Love And Devotion Part 23

'They all live miles away.'

He then remembered how she had deliberately cut herself off from everyone by living in the middle of nowhere. 'What about your children? Couldn't you go and stay with them?'

'Goodness, Bob, it's only a chest infection. I'll be fine.'

Not easily defeated, he said, 'I know, why don't I drive you to your friends in Hebden Bridge? That's not far.'

'They've just gone off on holiday to Bali. Now, please, stop fussing. But if you want to be useful, you could make me a drink.'

'I wish I could do more to help,' he said ten minutes later as he handed her a mug of tea. 'And for the record, I still think you'd be better off at home. The doctor said the damp will make things worse.'

She put the mug on the shelf behind the bed, then, to his surprise, reached for his hand. 'But if I went, I'd - ' Gripped by a bout of painful coughing, she covered her mouth with a hand. Finally, she rested back against the pillows.

'What were you going to say?' he prompted.

'No,' she said breathlessly. 'It's better I don't say it.'

He stroked her hand. 'Please tell me what it was.'

Her fingers became entwined with his. She met his gaze.

'I'd rather be ill here and still see you than go home to an empty house.'

Bob's heart quickened. He had to swallow away the tightness in his throat before he could speak. He murmured, 'But I can't bear to see you so ill. Let me take you home. You know it's for the best.'

Harriet was cutting it fine, but so long as the traffic kept moving, she'd make it to Maywood and catch the last half-hour with the children at Novel Ways. Howard had been great; he'd told her to shoot off the moment they'd got through pa.s.sport control. 'I'll catch up with you on Monday,' he'd called after her as she'd sprinted away. 'Have a good weekend.' He'd surprised her in so many ways during the trip. Behind the cra.s.s, overtly chauvinistic exterior, was a reasonable and approachable man. Why did people do that? Hide their real self behind another?

The other surprise had been Dominic showing up in Dublin. However, the extraordinary coincidence of their paths crossing hadn't amazed her as much as the content of their conversation had. Could Felicity really have told Dominic that Harriet had fancied him? Maybe, if she'd been drunk - Harriet didn't want to believe her sister could have let her down when she'd been stone-cold sober. It was too hurtful to contemplate Felicity deliberately betraying her, laughing with Dominic over something Harriet had scarcely been able to admit to herself: that there had been a time when she had secretly, stupidly, longed for Dominic to love her. The thought of Dominic crowing over such a confidence hurt Harriet to her core. She had sat through the rest of breakfast after Howard had joined them - Dominic had actually behaved himself - mortified that he knew something so intimate about her. She felt vulnerable, as if he had some kind of hold over her. What if he now intended to remind her of it, just to twist the knife when it so pleased him?

But far worse than any of that was Dominic's a.s.sertion that Miles could be Felicity's mystery lover. Surely it just wasn't possible. Or was it? Hadn't Dominic criticised her for losing sight of the bigger picture, of seeing only the detail? If that was true, then maybe something really had been going on right under her nose. When she'd said to Dominic that maybe she'd drop a few hints to Miles, just to see what his reaction was, he'd smiled and said he'd pay good money to see that. His parting words, when Howard had left them alone to go and settle the hotel bill, were, 'I wish you luck, but I doubt you'll succeed in getting Miles to admit to his affair with Felicity. He's probably so besotted with keeping her memory pure and unsullied he'd never confess to what they were up to.'

'Whereas if it was you?'

'Oh, I'd be right out there announcing it to the world.'

'I would have thought your feelings for Felicity would have made you extra-protective. In fact, I'm surprised you don't want to kill Miles in a fit of jealous love.'

'You mean, if I can't have her, no one can? Least of all my brother? Oh, Hat, what a precious little darling you are. That's the most romantic notion, if totally misplaced, you've ever come up with.' Pulling on his overcoat, he'd then gathered her into his arms and pressed his lips against hers. 'Thank you for breakfast and for cheering me up. Now why don't you hurry home and read yet more of those delicious-sounding emails and let me know what else you unearth? See if you can't prove me wrong about Miles. A hundred pounds says I'm right.'

He's mad, she'd thought as he hurried away and disappeared through the revolving door of the hotel.

She arrived at Novel Ways in time to see Carrie being awarded a book voucher for her vampire costume - gelled-back hair with widow's peak care of Superdrug; full-length black cape care of Eileen; and blood-tipped fangs and white make-up care of the joke shop in Maywood. She'd beaten an amazingly extravagant witch into second place and the witch's mother looked furiously robbed. She'd probably spent weeks making the costume and didn't take kindly to second place.

'I sincerely hope that was a clear-cut case of nepotism,' she said to Miles, slipping in at the back of the applauding parents.

'Harriet, you made it!' The pleasure on his face gave her a warm glow. But then she thought of everything Dominic had said and the feeling pa.s.sed. Miles and Felicity. Felicity and Miles. The more she said their names together, the more possible their affair seemed. But where did it leave her? Where she'd always been, she supposed. Miles's friend. She'd been stupid to imagine anything else. Perhaps the reason he'd grown closer to her recently was because he'd desperately needed the proximity of another person to take away the pain of his grief.

But there was no time to reflect on this. Joel hurtled across the shop and threw himself at her. He held on tightly, his arms locked around her waist. 'You mustn't go away again,' he said breathlessly, when she finally managed to release his hands and could bend down to him.

'Whyever not?' she asked.

'Because you might die. Just like Mummy and Daddy did.'

She looked into his tear-filled eyes and felt something like an earthquake inside her.

November Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure.

'Don Juan', Lord Byron

Chapter Thirty-Seven.

On Monday morning the children went back to school and just as soon as she had a free moment, Harriet took a break from work to ring Mrs Thompson, the headmistress. 'She'll be free in about fifteen minutes if you'd like to call back,' the school secretary told her.

A meeting, face to face, was probably a better way of dealing with the matter, but Harriet didn't want to take any more time off work unnecessarily. Nor did she want to take the easy way out by telling her parents what had been going on and offloading the problem onto them. When the culprits had been dealt with, then she'd tell them. Or maybe she wouldn't. Just now her parents seemed distant and unreachable. Particularly her father. On Sat.u.r.day he announced at breakfast that he was spending the day with an old work colleague who was going through a rough patch and needed taking out of himself. Harriet found it hard to believe that in his current frame of mind her father would be good for taking anyone out of themselves. But he must have done some good because he didn't come home until gone midnight.

When fifteen minutes had pa.s.sed, Harriet hit the redial b.u.t.ton on her mobile. Top of her agenda, when she finally got to talk to Mrs Thompson, was to stress that Carrie must never know that Harriet had got involved. She wanted Carrie to think she'd got through this without anyone else's intervention.

'Sorry to keep you,' Mrs Thompson said when she finally came to the phone. 'What can I do for you? Is it about the parents' evening next week?'

'No, it's not that,' Harriet said, scribbling a note on her pad in front of her. d.a.m.n! How had she forgotten that? 'I'm ringing about an altogether different matter,' she went on. 'I'd like to know what your policy is for dealing with bullies.' She heard a small but unmistakable intake of breath down the line. 'I'm a.s.suming you do have one.'

'Can you be more specific?'

'Yes. Carrie has received what I can only describe as hate mail. I suspect, given her behaviour recently, that it isn't the first Carrie has received.'

Her office door opened and Dangerous Dave poked his head round it. She raised her hand, indicating she'd be all his in five minutes. He scuttled away. 'I'm sorry,' she said to the headmistress when the door closed, 'but I'm not at all sure this is a storm in a teacup situation. My niece is being victimised and I want the culprits dealt with.'

'Do you still have the letter?'

'Yes.'

'If you bring it in, I can take it from there. In my experience, a small but firm word in the right ear is all that is required.'

A small but firm rap round the right ear seemed more appropriate, but Harriet let it go. 'I think we can safely say that this explains why Carrie skipped out of school the other week,' she said, 'so please, I'd appreciate it if you kept a close eye on her and made sure that the time she's in your care is a happy time.'

'I like to think that goes for all our pupils, Miss Swift. But we have to face facts. As unpalatable as it may seem, some children do single themselves out for treatment which is far from being socially acceptable.'

Harriet wasn't going to stand for this. 'I hope you're not suggesting that Carrie has brought this on herself because her parents are dead.'

'All I'm saying is that invariably there's a reason for these problems. Carrie didn't help herself with those terrible stories she told about her parents. We have to view the wider picture at all times. Have you talked to Carrie about the letter and that you were going to talk to me about it?'

'No. I didn't want her worrying that the bullying will get worse because I'm intervening.'

'Mm ... I'm not sure that's the best thing to do. But for now, as I said earlier, bring in the letter and we'll take it from there.'

Harriet knew a dismissal when she heard one. She rang off and considered the headmistress's comment about the wider picture. Was someone trying to tell her something? Until recently, she had never before thought of herself as being short-sighted or blinkered, but was she?

Before long, though, these thoughts were pushed to the back of her mind, and she immersed herself in what she'd been doing before the phone call. It was nearly an hour later, when she'd finished compiling a code, that she remembered Dangerous Dave had wanted her for something.

The thing about R.E.M., Will thought as he drove out of town on Tuesday morning with the volume turned up on his outmoded ca.s.sette player, was that you could tie yourself up in Michael Stipe's lyrics. Some made no sense at all, while others were diamond-bright with the strength of their clarity. Those were the lyrics you had to think about. That was often when Stipe was being his most enigmatic and was fooling you into believing you'd got him sussed. Which was how life was, Will had come to realise. One minute you had it all in place and the next you were flailing around helplessly.

Ever since his spectacular fall from grace, his life had jogged along quite nicely. The trick, he'd frequently told Marty, was to keep things simple. And he'd done that to great effect. Until now. Now there were complications coming at him from all sides. The biggest one was Suzie. She was six months pregnant and Maxine was still struggling to come round to the inevitable. She had taken to ringing Will to discuss Suzie's future. Or lack of it, as she saw it. 'Steve and I were looking forward to that day when we'd have the house to ourselves,' she said on one occasion. 'Now we're going to have a baby living with us. And for how long? It's not fair to Steve. He didn't marry me only to end up with a baby permanently under his feet.'

Will could sympathise; he enjoyed his freedom after all. 'Suzie's more than welcome to move in with me,' he'd said.

'How very magnanimous of you,' Maxine had replied stiffly. 'But I somehow don't see Suzie forgoing her comfortable bedroom and en suite bathroom to rough it with you in Maple Drive.'

'Thanks a bunch.'

'Oh, please don't start; you know what I mean.'

'Aren't you forgetting we started out in far less salubrious surroundings? When you're young you can rough it without even realising it.'

'Thank you for reminding me that I'm getting older.'

'It happens to the best of us, Maxine. Or should I say Granny?'

The attempt at humour hadn't gone down well. But grandparents they were about to become, whether they liked it or not, and the sooner Maxine got used to the idea, the better for them all. He couldn't exactly say he was thrilled at the new persona he was about to adopt: Grandfather. It put at least another twenty years on him, which he'd rather not feel right now. And that brought him to the other equally unexpected complication in his life.

Harriet.

He wasn't used to being turned down by women and he wasn't sure he could handle it if Harriet said no. He still hadn't plucked up the courage to ask if she'd like to come to the Jools Holland concert with him. Part of him reasoned that if he left it to the last minute, he could convince himself that if she turned him down it was because she already had something else arranged. But he really wanted her to say yes, and not just to please his vanity. In a way he wanted to test himself and see if he really was as intrigued by her as he thought he was.

It would serve him right if she said yes and then made him wear a bag over his head like John Hurt in The Elephant Man. 'You didn't actually think I'd be seen out in public with you, did you?' he could imagine her saying.

Every time he thought of Harriet - which he did frequently - he was reminded of that tough, determined spirit of hers. There was something quite magnificent about her, he'd decided. Heroic even.

He was five minutes early for his eleven o'clock appointment, but it didn't bother the elderly lady who answered the door of the terraced house. She ushered him through to the sitting room, where there was a tea tray awaiting his pleasure, and a coal fire that was hissing and spitting noisily. 'I've only just made the tea,' she said, 'so we'll let it brew, shall we?'

Will preferred his tea weak - like gnat's pee, Marty joked - but he said, 'That'll be perfect.' The old ladies always made tea for him and he always made a point of drinking it politely, no matter how stewed it was. 'Do you want to show me the cabinet you mentioned on the phone?' he asked. He'd already clocked the furniture in the sitting room; mostly post-war utility, which in itself had a market, but not one Will was interested in.

He followed her back out into the hall, which now felt like the Arctic after the heat of the small sitting room, and then along the narrow pa.s.sage to a dining room. Whenever he dealt with the SOLs - the Sweet Old Ladies as Jarvis called them - he kept in mind one of his mentor's apocryphal tales. 'Beware Laddie,' Jarvis had warned him, 'of the helpless old dear who gives you the sob story about her husband dying from lung cancer and how she doesn't know how she's going to sc.r.a.pe together the money for the funeral. It's the oldest scam going. You look at the woodworm-riddled bit of tat she wants to sell and you know it's worth thirty quid tops, but you feel so sorry for her you divvy up sixty. Meanwhile, round the back is her son, dusting down the next piece of heartbreaking tat.'

'It belonged to an aunt,' this particular old lady said now as she pointed towards a cabinet that was packed to the gunwales with pieces of china and silver. Strictly speaking it wasn't a cabinet, it was a credenza - trust the Italians to come up with a posh word for a side cabinet with display shelves at either end. This was a very fine Victorian example - burr walnut with a marquetry frieze, a central panelled door flanked by two glazed doors, tapering columns with gilt metal borders, a plinth base and bun feet, and only a modic.u.m of wear and tear. The patination of the wood was exquisite and he ran a hand up and down one of the elegant columns. A s.h.i.+ver ran through him. Without inspecting the back or even opening the door, he knew he was looking at four thousand pounds' worth, give or take.

'What do you think of it?' the woman asked anxiously, as though he was judging a favourite child.

'I think it's beautiful. But do you really want to part with it?'

'Oh, yes. My friends and I are planning a holiday and I thought this might help pay for it.'

Will could hear Jarvis hissing in his ear. Beware Laddie! Remember those SOLs! 'Where are you and your friends thinking of going?'

'A coach trip to Scotland. My husband, when he was alive, wasn't much of a traveller, but now I'm on my own, I've decided to have some fun. Do you think this might pay for a few nights in a guest house?'

Thinking of his mother's fondness for travel since she'd been widowed, Will said, 'I'll be dead straight with you. This will pay for more than a coach trip to Scotland. You could go on a luxury cruise with the proceeds.'

'Oh, dear me no. That would never do. I get seasick just having a bath.'

He smiled. 'What I'm trying to say is that this is a really fine piece of furniture. Its value is about three and a half thousand pounds. Maybe a tad more.'

'Really? Are you sure? It just belonged to my aunt. She was nothing special.'

'I don't know about your aunt, but this I am sure about.'

'Well, in that case, we'd better have that cup of tea. Goodness. What a day it's turning out to be.'

Two cups of tar-strength tea later, he was on the road with the credenza in the back of his car. He'd given the woman a fair price and knew that Jarvis would be frothing at the mouth when he laid eyes on it. It was a beauty. The kind of find that brightened the darkest of days.

He drove back to Kings Melford, where he was meeting Marty for lunch at Brian's burger bar. For once, Marty was late and Will chatted to Brian about the weather, the lack of punters and the c.o.c.k-up the government was making of everything. 'It's all them spin-doctors,' was Brian's considered opinion as he slapped two burgers about on the hotplate. His conviction was such that Will didn't feel inclined to argue with him. Instead he wrapped his fingers around his polystyrene cup and scanned the market for Marty's approaching figure. It wasn't like Marty to be late. Perhaps a client had overrun and kept him. He took a sip of his hot chocolate, glad of its sweet warmth.

The forecast was that winter was on its way. Just as it should be. It was, after all, bonfire night in two days' time. He thought of all those years he'd put on monster displays of fireworks for Gemma and Suzie. There'd been times, looking back, when perhaps he'd been a little reckless. One year he'd nearly blown his hand off. Maxine had gone berserk, screaming that he was out of his mind and that he could have got them all killed. Very calmly, despite the searing pain in the palm of his hand, which he was trying to subdue with a packet of frozen peas, he'd said, 'I think I'll just pop along to the hospital if that's okay with you.' That was the year he'd spent seven hours in casualty and a week off work. He still had the scar and sometimes, when he stretched his hand open too far, he was reminded of what an idiot he'd been.

He caught sight of Marty hurrying over and waved. 'Sorry I'm late,' Marty said, his face flushed red from the cold.

'No worries. Difficult client I presume?'

'Yeah, something like that. Have you ordered?'

'Naturally.' He turned to Brian. 'How are the burgers doing?'

'Ready when you are.'

They took their lunch and strolled through the market - Brian's only table and set of chairs were already occupied. 'How's Suzie?' Marty asked, as they stood absently browsing a CD and DVD stall.

'Other than not liking how pregnant she now looks, she's well. The sickness has eased off.'

'And Maxine?'

'Not too much change there yet.'

'She'll come round.'

'Even for a lawyer you sound unfeasibly sure.'

Marty shrugged. 'People just need time to adjust.'

'My, you're philosophical today.'

When Marty didn't respond, Will said, 'You okay? You don't seem your usual self.'

Marty picked up a CD of an old s.e.x Pistols alb.u.m. 'Do you remember us thinking this was the last word in world-changing music? How we ever fell for it, I'll never know. It'll take more than a few clever lyrics and bashed-out chords to change the world for the better.'