whenever she could.

She went into her bedroom and closed the curtains.

Her flat was as drab as her clothes, furnished mainly in beiges and browns, colours bordering on nothingness.

She undressed, wrapped herself in a towelling robe and lay on her bed but, irritatingly, exhausted though she was, sleep would not come. Instead a multitude of jumbled images flashed repeatedly across her brain.

Guy French, tall, and dark-haired; a man she had heard other women describe admiringly as sexually devastating. Perhaps, but not to her, never to her …

Her mind switched to Lucy. How long had they known one another? They had started at boarding-school together, two small, pigtailed girls in brand new uniforms, both wanting desperately to cry and neither feeling they should.

They had been friends a long time. Lucy’s new circle of friends, those she had made through Howard, looked askance at Campion, probably wondering what she and pretty, glamorous Lucy had in common.

She wondered if Lucy had told Howard about her. Probably, they had that sort of relationship, and Howard was the kind of man who invited one’s trust. How lucky Lucy had been in her marriage! How wise to wait a little while and not to allow herself to be swept off her feet in the first rapture of physical desire, as she had been …

As she had been … How impossible that seemed now! Now, she could no more imagine the deep frozen heart of hers being melted than she could imagine flying to the moon. Both were impossible.

Once, a long time ago, things had been different, she had been different.

Once, she had known what it felt like to have her whole body surge with joy at a man’s touch, almost at the sound of his voice, but that had been before …

She gave a deep sigh and opened her eyes, but it was no use, for some reason, the past was crowding in on her today.

For some reason? She knew the reason well enough: it had been the look in Guy’s eyes when he had asked her in that even, calm voice of his if she actually knew what it was like to feel emotion. She had felt as though her very soul had been raked with red-hot irons, but she had kept her expression cool and unrevealing. Let him think what he liked, just as long as he never guessed the truth.

The truth. Her mouth twisted bitterly. How melodramatic that sounded now! And what was it, really?

She closed her eyes again and tried to focus her concentration on her book, on Lynsey, but it was virtually impossible. Guy’s dark face surfaced through the barriers of her will, and then another male face, equally dark-haired, equally good-looking, but younger, shallower … weaker, she recognised.

She had been nineteen when she’d met Craig, and a rather naïve nineteen at that. Her girls’ school had been sheltered; she was an only child, with wealthy parents who spent a good deal of their time out of the country, and consequently she had spent very little time with them until she left school. And in that long, hot summer before she started at Oxford she had felt uncomfortable with them, alien and alone, and had wished that she had given in to Lucy’s plea to accept an invitation from her parents to spend the summer with them in the South of France.