So Close And No Closer

At five o’clock, her back feeling as though it was about to break in two, she made her last journey towards the drying shed to empty her trug. The long worktop under the window was inches deep in the flowers she had picked that afternoon.

She had several hours’ work ahead of her now, preparing the flowers for drying. Over the years, mostly by trial and error, she had evolved several different methods of drying flowers according to their various needs. Some of them could quite easily be dried in bunches suspended from the ceiling beams, others needed more delicate handling, and these she spread in very fine nets which she suspended between the beams. Others still needs drying in the warmth and darkness of the heated room, and for that purpose she used the lower part of the old stable, closing the heavy shutters on the window to keep out the daylight. Some of the flowers she left in their natural state, others she dyed in the more vivid shades that were becoming popular, especially among her more sophisticated clients.

Really, this evening she should have been devoting every minute of her time to her work. Angry with herself for wasting precious hours with a man whom she already knew she ought to be doing everything in her power to avoid, Rue made her way back to the house.

It was almost the end of the financial quarter. Soon it would be time to go through her books and prepare the returns for the accountant and the VAT officials. Her bookwork was the bane of her existence. She dreaded the two or three days a quarter she had to spend cooped up at her desk, checking and rechecking the tiny columns of figures she kept meticulously.

As she poured herself some lemonade, her mind shied away from the reality of her almost paranoic dread of this quarterly ordeal. It had nothing really to do with her ability to cope with the long columns of figures, and in fact sprang from the past. Julian had worked for her father’s accountants. He had come to see her two months after her father’s death. He had been so sympathetic and charming, so ready to spend time with her and listen to her, and she, lonely and bereft in those early months after her father’s death, had been only too eager to have someone to lean on.

He had been ten years older than her, sophisticated and mature, and he had known exactly how to flatter and coax her, so that by the time he actually proposed to her she was half wild with love for him, or rather she had believed that she was.

It had taken just one disastrous night of marriage to show her the real Julian, the man behind the mask he had worn to woo her, the man who cared nothing for her at all and had only wanted her father’s fortune. As always when her memories of the past threatened to spill over into the present, she fought to subdue them, to push them away, and she was glad when the telephone rang, giving her an excuse for doing so now.

It was one of the large city shops she supplied, asking if she could let them have some extra stock. It didn’t take her long to run through her stockbook. Luckily she had plenty of what they wanted already dried.

Because she was so busy, she informed them that they would have to send someone out to collect their order, and by the time she had replaced the receiver she had got the past firmly back where it belonged—out of her mind.

CHAPTER THREE

RUE worked until seven o’clock, grimly refusing to allow herself her normal break as a punishment for her folly in being trapped into having dinner with Neil Saxton. It was just gone seven when she returned to the house. Her bedroom wasn’t the largest of the upstairs rooms, but as far as she was concerned it had the best view. Its tiny dormer window looked out on to fields and, beyond them, the hills of the Cheviot countryside. It was a view of which she never grew tired or bored and, as she stood by the window breathing in the fresh coolness of the early evening air, she reflected on how very fortunate she had been that fate had stepped in just in time, allowing her to salvage this cottage and its land from the destruction of her father’s estate.

What she had not known about Julian at the time she married him was that, not only did he not love her, but he was also an inveterate gambler. He had married her quite cold-bloodedly, seeing her fortune as his only means of paying off his even then huge gambling debts, and once having paid them off he had gone on to gamble away not only all her father’s careful investments, but every single asset that Rue had been left—and she had known nothing at all about it.

It had been shocking enough to learn about his death, even though by then they had been living apart for five of the six months of their marriage. That another woman had been driving the car in which they had died had not really come as any surprise to her. He had made it more than plain to her, after that one appalling night of their honeymoon, just how inadequate he found her as a woman, and she had been left in no doubt as to his intentions to replace her in his bed.

Battered and bruised physically as well as emotionally, her dreams and illusions totally destroyed, she had only been able to feel relief that she would not be called upon to suffer his physical assault on her again. The discovery that the papers he had asked her to sign in the days leading up to their marriage had in fact been the power of attorney which gave him total control of her fortune had meant nothing at all to her until her solicitor had worriedly and uncomfortably explained that not only was she now a widow, but she was also completely penniless and her home, Parnham Court, would have to be sold in order to meet all of her husband’s gambling debts. And then, right at the last moment, when she was just about to sign the documents handing Parnham Court over, her solicitor had discovered the possibility of transferring to herself in her own name the freehold of Vine Cottage and its land, under an obscure legal loophole caused by the fact that at one time the cottage and its land had been made over to the gardener.

At first the cottage had simply been a place to live, somewhere to hide away, but as the months had gone by she had found herself growing attached to it, loving it, so that now it was part of her in a way that Parnham Court had never been.

Her father had bought the Court on his marriage to her mother, a gift to his new young wife, and he had kept the house on after her death as a home for himself and his motherless child. He had run his business from the Court and had even set up a laboratory there so that he could enjoy the research on which his fortune had originally been founded.

The patent for the drug he had discovered had run out shortly after his death, so that even funds from that source were no longer available to Rue. For a girl who had never known anything but the comforts of expensive wealth, poverty had come as a shock. But there were degrees of poverty, as Rue was the first to admit, just as she was the first to admit that it was far easier to be poor in the countryside than it was in one of the stark, lonely tower blocks of the country’s inner cities.

She had discovered within herself a strength that she had never suspected could exist, and with it had come a certain peace of mind. Not that she would ever be able to forgive herself for her folly in being taken in by Julian. The young girl she had once been was so alien to her now that she could scarcely comprehend that she and that girl were one and the same person.

She showered in the bathroom off her bedroom, turning quickly away as she caught a glimpse of her nude body in the mirror. Her own nudity was something she had felt slightly uncomfortable with ever since the first night of her honeymoon, when Julian had looked down at her as she lay, shocked and exhausted, on the hotel bed, and told her cruelly just how deficient he found her as a woman.

It was not that there was anything specifically wrong with her shape. She was small, it was true, very narrow on the hips and the waist, with full, soft breasts that she was at great pains to disguise with heavy sweaters and loose T-shirts. No, her abhorrence of her body was caused more by its inward flaws than any outward failings.

Even now sometimes, at night, she dreamt she could hear Julian’s mocking laughter as she wept and begged him not to touch her. Before their marriage he had been so gentle, so caring, so tender, so very much the considerate lover. She ought to have realised it was all simply a ploy, a fac¸ade, but she had been too thrilled and excited by his declarations of love, too eager to believe that he desired her to ever imagine that he was lying.

She had deserved to be hurt, she told herself ruthlessly, towelling her body dry with rough ferocity until her skin glowed a bright peach. Her sexuality was not something she ever allowed herself to think about these days. When she was in the company of other women she listened to their frank exchanges regarding their lover’s prowess or lack of it and sometimes their even franker descriptions of their own needs and desires, and, although she smiled and laughed and made the appropriate comments, inside her body felt dead. They may as well have been speaking in a foreign language when they described their pleasure, so different was her own experience.

She had never experienced sexual pleasure other than fleetingly and tenuously in those early days of their courtship, when Julian had teased her with kisses that promised so much and yet in the end meant so very little. Perhaps if she had not been so sheltered, so naı¨ve, she might have realised the truth, might have queried the sincerity of a man who professed to desire her and yet at the same time seemed content with no more than a good-night kiss.

It had not been with desire that he had come to her on their wedding night but with rage and resentment, and with a determination to let her know exactly what role she was to play in his life. He had entered her brutally and ruthlessly, without making any attempt to prepare her for his possession, taking an almost sadistic satisfaction in her pain and shock, and then, when she had cried out, he had punished her for it, inflicting bruises and contusions on her pale skin which had taken days to heal.

After that first night he had never come back to her bed, and she had been too relieved to care. In that one short night he had ripped away the veils of innocence and naı¨vete´ which had protected her, and she had seen all that her marriage was going to be. She had lived in a state of shock after that, relieved that he continued to stay away from Parnham Court and yet at the same time too proud to seek advice from those who might have been able to help and advise her.

His death had brought about her release in more ways than one, and she had not been able to mourn for him. Now she was a different woman from that naı¨ve, foolish nineteen-year-old girl. Now she reflected hardily that she was better off for what had happened to her, and her life as it was now was richer in all the things that mattered than it had ever been when she was her father’s pampered heiress.

She had no regrets about the loss of her father’s wealth, other than those that sprang from guilt caused by her knowledge that there were many, many needy causes that could have benefited from her inheritance. For herself, she was content as she was, and proud of her own small achievements and the progress she had made towards independence.

It was true, as her solicitor had warned her only this morning, that a bad summer, a freak thunderstorm, anything, in fact, that damaged her flowercrop, could jeopardise her financial position almost disastrously. She had very little money behind her. All the profits she had made so far had been ploughed straight back into the business and, although it was true that she had neither mortgage nor debts to worry about, she still had to live.

She pulled on her housecoat. It had been one of her father’s last Christmas gifts to her, worn and faded now but still comfortable and warm, even if it was a trifle girlish for a woman of twenty-five. There were very few clothes in her wardrobe. The expensive designer things she had bought as a teenager had either been sold or given away, most of them too outrageous to last for more than one fashion season. In the place of the silks and satins she had once worn, she now wore denim jeans and cotton sweatshirts—hardly the sort of thing one could put on for dinner with a man like Neil Saxton, she reflected wryly as she opened her wardrobe doors and checked abruptly.

Why should it matter what she wore? She had no desire to impress the man. Women adorned their bodies in silks and satins so that they would be pleasing to the male of the species, she reminded herself grimly. She had no desire to please the eye or the sexual appetite of any man.

She reached out for a pair of clean jeans and then hesitated, her pride, that same pride that had driven her to accept his invitation in the first place, making her check and turn instead to frown over the few formal clothes she possessed. There were a couple of suits, the one she had worn this morning and a heavier, more winter-weight one, which she wore for important business meetings with her bank manager or her accountant.

There was her raincoat, a classically cut trench-coat in a waterproof stone-coloured fabric, and a heavy navy winter coat she had splurged out on and bought for herself the previous winter. There were a couple of tailored linen dresses she had bought in a second-hand clothes shop which would have been eminently suitable for city shopping on a hot day, but were hardly the right sort of things to go out for dinner in, and then there were her two evening dresses. One was full-length and formal, and she kept that for the rare winter balls she was obliged to attend; the other—she reached out towards it, and then tensed—the other had been a gift from a client for whom she had done rather a lot of work.

Hannah Ford and her husband had moved into the area less than eighteen months ago. Originally from London, Tom Ford had been forced by ill-health to take a fresh look at his life-style. He had been a successful investment manager in the high-pressure field of corporate finance, but one heart attack and a threatened bypass operation had been enough to suggest to his employers that they should give him a sideways move to a country branch of his bank. Hannah, whose career as an interior designer was just beginning to take off, had given up her own work to come with him, and the move had paid off for them in more ways than one.

Determined not to allow him to feel guilty over the fact that she had given up a very promising post, Hannah had insisted on starting up in business on her own. Even she admitted that she was astounded by her own success. In fact, she had been so successful that Tom was now thinking of giving up his bank job completely so that he could handle the financial side of her business. As if that had not been enough, within six months of moving to the Cheviots Hannah had discovered that she was pregnant.

As she’d confided to Rue, at thirty-nine the last thing she wanted was to start a family, but, once Lucy Saffron Ford had arrived, no parents could have been more doting or adoring than Hannah and Tom, and Hannah was even talking about providing Lucy with a brother or a sister. Having seen one of Rue’s beautifully arranged baskets in the home of one of her clients, Hannah had lost no time in getting in touch with Rue and asking her to design some arrangements to complement her own colourschemes.

Astounded by the very modest fee Rue had asked, ridiculously low by London standards, or so Hannah had told her, she had presented Rue at Christmas with a beautifully wrapped, large box. Inside it, beneath layer upon layer of white tissue paper, had been a dress like no other Rue had ever seen. It had been designed by a friend of hers, especially for Rue, Hannah had told her.

It was black velvet, the softest black velvet Rue had ever seen, and cut so plainly yet so cleverly that it was only when it was actually on that the skill of its designer could truly be seen. The long-sleeved bodice moulded Rue’s soft curves and tiny waist; the slightly gathered tulip-shaped skirt skimmed her knees and hinted at the fragile curve of her hips; the ruffled bustle at the back added emphasis to the skirt and a formal touch to the dress, which drew everyone’s eyes to her whenever Rue wore it. She had told Hannah initially that the dress simply wasn’t her and at any rate was far too expensive a gift, but Hannah had looked so crestfallen, so hurt, that Rue had not been able to refuse to accept it.