Chapter 14
Grace was reading in bed when Jane entered the cabin.
‘Well, I can highly recommend the shower,’ said Jane. ‘And the toiletries – like liquid silk.’ She blew a chef’s kiss into the air.
‘I’ll take one in the morning instead,’ said Grace. ‘If I have one now, it’ll wake me up.’
Jane took off her robe and laid it at the bottom of the bed.
‘Don’t you go anywhere, I’ll be needing you tomorrow,’ she addressed it with a small chuckle before folding the quilt back and climbing in. The mattress was the perfect mix of firmness and giving, the duvet had just the right amount of comforting weight to it when she pulled it up around her.
‘Oh my, someone took their time to research the best bedding available to modern man, didn’t they?
’ she said, snuggling down. Good bedding was something Clifford had always insisted they buy, whatever the cost, but this was leagues in front of what they had.
For a moment she imagined him lying where Grace was, giggling like a child, horizontal dancing like Michael Flatley on amphetamine between the smooth sheet and the duvet.
They should have had more time to do what they had planned. So many things on their wishlist.
‘Did you say you were going to family for Christmas, Jane?’
Jane nodded. ‘My stepson and his wife. They’re the only family I have left now.’
‘I hope you can get a message to them soon. They must be worried sick about you.’
Jane didn’t reply what was on the tip of her tongue: that they were probably rubbing their hands with glee at the possibility that she might have perished in a snowstorm.
She said instead, ‘I’m sure they’re anxious for news of me,’ an answer which covered all bases.
‘Do you mind if I read for a while or will the light annoy you?’ asked Grace.
‘It won’t annoy me one bit,’ said Jane. ‘I’d be asleep in no time even if the room were floodlit.’
‘Huh. You’re lucky. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be able to drop off so easily.’
‘Menopause?’ Jane inquired. She aged Grace around early fifties.
‘No, not that.’ Grace didn’t elaborate and Jane didn’t push, though she was intrigued.
She lay with her head against the fat, downy pillow having a conversation in her head with her late husband, the like of which they’d had so often when he was alive because they talked a lot: they were friends as well as husband and wife, as well as lovers to the end.
‘So what do you think the dynamic is between Grace and Frank then, Jane?’
‘I think she can’t forgive him for something, Cliffy.’
‘Affair?’
‘No, I don’t think that’s it. Something he couldn’t help, and that’s why he can’t find the way to atone, because no apology would fill the hole that’s between them, though it won’t stop him trying.’
What could it be? It was none of her business, of course, but she was very in tune with her senses. She had liked Frank from the off, he was a rough diamond type, but kindness exuded from him like benign radiation, whereas his wife was coming across as colder than the climate outside the train.
‘What are you reading?’ Jane asked.
‘Something I can’t get into.’ Grace shut the book and put it on the shelf at the side of her bed. ‘It’s a murder mystery. I don’t like any of the characters. I’m finding more sympathy with whoever did it than the woman it was done to. But I’ll have to finish it.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Well, why would you force yourself to finish a book you aren’t enjoying?’
‘Because…’ Grace’s voice trailed off. It was a reasonable question to which she had absolutely no answer other than the one she gave: ‘… because I always finish books.’
‘And how will you feel at the end of it then?’ Jane realised she might be sounding a little invasive and so apologised for it. ‘Forgive me for asking, I’m just interested. You don’t need to answer.’
But Grace did answer, although she had to search inside herself for her reasoning.
‘I suppose it’s a sense of commitment. Or a hope that it’ll improve.’
‘Do you feel as if you don’t want the book to win? Is that it?’ asked Jane, getting it.
Grace thought about that. ‘Yes, maybe…’
‘As if by abandoning it you feel you’ll have wasted time. So you waste more time to justify the time you’ve spent on it.’
‘I…’
Jane shook her head at herself. ‘I’m sorry for interrogating you, it’s a terrible habit I’ve picked up over the years.
My husband was a psychologist. Over the years his burrowing into heads rubbed off onto me.
People are puzzles and they can always be solved, he used to say. Ignore me, Grace, please. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight, Jane.’
Jane had already solved this puzzle anyway.
Grace needed to control, even something as trivial as reading her book.
And that, whispered Clifford into her head, was probably because there was something very big in her life that she couldn’t control and she was clawing for the ability to do so everywhere else that she could.
Not having control panicked her, made her feel that if she didn’t hold herself in tight, that she’d burst her banks like a dynamited dam.
That was why she carried on reading a book that was infinitely more interesting when it was still growing in a forest somewhere, and the result at finally finishing it was a lost leader, a Pyrrhic victory.
Jane closed her eyes and heard Grace drop a sigh as she reached over for the book she wasn’t enjoying to carry on reading it.
Next door, Elizabeth pulled the quilt up to her chin and made a noise of bliss. Even her future mother-in-law didn’t have bedding like this and she bought hers from the same place that supplied the Savoy.
What would they all be doing now in Topston?
How much would she have been ripped apart in her absence?
Vincent would get some of the blame, of course, for his guarantee that he would get her there, even though he couldn’t have managed that if he’d been driving a snow plough.
They probably wouldn’t even pay him. She’d make sure, if that were the case, that she would pay him herself.
As if her thoughts of him had traversed the dark, Roo said, ‘I assumed you and Vincent were a couple at first.’
‘Did you?’
‘He’s lovely, isn’t he? How old is he, do you reckon? Mid-thirties, I’d say.’
‘I don’t know. I only met him for the first time today.’
‘You looked good together when I saw you in the waiting room at the station… just saying. I’d have matched you up.’
Elizabeth shook her head, but she was smiling.
‘Oh Roo, stop. You’ve only known him – and me – for hours. He might be a serial killer.’
Roo would like to bet he wasn’t. And though Vincent was a bit ragged around the edges, like a friendly scrapyard dog, and Elizabeth was like a pedigree Persian cat, she could easily see them as a couple.
He and Frank were the sort of men who looked after their ladies, she could tell.
Old-school gents. The type that opened doors for women and carried their shopping and stood up for them on buses.
‘What’s your fiancé like?’
He likes people not to interrupt his best-made plans, Elizabeth answered in her head.
She was glad that the phone had no reception because she would be saved from his diatribes.
She’d listened to the couple of voicemails he’d left when he obviously couldn’t connect to her in person, but in neither had he said: ‘Are you all right, Elizabeth? You must take care and get to me when and only when it is safe to do so.’
‘He’s tall, dark and very handsome,’ she said instead.
‘You’re going to have great-looking kids,’ her PA had said to her in the office.
Kids that she just knew she’d have a battle to keep with her when they reached the age to go to boarding school.
Gregory, like Elizabeth’s father, had had an infinitely more successful experience at such an institution than she had and she knew she’d be up against both of them when the time came for enrolment.
Power was very sexy, of course, and Gregory was very powerful.
Oh, she knew how women envied her having landed the big important fish, Gregory Pennington.
People all his life had spoiled him and stroked him and never said no to him and had sculpted him into a Roman emperor.
He savoured his potency, his ability to make grown men feel as if they’d been blessed to gain his approval or to have them quiver in their boots when they’d met his censure.
Elizabeth had been totally seduced by his confidence, the force of his personality, because he was impenetrable to everyone except her, because he was different with her and that made her feel beyond special, valued.
At least, she’d wanted to believe it was her – Elizabeth, the woman, rather than Elizabeth, the heir to the mega-successful R.
W. Dudley and Sons export firm. They’d be a power couple, her beauty, breeding and fortune lumped together with his money and intelligence and looks and ambitions because he was gearing up for a leap into the political arena.
He was everything the behemoth MP John F.
Mayhew should have been a few years ago had he not fallen prey to his own weaknesses and believed his own infallibility.
Sex was so often the weak screw in the armour of powerful men, a flaw that wouldn’t affect Gregory, despite the fact he might have been a lot of women’s (and men’s) carnal fantasy.
His accomplished flirting certainly led one to believe he would be hot, insatiable even, between the sheets.
‘What does he do, for a job?’ asked Roo.
‘He’s the MD of my family’s firm. We deal in exports.’
‘Exports of what?’
‘Anything anyone needs to export. They are very good at… circumventing costs and duties and taxes. In short, they’re expensive to use, but they’ll still save companies a fortune. And yes, it’s the right side of legal. I wouldn’t work for them if they weren’t.’
‘So are you having a big, fat wedding then?’