Cruel Angel

She was walking towards the park, having arranged to meet Judy her flatmate from the drama school at which they were both final-year students. No one went into the canteen or to cafés in weather like this—they sought the shelter of the frazzled trees, or the light breeze which they prayed they might find near the large pond.

Cressida saw Judy in the distance, gave a languid wave, and walked towards her. Her dark red hair was already damp around her temples, the thin material of her cotton dress limp with the heat and clinging to her body like a second skin. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat—not, as so many of her peers did, for effect, but because it protected the fair skin which had remained pale all summer.

She reached Judy, who was lying on a beach towel spread out on the grass. She sat up and smiled as Cressida approached.

‘Hiya, Cress!’ she called. ‘Come and eat—I’ve made heaps of sandwiches. Ham and tomato, egg and cress. Cress! Get it?!’

Cressida’s shaded eyes were raised heavenwards. ‘Original sort of person, aren’t you?’ she teased, and shook away the foil-wrapped packages which her friend offered, wrinkling her nose at them. ‘No, thanks. I couldn’t face them. I don’t know how you can eat in this sort of weather.’

‘Oh, you just want to be thin, thin, thin,’ teased Judy as she flapped her hand in the air. ‘Go away!’ She swiped again. ‘Bother these wasps—there’s millions of them.’

‘Well, if you buy jam doughnuts, what do you expect?’ asked Cressida drily, and sank down on to the grass, pulling off the straw hat, so that her hair tumbled down the sides of her face.

Judy’s sandwich froze in mid-air. ‘Wow!’ she breathed. ‘Hot!’

‘Too much mustard?’ enquired Cressida mildly.

‘Hotter than that. I’m in love!’

‘Where?’

‘Over there. Don’t look now. Oh, Cressida—now he’ll see!’

And Cressida saw him.

He was sitting across the grass from them, but his face was clearly visible. The thing that struck her first was how cool he looked, and how surprising that was in view of the fact that he was wearing more clothes than almost anyone else. Not for him the ubiquitous uniform of singlet and shorts—a lot of them worn by pot-bellied men who should have known better. This man was wearing a lightweight suit of cream, against which his olive skin contrasted superbly well. She found herself studying him closely, which in itself was unusual, thinking to herself that he, of all people, would have looked superb in some of the sawn-off denims which were all the rage that summer. The man had loosened his tie, and that was his sole concession to the day.

Dark brown velvet eyes met hers, and held them in a mocking gaze, one eyebrow raised in question, and she hurriedly looked away, taking a mouthful of the warm lemon barley beside her.

‘I didn’t get a look-in,’ said Judy in mock disgust. ‘He was too busy ogling you.’

Cressida blushed. ‘He wasn’t really.’

‘Yes, he was.’ Judy finished the last of her sandwich and rolled over on to her stomach. ‘Oh, well—I might as well tan the back of my legs. Do you want some cream?’

Cressida shook her head from side to side, trying to create some moving air, but it was no good. There was simply no cool to be found. ‘No, thanks—I’ll burn. I want some shade. I’ll wander down towards the lake.’ She stood up, in a fluid movement which was testimony to the years of ballet training. She tucked her copy of Antony and Cleopatra under her arm, and slowly walked across the fried earth.

She had found the welcome green umbrella of a horse-chestnut, when she heard a loud buzzing and a wasp danced infuriatingly around her face. She waved it away. ‘Off! Off!’

But the wasp was persistent, straying so dangerously close to her eye that her wild swipe at it sent her off balance, causing her to trip forward, one foot catching the jagged edge of an exposed tree root.

Down she tumbled to sit on the grass, seeing the sudden appearance of blood on her foot. The pain brought tears to her eyes, and as a shadow moved over her she looked up with over-bright eyes at the man in the suit.

‘Do not cry,’ he said gently, and she noticed that his voice had the slightest foreign inflexion. ‘Here. Let me see.’

And, before she could stop him, he had crouched beside her, gently removing her sandal and putting it aside, and then he was cradling her foot in the palm of his hands, examining it with long fingers which were both cool and firm. Bizarrely, she felt an electric tingling at the curiously intimate sensation of his skin touching hers, and in an automatic reflex she tried to withdraw the foot.

‘No, please . . . ’ she protested without conviction, her normal savoir-faire deserting her. She was transformed instead into a creature who was gazing up at him as if he could take the pain away by magic.

‘Yes,’ he insisted quietly. ‘I will dress it for you.’

She watched as he retreated to the tree where he’d been sitting to pick up a bottle of mineral water. He saw her bemused expression as he returned. ‘Not fizzy,’ he smiled. ‘Still water. And Italian—so it’s only the best, naturally, for such an exquisite foot!’

Involuntarily, she gave a slight shiver at the compliment he paid her, watching as he tipped the mineral water over a fine piece of linen which he produced from his jacket. He squeezed it out with strong hands and then, very firmly, tied it around her narrow foot.

The coolness of the makeshift bandage provided instant relief, but, perversely, she missed that contact with his hand as he had touched her bare flesh. She found herself looking at the line of his mouth, at the slightly mocking upward curve at each side—and began to wonder what it would be like to be kissed by him.

She shook her head to make the thoughts go away. Crazy thoughts! Summer madness. Heat-stroke. ‘I have to go,’ she said.

To her surprise he made no demur. He nodded. ‘Of course.’ And with the same delicate touch he slipped her bare foot back into the sandal, his dark eyes narrowed slightly as they looked at her with concern. Prince Charming, she thought suddenly, as he fastened the strap.

He sprang like a panther to his feet and, looking down at her, extended his hands.

She found herself reaching up her hands, and when he had grasped them he swung her up lightly so that she stood in front of him, looking up expectantly into his face. For a moment he frowned. He was very close. She could hear the humming of bees, and the longed-for breeze had just started. Her lips instinctively parted, and her green eyes were huge in her face.

And suddenly, he became very formal. ‘Can you walk?’ he asked courteously.

She felt as though she had snapped out of a dream. ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said, very shaken, though less by the accident than by the realisation that she had been standing waiting to be kissed by a man who was a total stranger to her. And thank God, she thought, that he had not responded. She tried to move away, but he caught her by the elbow.

‘Let me help you,’ he insisted, in that mocking, accented voice, and slid his arm around her slender waist to walk her back to Judy.

And she allowed him to hold her in that familiar way, relaxing naturally against his strength. The short journey was heaven, but, too soon, they’d arrived. She saw Judy roll over from her prone position, rubbing her eyes, her expression of curiosity showing that she’d seen nothing of the incident. ‘I—tripped,’ Cressida explained, still weak from the effect that this man was having on her.

His hand dropped from her waist. ‘It will cause you pain for no more than a few hours, I think.’ He smiled. And then he looked down at a mute Cressida, cupping her chin between thumb and forefinger. ‘Ciao,’ he said softly, so softly that only she could hear, and then he walked away over the brown grass, the brilliant sunlight glancing off the dark hair.

There was silence for a moment. Judy’s eyes were like saucers.

‘Who was he?’ she demanded. ‘Close-up he’s even more of a hunk!’

It sounded absurd, even to Cressida. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted.

‘What do you mean—you don’t know?’ quizzed Judy.

‘Just what I say,’ replied Cressida, a touch querulously. ‘I’ve never seen him before in my life, and all I know is that he tended to my foot.’ Her eye was caught by the linen handkerchief.

‘But did you see the way he was looking at you? Did you give him your phone number?’

‘He didn’t ask,’ said Cressida, trying, and failing, to sound annoyed at the implication that she might give out her phone number to a person she had just met. Because if she were perfectly honest, she would have given it—willingly.

Judy was looking at his retreating back-view just visible in the distance. ‘Well, that’s that, then. London’s a big place—you’ll never see him again.’

And that was what Cressida had thought, too, after a week of spinning ‘What if?’ fantasies.

What if he went there for lunch every day? Would it look too obvious if she went back there? And why should it? she reasoned—for all he knew it might be her regular lunchtime venue. Which might have been all very well in theory, had the weather not broken with a series of alarming thunderstorms which prevented her from re-visiting the park.

What if he worked near the drama school? Along with half a million others, she thought wryly. If he did work near by, she never saw him, even though she spent too much of her meagre grant on frequenting the many swish new sandwich bars in the vicinity, thinking she might spot him.

No, she decided, as she pushed the fine linen handkerchief she had carefully laundered and ironed to the back of her underwear drawer—it had just been a strange, one-off encounter, and she should take comfort from the fact that she had reacted so strongly to him, stranger or not, because hadn’t it worried her for long enough that she had seemed to share none of her peers’ urges for sexual experimentation? Hadn’t there been shrugs and whispered comments because she showed not the slightest inclination to disappear at parties—unlike the other girls, who were seen leaving the room with their current flames, usually in the direction of the bedroom.