Deception and Desire (28 page)

Neil felt a sweat begin to break out all over his body. He hadn't intended to do more than comfort Dinah; he liked her and he'd flirted with her a little, but he had not seriously considered going any further than that – he was, after all, going steady with Angie. But the way she was pressing herself against him was more than flesh and blood could stand. She really seemed to want it!

He thrust a finger deep inside her. She winced and he knew he had been right about her all along – she was a virgin. Again he pulled back. He could do without complications like this. Again she pressed against him, clinging, panting, almost sobbing.

‘Please, don't leave me – don't leave me – don't stop!'

It
was
more than flesh and blood could stand. Neil forgot caution, forgot Angie, forgot everything but the demands of his own body and that of the girl beside him. It was all over quickly – too quickly – and at once the guilt was there, rushing in.

‘Christ, Din, I'm sorry! I didn't mean …'

But she was still clinging to him, still sobbing.

‘Oh, say you love me, please say you love me!'

‘Dinah!' He extricated himself. ‘ For goodness' sake!' He looked down at her lying there on the bed with the sort of expression on her face that warned she might be going to cry again. ‘ Dinah – look, I said I was sorry. But you … you really were asking for it.'

Her eyes widened, she gave a little hiccupping sob, then sat up, straightening her clothes in terrific haste as if simply by covering herself quickly all that had happened could be undone.

‘Dinah.' He reached out to put a hand on her shoulder.

She jerked away. ‘ Don't touch me!'

‘But …'

‘Just don't touch me. All right?'

He shrugged, turned away. ‘Suit yourself.'

She slipped on her shoes and ran back to the living room for her overnight bag. In her own room she slammed the door and leaned against it, slumping, staring like someone in shock. What had she done? What in the world had possessed her? Had it been the vodka? No wonder Grandfather said drink was the road to damnation! Or had it just been that she had desperately needed someone to love and comfort her? She didn't know. She only knew that she had thrown herself at Neil like a hussy and she could not bear the thought of having to face him – or any of the others – again. Overcome with grief and shame she sank to the floor, huddling there, staring into space.

She was still there when Lynne came home an hour later.

‘Oh you poor thing!' Lynne sympathised when she had persuaded Dinah to move so that she could open the door and come into the room. ‘Was it awful?'

Dinah nodded mutely.

‘Funerals are horrid, I know, especially if it's someone you care for. Come on, I'll make you a cup of tea. Or would you like something stronger? I think Neil's got some vodka. I'm sure in the circumstances …'

‘No!' Dinah said hurriedly. Tea – please!'

She had no intention of telling Lynne that she had already had some of the vodka, and she certainly was not going to let a living soul know, if he didn't, that it had gone far beyond that.

All she wanted to do was forget. And she could only pray that he would do the same.

One June morning Dinah set out as usual for college, but when she came in sight of the utilitarian building, three storeys of soulless grey concrete which housed the school of fashion, she knew she could not bear to go in. She walked straight on across the car park, past the low prefabricated huts where the foundation-course students worked, into the lane beyond and from that into the fields that led down to a stream.

It was a beautiful morning, the sky high, clear blue and the foliage, still unspoiled by the dust of summer, fresh and green. A light breeze stirred the white flowers of the may where it made heavy bunches on the branches that overhung Dinah's path. Birds flew and swooped in the hedges and although it was still early the bees were already about, buzzing with lazy purposefulness from clover to clover. But Dinah scarcely noticed. She was too preoccupied, locked in the private world that had imprisoned her ever since the awful truth that she ought be pregnant had begun to dawn.

Strange how it had crept up on her, the constant nausea that she had initially put down to grief, the realisation that in spite of a constant niggling pain in the pit of her stomach her period was not going to come. At first she had thought grief might be to blame for that too – everyone knew that emotional turmoil could upset the balance of the cycle and the more you worried about it the more you put if off. But all the time she had somehow known that was not the reason. When she was three weeks overdue she had had a little bleed that had lasted half a day, accompanied by the most severe stomach cramps she had ever experienced, but she had welcomed them, thinking that here was the proof – everything was all right. But when the bleeding suddenly stopped she began to worry again. Why did she have this dull heavy ache? Why did she feel so sick all the time? Why were her breasts changing? The nipples hadn't been dark like that and covered with little white bubbles – had they?

Day by day the feeling of dread grew more intense, even creeping into her dreams so that she woke trembling, her face wet with tears.

Dinah told no one of her fears – keeping her secret seemed the single most important thing. Neil had hardly spoken to her since that afternoon and she was hurt but not surprised. She knew he was embarrassed by what had happened and she blamed herself entirely. She did not want him to realise she was pregnant as a result of that brief encounter; her pride would not allow it. But something had to be done. She could not pretend for ever that nothing was happening to her. At the moment she did not show – her body was as slim as ever apart from a slight thickening of the waist – but she would not be able to hide it for ever.

That lovely June morning Dinah walked by the river trying to clear her head and make plans of some kind. If she stayed at college much longer not only would Neil realise she was pregnant but so would all the others. Dinah was suffused with a hot and debilitating flood of horror at the prospect and she found herself beginning to tremble. She would have to take a year out at the very least and go right away, she decided. But when the baby was born – what then? Adoption was the obvious answer, but that thought was horrific too, making her stomach contract as if to keep the baby safe inside her, and Dinah was suddenly quite sure she could never bring herself to part with it.

If I went right away from anyone I know, maybe I could bring the baby up myself, she thought. She would have to get a job to support them both, of course, and it was unlikely to be the sort of career she had hoped for. But it was the only option that offered hope rather than despair, a positive step. For a moment Dinah felt almost cheerful, as if she were setting out on a great adventure, then, as suddenly, she was terror-struck at the enormity of what she was proposing to do.

But for all her confusion there was one solution she did not consider for even a moment, and that was going home. She would not give her grandfather the satisfaction of knowing he had been proved right. Whatever she did to sort out this mess, Dinah was determined she would do it alone.

Christian Van Kendrick Junior, or Van, as he liked to be known, was not feeling best pleased. It was not part of his brief to have to interview applicants for the more menial jobs in his father's boot-making factory – at least, he did not consider it was. His father, however, Christian Senior, seemed to think differently.

‘I have to go out,' he had said. ‘I have to go and see the bank manager. You can do the interviews for me. There are only three of them and they are all after the one operative's vacancy. You know what we are looking for – someone steady and reliable, a hard worker who won't go sick for a week every time he has too much to drink at the working men's club on a Saturday night. A man with a young family is probably best. He will need the money regularly as well as doing a bit extra to make up on the piece work.'

‘Why not let Jim Pratten see them?' Van suggested.

Jim Pratten was the charge hand. He had been with the company for years – ever since Christian Van Kendrick had come to England from Holland just before the last war and set up his little factory manufacturing industrial safety boots. In Van's opinion, Jim was the obvious person to conduct the interviews – he was the one, after all, who would have to work with whoever was taken on, and if he couldn't spot a good operative after twenty-five years he had no business being in the position he was.

But the old man would have none of it.

‘I'm asking you to do it, Christian. It is all good practice for you – for when I retire and you take over. Now, the first interview is at three o'clock, and here are the letters of application …'

Van's mouth tightened angrily. He knew it was useless to argue – in the end his father would have his way. He was the most stubborn man imaginable; sometimes Van thought of the legend of the Dutch boy who had saved his town from the flood water by sticking his finger in the hole in the dyke, and mused that his father could very well have been that boy – he would have stood there too, hour after hour, with his finger jammed in the hole, if he had made up his mind to it. Perhaps stubbornness was a national characteristic of the Dutch.

Van picked up the sheaf of papers fastened together with a metal clip, which his father pushed across the desk towards him, and slammed out of the office.

As he crossed the machine room Jim Pratten looked up and acknowledged him with a mock salute that reminded Van uncomfortably of a tug of the forelock. He nodded curtly – no point trying to talk over the noise of the machines, and in any case he had nothing to say. He went into his own office, put on the light – a single bare bulb in a plain white plastic shade directly over the desk – and closed the blinds on the window that looked out on to the factory floor.

His father's office was a mirror image of this one, though with no curtain or blind at his window, but Van could not stand the feeling of being in a goldfish bowl and so he had installed the Venetian blind. Pulled to the right angle it enabled him to look out and watch the operatives at work without them being able to see him.

Van sighed, acknowledging the truth that he had avoided for so long but which was now constantly on his mind. He hated the factory, hated the soul-destroying mundaneness of it, the feeling that Kendricks was a little family concern that would never – could never – grow beyond its humble origins. Most of all he hated the feeling that it had somehow trapped him with tentacles as unyielding as his father's stubbornness and would never let him escape.

There was no doubt in Van's mind that Christian Senior intended the factory to be his son's destiny. Even before he could walk he had been taken there in his pushchair and as he grew older his father would take him on a tour of the cutting room and the stitching lines, holding him by the hand to make sure he did not hurt himself on any of the machinery and explaining what was going on. In those days he had loved the noisy whirr and the smell of leather, loved to hear the stories of how his father had come to England from Amsterdam, fallen in love with his mother, married her and bought the small run-down factory premises whose previous occupant had gone bankrupt during the depression.

‘They laughed at a Dutchman making boots,' Christian would say. ‘They thought we wore only wooden clogs. But I showed them. Oh yes, I showed them.'

The young Van had listened to the stories and never tired. It was only later that his enthusiasm had begun to wane. It was not easy, he thought, to remain fascinated for very long with safety footwear, and the thick-soled heavy-duty boots which were Kendricks' stock in trade were unbelievably ugly. But they sold well – and that was what constituted the trap. Cheap, serviceable, unexciting boots were mandatory wear for thousands of working men, and Kendricks had captured a slice of the market with their reputation for value for money. The factory was not making a fortune but it was ticking over nicely; though the Van Kendricks were by no means rich, they were, by any standards, comfortably off.

Van was now thirty years old and he knew he had a great deal to thank the family business for – his comfortable childhood, his education, the standard of living to which he had become accustomed – but it didn't make him like it, or the part he had to play in it – any better. His father might be content within his limited horizons; Van was more ambitious. He found Christian's pride in his life's work faintly irritating, and the expectation that he would simply carry it on, maintaining it on the same lines without expanding or diversifying, was a millstone around his neck.

It was not the long hours that his father expected him to put in that he minded – Van was not afraid of hard work. But if he was to devote his life to the business as he knew his father intended him to, then he wanted to play for higher stakes.

Many times in the last few years Van had tried to persuade Christian to allow him to develop the business, but the old man had reacted with characteristic stubbornness.

‘It's a good family business,' he would say. ‘We don't want it to get too big. Better to be able to run it ourselves. I know everyone who works for me. I've watched their children grow up.' The Christmas party for the children of his employees, when Christian himself dressed up as Santa Claus to hand out an orange, an apple and a small present from the huge ten-foot Christmas tree, and the annual outing to Weymouth, when Kendricks hired, and filled, two charabancs, had featured in the works calendar for as long as Van could remember.

‘But we need to expand,' Van argued. ‘Times are changing and we should be changing with them. Big is beautiful these days. There won't be any more room, soon, for the little man. If we don't modernise and streamline our operation we shall be squeezed out.'