Sheltering Rain (15 page)

Kate could not believe this. Geoff, snapped up by the most eligible single woman either of them knew. Geoff, who had suddenly become the glittering prize of the female middle classes. How had this happened? Was she so shortsighted that she had missed some quality in him all along?

“I only told you because you said you were happy with Justin. I would never do anything to hurt you, you know that.”

“Oh, don't worry about us. We're fine. Ecstatic.” She knew she sounded childish, but somehow couldn't help it.

They sat in silence for some minutes, Kate drinking her wine too fast. Eventually, she spoke again.

“Is it serious?”

“Yes. It is.”

“After three weeks?”

“No point hanging around at my age.” He tried to make it sound like a joke.

“What, as in living together?” She was incredulous. How could he have a new life already? When she had not even begun to come to terms with the loss of their old one?

“Well, I've got the Bromley place on a three-month lease. But, yes, I spend most of my time in Islington.”

“How nice for you.”

“You know that stuff has never been important to me.”

Kate stared at his shoes. Until now, she thought. Soraya will have you kitted out and turned into one of those designer intellectuals, all Nicole Fahri jackets and linen shirts, before you know it.

Geoff stroked the cat. Both of them looked too much at ease.

“Did—did anything happen between you before?” The suspicion, which had wormed its way into her mind, had suddenly filled her head like a multiheaded, toxic Medusa.

“What?”

“Well, this all seems terribly convenient, doesn't it? Three weeks after you move out of here you're practically moved in with one of our friends. You've got to admit it's pretty fast work.”

Geoff's expression was deadly serious.

“Kate, I can categorically promise you that nothing happened until you told me about your—about Justin. I had thought of Soraya as an attractive woman, but no more than any of our friends. Well, perhaps more attractive, but I'd never thought about her more than anyone else, if you know what I mean.”

He was telling the truth. Geoff had always found it impossible to lie. So why did she feel so bitter?

“She says she always liked me, but she wouldn't have gone near me while I was with someone else. And if she hadn't made a move—well, I would have probably slunk into my rather horrid new flat and licked my wounds for years. You know how I was. You know how I am. I'm just not the type. For infidelity.”

And I am, she thought. Although you're too kind to say it. Kate feeling suddenly, inexplicably, left behind, realized she wanted to howl. To shout and scream uninhibitedly, like someone cheated, and cry until her chest heaved and her stomach muscles hurt. And it was all her own fault.

Perhaps, she thought, suddenly, insanely, she would seduce him. Leap on him, claw off his clothes, and make love to him with an animalistic passion that would leave him trembling, no longer smug and secure about the rightness of his new love. She wanted him suddenly insecure, anxious. She wanted to obliterate Soraya and her enigmatic Asian smile. She could do it, she knew she could do it. She knew him better than anyone, after all.

Then she realized that Geoff was staring at her, his expression gentle and concerned. It was the kind of look, she realized, with some horror, he normally reserved for his patients. And that was worse than the near-infidelity. She pulled at her glasses, suddenly remembering with discomfort her pale, unmade appearance.

“Are you okay?”

“Okay? God, I'm great. Just stunned by your wonderful news. I'm so pleased for you.” She stood, letting her silk shirt flop open at the collar, shaking her head slightly. “Isn't life grand, eh?”

Geoff, aware that their meeting was being called to an abrupt close, stood also, placing his half-drunk glass of wine on the side table.

“You're sure you don't mind? Believe it or not, it's important to me that you're okay with this.”

Kate's eyes glittered.

“Mind? Why should I mind?”

She smoothed at her hair, looking absently around the room.

“Justin will be so amazed when I tell him how everything's worked out. So amazed. And pleased. Yes, we're both very pleased. Now, let's get your stuff, shall we?” she said brightly, and with a broad, fixed smile, walked toward the door.

T
hat's it. Heels down, sit up straight. There, see? You're doing grand.”

“I feel like a sack of potatoes.”

“You're doing fine. Just lift your hands up a bit. Just off his neck.”

“They're the only thing keeping me on board.”

Sabine scowled into her scarf as Thom grinned at her, her breath sending a soft, hot blast back up against her face. Not that she was going to let him know, but she had to admit she was almost enjoying herself. The little gray horse moved obediently under her, its ears flicking backward and forward as Thom talked, its neck arched like that of a rocking horse. It hadn't tried to buck her off, bite her, kick her, swerve into a hedge, or bolt into the distance, as she had secretly feared. It hadn't even eyed her with that expression of malevolent intent particular to the riding school horses, but instead seemed simply satisfied to be out enjoying the crisp winter morning, accepting its human passenger as a necessary cost.

“I told you your gran was a good judge of horseflesh,” Thom said, from the greater height of the big bay horse beside her. He held both reins in his right hand, Western style, while his other arm hung loosely down his left side.

“She wouldn't have put you on anything too lively. She made sure this one here was absolutely bombproof before she'd let them send it over. I heard her on the telephone myself.”

Sabine sensed that at this point she was meant to express some kind of gratitude, or admiration. But she couldn't. Her grandmother had barely seemed to notice her the past few days, and when she did it was only to observe some wrongdoing on her part. Like not washing the mud from her boots before putting them in the boot room. And letting Bertie sleep on her bed in the afternoon. She had even shouted at Mrs. H for putting the wrong sort of butter on Grandfather's scrambled egg, bringing the tray back down herself and going on and on about it as if poor old Mrs. H had tried to poison him or something. Sabine had wanted to shout back at her, but after her grandmother had gone back upstairs to his room with a reloaded tray, Mrs. H had put a hand on her shoulder and said it didn't matter. “She's under a lot of strain. We have to give her a bit of leeway,” she said, shaking her head.

“Why does everyone let them get away with it?” she asked Thom, as he dismounted to open a wooden gate.

“Who? Get away with what?”

“Them. My grandparents. Why do you all stay working for them when they're so awful to everybody? I can't believe they pay you a great whack, she's always going on about
economizing
.” She spat out the word, as if it tasted bad.

Thom pushed the gate open, tapping his horse on its side so that it pirouetted clumsily around him, and Sabine rode through, her horse's hooves making crude sucking noises in the mud.

“She's all right.”

“No, she's not. She never says thank you to you for all the things that you do. And she was rude to Mrs. H yesterday. And yet none of you answers back.”

“No point. She doesn't mean it personally.”

“That's no excuse.”

“I'm not saying it is. But people have their ways, and that's hers. God, it's cold this morning.” With a slight grunt, Thom shoved his foot in the stirrup and, pushing up, swung his other leg over the back of the horse. His boots were caked in mud.

“But it's demeaning. She treats you like servants. Like you all lived in the nineteenth century.”

Thom patted the bay horse's muscular neck.

“Well, I suppose you could say we are her servants.”

“That's ridiculous. You're staff.”

Thom was grinning again now. His smile rose up above the scarf wrapped tightly around his neck.

“So, what's the difference?”

“There just is a difference.”

“Go on.”

Sabine stared at her horse's ears. Back and forth went the right one. Thom could be immensely irritating sometimes.

“It's what she makes it. Them. Both of them. The difference is in how they treat you—as equals, or as . . . as . . . well, without any respect.”

She glanced furtively at Thom, wondering if she'd gone too far. She had realized halfway through the conversation that he might legitimately be offended by what she was saying.

But he just shrugged, and pulled a wet leaf from an overhanging branch.

“I don't see it like that. They're good people, your grandparents, but with old-fashioned ways. You've got to remember that they grew up with servants. They grew up in the colonies. They like things done a certain way, and they're just old and easily frustrated if that doesn't happen. Now”— Thom pulled up his horse, and turned to look at her—“if it were just one person they treated badly, or shouted at, or whatever, I think we'd all walk out. There are no mugs in this place, Sabine, whatever you might think. But we understand them. And their ways. And although you might not see it, they respect us, too.”

Sabine still didn't agree, but something in Thom's manner meant that she was disinclined to pursue the conversation further.

“And no matter what you might think of her right now, Mrs. H is right. She is under a lot of strain. You should open up to her a bit, Sabine. Talk to her. You might just be surprised.”

Sabine shrugged, as if it were beyond her to care. But the strain her grandmother was under, she knew, was down to her grandfather's encroaching ill health. He hadn't come down from his room for five days now, and the doctor, a young locum tenens with an earnest manner, had been a frequent visitor.

Sabine hadn't liked to ask what was wrong. On the one occasion Mrs. H had asked her to take up his lunch tray, he had been asleep, and she had stood, frozen in the doorway, watching appalled and fascinated as, above the vibrant red of the oriental bedspread, the skeletal head painfully drew breath, wheezing and spluttering in fitful slumber. She couldn't have told if he looked unwell. He was too old to look anything but—well—old.

“Is he going to die?” she asked Thom.

He turned in his saddle and stared at her briefly, then looked away, as if considering something.

“We're all going to die, Sabine.”

“That's not an answer.”

“Well, that's because I can't give you an answer. C'mon, the weather's closing in. We'd better get these horses back.”

It had all stemmed from the night of the hounds. Nearly a week ago, Sabine had woken in the early hours to what sounded like a pack of wolves outside her window, their voices raised in a strangled, anguished chorus. They howled not in a mournful way, but with a kind of urgent blood-thirstiness, a bloodcurdling harmony, a song to raise primeval fears. Chilled, she had climbed slowly out of her bed, and padded barefoot to the window, half expecting in her dreamlike state to see a full moon. Instead, in the dim blue light, she had just been able to make out below her the thin figure of her grandmother, her dressing gown pulled tightly around her, running through the stable yard, a candlewick apparition. She was shouting at someone to come back. It wasn't the furious, electrified cry of someone chasing a criminal, but brisk, and yet almost pleading. “Come back, darling,” she said. “Come back, now.
Please
.”

Sabine had stood, her hand raised at the window as her grandmother disappeared, unsure what to do. She half wanted to help, and yet even watching she had the strong sense that she was intruding on something private.

Then, a few moments later, the howling had stopped. And she had heard footsteps, and then her grandmother's voice again, this time soft and scolding, like it was when she spoke to the Duke. Sabine had pushed back the curtain to see her grandmother slowly walking her grandfather back toward the back door. He stooped and limped, and the wind molded his pajamas around him in the wind, so that his bones seemed to poke right through, like warped coat hangers. “I was just checking on the hounds,” he kept saying. “I know that man's not feeding them enough. I was just checking on the hounds.”

Sabine and her grandmother had not spoken about this incident. Sabine wasn't even sure if she was supposed to know. But from then on her grandfather had not emerged from his room. And at night, occasionally when she half woke, she could hear the brisk padding of her grandmother's steps along the corridor, as she checked that her husband was still in bed, and had not disappeared on another nocturnal engagement.

Her curiosity awakened, Sabine did, however, ask her grandmother whether she could go and see the hounds. She had wanted Thom to take her, but her grandmother, after giving her one of her looks—as if she couldn't quite believe Sabine might be interested—said she could come up with her later that afternoon. “They're black-and-tans,” she told Sabine as they walked briskly through the stable yard. “It's a special breed of hound, we've had in this area for generations.” She pronounced it “hind.” It was the longest sentence she had said to Sabine in over a week.

“The Ballantynes were always Masters of Foxhounds. That's the leader of the hunt. They started the pack, back at the end of the nineteenth century. And your grandfather has spent the best part of his life making sure it carried on. He was Master until about ten years ago, when he stopped riding. They're a wonderful pack. The last time I went out you should have heard them give tongue.” She paused briefly, and smiled, savoring her reminiscences.

Sabine, fighting the urge to giggle at her grandmother's last words, didn't tell her she had ulterior motives. She was convinced the poor dogs would be kept in cruelty; no contented animal could make a noise like those dogs had made. And the thought that they lived in concrete sheds, away from the comforts of warm fires and worn rugs, made her feel almost tearful. What she would do when she saw them, she wasn't quite sure. On her bad days, she resolved to set them free, or contact the local animal-rights people to make a fuss. But that would get all of them in trouble, including Thom. On her better days, she didn't think about the dogs at all.