One Reckless Night

Turning with a start, she saw Henry Walton, the chairman of Zolto Electronics, his lined face tired and defeated.

He said, ‘I wanted to congratulate you, Miss Westcott. You have a bargain—as, of course, you know.’

‘Yes.’ Zanna lifted her chin, her expression challenging. ‘I hope there are no hard feelings.’

He shook his head with a faint smile. ‘No, that is too much to ask.’ He studied her for a moment, his eyes suddenly sharp and shrewd, giving her a glimpse of the man who had built up a company from a dream only to see it ultimately undermined by the recession.

He said, with a sigh, ‘Yes, you’re your father’s own daughter, Miss Westcott. And please don’t think I mean that as a compliment. Instead, I’m almost sorry for you.’ He inclined his head with a kind of remote courtesy and walked away.

Zanna stared after him, as shocked and winded as if he’d actually raised his fist and struck her.

It had been the quietest of exchanges yet she suddenly felt self-conscious, as if everyone in the hotel lobby had turned to look at her. As if she were suddenly naked under their censorious gaze.

Her sense of achievement, her plans for the evening ahead suddenly went by the board. She felt chilled and oddly uncertain.

‘May I help you?’ One of the receptionists was free, her brows raised enquiringly, her smile plastic and professional.

Zanna shook her head, then turned away, the edge of the folder still biting into her hand. Her immediate intention was to go back to her room. Instead, she found herself headed, almost running, for the main exit to the hotel car park.

With the thought, I’ve got to get out of here—I must...beating in her head like a drum.

The motorway service station was like any other. Zanna selected a plate of mixed salad and a pot of coffee and carried them to an empty table.

What an idiot, she thought with vexation, to have allowed that little encounter to push her off-balance like that. Normally she wouldn’t have leapt into the car and driven off without the slightest idea where she was heading.

And why was she so disturbed anyway? Being Gerald Westcott’s daughter—being recognized as such—was something to be proud of. Whereas there was nothing admirable in admitting defeat—in failing. That was a lesson she’d been taught since her earliest years.

Achievement—coming first—was the name of the game. Getting the best results at school. Knowing that less would only provoke some disapproving comment from the man she wanted so desperately to please. Any kind of second-best was unthinkable. Times were hard. You had to be tough. There was no room for sentiment in business.

This was the armour she dressed in each morning. The armour in which Henry Walton had found an unexpected and unwelcome chink.

How dared he feel sorry for her? she thought rawly. She didn’t need anyone’s pity. She had a flat overlooking the Thames, an expense account, a new car every year—and she’d just scored her first major negotiating success. She had everything going for her.

She gave a mental shrug as she sat down. Mr Walton had simply turned out to be a bad loser, which, although something of a surprise, was his problem, and she was a fool to let his remarks get to her. Although they’d certainly taken the edge off her triumph, she thought restively. Soured the day when she had totally justified her place on her father’s top team.

She was half tempted to change her mind and return to London, except it might be seen as a kind of climb-down, and the thought of Tessa Lloyd’s superior smile as she obeyed the tug on the leash cemented her determination to stay away, however briefly.

She still had the hotel’s information folder on the table beside her. She’d stop this aimless pounding up the motorway and find something positive to do for the rest of the day.

As she picked up the folder a pale green leaflet fluttered to the floor. Something about a series of spring art exhibitions in local village halls. Nothing she would normally have noticed. But as she bent to retrieve the paper the name ‘Emplesham’ seemed to leap out at her.

For a moment she was very still, staring down at it. Remembering.

Emplesham, she thought wonderingly. It hadn’t even occurred to her how close it must be.

Yet once she’d have known. And without any prompting either. When she was a child, she’d looked it up almost obsessively on the map, calculating the distance from London, from boarding school—from anywhere, she remembered, wincing—and promising herself that one day she’d go there. See the place where the mother she’d never known had been born. As if that, somehow, would bring her closer.

And now I’m actually in the neightbourhood, and if I hadn’t seen this leaflet I wouldn’t have given it a second thought, she told herself wryly.

It was evidence, she realised, of how far she’d grown away from that lonely, introspective little girl.

And perhaps that was how it should stay. After all, going to look at the outside of a house wouldn’t answer any of the questions which had bewildered and tormented her for so many years. The questions that her father, too racked by the grief of his loss, had always refused even to discuss.

After Susan Westcott’s death he had sold the house they had shared, and its contents, dismissed the domestic staff and moved to a new locality with his baby daughter, Suzannah. From then on, of course, she had been always known as Zanna, as if even the similarities in their names were too painful for him to contemplate.

There were no mementoes, no photographs anywhere, and no one the child could ask about her mother. The only reminder that Sir Gerald seemed able to tolerate was the strangely disturbing portrait of his wife kept in his study.

It had always worried Zanna. Nor was it really a likeness either. Above the vibrant swirl of her crimson blouse Sue Westcott’s face was a pale blur, the features barely suggested, apart from her eyes which seemed to burn with a wild green flame. Desperate eyes, Zanna had decided as she grew up. She’d found herself wondering whether her mother had known, somehow, how little time she had left to live. As a picture, it revealed little more.

And then on her eleventh birthday she’d received a small packet at her boarding school, the accompanying lawyer’s letter stating that her mother’s former nanny, Miss Grace Moss, had directed in her will that Zanna should be sent the enclosed.

It had been a small leather-bound photo album, full of ageing snapshots of people she didn’t know in clothes from bygone years, and for a moment Zanna had been bewildered as to why this stranger should have bothered.

Then she’d seen that the last few photographs were all marked ‘Church House, Emplesham’ on the back. The first one was dated—‘1950, Susan two days old’—and showed a woman in a neat dress and apron, presumably Nanny Moss, smiling in the wisteria-hung doorway of a long white house, with a tiny baby held protectively in her arms.

Others showed a small blonde girl playing among tall hollyhocks and delphiniums in a garden, or riding a tricycle, until finally a taller Sue had proudly showed off a new school hat and blazer.

Zanna had thought, Mummy, and her eyes had filled with tears. But she’d been grateful that she at last had something tangible to hold on to.

From that moment on the album went everywhere with her and became her most cherished possession, almost a talisman. But at the same time the way the bequest had been made had warned her, young though she was, that her father might not regard it in quite the same light, and that this was a gift to be kept secret, not shared with him.

She didn’t want him to be unhappy again, and the only times she had ever pressed him for information about her mother he had become so angry and upset that she’d been almost frightened. His unresolved pain and grief for his late wife was his one weakness. The only sign of vulnerability he’d ever shown.

All these years she’d kept the secret, she thought ruefully, and the album occupied an inside pocket in her bag even now. Her sole and private link with the past.

Zanna took it out and flicked through it while she ate her meal.

It was probably a wild-goose chase, but there might be someone in the village who’d remember the little girl at Church House, who could help wipe out the apparent vacuum that Sue Westcott had left in her wake.

At any rate, she would have to go and see.

After all, she argued, what do I have to lose?

Almost within minutes of taking the appropriate motorway exit she found herself in a maze of country lanes. The day was warm for late spring, and Zanna opened the sun roof and slung her jacket into the back of the car.

It wasn’t a fast journey. Every bend in the road seemed to reveal some new hazard—a tractor idling along, a group of riders on horseback, a pair of motorists who’d stopped to exchange the time of day, thereby blocking the lane completely.

Even the throb of the motorway traffic was extinguished by birdsong and the bleating of sheep. Zanna had the crazy sensation that she’d stepped backwards into some time-warp, where life moved at a different, slower pace.

Usually she would have been impatient, pushing herself and others, looking for a way round the obstacles in her path. But today she felt herself slowing in unison. She was aware that the tension was seeping out of her, that the sun and the warm breeze with its scent of hedgerows were bestowing a kind of benison.

Someone had once said that to travel hopefully was better than to arrive. For the first time she could understand that, and agree.

The Emplesham village sign was emblazoned on a huge circle of stone half-buried in long grass and hawthorn at the side of the road.

As Zanna passed it she began to realise that all was not well with her car. The engine note was not right. It seemed to have developed a kind of stutter, she thought with dismay. And then, without further warning, it died on her altogether.

Using the slight downward slope, Zanna steered the car onto the verge and applied the hand brake. She said under her breath, ‘I don’t believe this.’ It was as if the damned thing had become suddenly bewitched as it crossed the village line. Although that, of course, was nonsense.