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* * *
As a serious proposition, the resolution faded overnight. Regretfully, Fler acknowledged that she wasn’t the stuff of which murderers were made. It didn’t stop her from fantasising about doing serious harm to Kyle Ranburn. More realistically, she contemplated laying a complaint with the university authorities, but knew that her own relationship with Tansy might suffer badly from that. And what Tansy needed now was support and rest, not to be unwillingly involved in a vendetta which might well turn public.
It made her heart ache that every time she went into the room she saw the tense expectancy in Tansy’s face turn momentarily to disappointment before she put on a smile for her mother. Neither of them mentioned Kyle Ranburn again, but he was always, Fler was grimly aware, there in spirit, like a spectre at the feast.
The staff told her he hadn’t visited, and although she was sure that it was better for Tansy not to see him again she was furious all over again at his heartlessness. She covertly inspected the card on a basket of flowers that appeared on the bedside locker late on Sunday, but it was from Tansy’s flatmates.
That evening, when they had told her that Tansy would be discharged in the morning, she found him at the ward door when she was on her way out.
She halted abruptly at the sight of him, and said, ‘Have you come to see her at last?’
He shook his head. He looked grim and slightly uncomfortable. As well he might, she thought.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Actually I hoped to see you.’
Her head went up sharply. ‘Why?’
‘I thought...we should talk about your daughter.’
A group of visitors brushed past them, carrying flowers and magazines, and he lightly took her arm, moving her to one side.
Fler pulled away from him, her mouth tight.
He said, ‘Can I buy you a cup of coffee? Somewhere that we can talk with a bit of privacy.’
She said, ‘I’ll buy my own coffee, thanks.’ She didn’t want to take anything from this man. ‘But I’d like to talk to you, too.’ She had a few home truths to tell him.
* * *
They walked to a coffee bar. He seemed to know the area, and while the place he chose wasn’t upmarket it was clean and cosy and the coffee was good. He led her to a booth and saw her seated before he slid in opposite her. He asked her what the doctors had said, and she told him that they didn’t expect any permanent after-effects.
He nodded and said formally, ‘I’m glad. That must be a burden lifted for you.’
Fler didn’t answer. The booth was small, and she was conscious of his masculine aura, a sense of controlled power, of assurance about the straight dark brows, the clear-cut mouth, the broad shoulders under a faultlessly cut charcoal suit. Today he wore a grey tie patterned with tiny red diamonds, and his paler grey shirt was pristine. When he spooned half a teaspoon of sugar into his coffee she saw a gleaming cufflink in his sleeve, a tiny dark red stone set into one corner of an initialled gold square. Not many men of his age used cufflinks these days. His hands looked smooth but strong and masculine, and he wore no rings.
Although not spectacularly handsome, he had an indefinable low-key attraction. She wasn’t surprised that Tansy had fallen for him. It had probably been all too easy for him to dazzle her, not least because a lecturer was someone she would naturally look up to.
He sat thoughtfully stirring the drink in front of him. When he leaned back and put down the spoon he asked abruptly, ‘Just what did Tansy tell you about me?’
Was he anxious about his job? she wondered. It wouldn’t look good for him to be known to have caused one of his students to attempt suicide. There’d been a time when Tansy had told her everything, but lately they had tacitly refrained from discussing him.
‘Does it matter?’ she asked. ‘You needn’t worry that I’m going to make trouble. For myself, I’d love to see you come thoroughly unstuck. But Tansy’s welfare is my main concern, and I don’t think she needs any more stress right now.’
‘Is it any use telling you that I’m not responsible for what she did?’
‘Legally, I’m sure you’re in the clear. Morally—’
‘Is she getting help?’
‘Help?’
‘Psychiatric help,’ he said bluntly.
‘It’s good of you to be so concerned—at last,’ Fler said. ‘The hospital crisis team talked to her.’
‘Crisis team?’
‘Nurses who liaise with a psychiatrist, but they didn’t feel it was necessary for her to see him.’
‘No?’ He was looking at her in a slightly bothered, undecided fashion. ‘She’s not normal, you know.’
Fler gave him a hostile stare. She’d seldom heard anything so ridiculous. Tansy wasn’t the only girl in the world to over-react when her first love-affair went wrong. No one had suggested she was mentally ill. ‘If you mean that she’s mad to think that you are worth trying to kill herself over, I’d have to agree.’
She saw him quell a spurt of temper. He said levelly, ‘It’s not just that. She’s been—’ he spread his hands ‘—fantasising about things.’
‘About you.’
‘Well...yes.’ He bent his head, almost as if embarrassed, and rubbed a hand briefly at the back of his neck. ‘It’s...a difficult situation,’ he said.
‘You mean, since you lost interest in her.’
‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ he said less patiently. ‘Whatever Tansy likes to think, there was never any great love-affair.’
‘I see. Just a sordid little encounter or two, a bit of harmless fun?’ Her voice was raw with resentment. It hurt to think he had taken so lightly what Tansy had so generously offered him.
‘There was nothing sordid about it,’ he said shortly.
Tansy certainly hadn’t thought so. She’d thought it was the love-story of the century. ‘And it wasn’t harmless either,’ Fler said swiftly, ‘for Tansy.’
‘Look,’ he said, his eyes holding hers. ‘For what it’s worth, I suppose I handled it badly. I tried at first to let her down lightly. It didn’t work. In the end maybe I was too—brutal. What you don’t seem to understand is how unreasonable she was. I couldn’t let it go on. And there was nothing in it. It was all totally one-sided.’
‘Are you saying she imagined all of it?’ This was unbelievable. ‘That you never took her out, never touched her?’
He was silent for a moment. ‘I went out with her,’ he admitted. ‘A couple of times. I didn’t know then that she was a student,’ he told her.
Fler allowed her brows to rise fractionally in disbelief, but said nothing.
He said, ‘She looked all of twenty-five when we met. It was a party. We talked. I took her home. The point is—’
‘The point is, you don’t want anything more to do with her.’ He was obviously bent on denying any real involvement, any culpability.
He hesitated only briefly. ‘In a nutshell, yes. But I’d like you to understand—’
‘I understand perfectly. You’ve been playing my daughter for months like a fish on a line. Now the game’s suddenly turned serious and you want out! Your career might suffer if this story gets about. You even feel a little—just a little—guilty. Are you married?’ It was a suspicion she’d entertained for some time, been afraid to voice to Tansy.
He looked startled at that, and angry. ‘No, I’m not married! If I had been I’d never have gone near the girl in the first place.’
Fler let her scepticism show. His type didn’t change their spots with marriage. He’d probably still be running after nubile students when he was in his dotage, and not able so easily to persuade them into falling in love with him.
‘She’s a nice young woman,’ he said quietly. ‘I liked her. But the whole thing got out of hand.’ He shook his head. ‘I think you ought to persuade her to have some kind of counselling.’
The nurses had suggested it, but when Tansy rejected the idea they hadn’t really argued. The consensus seemed to be that she’d over-reacted and given everyone, including herself, a nasty fright, but that it was unlikely to be repeated.
‘Would that salve your conscience, Mr Ranburn?’ Fler asked him. ‘It’s easy for you, isn’t it? Turn her over to other people to pick up the pieces, and find yourself some other poor little innocent whose life you can wreck.’
He leaned across the small table, the hazel eyes greening with temper. ‘I have not wrecked anyone’s life!’
Ignoring the denial, Fler went on, her own temper rising, her skin heating and the nerve-ends prickling. ‘Is Tansy the first one to go this far? Maybe I should talk to the university board about your activities with female students. People like you ought to be stopped before they do any permanent damage.’
‘I’ve tried to explain,’ he said tightly. ‘But you don’t want to listen—’
‘Has it occurred to you,’ she asked him, going much further than she had ever intended, ‘that Tansy might be pregnant?’
She stopped abruptly there. Until she said it, she hadn’t realised herself that it was a fear that had been lurking at the back of her mind.
She appeared to have stunned him, too. He stared at her for a second, then gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘If she is, she’d better not try to lay that at my door!’
Fler felt a hot thundering of pure fury in her head. But before it could explode into action, he’d pushed himself out of the booth and stood up. Looking down at her, he said, ‘I don’t think I’ve got through to you any more than I could to your daughter. But if you want a bit of advice, here it is. Because I’m just about at the end of my patience with her. Get her off my back!’
Watching his rapid progress to the door, Fler barely restrained herself from hurling her untouched cup of coffee after him.
CHAPTER THREE
TANSY hadn’t objected to Fler’s plan to take her home. She didn’t want to face her flatmates yet, she said shamefacedly. Would her mother go over there and pack up some of her clothes?
It was only two weeks to the August holidays. Maybe missing that fortnight wouldn’t be too disastrous. If she didn’t go back to university after the holidays, though, she’d have no chance of passing her first-year exams.
They’d have over a month to decide, Fler thought, looking through drawers in the flat and folding undies, shirts, jeans into a bag. She hesitated over the photograph of Tansy with her father and Fler, and decided to leave it.
‘Need any help?’ One of the flatmates peeked round the door. They’d been helpful, embarrassed, subdued when Fler arrived. And anxious about Tansy. That had warmed her, their genuine concern and shock at what had nearly happened. So different, she thought, from Kyle Ranburn’s patent self-interest. ‘We had no idea!’ they’d told her, stricken at their own lack of awareness. ‘Why did she want to do that?’
Fler hadn’t told them why, respecting Tansy’s agonised plea, ‘Don’t tell them! I feel such a fool.’
Fler smiled at the girl. ‘I think I’ve found everything she’s likely to need.’
‘Don’t forget her diary.’
Diary? Tansy had never kept a diary before. Fler looked about, and the girl came into the room and plucked a thick, hard-covered volume with a small gilt lock on it from among the books on a shelf over the bed. ‘I think she’d want it. She nearly went spare once when she thought she’d lost it. We finally found it down the back of the sofa. She’d been writing it up in front of the TV. Forgot to take it back to her room. She must have been tired.’
‘Thank you.’ Fler tucked the book down into the front of the bag. ‘Do you know where she keeps the key?’
The girl shook her head. ‘Secret. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s got it on a chain around her neck.’
There had been no chain around Tansy’s neck. When she got to the hospital she’d been wearing her watch, a pair of panties and a night-shirt under the blanket that Kyle Ranburn had wrapped about her before bundling her into his car. ‘I’ll find it,’ Fler said.
‘Good luck, then.’
It wasn’t in the musical box on the dressing-table, nor on any of the cluttered shelves. Knowing her daughter’s habits, she eventually found the tiny brass key hanging on a nail inside the wardrobe. About to place it safely in her handbag, she paused, looking at the diary that it fitted. No, she said to herself firmly. Being Tansy’s mother didn’t give her the right to violate her privacy.
* * *
By the time the Toyota breasted the Brynderwyn hills and began the long descent towards the township of Waipu and the long stretch of road running by the sea at Ruakaka, Tansy was beginning to lose some of her extreme pallor.
They’d been travelling for over an hour and a half and she’d scarcely spoken two words, but now she stirred in her seat and said, ‘It seems ages since I was home.’
It had been a weekend two months ago. Fler said, ‘It seems a long time to me, too.’
In the blue distance the jagged uneven peaks of Manaia rose from the glitter of the sea. According to Maori legend the tall, commanding rocks standing stark against the sky at the summit were the petrified figures of the chief Manaia and his family. Lower and closer, the striped towers of the oil refinery at Marsden Point stood near the shore, an equally impressive modern echo.
Fler didn’t stop at Whangarei, the small northern city cradled between bush-covered hills and a tranquil harbour, but continued north along the Tutukaka Coast road that wound through softly folded farmlands latticed with stone walls, and sometimes narrowed between stands of trees or to accommodate a short bridge over a shallow stream.
Then they were down near the sea again, driving alongside a sandy stretch of coastline, climbing once more before turning down the twisting road that led to Manaaki, the big old house overlooking the sea at Hurumoana. Glancing at Tansy, Fler was sure that the girl looked more relaxed already, her eyes brighter and her shoulders less hunched.
‘Nearly home,’ Fler said.
Oh, God, she prayed, let her be all right. Please let everything be all right.
* * *
Fortunately the guest house had few visitors at this time of the year. Most of the rooms were empty, and in the neighbouring bay the motor camp with its rows of cabins was almost deserted. The sea thundered into the gap between the rocks below the house, pulling at long strings of brown seaweed that looked like dark hair streaming in the water, and turning over the fine pebbly shingle below the crescent of white sand on the tiny enclosed beach. A salty winter wind flattened the manuka growing at the edge of the cliffs and set the brittle sword-leaved flax rattling and bending before it.
Tansy settled into her old room and spent the first few days listlessly sitting on the window seat facing the garden, gazing out through the glass, an unread book or her open diary in her lap. Sometimes she pulled on a jacket and went down the cliff path to the beach, scuffing among the small grey pebbles and broken shells along the strip of sand and then sitting on the rocks to watch the foam-flecked water hurtle by.
Fler would stand at the lounge window, her heart thudding, until Tansy got up and slowly made her way over the rocks to the sand again, to climb the path to the house.
‘Don’t you worry, she’s not going to throw herself in the sea.’ Rae Topia put a comforting brown hand on Fler’s shoulder. She was the only full-time staff member that Fler kept on through the winter months, and over five years she’d become a friend as well as an employee.
Fler turned from her contemplation of the rocks and the raging water. Tansy was on her way up now, hidden by the steep drop of the cliff. ‘I can’t help worrying.’
Rae’s brown eyes were sympathetic, her comfortable figure somehow reassuring in its motherly bulk. ‘She’ll come right. You wait.’
Within a few weeks it seemed that Rae’s prediction was coming true. Tansy’s appetite improved, her cheeks began to fill out a little and take on their normal soft-rose colour, and she even laughed sometimes. One night she came into Fler’s room before her mother turned out the light, sat on the bed and said, ‘Mum, I’m sorry I worried you like that. It was a dumb thing to do.’
‘Yes, it was,’ Fler told her frankly. ‘Honestly, sweetheart, no man is worth it, believe me!’
Tansy shook her head. ‘I s’pose not,’ she said, looking down. ‘I promise I’ll never, ever do that again. But...I don’t know how I can live without him!’
Fler’s heart sank. She opened her arms, and Tansy threw herself into them and sobbed her heart out.
* * *
When Tansy said she was going to return to Auckland and her studies after the holiday, Fler was torn between fear and relief. The thought of Tansy dropping out of university was dismaying, but going back meant she’d be within Kyle Ranburn’s orbit again. Was Tansy ready for that? His name hadn’t been mentioned between them since that night she’d cried in her mother’s arms.
But even if Tansy was still carrying a torch, he’d made it brutally clear that he was no longer interested. If he ever had been.
He’d said it was all one-sided on Tansy’s part. Yet he’d admitted to taking her out ‘a couple of times’. That was probably downplaying it. So it hadn’t all been on Tansy’s side at the beginning. Not for the first time, Fler felt a swift rush of impotent anger with the man who’d carelessly, selfishly almost ruined her daughter’s life. Tansy, brought up in the north where life was slower and kinder and less sophisticated than in Auckland, must have been a pushover for an unscrupulous older man.
The night before Tansy was to leave again, Fler resisted the temptation to persuade her to stay or to extract impossible promises to phone every day, to let her mother know immediately of the slightest problem, to look after herself and please not pine after a worthless man who didn’t want her anyway.
