A Winter's Child (33 page)

‘Oh – I keep to the very letter, as understood by Faxby Town Hall, that is.'

‘Very wise. I take it you have a good friend on the Licensing Committee who can explain it all to you.'

And they smiled at each other, men of the world who perfectly understood the needs and nature of such friendships. Towards the end of the
Chicken Supréme
Kit, after a whispered consultation with Mr Clarence, was called to the telephone, excusing himself with just the right degree of reluctance at leaving his guest.

‘It will be Mr Crozier, I expect,' said Claire brightly, knowing – because where Kit was concerned she always seemed to know these things – that it was far more likely to be his latest and more than usually persistent entanglement, a mezzo-soprana from the Viennese Operetta currently on tour in the north west.

‘I wonder,' said Benedict, without altering the restrained cordiality of his voice, ‘if you are free tonight …?'

Perhaps she had expected it, or something like it, but had prepared no reply and was saved from doing so now by the arrival of the head waiter, with a flourish of white napkins and the clinking of ice, to refill her glass.

‘Thank you, Gerard.' And when he had bowed, spun round on a polished heel and gone away, she sipped her wine and smiled with a brilliance worthy of Polly at her best.

‘This is a very unusual wine, don't you think, Benedict?'

‘Delicious.'

‘Very delicate and fresh, yet
definite
– very individual. Don't you agree?'

‘Absolutely.'

She sipped again, savoured, offered another radiant smile.

‘It comes from a little place called Vouvray – do you know where that is?'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh – do you really?'

‘I do. Near Tours in the Loire Valley.'

‘Quite right.'

‘I know.' And they exchanged small sharp smiles that were the acknowledgement of duellists before swordplay.

‘Have you been there, Benedict?'

‘Not recently.'

‘Kit was on leave there once, during the war – I suppose he must have been visiting a girl – and, whatever happened to the girl, thank goodness he discovered the wine.'

‘Very astute of him.'

‘Well yes – because it's not at all well known in England. You may find it in London, I suppose, but where Faxby's concerned it's a rarity – I am pleased to inform you – only to be enjoyed at the Crown. We're very proud of it. Oh, Kit – there you are! I've iust been telling Benedict about the
Vouvray.'

And as Kit took his seat, smiling urbanely, betraying no hint of the tirade he had just received from his excitable Viennese prima donna, the conversation embarked smoothly, safely, on a wine-lover's tour of the Loire Valley – from subtle
Vouvray
to pale dry
Sancerre,
spicy
Pouilly-Fume,
the rich dessert wines of
Anjou,
gentle
Muscadet
– which would have delighted Arnold Crozier and soon left Claire behind.

Brandy was offered to the gentlemen,
Cointreau
to the still brightly smiling lady, and then coffee in the dusky-pink Baroque lounge where once again, for a moment, she was alone with Benedict.

‘Is the coffee from Brazil?' he enquired pleasantly, ‘or from some little plantation in the heart of Africa?'

And she knew, with regret, that the complex tangle made up of anger and offence, bruised pride, natural caution, simple common sense, was rapidly melting away.

‘Cream?' she offered, as wide-eyed and innocent as Miriam, ‘and sugar?'

‘Are
you free tonight, Claire?'

She smiled and shook her head.

He would not ask again. She had put an end, as graciously as could be expected, to something which should never have started, a decision she knew he would respect. The matter was closed. She had done the sensible thing, the
right
thing. They both knew that. She walked with him to his car, utterly convinced of it.

‘Goodbye, Claire.'

The afternoon was very cold, the white sky of winter already promising frost, a razor-sharp edge to the wind.

‘Tomorrow perhaps?' she said.

The back gate of the house in Mannheim Crescent could be reached only by Claire's garden. The alley beyond it; cut between two high stone walls and further obscured by old overhanging trees, was unlit and just wide enough for Benedict's car to pass. Why had she agreed to meet him there? Better not to think. Standing in the bitter cold wind outside the hotel he had been neither angry nor distant, evidently prepared to take her refusal well. And, reminded too closely of the frail and mysterious quality of their second lovemaking her resistance had quite simply collapsed. She had agreed to see him again because she had wanted to see him. It was as straightforward as that. Very well. Once more, and only once. An indulgence. After which she would have to take herself more seriously in hand. The time had come to forget her old wartime attitudes of living for the day, somehow getting through the night. One had to plan now for tomorrow, even the day after. The war was over. Dear God – how many more times would she have to hear that?

Her heart did not leap as she saw Benedict's headlights entering the lane. Having spent the day burdened by the prospect of the night ahead she was already heartily sick of it and simply wanted it over and done. That he was married and that she had been married to his brother did not greatly trouble her. She would have considered herself unduly sentimental if it had. Paul too had been married, legally although in no other fashion. Nola's marriage to Benedict was a sham. Jeremy was dead. No hearts were likely to be broken. Yet even so, this was a small town where adultery remained adultery and she could not ignore the damage she would do to Dorothy should she be discovered. But what likelihood was there of that? Who cared enough to make a fuss? Certainly not Nola. And who, in the event of gossip, would have the nerve to do other than take Mr Benedict Swanfield's word that there was nothing in it? But the thought of Dorothy remained, a pale but persistent shadow at the back of her mind, accompanied by the anxious prayer, inevitable at such times, that the techniques of Doctor Marie Stopes in which she, like Nola, had placed her trust, might continue to succeed.

Yet the dread of untimely maternity had never been strong enough to hold her back from those war-torn encounters before his waking face or, being skilful and astute, would offer to her any image of himself he chose to create. But he could not be so inscrutable – she thought – in the vulnerable, revealing act she had decided to call sex but still thought of as love. No one could. And the last time, the second time, she had detected no meanness in him, no coarseness, no lack of physical sensitivity. Yes, it was certainly her surest means of getting to know him. She smiled, thinking that as an excuse for wanton behaviour it was as good as any other. It also seemed to be the truth.

‘Do you play backgammon?' he said. ‘Oh Heavens – do I? Yes, I think so.'

‘You can hardly think so. You either do – or not.'

‘Well, yes, then. I was at a Mess party once, in a cháteau somewhere or other – rather drunk I suppose as one tended to be in those days – and for some reason somebody taught me backgammon. You'll beat me into the ground of course – no contest.'

In fact she played quite well when she could be bothered to put her mind to it, a fast chancy game which was no match, as she had expected, for his deadly accurate calculations.

‘Benedict, I don't even understand what you're doing, much less how to stop you. If you ask me to play chess next I shall go home.'

‘I don't think I shall do that. I'm
very
good at chess.'

‘Yes – it did occur to me that you would be.'

He glanced down at the board and then, with his dry smile, looked full into her face, his expression speculative, amused, not at all sorry to see that she had not the slightest chance of defeating him.

‘Why take so many risks, Claire? Do you enjoy them?'

‘Heavens no. I don't even think about them. It's only a game.'

‘Games, my dear, are to be won.'

‘I dare say. I can't seem to take them seriously, that's all.'

‘You should.' And he was no longer, perhaps had never been, talking of backgammon.

‘To leave oneself so wide open – dear Claire – amounts to an invitation to be taken advantage of – imposed upon. Don't you see that?'

She smiled. ‘Oh – well – but at least I do
know
when people are taking advantage of me.'

‘And you are good-natured enough to-let it happen.'

‘Good nature – or laziness perhaps. Most of the time I don't really mind, you see.'

‘You're not hard enough, Claire.'

‘I know. I should have thought you'd be glad.'

‘Of course. It pleases
me
very well.'

The pattern, therefore, was fixed. Two or three times a week through November and December he would drive her to Thornwick where, after whatever civilized preliminaries he had devised in the way of food and wine, teaching her chess, listening to music she found too difficult for pleasure, he would make love to her, enjoying her body to the full extent of their shared capacity and then, for a silent, hostile quarter of an hour, he would turn his back to her until whatever troubled him had passed away. He was older than the other men she had known, his experience infinitely more varied, his patience – since he was patient in nothing else – amazing and moving her sometimes more than she thought wise. Each time she left his bed it was with a sense of every nerve deeply at rest, every muscle purring with content. And her body would hum sometimes for hours afterwards like a finely-strung instrument replete with remembered harmony.

She had never experienced so much unmixed sensation. Yet, beyond his ability to thrill and explode her senses into the kind of orgasm which had somehow never taken place in her past experience of young bodies in cramped and hurried conditions, thinking more of loving and parting than of satisfied desire, she seemed no nearer the truth of him than before. She continued to enter his world at times of his choosing, a clandestine, entirely sensual relationship between accommodating mistress and powerful lover which, had she not been the mistress in question, she would have declared distinctly old-fashioned.

And she was not the stuff of which good, old-fashioned mistresses were made. She spent many a long hour pondering that. She needed friendship and partnership from a man. His confidence a certain amount of laughter, above all frankness. The relationship, she knew, with a wry shaking of her head had to be waiting for her with Kit Hardie. And Benedict, apart from an occasional flash of dry humour, gave her none of those things.

Yet she was still curious about him. Sometimes she could readily admit his fascination. Sometimes she could go further still and acknowledge both the physical hold he had established over her and her own perverse delight in surrendering to it. She had detested, more than anything in her life, her mother's complete surrender to Edward. With Jeremy and Paul the question had never arisen. But if she had inherited enough of her mother's nature to enjoy being what amounted to the plaything of a man like Benedict, then she would just have to come to terms with it and keep it under control.

She continued to see him because she wanted to see him. It was no longer either simple or straightforward. It puzzled her a great deal, often alarmed her, yet it persisted. And, as December brought its rush of seasonal business to the Crown, obliging her to work longer and later, she soon found herself living her life, not for the first time, frantically and against the clock.

‘Are you free tomorrow?' Benedict's voice would ask, sounding curt on the telephone.

‘I should be. It's supposed to be my night off.'

‘Eight o'clock then.'

‘Fine. Oh Lord – just a minute – perhaps we'd better say nine. It gives me time to change.'

But nine o'clock, more often than not, would find her racing like a hare through the back door of the hotel, shrugging on her coat as she ran, her feet and her stomach aching, having eaten nothing all day, in the midst of rich food, but whatever she had been able to snatch on the wing. Late, of course, however fast she ran; and still in her working clothes, either her daytime uniform of narrow dark grey dress with its white collar or the long net shift covered with jet beads she wore in the evenings, both of which Benedict detested.

‘I see you decided not to change.'

‘I'm sorry.' And she was always irritated by her own apology. ‘I've had no time even to wash my face – which makes me bold enough to beg the use of your gorgeous bath.'

‘Of course. Can you stay the night?'

This, for reasons she was uncertain, was the one request she would never grant. It would have been easier, of course, particularly for Benedict, had she been willing to stay. It did not please him, she knew, to get up from a warm bed in the middle of a winter night to drive her to Mannheim Crescent, particularly when there was no real need for her to go there. Yet she resisted his attempts to keep her at Thornwick as firmly as Miriam's hints about the spare bedrooms at High Meadows. She had a room of her own, a cherished measure of independence, and so long as her dresses and shoes remained in her
own
wardrobe, not a change of clothes here, a change of clothes there, she felt far more certain of keeping it.

And so she made excuses.

‘Oh no – I have to be in early tomorrow. We have sixty-four for lunch and then a Townswomen's Guild Christmas Tea-party…'

‘Splendid. I'm flattered you found the time to see me at all. And you'll want to be home early, I suppose, to get a good night's rest.'

He was not accustomed, it seemed, to working women. But she had been crossing swords all her life, here and there, with autocratic men.