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She left for the States just a day later, without talking to Guy again.
But she was to return.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_23e356ca-7ae9-525b-83dc-eb9c7e4ad3af)
‘THERE’S a man hanging around outside,’ Maxine announced some time later, having tracked her mother down to the kitchen.
‘A man?’ Hope’s mind returned sharply to the present ‘He’s been there a couple of minutes,’ Maxine relayed. ‘I think he’s deciding if he has the right address. He has it written down, but, of course, our nine has come loose and turned into a six…I’m sure I told you.’
‘Yes.’ Hope recalled that Maxine had informed her several times.
The bell rang and Maxine continued, ‘That’ll be him. He must have worked out that if we’re next door to twenty-one and seventeen we can’t possibly be sixteen. I suppose it’s one way of discouraging any totally moronic visitors, but I really would fix it, Mum, if I were you.’
‘Thank you, Maxine, I will.’ Hope wondered what she’d done to deserve a daughter so different from her.
A tidiness freak, Maxine couldn’t stand things out of place or not working. Her own room was immaculate at all times and she reserved her most expressive sighs for her mother’s hit-or-miss style of housekeeping.
She watched now with a disapproving eye as her mother riffled through a pile of papers on the kitchen table.
‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’ she asked, when the bell rang again.
‘Could you?’ Hope appealed. ‘It’s a motorcycle courier from one of the ad agencies. He’s been sent to pick up some jingles I’ve written, only I’ve misplaced them.’
‘Really, Mum.’ Maxine despaired of her mother’s inefficiency, before running on, ‘He doesn’t look much like a courier to me. He doesn’t have a helmet, for a start.’
‘He’ll have left it on his bike,’ Hope declared. ‘Please, Maxine…before he decides to give up.’
‘All right.’ Maxine shrugged and disappeared out of the kitchen.
Hope continued searching for the lost music sheets she should have had ready. They represented three days’ work and a fairly good commission.
Maxine reappeared. ‘He wants to see you, but he’s not a courier.’
‘Did you ask him who he was?’ Hope frowned.
‘No, but he looks OK,’ Maxine assured her. ‘He’s wearing a suit and tie and he was fairly polite.’
‘Oh, no, he’s probably a double-glazing salesman.’ Hope had a disproportionately high number of such callers, possibly because the metal window frames of her 1930s semi were so rusted. ‘I’m hopeless at getting rid of them.’
‘Just tell him we have no money,’ Maxine suggested, before wandering back into the sitting-room to rejoin her friend.
Hope raised her eyes at Maxine’s comment, and wondered how she was meant to take it. Helpful advice? A statement of fact? A complaint? Or all three?
Years ago, she’d consoled herself that it must be easier to bring up alone a daughter rather than a son. She’d been wrong.
She approached the front door and looked through the opaque glass to find the man still standing on the step, his back to her. She took a deep breath and told herself to be assertive, then opened the door a fraction.
‘Look, if it’s about the windows, I like them like that,’ she said, before the salesman could launch into the usual sales patter.
But it wasn’t about windows or doors or insurance or anything safe and boring and ordinary. Hope realised that even before he turned and she saw his face. She recognised him from the back, tall, broad-shouldered, narrow in the hip.
Guy Delacroix wheeled round and stared at her for a moment, long and hard. She stared back, caught by the awful surprise of it. Years stripped away and she felt her treacherous heart flip over at the sight of him.
‘You’ve changed,’ he eventually said in his precise, accentless voice, and a shiver ran through her at the sense of déjà vu.
She just stopped herself from saying ‘you haven’t’, as her past life ran before her eyes like a drowning man’s.
But it was true. He’d hardly changed at all. It had been twelve years since they’d met, yet he seemed little altered. Slightly more grey hairs threaded through the black, and some laughter-lines now fanned from his grey eyes. The latter seemed a strange thing for him to have, a man who rarely laughed. Or maybe he had learned how to, since she’d run away from Heron’s View—and him.
She thought how different she must look to him. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been only twenty, with the face of a girl and with hair so long it touched her waist. People said she still looked young at thirty-two, but she had the face of a woman, more angular, and her hair had been cropped short. She wasn’t at her smartest, either, in jeans and white T-shirt.
‘That was your child.’ He dragged her back to the present, reminding her that he had just met Maxine.
‘I…’ She wanted to lie, to say no, to deny Maxine’s existence but that was absurd. He must have heard of her from Jack. ‘Yes…Maxine.’
‘After your father,’ he recalled then commented shortly, ‘She looks quite like mine.’
Hope stared back at him, like a rabbit caught in his headlights. He’d noticed the likeness. Of course he’d noticed. How could he not? Apart from her eyes, Maxine was pure Delacroix.
But it was all right. Like his father, he’d said. His father. Jack’s father. Same person. She tended to forget. They were so unalike, the brothers.
‘I have some news for you,’ he went on. ‘May I come in?’
She hesitated, wanting to say no again. He didn’t give her the chance. He walked past her into the ball. He waited for her to close the door and lead the way.
She avoided the living-room with Maxine in it, and took him to the kitchen.
It was a fair-sized kitchen, with room for a table and chairs.
He stood in the doorway and made it look small. Dressed in a dark lounge suit and conservative tie, he made the room look scruffy too.
‘Do you want to sit down?’ Hope resented the way he made her feel.
He shook his head. ‘This won’t take long. As I say, I have some news for you.’
‘It’s all right. I heard it over the radio,’ she informed him.
He looked at her again, as if to gauge her reaction. She lifted her head a little higher, not giving him the satisfaction of seeing she’d been upset.
‘And Maxine?’ he added shortly.
‘I’ve told her,’ she replied just as shortly.
He frowned. ‘How is she?’
Hope shrugged. She wasn’t going to explain Maxine’s feelings to him. He was obviously thinking that the girl who had answered the door to him had scarcely looked grief-stricken, but then what did he expect? He must realise Maxine had barely known Jack.
‘Will she want to go to the funeral?’ he pursued.
‘I—I’m not sure.’ Hope hadn’t thought that far herself. Jack had only died that morning.
‘Will you?’ he added.
Her eyes widened in surprise. Surely she wouldn’t be welcome—an ex-wife?
‘I don’t think Jack would have wanted it,’ she said eventually.
‘No,’ he agreed, ‘probably not…Is that why you didn’t come to my mother’s funeral?’
He really hasn’t changed, Hope thought as he directed another blunt question at her. He was so different from Jack. It had been ‘anything for an easy life’ with Jack, but Guy had always met things head-on.
Well, this time, Hope decided, he wasn’t going to walk all over her. Her heart might still be racing but her head was clear.
‘No, I didn’t think you’d want it,’ she responded sharply.
His eyes narrowed assessingly. ‘No, you’re right. I wouldn’t,’ he acknowledged, then added on a note of accusation, ‘You came all the same, though, didn’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’ Hope’s face went a shade of pink, betraying her.
‘I returned to the graveyard after the service,’ he informed her. ‘I saw you.’
‘Oh.’ Hope couldn’t deny it.
She had kept in touch with Caroline Delacroix even after her split with Jack. Occasionally the older woman would call on her when she was in London. She had come to see Maxine, her only grandchild, but Hope knew she’d never mentioned these visits to her sons.
‘Her solicitor telephoned me,’ Hope went on to explain, ‘saying it was your mother’s wish I should be there. So I was…sort of.’
She’d gone down by train to Penzance, then waited until the actual service was over, before going to the graveside. She’d placed an anonymous wreath among the others and said a tearful goodbye to a nice lady.
Hope frowned as she thought of him watching her. What had he felt? Anger, she supposed, that she’d had the nerve to appear.
Guy watched her now, much as he would have done then, with contempt in those wintry grey eyes. ‘The solicitor meant for you to come to the house—for the willreading…’ He left the sentence hanging in the air, waiting for her reaction.
Hope didn’t rise to the bait. She hadn’t expected Caroline to leave her anything, and, if she had, Hope would have heard of it by now. It had been almost two years since Caroline’s death.
‘Didn’t you ever wonder if she left you something?’ Guy added at her silence.
‘Why should she?’ Hope shrugged. ‘I wasn’t her responsibility.’
‘No, you were Jack’s.’ Grey eyes scanned the room, taking in the state of the kitchen.
Hope wasn’t ashamed of her home. It was small and the furniture shabby, but she’d done her best and it was comfortable. The kitchen table and chairs were old and marked, but they were made of solid pine. She had no money for new units but she’d splashed out on some good tiling and wallpaper which she’d hung herself.
But Guy Delacroix was hardly impressed. With a luxury flat in Truro as well as the magnificence of Heron’s View, a terraced house in Putney probably seemed one step from poverty to him.
‘You didn’t get much of a settlement from Jack, did you?’ he finally remarked.
She stared back incredulously. He dared say that to her? ‘Well, you saw to that, didn’t you?’ she retorted bitterly.
His brows rose, feigning surprise. ‘Perhaps you’d like to explain that remark.’
Hope’s lips pursed. He knew well enough. ‘Come on. You were the one who advised Jack how little he could get away with. Did you think he wouldn’t tell me?’
This time there wasn’t a flicker of reaction. Reading anything from Guy’s face had always been difficult, and nothing had changed.
‘Jack told you I advised him on your settlement,’ he stated flatly, rephrasing what she’d just said.
Hope nodded. ‘Don’t deny it’ she snapped back.
‘All right, I won’t,’ he agreed coolly, his eyes fixed on her face.
Hope refused to be intimidated, and stared back. It was a mistake. She saw reflected in his eyes too many memories, and for a moment felt, as she had all those years ago, that curious mixture of attraction and fear.
She turned away, and started to busy herself in the kitchen, talking to hide her confusion. ‘I’ll ask Maxine if she wants to go to the funeral. If she does, I’ll let you know…Now, if that’s all, I have to make tea.’
She ran water into a pan, and banged it noisily on to the cooker, then tried to light the gas with a sparking device. If there was a technique, she seemed to have lost it. She clicked the sparker ineffectively. The smell of gas filled the room.
‘The flint’s gone,’ she was coolly informed.
It did nothing for Hope’s humour. She rounded on him, with an idea of telling him to get lost, and they semi-collided as he reached past her to turn off the gas. She grabbed at his arms as she threatened to overbalance, then wished she hadn’t. He held her for a moment, and his touch was like a burn on her bare arms. She flinched visibly, and he let her go, but only so that he could turn off the gas. He didn’t move away and she was effectively trapped by his proximity.
Hope wasn’t frightened of him. She was frightened of betraying herself. Over a decade, but nothing had changed.
He felt her body tremble. His eyes caught hers, trying to see into her very soul.
Appalled by her own weakness, Hope forced herself to remember all of it. Not just the love, but what followed. The hurt. The loss. The ultimate pain of betrayal.
It didn’t seem to make any difference: her body continued to tremble at his nearness.
It made no difference to him either, as his hands began to caress her bare skin.
‘All this time, and nothing’s changed.’ He spoke the words in her ear as they stood there, caught by the past.
She shook her head and breathed, ‘I hate you,’ meaning it.
‘And I hate you,’ he breathed back, clearly meaning it too.
But he was right. Nothing had changed. Desire was as strong as hate, and just as destructive.
She told herself to break free. She tried to; he held her easily. Not just with his hands but with his eyes. It was strange how such cold grey eyes could be so mesmeric.
‘Mum…Mum?’ Maxine stood in the doorway, looking from one to the other, unsure what she was witnessing.
At last Hope broke free, almost leaping back from Guy as she caught sight of her daughter. ‘I didn’t realise you were there,’ she said unnecessarily.
Maxine said nothing, but stared hostilely at Guy. He didn’t seem to notice, greeting her with a peculiarly soft, ‘Hello, Maxine.’
Maxine continued to stare, and Hope stepped in, saying, ‘Maxine, this is your uncle—’
