Past Loving

‘Marriage? But you’re only eighteen. You’re going to university in September. You’re too young…’

You’re too young. How neatly and logically he had used her youth against her, exonerating himself from all blame…from any guilt.

Where now she might have bitterly pointed out that she had also been too young for the sophisticated game of casual sex he had obviously been playing with her, then she had been too shocked, too hurt…too overwhelmed to remind him of those words of love he had whispered to her when he had held her in his arms, to remind him of the passionate intensity of their lovemaking…to remind him that at eighteen she had been too young and too unknowing to be able to differentiate between a man’s desire for sex and a girl’s infatuated desire for what she perceived to be love.

Now, with over a decade of experience separating her from the girl she had been then and the woman she was now, she waited patiently with a calmly serene face for Patsy to unload her burden of news, allowing only the merest flicker of response to cross her face when Patsy told her importantly, ‘Robert Graham is back. I thought I’d better warn you…’

‘Warn me?’ Holly enquired politely, allowing her voice to express a faint puzzlement with her friend’s intensity. ‘Warn me about what?’

‘Well…well, about the fact that he’s back,’ Patsy told her, floundering a little. ‘I mean, I can remember how devastated you were when he dropped you—well, we all can. I was saying to Lucy only the other day that we all thought that you and Robert would be married by the time you were twenty-one…’

Grimly suppressing her real feelings, Holly allowed herself to appear relaxed and to smile. The media-familiarisation course her PR adviser had virtually forced her to go on was having some benefits after all, she decided with irony.

‘Good heavens, Patsy, that was over ten years ago. You don’t surely still think that silly teenage crush on Robert Graham has any bearing on my life today, do you? Heavens, I can barely even remember what the man looks like. He must be well into his thirties by now.’

She managed to make it sound as though Robert were merely one step away from drawing his pension, her smile and shrug implying that the woman she was today could only derive amusement and disdain at the thought of her childish folly in loving such a man.

Patsy’s mouth dropped open a little.

‘You mean you aren’t bothered?’

‘About what?’ Holly enquired, smoothing a non-existent crease from her suit. The combination of primrose yellow silk and her highlighted blonde hair was one which she privately considered to be gilding the lily, but her PR consultant had been insistent that for the sake of the business she must present an image with which other women could not only identify, but which they could also aspire to.

‘But it’s not the real me,’ she had protested, wrinkling her nose with distaste.

‘It will be,’ Elaine Harrison had told her robustly with a determined look. ‘It will be.’And rather weakly she had given in, more because she felt that she owed it to everyone else, those who had supported her and the business in the early days when she was struggling to make ends meet, than because it was what she personally wanted.

‘We aren’t changing you,’ Elaine had pointed out more kindly. ‘Just emphasising certain aspects of you.’

No, they hadn’t changed her. But sometimes she wished…

‘About Robert moving back here,’ Patsy was saying. ‘I mean I thought he’d left for good. From what I’ve read in the papers he’s so high-powered and everything now that I never thought he’d want to come back here to live. Every time you read about him, he seems to be jetting off to a different part of the world to see one of his clients. A management consultant…you’d think he’d live in New York or London.’

Her voice expressed her dissatisfaction that someone who could choose to live somewhere so glamorous would bury themselves in a quiet English village. Personally Holly couldn’t think of anything worse than living in a large impersonal city…but then she was not Patsy. She wasn’t Robert Graham either, and although she wasn’t going to say as much she too was surprised that he should base himself here in the country.

Patsy was wrong about one thing, though…Far from jetting all over the world to see his clients, his eminence and reputation these days was such that they were the ones jetting in to see him—and he was no longer someone employed by millionaires. He was one himself.

Not that she envied him that. Large wealth brought with it its own set of very complex responsibilities, as she was beginning to discover.

‘So you’re not bothered about it, then?’

Patsy sounded quite disappointed. For the first time a glimmer of amusement broke through the icy apprehension which had frozen the normally warm core of her life since she had learned that Robert was coming back. No wonder she had turned to her garden for solace, desperately planning colour schemes for the spring, desperately giving herself something to hold on to, something to reach out for, something to look forward to once the long cold months of winter were over.

‘I’m bothered about all manner of things,’ she corrected Patsy with a faint smile. ‘I’m bothered about the ecology, about the destruction of the rain forests, about the destruction we, the human race, are wreaking not just against one another but against our whole environment—’

‘Oh, yes…I know about that,’ Patsy interrupted pettishly. ‘But that wasn’t what I meant and you know it. I meant were you bothered about Robert coming back?’

Holly stood up. As she reached for her bag, the soft swing of her hair skilfully hid her face.

‘No, I’m not. Why should I be?’ she questioned, adding wryly, ‘As I’ve just said, all manner of things do “bother me”, as you put it, Patsy…things which are far, far more important to me than Robert Graham could ever be.’

She smiled at her friend as she straightened up and added dulcetly, ‘And as for Gerald, I really don’t think you need to worry. Have you actually met his new secretary yet?’

‘No. No, I haven’t, why?’

‘She’s fifty-five, married with two grown-up children and four grandchildren,’ Holly told her drily.

OUTSIDE SHE STOOD in the sun for a while, enjoying its beneficent September warmth. Last night there had been a full moon, and the night air had been cool, a foretaste of the autumn to come. She thought about her wardrobe, bulging with the new autumn clothes the PR girl had almost forcibly made her buy. They were launching their new range of natural perfumes and body products before Christmas; there would be a rash of media interviews to attend. She had to look the part…and there were now so many things to consider. She herself had insisted that she would only wear clothes made in natural fibres, and then had been irritated when Elaine had solemnly pronounced, ‘Very good—yes, that will really underline your commitment to the environment and to the new green mood sweeping the country.’

She had wanted to protest there and then that her decision had nothing to do with fitting into a given mould, but Elaine had already passed on to other issues, complimenting her on her decision not to have her hair permed but to keep it natural and straight.

She had ached to point out that the shockingly expensive hairdresser who cut it once monthly and the even more horrendously expensive lightening procedure which involved a trip to London every month could hardly be described as natural, but what was the point? In actual fact she rather liked the simple elegance of her new hairstyle now that she had had time to grow accustomed to it. It was much more suitable for a woman of thirty than her previous unstyled long hair had been, but she hated the way she sometimes felt that she was being forced into a specific image, just as she disliked the current ‘fashion’ for promoting environment-conscious awareness and products in a way that really only paid lip-service to the ethics that lay behind them.

But then, as Paul had wisely pointed out to her, the more people who bought her products, the more people would become aware of how precious and how vulnerable nature’s resources were, and the profits her business made were even now helping to preserve those resources, to fight off the effect of their destruction.

She smiled wryly to herself as she unlocked her car. Environmentally speaking, she supposed she ought to have owned a bicycle and not a car…She did use lead-free petrol, however, even if Paul, who was in charge of the fleet-purchasing of cars for the company, had stunned her by presenting her with the keys for this bright red convertible model of the same car he had leased for the other company executives.

When she had protested that it was far too vibrant, and far too high-powered for her, he had grinned at her and said, ‘OK, I’ll send it back, shall I?’ and they had both burst out laughing.

‘You’re a rat,’ she had told him affectionately. ‘You knew I wouldn’t be able to resist it.’

‘Well, someone has to bring you down from the lofty heights and remind you occasionally that you are human and subject to the same vices as the rest of us,’ he had told her, and behind his teasing she had realised what he was trying to say to her. She had never deliberately tried to appear holier than thou, and that was the last way she wanted people to perceive her, and so, feeling rather chastened by his comment, she had allowed Elaine to sweep her off to London and equip her with the new wardrobe she would be wearing for the rash of interviews she would be forced to face in October.

As she drove away from Patsy’s, she thought how lucky she was to be able to work in a country environment.

The business had expanded to such an extent now that they had their own purpose-built factory and office complex, on a small industrial site outside their local market town and close to the nearest motorway complex, and it was there that she headed for now.

She had a meeting this afternoon to discuss the packaging for a new make-up range they hoped to bring out in time for Christmas. She glanced at the dashboard clock and realised she had spent rather longer with Patsy than she had intended. There was a short cut she could take, a narrow dusty country lane which would cut a good few miles off her journey, even though, strictly speaking, it was a privately owned road.

She turned off on to it a mile away from Patsy’s house. It had been a hot summer; the grass that grew either side of the lane was just beginning to die back, blackberries glistened on the hedgerows. The thought of her mother’s blackberry and apple crumble made her mouth water, but she wasn’t likely to taste one this autumn. Her parents had only just embarked on a world cruise, something her father had been promising her mother they would do once he had retired. Even though she now had her own home, she missed them. Like her, her mother was a keen gardener, and together they would have spent the autumn months poring over plant catalogues.

Her mind on her garden and the pleasure of the work that still lay ahead of her there, she drove down the lane, the land to either side of her obscured by the overgrown hedges, so overgrown that as she approached a particularly bad bend the branches actually scraped against the sides of her car. It was a blind bend, impossible to see round and the lane was only wide enough for one car, so to be confronted by the imposing black bonnet of a brand new and very large Mercedes saloon coming in the opposite direction made her reach automatically for the brake-pedal, her heart in her mouth, guilt and tension tightening her stomach muscles as she immediately recognised Robert Graham as the driver of the other car.

Guilt because she knew quite well that this lane was the private rear entrance to the Hall, continuing on past it to rejoin the main road on the other side of the village, and tension because…well, because Robert had stopped his car and was getting out.

Why on earth had she ever implied that a man of thirty-odd was a man well past his sexual prime? A tiny shiver of a sensation she did not want to recognise ricocheted down her spine as she sat virtually frozen in her own seat, staring at him as he walked towards her.

CHAPTER TWO

DISTURBINGLY Robert was dressed not as the image projected both by the financial Press and the sleek bulk of his expensive car suggested—in the immaculate formality of a business suit and shirt—but in jeans and a checked shirt worn under a soft leather blouson jacket, the clothes soft and well-worn, lacking the image-conscious stiffness of clothes conspicuously brand new and bought ‘for the country’.

No, these were clothes he was used to wearing, familiar and chosen for comfort. And yet for all the casualness of his clothes there was about him a very strong aura of power and control, emphasised by the impatient, semi-hostile way he was approaching her car, his forehead creased in a frown as he called out curtly to her once he was within earshot.

‘I’m sorry, but you must have missed your way. This is a private lane—’

He stopped speaking abruptly, his frown deepening as he stared into the car and then demanded incredulously, ‘Holly?’

She forced herself to remember that she was thirty and not eighteen. Her face felt as stiff as wood but somehow she managed to get her lips to creak into a facsimile of a polite and distant smile.