Cory glanced at Harriet’s legs.
‘Pleased with her, are you?’ he said.
‘Well I’m not saying she isn’t a bit dreamy at times, but we’ve had some laughs, and she’s a hard worker,’ said Mrs Bottomley, unpinning her hat. ‘Which is more than I can say for some of those hoity-toity misses in the past. And how was Antibes?’ she added, pronouncing it Antibees.
For a second Cory’s eyes met Harriet’s.
Then he said gravely, ‘Antibees was very exhausting.’
‘You look peaky, I must say,’ said Mrs Bottomley, ‘as though you’d walked all the way home. Must be all that foreign food — frogs legs and ratty twee — you need feeding up.’
Harriet was determined to redeem the morning’s disastrous homecoming by cooking Cory a magnificent dinner, but it was not to be. She went into the garden to shake the water out of a lettuce, and stood transfixed. The pine trees now carried armfuls of gleaming white blossom, urns filled with snow were casting long blue shadows across the lawn, flakes soft as tiny feathers poured out of the sky.
Memories of the first time she’d met Simon came flooding back. Oh, God, she thought, in an agony of despair, when will I ever see him? She didn’t know how long she stood there — five, ten minutes — but, suddenly, she realized she was frozen.
When she got back to the kitchen she gave a shriek. Tadpole, Cory’s labrador, had the steak on the floor, Ambrose was sitting unrepentant on the kitchen table, tabby cheeks bulging with the last of the prawns and the sauce had curdled past redemption on the stove.
At that moment, Cory walked in. ‘For Christ sake, what’s the matter now?’
Trembling, Harriet pointed at Ambrose and Tadpole. ‘The snow was so beautiful, I forgot I’d left the steak and the prawns on the table.’
Again Cory surprised her. It was the first time she’d heard him laugh and, after a few seconds, she began to giggle.
‘There’s nothing in here,’ he said, looking in the fridge. ‘We’d better go out.’
‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry.’
‘Stop apologizing and go and do your face.’
‘But you can’t take me!’
‘Why not? Mrs Bottomley’ll babysit.’
‘But, but. .’ Harriet began a stream of feverish excuses.
Cory interrupted her. ‘I don’t mind hysterics, nor having my dinner ruined, but I can’t stand being argued with. Go and get ready.’
He took her to a restaurant down the valley. Harriet, appalled by the prices on the menu, chose an omelette.
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said irritably. ‘What do you really want to eat?’
‘It’s all so expensive!’
‘You should see the prices in Paris. Anyway I’ve just had a large advance so you might as well take advantage of it.’
At first, he kept the conversation on a strictly impersonal level, telling her about his trip to France, and the black mare, Python, he had just bought on Kit’s recommendation, who was being flown over next week. ‘If she’s any good I’ll just have time to get her fit for the point-to-point in April.’
By the time coffee arrived, wine had considerably loosened Harriet’s tongue.
‘Well,’ said Cory, re-filling her glass, ‘how’s it working out, looking after the children?’
Harriet smiled nervously. ‘Fine, I’m awfully happy here.’
He didn’t smile back. ‘I’ve been watching you for the past two hours. You still give the impression of a girl who cries herself to sleep every night.’
‘Black or white coffee?’ asked Harriet, confused.
‘Black, please, and don’t change the subject. Sure, you think you’re fine. You’ve filled out, you’ve got some colour in your cheeks, but your eyes are still haunted; you get flustered far too quickly. And you’ve torn that paper napkin you’ve been clutching into shreds.’
‘I’m OK,’ she muttered. Then added in a trembling voice, ‘Are you trying to say you want me to go?’
If she had looked up then she would have seen his face soften.
‘You don’t know me very well yet,’ he said gently.
‘If I wanted you to go, I’d tell you straight. Tomorrow you’re going to see my doctor for some tranquillizers and sleeping pills. You’ll only need them for a few weeks. I don’t want you cracking up, that’s all. Now, I suppose you’d prefer I talked on impersonal subjects. How did you meet Simon Villiers?’
Harriet choked over her coffee, then shrugged her shoulders. She so badly needed to talk to someone.
‘I met him at Oxford. It was snowing like today. Simon drove round a corner and knocked me off my bicycle. Of course, I knew who he was. Everyone knew about the Villiers set — all night parties, fast cars, models down from London. I wasn’t hurt, but he insisted on my going back to his rooms. There was a party on. Later he kicked everyone out. When we woke up next morning, he asked me what my name was. You’re not shocked?’
Cory lit a cigar. ‘Not unduly.’
‘It was the first time I’d been to bed with anyone. It was like stumbling into Paradise.’ She looked at her hands. ‘I thought it would last for ever. Then one morning we were drinking coffee and he suddenly announced I’d have to move out as his regular girlfriend was coming back that day. I was so stunned, when I found I was pregnant, it seemed unimportant compared with losing Simon. The reason I kept William really was because he was the only thing of Simon’s I had.’
She looked at Cory with huge, troubled, slate-grey eyes.
He smiled. ‘Do you think Jonah’s happy at school?’
She was intensely grateful that he realized she didn’t want to talk about herself any more.
Chapter Twelve
Life became much easier for Harriet after Cory Erskine arrived. It was having a man to make decisions, to shoulder responsibilities, to shut up the children when they became too obstreperous and, most of all, to talk to.
Cory was, in fact, not easy to live with — aloof, peremptory, exacting, often extremely bad-tempered. But in a good mood, Harriet found him lovely company, amusing, never pulling intellectual rank on her, an inspired listener. Yet as weeks passed, she didn’t feel she knew him any better.
He was very unpredictable. Some days he would bombard her with questions, what did she feel about this, how would she react to that. On other days he was so abstracted she might not have been there, or he would suddenly get bored with a conversation and walk out leaving her mouthing like a goldfish in mid-sentence.
He also kept the most erratic hours, working most of the night. Often when she got up because William was crying she would hear the faint clack of the typewriter against the gramophone pouring out Verdi or Wagner. Then he would appear at breakfast looking terrible, read the paper, drink several cups of impossibly strong black coffee, and go out and ride across the moors for a couple of hours.
After that he generally snatched a few hours’ sleep on the sofa in his study (Harriet had a feeling he couldn’t bear sleeping alone in the huge mausoleum of a double bed), and emerged at teatime absolutely ravenous, and often as not wolf all the sandwiches Harriet had made for the children’s tea.
He was also drinking too much. Every day Mrs Bottomley, her mouth disappearing with disapproval, would come out of his room with an empty whisky bottle.
He was obviously miserably unhappy. The drinking to drive out the despair would plunge him next day into black depression, which made him irritable and arbitrary. While he was working he hated interruptions. The children had to be kept out of his way. The telephone rang all the time for him, and he went spare if Harriet didn’t catch it on the third or fourth ring. Always she had to make the same excuse: ‘I’m afraid Mr Erskine’s working. If you leave
