The War Widow
Only he didn’t. He must have felt my recoil. I saw him make a rapid reassessment, a jerked withdrawal of his hand, and watched his mind dismiss the moment as nonsense. He was already saying impatiently like a perfectly normal man might, “Why not? Because you’ve just told me you have lately sustained a severe concussion; that you haven’t been resting properly and that you’re absolutely exhausted. That’s why.”
I struggled out of my seat and past him, dragging my unwieldy coat and bag through the gap behind me, unable to recall any more if this rough attempt at reasonableness really did stand apart in my memory from all the other angry voices that were lodged there now. It felt like something he’d said was an echo of something familiar, something much older than this recent stress, which drifted out of reach almost at the instant that I reached for it. But there was no memory there. It was nothing more than a fresh trick of the tiredness that stalked behind the fear in my mind.
Because I was tired. I was tired of pretending to be nice. I snapped, “Don’t be silly, Mr Hitchen. I’m quite capable of looking after myself.”
I saw his lips release from their tight line. They parted slightly. Disbelief, stupefaction, injury; they were all here. I had to pretend I didn’t care. I had to make such a drama out of my exit even when we had just shared such a civilised lunch because the alternative was even worse. The alternative was to cling to him in the way that a lifetime of conditioning urges any frightened female to cling to the first unwitting male who happens to present himself for the part of prospective hero. But I didn’t need the vision of those men at the bus stop to remind me that reality didn’t mirror imagination and I certainly wasn’t going to truly put chivalry to the test by actually getting into a car with one.
I shuffled out of my seat and past him with a simple farewell as my only concession. He didn’t return it. I hadn’t got many yards down the road, however, before he’d changed his mind and caught up with me. I stopped at the entrance to the station, turning to face him and trying not to bristle, not to give in to weary frustration, and most of all trying not to notice how very forbidding he seemed.
“Thank you for the lovely meal,” I said with a brightness that jarred. “I truly am very grateful for your offer, but I’d really rather take the train.”
“Never accept lifts from strangers, eh?”
His wry perceptiveness shook me more than any temper could. I gave a jerky nod and turned my eyes fiercely to the oblivion of the waiting carriages before doubt could transform into guilt and from there into a confession.
He stood there, saying nothing and frowning down at me, waiting for my attention to return to him again with perfectly genuine disbelief etched across his face. The frown softened to something closer to his natural level of seriousness and abruptly I realised, conditioning or not, just how much I wished to dare go with this kindly man with whom I’d shared a pleasant lunch instead of hurrying for the crowded train.
But before I could formulate the thought into words, he was saying heavily, “All that steam whistling, by the way, was to mark the end of the Royal Wedding. But all the same you’d better get on. Looks like it’s about to leave. If you change your mind, I’ll be the one wrestling with the starter handle of that draughty relic of a geriatric car over there.”
I followed the line of his hand and saw, amongst the modest cluster of blue Morrises and black Austins that still had enough fuel for a scenic outing, a sweet red touring car with soft canvas roof and deep leather seats. It was battered and worn and might have been splendid in summer but was really not very suitable for a November excursion, even when it was a dry day like this one.
It struck me then, just how sorry I was.
“Thank you,” I said, very sincerely indeed. He only inclined his head in a short nod of farewell that somehow communicated everything that needed to be said about fiercely independent women and their lunatic decisions, and turned away to find his car. Its plates showed that it had been registered in Brighton.
Feeling both the wonder and shame of my release in equal measures, I hurried down the platform into the fug of coal smoke with the other passengers. I expected a rush for the seats but they seemed to be all standing about exchanging merry congratulations on the successful conclusion of a state wedding rather than queuing to get on.
“Miss Ward.” A quick step and a man’s voice appeared just behind me. “We get to have our chat after all. What luck.”
I was a fool. A complete and utter fool. In my urge to get away I had forgotten about this irrepressible source of cheerfulness.
Trying to be discreet, I cast a desperate glance at the waiting carriages ahead and then back down the platform past Jim Bristol to the dirty gravel near the road. I could just make out Adam as he rummaged beneath the dashboard for the starter handle. No more than a moment later, he had it in his hand. I looked up to Jim Bristol’s face. He was still smiling, honest, handsome and open; and yet again peculiarly thrilled by the prospect of spending more time with me.
I blinked at him for a moment and then looked away. In the car park, the engine must have rattled into life because Adam was climbing in behind the wheel.
“Sorry, Mr Bristol.” I stepped out of the crowd and smiled guilelessly. “I’ve just realised I’ve forgotten something. Would you mind being very kind and seeing if you can find me a seat?”
I left him nodding eagerly into the space where I had been and hurried back down the platform. I reached the end just as the car roared into life. For a moment I thought I had left it too late and my heart fell as I saw the car swing in a great arc towards the road. But then I was stepping heedlessly out onto the smooth tarmacadam and lifting a hand.
I thought he hadn’t seen me; I wondered whether to actually place myself in his path. But then, with a hiss of brakes, the car slowed and drew to a smooth halt so that the driver’s door was about a yard from my feet. Adam turned his head; he looked up at me with a mixture of surprise and badly concealed impatience and something else that was obscurely like a quickening into relief.
I gave a silly flustered smile and spoke through the glass. “I’m sorry, Mr Hitchen, I’ve changed my mind. Might I come with you after all?”
“I thought we’d settled on Adam.”
“Adam, then.”
He hesitated. But then, without another word, he reached across and tugged on the handle to the passenger door. In the time that it took to swing open, I had stepped around the car and then I was climbing in beside this irritated stranger, just as the train gave a formal whistle to indicate that the party was over.
With a rather less elegant chuckle, the car’s engine rose to match it, smothered it, and then we were away in this Rover 10 that came from Brighton and accelerating along the high winding ridge towards Aberystwyth.
Chapter 4
The reason it mattered so much that the car was from Brighton was that it wasn’t from Gloucestershire – or, to be precise, the market town of Cirencester. It meant they hadn’t found me again. And it meant that I hadn’t made a terrible mistake in getting into this car.
Cirencester had been my home until my divorce and it housed the gallery where Rhys had still been living and working until those final few hours that had ended here. At least one of the demands levied by those two men had tenuously referenced the gallery and, although the details had grown muddier through the course of my bewildered wanderings in that hospital bed, they had certainly decided to take me somewhere. Reason told me it was the gallery. The alternative was that they’d simply decided to carry me away to some secluded spot where they might dispose of me, but I didn’t dare think about that for long.
Either way, this car mattered. And so did the risk I was taking now. Aberystwyth gave me hope. In Aberystwyth I stood a chance of uncovering a few meagre hints about Rhys’s last movements and through them a glimpse of what awaited me at the gallery. It could all vanish in a heartbeat if it turned out I’d made the wrong choice by tentatively deciding to believe this man beside me was what I thought he was.
We were at least heading in the right direction; west towards the coast where the sun was already dipping. Adam was driving smoothly but with a degree of seriousness that implied conversation would be unwelcome, even if I could have made myself heard over the noise from the road. He was wearing driving gloves. This was perhaps an alarming development since it meant he would leave no fingerprints. But actually, on the assumption he wasn’t planning to throttle me, even I could understand why he should want them. The view northwards to the foothills of Snowdonia was glorious but the car was immensely draughty, the canvas roof thrummed overhead and I was grateful when he reached one of those gloved hands onto the back seat and drew forward a thick woollen blanket for me to drape across my knees.
The road ran high along a ridgetop. Every turn offered a fresh spectacular panorama of the wide glacial valley below, filled with leafless trees and pasture fields and sparse hills turned the colour of burgundy by old heather. I caught sight of the distinctive spread wings of a buzzard once and I lifted my hand to point it out to my companion but he only gave it a cursory acknowledgement now that he didn’t feel the need to disarm me. That is to say, he glanced upwards and nodded his appreciation and then returned his attention to the curling road. It was actually quite pleasant to be travelling with a man who understood the value of companionable silences. Then the worst happened. The car suddenly checked as if to stop.
We were passing through a small hamlet; a little plain cluster of five or so workman’s cottages typical of the area. They meant nothing to me; at least nothing beyond the vague familiarity of having travelled this road once or twice in the course of my marriage. Now I turned to my driver. He wasn’t looking at me. He was peering beyond me at a set of two grey cottages that squatted a short distance away from the road. Quite automatically, I pressed back in my seat to give him a better view, and it was barely acknowledged before he identified the one he wanted and steered the car to a halt on the verge.
Now he turned to me. He looked very different in this dull light. He wouldn’t have known it but the cold had ruffled his hair and drawn his features into dramatic relief. It hardened him and made him a stranger all over again. He was drawing off the leather gloves with measured tugs on long fingers. They would have dwarfed mine. The cold must have been working on my face too and making my eyes very large because when his gaze found mine, it seemed to throw him for a moment. Then he covered it by reaching past me into the cramped space of the back seat for a jacket and a discarded hat.
He said, “Are you in a hurry to get back?” His gaze was angled into the footwell; his posture held that air of distance which for a time had disappeared.
My voice wasn’t working very well. “N—no?”
“Good,” he said. “You won’t mind then if I just nip in there for a few minutes? You can come if you’d like? Or stay in the car; it’s up to you.”
He was already pushing open his door. I stayed in the car. It seemed to be what he wanted and politeness was acting as my defence again. I do believe if he’d asked if I minded a spot of abduction I probably would have given him a tactful reply to that too.
As he climbed out, I asked in a voice made even more rapid by the shadow of his own tension, “What are you doing?”
He paused in the act of shutting the door. “Research,” he said.
Then, by way of an afterthought, his head ducked below the doorframe. He added, “Here, put these on. Your hands will thaw in a moment. It’s not that cold out here now that the car’s stationary, I promise.”
He’d dared to glance at me at last. The swift gleam of those grey eyes was shy but the humour there was genuine. He was bemused by his own brusqueness and by my reaction to it. It was a sudden simple reassurance. He knew he’d confused me and he meant me to know everything was fine with this little act of kindness. I took the gloves. Then he shut the door.
I watched as, shrugging his way into the coat and conventionality, he stepped across the grassy verge towards the nearest of the low run-down cottages. The unkempt door with its peeling red paint and the dilapidated coal shed certainly fitted my idea of what constituted sinister. Adam rapped lightly on the wood, waited, then peered through the glass at the side before knocking again. Someone must have seen him because with a change to his posture he waited until the door finally opened and then, with a quick unsmiling glance back at me, he stepped inside. The other man had been ordinary and old and crabbed.
I sat there for about ten minutes, watching the road behind in the single driver’s side wing mirror in case it should turn out that this was a simple way of arranging an exchange with those men, but no other car appeared. A pony-cart crossed the road ahead from one field into another with a lean sheepdog trailing dutifully behind, but nothing else happened that could possibly be an excuse for alarm and finally I was forced to admit that his stop was exactly as he implied – nothing to do with me.
With a grimace at what amounted to yet another painfully unnecessary display of doubt, I rummaged in my bag to drag out the little sketchbook. I waited a while longer but then, laying the gloves upon his seat and clutching my pencil and pad like a shield, I decided firmly that if he could do research, so could I. I climbed out of the car and drifted artlessly around the wide curve of the road.
Beyond the corner I found a gateway overlooking a promising field where broken hedges and ancient trees straggled down the tussock-strewn slopes. The solitude was glorious. But I wasn’t alone. A sheep gave a surprised grunt and lumbered quickly to her feet as I appeared and I quickly sketched her head before she could decide to run away. She had half a bramble thicket trailing from her fleece and I sketched that too before slowly but surely moving onto the hints and touches for the field’s other occupants as they rolled gently downhill to the floodplain at the bottom.
“I thought you must have given up and had decided to walk back.”
A now familiar voice broke my all-absorbing peace of concentration. I’d heard his step on the gravel behind but it hadn’t frightened me this time. I turned my head as Adam appeared next to me to contemplate the view, faintly perfumed with pipe smoke and inoffensively comparing my work with the scene below. He had reverted to his more usual habit of looking like a relaxed companion, although his voice was not fully restored to the ease of our tea in the hotel. He asked, “Are you ready to go, or do you want to stay a while?”
I shut my sketchbook with a snap and smiled at him.
“I’m finished, thank you. I was only passing the time while you paid your visit, and my model has very rudely walked away without so much as a by-your-leave anyway …” And then, because I knew that was, to all intents and purposes, exactly what I had done to him at Devil’s Bridge, I followed it with a hastily mumbled, “Sorry. I am very glad, you know, that you let me tag along on this drive.”
“Think nothing of it.” His quick dismissal was meant to reassure. We were already walking back around the bend to the car.
I waited until we were out of the hamlet before trying to make a fresh beginning by asking, “Did you get what you needed?”
He had to incline his head towards me to be heard over the shrill wail of the old engine and he made me think his tension over the past minutes had been because he’d been waiting for that apology because that old stiffness wouldn’t quite leave his voice and he barked out, “Very useful interview actually.” Then he grimaced a little before adding in a less stilted tone, “In case you haven’t guessed, that meeting was the conclusion of one of the threads I’ve been following for some time. It’s taken me all week to set up this visit and it was worth the effort. My latest work will be – or I should say is – based around a small mining community. Old Mr Hughs worked in the local lead mine before it shut so was able to give me all sorts of useful insights on the mechanics of that kind of life.”
“How interesting,” I said. I suspect my own efforts to sound more normal were lost in the noise from the road because I saw his eyes flick left twice to read my face before apparently being reassured that I wasn’t trying to mock. His doubt was valuable to me in its way though. It gave me the chance to realise once and for all that it wasn’t temper that had been colouring his manner on this drive; he hadn’t been trying to punish me for my rudeness. He’d simply been nervous about his meeting. And the realisation was like a glimpse of a far less justifiable tragedy than the one that was presently stalking me. The one that had made a kind, normal, safe man like him shy.
It made me say in a sudden urgency of honesty because I knew now that it mattered, “I didn’t mind staying in the car just now, you know. If I’d been in your position I’d have wanted to go in alone too. I know what it’s like when you’re steeling yourself to do an interview. You don’t need anyone else muscling in and disrupting your thoughts when you just need a few quiet seconds to think of everything you want to say. You know I had to do it all the time with the clients at the gallery.” I stumbled a little then. I’d slipped into talking about my old life at the Cirencester gallery where I’d handled the business for Rhys. In fact, invariably Rhys would have been the source of the distraction that had put me off my stride. But Adam wasn’t going to know that and he couldn’t have known that I wasn’t talking about my present placement at the Lancaster gallery, certainly not when I hastily tacked on, “I mean I still do have to talk to people. I told you that at lunch earlier.”
I faltered. I’d seen his initial surprise as I’d sympathised. That had been natural enough perhaps, but then it appeared again as I rushed into adding those last words. I’d meant to make him comfortable and he was in a way but his swift sideways glance also bore a hint of incredulity, like the rhythm of his thoughts had experienced a momentary sharpening of concentration, followed by an anticlimax when the growing feeling was dismissed as an error. Then I felt his gaze briefly touch my face again and saw him register the curiosity there, and in an instant his expression was wiped clean.
When he spoke, it was only to assure me that I wouldn’t have been in the way.
“But thank you,” he added, contradicting himself. “Thank you all the same.”
And then we were safely stowing his car on a backstreet where the salty sea-spray couldn’t cement itself onto the precious paintwork before winding our way back through the town.
He stopped as we were about to cross the main shopping street onto the road that ran down to meet the seafront and turned to me. Behind him, someone stepped out of a red telephone box and I heard the quick murmur of apology as they made him step aside.
He was himself again. He tipped his head at the box as an indication of what he intended to do next. It obviously required privacy since there was a telephone at the hotel. He knew I’d noticed, and he also clearly appreciated that I made no remark. Then he asked with his faintly mocking smile, “Do you think you can cope with walking all the way back to the hotel on your own?”
He’d obviously read my thoughts too. I’d been running an eye downhill towards the frontage of the pier that stood at the bottom and telling myself sternly that the gauntlet of terrors – imagined or otherwise – between me and the hotel was all of about four hundred yards long. Adam meant his comment as a joke. He didn’t really think I was worried. I gave him a slanting smile in return. And was still smiling when I said something vague about it nearly being time for dinner and he broke in to say rather abruptly, “I’m sorry, this is going to sound strange but since you said in the car a moment ago that you know me, I’m going to take you up on it. Can you not mention to the other guests that I drove you back just now?”
“I, er … Yes. Of course, if you like.”
His brows lowered. “Now I’ve confused you and that isn’t what I meant, I promise. I just don’t want to attract any more attention to myself than I already have. You’ve seen how it is; if I become the subject of idle chatter about a fellow guest, my cover really will be blown …”
“Absolutely,” I agreed heartily. I could tell I was beaming like a mad thing. Inside I was cold. I was rapidly thinking that he was right; I was confused and if he thought I knew him, he was mistaken. I was trying to absorb the unpalatable truth that my attempt at ordinary friendliness with this man was an even bigger disaster than paranoia. I had the horrible feeling he thought I was meaning to turn our quiet lunch at the hotel into a public dinner together at the hotel and this was his way of tactfully curbing it. Only if he was he was mistaken there too. And now I was rushing into giving him blind sympathy and I could tell from the way those grey eyes were scrutinising my face that this wasn’t the response he wanted. He drew breath and I knew he was going to try to change it, soften it and steer me into not minding the misunderstanding, and it was all going to get even more excruciatingly tangled than ever.
So I took control in the only way I knew how and paved the way for an easy – and permanent – conclusion to this ridiculousness for both of us by wrapping the moment in yet more layers of politeness. I gave him a broad smile and said brightly, “Actually, I understand perfectly. No, really I do. Fame and fortune is all very well, but not when you want a bit of peace in which to get on with the day job?”
I saw him nod. “Exactly,” he said. “Thank you.”
There didn’t seem much to say after that. I thought he would be glad to have it so easily laid out that I understood and he would get the privacy he required but I found instead that my smile had made his brows furrow again. Apparently he’d read my withdrawal beneath its cheerful mask and he was puzzled by it. Quite simply, I couldn’t get away from him today without causing some upset first.
Instinct made me slide hastily into a firm utterance of goodbye and then things went from bad to worse because he seemed determined to end things on a friendlier note after all and in the midst of the confusion of awkwardness and platitudes we ended with a swift step in to touch cheek to cheek.
I don’t honestly know who initiated it. I thought he had but there was that briefest telltale hesitation from him as I automatically reciprocated that gave me time to realise that I really had got it wrong this time. Or perhaps I hadn’t. Perhaps he’d done it in that awful impulsive way people have of assuaging their conscience when they’re a little bit ashamed that you’ve guessed they really just want to be shot of you and end up accidentally lurching into warmth instead. Perhaps it was simply a reasonably appropriate way to mark the end of a social outing as new acquaintances might do.
Whichever way it was, it didn’t exactly warrant the reaction I had. After all, I’d made this gesture all the time at home both in greeting and farewell with clients at the various events in the gallery. At the Cirencester gallery I mean. In the north, women simply shook hands like sensible creatures and saved themselves the trouble of getting it wrong. In Cirencester, this would have all just been an embarrassingly mishandled version of a familiar social norm. The feel of his touch to my arm, the automatic lift upwards to draw closer, that brief ordinary moment of confusion as one or other of us had to dictate which cheek was presented, even the accidental little intake of breath at the moment of contact and with it drawing in the faintest hint of the scent of his skin, followed by the oddly prolonged sense of suspense before one or other of us finally withdrew … It was all so familiar.