The Price of Deceit Page 8

  But—and this frustrated her—what?

  She made herself a cup of very sweet tea, tucked herself on the sofa and began jotting down a few rudimentary plans for what she would do with the children when they were back at school.

  The slow approach to Christmas was always a busy time. There was the nativity play, a thoroughly amateur event, which the children enthusiastically threw themselves into and which she enjoyed hugely. She had two outings lined up, one to the local fire station, which the children would adore because they would all feel as though they were meeting Fireman Sam in person, no less.

  She forced herself to begin sketching the plot for the nativity play, which she always did in conjunction with two of the other teachers.

  But her mind was wandering. It had been wandering ever since Dominic Duvall had re-entered her life and, try as she might, she couldn’t seem to contain it on a leash.

  She lay back and stared at the ceiling and thought again, for the hundredth time, about the last time she had seen him, which was two weeks ago. She had stormed over, intent on putting him straight on a couple of things, intent on making it clear that she felt nothing for him, that there was no need for him to fear that she would become a nuisance, but now, when she sat down and thought about it, she couldn’t remember whether she had achieved what she had set out to do or not.

  She could only recall the heavy beating of her heart, the leap of her senses whenever he had looked at her, the feel of his fingers when he had reached out and freed her hair.

  She closed her eyes with a shaky sigh, and was trying to work out what it all meant when there was a sharp knock on the door.

  It was David. She hadn’t seen him for quite some time, although he had occasionally called her on the telephone—quick calls that lacked the intimacy of their previous conversations.

  ‘I’m glad you’re in,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t sure whether you would be.’

  ‘Where else would I be?’ She laughed and walked back into the hall, hearing him quietly shut the door behind him.

  ‘I’ve just made some tea,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Would you like a cup? Or has your unruly class driven you to stronger things?’

  ‘Not yet.’ He grinned. ‘I put my foot down at those tyrants driving me to drink. Besides—’ he followed her into the kitchen and sat down at the table ‘—I must confess that they haven’t been too bad recently. In fact, they actually seem to listen when I talk to them these days.’

  ‘How alarming for you!’ Katherine said, laughing at the surprise in his voice at the admission. ‘However are you going to cope?’

  She poured him some tea, extracted a tin of biscuits from the cupboard, pleasantly surprised to find that there were more there than she had anticipated, and then sat down opposite him.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘tell me why I haven’t seen you for such a long time, and why, whenever you call, you sound as though you’re about to rush off. Have I developed some awful odour problem?’

  He dipped his biscuit in his tea, took a bite with great relish and then informed her, with uncharacteristic bluntness, that he had been seeing a lot of Jack.

  ‘Have you?’ Katherine raised her eyebrows in surprise.

  ‘She can be very persistent,’ he said, smiling. ‘Like a dog with a bone.’

  ‘But how do you feel about being a bone?’

  ‘Quite good, actually.’

  ‘Dogs bite, David,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I wouldn’t like to see you hurt.’ She looked at him evenly. ‘I mean, she’s a very nice girl, but she comes from a world that’s quite different from yours. Or mine, for that matter.’ She saw him frown at that, and rushed on. ‘You know that I don’t mean to be awful when I say that. But I like you, and what’s the point in liking someone if you can’t be honest with them? I wouldn’t like to think that you were being used as some kind of novelty for Jacqueline Duvall.’

  She wasn’t thinking of Jacqueline Duvall when she said that. She was thinking of Dominic. But weren’t they cut from the same mould? Supremely self-confident, good-looking people, who had only ever known a life of wealth. People to whom exploitation could perhaps come more easily than to others.

  ‘I know what you’re saying.’

  ‘But you don’t agree.’

  ‘I’m in love with her.’ He looked at her as he said this, and his expression was more resolute than she had ever seen it. ‘I know that we’re worlds apart, as you say, but I can’t opt for the devil I know. My mind might want to do that, but my heart is telling me something else. Can you understand that?’

  ‘No. Yes. I suppose so. What I mean is, I wouldn’t, but then, I can understand why someone else might.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ His face expressed interest. ‘Why is safety so much more appealing than the unknown?’

  Because, she wanted to say, the unknown can cause a great deal of pain, because hearts can never be mended fully, because it’s better to be in one piece than broken into a thousand bits with no chance of ever being put together again.

  ‘How does she feel about it?’ Katherine asked instead, and she noticed the way his eyes lit up as he began talking about her.

  She felt an unfamiliar lurch inside her, a twisting of something sharp. She felt like a beggar, standing on the outside and peering through a window into a room full of tables groaning with food, full of people eating to their hearts’ content, and she had to tell herself that she was being ridiculous.

  ‘The thing is,’ David said, pausing and looking at her seriously, ‘we need your help.’

  ‘My help?’

  ‘We want to go away for the half-term and we would rather that her brother didn’t know.’

  ‘Why?’ Katherine looked at him candidly. ‘You’re both over the age of consent. I doubt he would come flying behind you with a shot-gun just because you happened to spend a week together.’

  ‘No,’ David said slowly, ‘but Jack adores her brother. She knows what he would think if he knew that we were seriously seeing one another. He would think that I was after her money.’ He said that as a matter of fact, with no resentment at what it implied. ‘I’m a fairly impoverished teacher from a fairly impoverished background, and I’m mad about his sister who has money coming out of her ears. Two and two may not make four in this instance, but it very well could, couldn’t it?’

  ‘So what am I supposed to do?’ Katherine asked, at a loss.

  ‘Simply not say that we’ve gone off together. If you happen to see him. If he happens to ask. Kath—’ he leaned forward urgently ‘—I need time for this, time to find out whether it’s the right thing or not. We both do. We’ll never achieve that if Dominic’s breathing down our necks and trying to destroy it all before it’s hardly begun.’

  ‘I can see that,’ she agreed reluctantly.

  Dominic could be ruthless, and if he suspected for one moment that his sister was being exploited for her money he would react immediately and decisively.

  ‘You could always get to know him,’ she suggested. ‘He’ll realise that you’re no gold-digger when he gets to know you.’

  David’s face settled into lines of stubborn refusal, which astonished her because she had never known he could be as adamant as this about anything. He had always been light-hearted, easygoing, inclined to cede rather than fight.

  ‘We need undiluted time without his suspicions about my motives. I dearly love his sister and I feel that this is the only way we can go forward. We both do.’

  ‘He’ll find out in due course.’

  ‘The bridge will be crossed when we get to it.’ There was something else he wanted to ask. She could see the hesitant question hovering, and she waited. ‘We’ve been friends for a long time,’ he started, and she threw him a dry look.

  ‘Why do I suspect that there’s another favour in the offing?’

  ‘Quite a small one,’ David admitted, going red. ‘Perhaps you could imply that you and I are still going out. No, no, no—’ he held up his hands to
ward off her immediate protests ‘—just listen. I’m not asking you to lie…’

  ‘Simply to economise with the truth?’

  ‘You could hint, if the situation ever arises, which is unlikely. But it’ll give us time to sort ourselves out, to find out whether what we’re feeling is real or something induced by circumstance.’

  His face was flushed and earnest and she found herself nodding reluctantly.

  ‘But that’s absolutely it,’ she said firmly. ‘I refuse to lie outright. If he asks me directly whether you’re seeing his sister, then I shall have to tell him the truth. And I won’t be coerced into providing alibis of any kind whatsoever.’

  ‘Of course not!’ He looked at her, horrified, and she had to smile.

  It all seemed a silly game to her, but then, when love was concerned, what ever made sense? Sense was having your life in order; sense was revelling in the calm predictability of your days. She felt that sharp pull inside her again, and brushed it aside. She had toyed with the senseless passion of love and she would never make the same mistake again.

  Besides, what real harm would there be in agreeing to what David wanted?

  There was little chance that she would bump into Dominic Duvall again, and if she did it would be in the formal setting of a parent-teacher meeting, when the only subject raised would be his daughter.

  She doubted that even he, formidable though he was, would be inclined to initiate an argument on his sister’s romantic life in the setting of a school.

  Once they had sorted themselves out, David would insist on telling Dominic everything. She knew David well enough for that. She also knew that he would never pursue anyone for their money.

  Katherine was settling down comfortably into her usual routine of shops and coffee with her friends, which usually ended up with discussions about school since, inevitably, most of her close friends were also part of the school community, when, in the middle of the week, in the middle of the afternoon, a telephone call disrupted all that.

  She had just finished washing her hair and was about to trek to the shops for some food when the phone rang and, for some reason, she automatically thought that it was going to be David. That her neat little summary of him had been wrong, and he had done something utterly unexpected and needed help.

  It wasn’t David. It was Dominic. She recognised his voice instantly and, even though she was only speaking to him on the phone, she automatically drew her bathrobe tighter round her and glanced suspiciously around the room, as if expecting him to materialise calmly out of nowhere.

  ‘I’m glad you’re in,’ he said, with a thorough disregard for any polite preliminaries. ‘Jack’s not around. Vanished somewhere for a week’s break and didn’t leave me her address. I don’t suppose you know where she went?’

  ‘No.’

  She was steeling herself for a debate on the subject, but he dropped it immediately and said instead, ‘Never mind. You’ll do. Claire’s not well. She’s got some kind of stomach bug and the child-minder says that she needs to stay at home. Jack isn’t here, nor is Lise, and anyway, looking after Claire is not one of her duties. She is too old.’

  ‘And what does that have to do with me?’ Katherine asked.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I have a series of high-level meetings today and I can’t stay put to look after a sick child.’

  ‘Go right ahead and criticise,’ she said coolly, ‘but isn’t that what parenting is all about?’

  ‘I have no time to listen to your views on parenting,’ Dominic said, his voice clipped, and she could picture him looking at his watch impatiently, ‘I’ve already taken enough time off work to drive back to the child-minder and collect Claire. I need to leave as soon as possible. When can you get here?’

  ‘I have no intention of—’

  ‘Yes, you have,’ he said, cutting her short.

  ‘Why me?’ Katherine asked, resenting the manner in which she was being taken for granted. Why did everyone simply assume that she would never mind putting herself out on their behalf?

  ‘Because I don’t know who else to ask,’ he said bluntly. ‘I could get one the girls at the office to come over, I suppose, but Claire can be awkward with people she doesn’t know.’

  Katherine sighed. A little sigh of resignation. ‘I’ll be over in fifteen minutes,’ she said. ‘I just need to change first.’

  ‘Thank you, Katherine,’ he said, after a short pause. ‘I do realise that you have a life to lead, and that this is an unnecessary interruption. I’ll see you shortly.’

  He hung up, and she raced around, shoving clothes on in a haphazard manner, slinging her jacket over the whole uncoordinated mess, and then climbed into the car.

  As happened every time she had even the briefest of contact with him, she found herself operating in overdrive, as though her body had been suddenly injected with a large dose of adrenaline.

  She made it to the house in twenty minutes, and found him virtually waiting on the doorstep for her, dressed in an impeccably cut suit.

  How was it, she thought, looking up at him, that he always seemed to reduce her to a state of absolute confusion? She stripped off her jacket and almost felt like apologising for the jeans, the baggy jumper and the sneakers.

  ‘When I was a boy,’ he said, looking her up and down without, she decided, a great deal of appreciation, ‘I always assumed that teachers dressed as starchily out of work as they did for work. At last, I have been proved wrong.’

  ‘I’m normally a lot tidier than this,’ Katherine felt compelled to say defensively, ‘but I was in a rush to get here.’

  He nodded and said, abruptly looking away, ‘Claire’s upstairs in her bedroom. Feeling sorry for herself.’

  ‘Children do,’ Katherine replied tartly, following him up the stairs as he led the way. ‘Though not as much as adults.’

  She looked at his lean body, his wide, powerful shoulders. How odd to think that she had once caressed that body intimately, run her hands along the sinewed, muscled length of him. Now he was a stranger, and she felt a sudden pang for things lost. Then she was being shown into Claire’s bedroom, where Claire was mournfully propped up against some pillows, watching cartoons on a portable television.

  She turned to look at them and her little face broke out into a smile.

  ‘I didn’t believe that you would come!’ she squealed with delight.

  Katherine said wryly, ‘Are you quite sure that you’re ill? You look very healthy to me.’ At which Claire immediately looked mournful once more and launched into a childish description of her symptoms, which appeared to range from a sore throat to a headache in her stomach. And all this said with such gravity that Katherine was hard-pressed not to burst out laughing.

  She could sense Dominic watching them from behind her, then she heard him say, ‘I’ll be back a little later.’

  ‘When a little later?’ Katherine asked, twisting round to look at him.

  ‘Some time after six,’ he drawled, ‘and before eight. Is that good enough?’

  ‘No doubt it will have to be,’ she said, turning back to face Claire. ‘You’ve missed your calling, though. You should have worked as a plumber. They can never promise definite times for doing anything, either.’

  She heard him laugh under his breath as he left the room, and then, for the next few hours, she had a thoroughly good time with Claire.

  Holidays, however carefully she planned them, were invariably lonely times for her. Married friends tended to spend their time together, doing all those domestic things which Katherine vaguely assumed to be richly rewarding and totally exclusive of single friends at loose ends.

  It was, she had always thought, a bit unfair that people could feel free to call on her whenever they wanted to, but she always thought very carefully when it came to calling on other people.

  At thirty-one, single girlfriends were a bit thin on the ground. She had watched them, over the past six years, move from engagement to marriage to children, while she ho
vered on the sidelines, knowing that they were entering a whole sphere of life which would never be hers.

  Once, she had thought that perhaps she should just make do, just summon up the energy to encourage one of the blind dates which her friends would arrange, convinced that they were doing her a good turn.

  But she never could. At first, it had been because the spectre of Dominic had still been too close to her heart, and then she had come to accept her solitude, so that the thought of sharing it with someone simply for the sake of having a partner made no sense. By which time it was fairly theoretical anyway, since the blind dates had dried up.

  She looked at Claire, who was attempting to build an intricate monster out of some Lego bricks, while grumbling under her breath about the unfairness of being starved of food when her tummy felt much better, and saw Dominic. She saw him from across the great gulf of unspoken truths and wished with passion that he had never returned. She had learned to cope with the spectre, but she couldn’t cope with him. It hardly made it any easier to know that the past had made her loathsome for him.

  At seven, she told Claire that it was time for bed and got the expected response that she wasn’t sleepy.

  ‘I’ll read you a story,’ Katherine suggested temptingly. ‘You can choose the book yourself.’

  She looked at the small figure in the nightie fondly, and wondered what it must be like to have a child. Not to be caretaker for dozens of children, whose faces changed from year to year, but to have a child of her own. She had never felt as discontented with her lot as she had done recently, and she wearily realised that it all had to do with Dominic’s reappearance, raising questions which unfortunately had no answers, offering a view of things which, inevitably, were unattainable.

  Bitterness, she knew, was a pill that left a sour aftertaste for the rest of your life.

  His bitterness was as tangible as a wall of steel. But bitterness was not the only wall that lay between them, high and cold and immovable.

  There was herself, dull, staid, no longer a Cinderella at the ball—just an ordinary, unexciting woman with nothing to offer a man like Dominic Duvall.