kissed him with passion, pressing her lips hard against his. He responded by leaning towards her, pushing her firmly back into the corner of the sofa. Their mouths relaxed and found a better position. His fingertips were on her face, stroking her cheek, a light, sensuous touch that thrilled her. Then the fingers moved across her neck and over her breast.
This is it, she thought. I'm seducing a priest. I'll pay for this on Judgement Day and I don't give a toss.
There was a crash. Not the gates of Heaven being slammed. Just his leg or hers nudging the coffee table and knocking over the wine bottle.
He drew back and looked behind him.
'Oh, no!'
He sat right up and so did she.
The bottle was on the floor, on its side. He grabbed it up. A large stain was spreading over the mushroom- coloured carpet.
She said automatically, 'Oh, Jesus!' Then: 'It's all right.' It wasn't. She ran out to the kitchen and fetched a sponge and warm water.
When she came back he was trying to clean splashes off the account books with a handkerchief. She knelt and rubbed at the carpet with her one good hand. The stain was the size of a saucer.
'I think I'm only making it worse.'
'Want me to try? There must be something you use for wine stains. Salt?'
She shook her head, attacking the stain past the point when she was making any difference. She was putting off the moment when they faced each other again. They'd messed up in every sense.
He suggested she let the stain dry and use a commercial stain-remover. He'd stopped trying to clean up the books.
'They're not too bad,' he said. 'It can't be helped. I'm really sorry about the carpet.'
'My own fault,' said Rachel. 'Made a right idiot of myself.'
'Don't say that. Don't say anything. Let's have a pact. No blame, no regrets, no thoughts of what might have been, right?'
That would be impossible, but she murmured something.
'Above all, no talking about it to anyone else.'
'Agreed.'
He said, 'I've got to go. You understand why?'
'Mm.'
He smiled faintly. 'Potent wine.'
'Yes.'
'It doesn't mean we can't work on the books again. In fact we must. You're going to need help. I'll just have to stick to the one glass in future.'
'Me, too.'
She went to the door with him. Before leaving, he put his hand lightly on her forearm and said, 'Thanks.'
She watched him to the gate and up the street. From first to last it had been a cringe-making mistake. And when she closed the door and went back inside and saw the great box of account books and the stain on the floor she made a sound deep in her throat that was nothing less than a howl.
Ten
New Orleans had been paradise. Gary was back, red-faced and triumphant, keen to talk about his great adventure, but in a way that put Rachel down. 'You've never heard anything like it and never will. Jeez, those long, hot nights in Preservation Hall and the Palm Court Jazz Cafe. We were cutting it up until dawn usually.'
'Which was why you didn't get to the phone.'
'I called you.'
'Once in three weeks.'
'Sure, honey.' He'd taken on some outdated Americanisms that irritated her even more. 'By the time I was waking up most days, around two in the afternoon, I needed to eat, and when I got to thinking of calling home it was always too bloody late over here, with the time difference, so I didn't disturb you. There wasn't much I could tell you anyway. It's a blur, but, man, what a blur.'
The Southern cooking-even in the inexpensive places Gary and his friends had patronised-had suited him better than he expected. Glaring at the pork chop and two veg Rachel served up, he talked with relish about delicacies she could only imagine, gumbo and po-boys, black-eyed peas and jambalaya.
He was so high from the trip that he didn't notice the wine stain on the living room carpet. Rachel had tried glycerine and a carpet shampoo and got some of the colour out. It was still an eyesore. She'd brushed in talcum powder and made a small difference, but not enough.
He said, 'I can't think why I left it so late in my life to make a trip like this one. You can keep your holidays in Buddleigh Salterton. I'll be jetting to the jazz spots in future.'
The cosmopolitan Gary was a new infliction. Practically every statement he made about America downgraded England-and, by association, herself.
Later the same evening he said he wasn't feeling so good.
Rachel said it was probably the jet-lag.
'I don't think so.'
'How do you know? You've never been on a jet before.'
'Neither have you. I've got this pain across the chest. Can't shift it.'
'Could be something to do with the way you were sitting in the plane.'
'Hope it's not my heart.' He'd always insisted he had a heart murmur, whatever that was. Just an excuse for not helping with the garden, Rachel always thought.
'If you're worried, let's call the doctor.';
He didn't want the doctor, but after another hour of groaning and self-pity he thought better of it and let her phone. Old Dr. Perkins was on duty that evening and he was at the cottage inside twenty minutes. After pressing the stethoscope to Gary's chest, he said that the beat was a little irregular, but nothing to be alarmed about. 'You say you've just had a long flight from the United States-and some over-indulgence there, am I right? It's a big effort for the body, bigger than we appreciate, flying for hours and then having to adjust to another time. This may well be a touch of angina.'
'Angina? At my age?' Gary was horrified.
'What are you-mid forties?'
'Only forty-two,' Gary said, and the hurt at the doctor's overestimate sounded in his voice.
'It's better than a full blown heart attack, I can assure you. If you're sensible, it needn't hamper you unduly. Some of my patients have had angina for years and lived well into their eighties.' He produced a nitroglycerin tablet for Gary to chew and told him it should relieve the pain rapidly. It would still be necessary to have some tests on the heart function and he would arrange a hospital appointment.
The tablet worked, and Gary was still asleep when Rachel left in the morning for her appointment with the orthopaedic surgeon.
The bliss! It had been worth an 8:30 hospital appointment to be released from that horrid, heavy, grease- stained plaster. Now she was in the front garden making up for lost time, attacking some of the most vigorous weeds. Festoons of bindweed had taken over while she'd been unable to work out there, and when she tugged it away in satisfying armfuls she revealed other horrors, ground elder, couch grass, creeping buttercups and sticky groundsel. Some wild flowers she was willing to tolerate in a cottage garden. Harebells, columbines, the pink foxgloves, the purple monkshood and the dog rose hedge coexisted with the expensive plants she had bought from nurseries. The majority of the weeds had to go. Just about everything needed attention. If it wasn't overgrown, it was ailing. But she enjoyed being out there.
Cynthia Haydenhall rode unsteadily up the village street on her bike with bulging carriers dangling from both
