CHAPTER ONE
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Christy opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the garden. The air smelled of snow. She breathed it in slowly, savouring the crisp scent of it, and looked at the leaden winter sky.
A thin curl of smoke from her father's bonfire smudged the skyline before mingling with the greyness of the cloud. Beyond the garden lay a vista of fields broken by clumps of woodland, backed by the slopes of the Border hills, their peaks already whitened by the first fall of snow. Everything lay intensely still beneath the cold January air. It was all so very different from London and the life she had lived there, but it was familiar as well. After all, she had spent the first seventeen years of her life in these Border hills. And the last eight away from them, apart from brief visits home.
She reached the bottom of the garden and stood for a moment watching her father as he threw the last of the rubbish on his bonfire. He was wearing the same tweeds she remembered from her teenage years, shabby and well worn. He turned and saw her, and smiled affectionately at her; a tall, mild-mannered man who had passed on to her, his only child, his height.
'Lunch is ready,' she told him.
'Good, I'm hungry. I'll just damp this fire down and then I'll be in.'
If her height had come from her father, then her oval green eyes had come from her mother's Celtic ancestors, like her rich banner of copper hair, and her quick temper. Scots and English had quarrelled and married across the Border for centuries, but her mother's family had been Highlanders from Glen Coe, and she had often bemoaned the fact that Christy seemed to have inherited their fierce warring spirit.
Christy waited for her father to finish putting out the fire.
'You know, Christy,' he said, 'it's good to have you home, although I wish it could have been in happier circumstances. You don't have to stay, you know. Your mother…'
'I want to stay,' she interrupted firmly. 'I would have come home even if Mum hadn't had to have that operation. You know, in London it's all too easy to get out of touch with reality, with everything that's important in life.' She sighed faintly, a frown touching her smooth forehead. 'I've given up my job, Dad.'
There hadn't been time in the frantic telephone call telling her of her mother's emergency operation for Christy to tell her father her own news, but now that the danger was over and her mother was safely back at home, it was time for her to talk of her own plans.
Now it was her father's turn to frown, and Christy looked away from him. She could sense his surprise and concern, and bit down hard on her bottom lip.
'But you seemed so pleased to be working for David Galvin,' he said. 'When you came home last summer you seemed so happy.'
'I was. But David has been asked to write the music for a film and to do that he has to go out to Hollywood. He asked me to go with him, but I didn't want to, so I handed in my notice.'
She prayed that her father would accept her explanation at face value and not press her any closer. What she had told him was in effect the truth, but there was a great deal that she had concealed from him.
There was David's desire for them to become lovers, for a start. She shivered slightly, a frisson of sensation running through her that had nothing to do with the cold. She didn't love David, but he was a very magnetic and masculine man; she had known that if he continued to press her she might have been very tempted to give in to him—and how she would have hated herself if she had done so. She wasn't blind, or a fool; she knew that David was almost consistently unfaithful to his wife Meryl, and that Meryl accepted his infidelities as the price of being married to a man whose artistic abilities had made him world-famous by the time he was thirty years old.
The sort of affairs David indulged in meant nothing in any emotional sense; he was an intensely sensual and sexual man who enjoyed women and, shamingly, she knew that there had been the odd moment when she had not been sure of her own ability to withstand him should he choose to use the full force of his sexual power against her.
She had worked for him for four years, and had been accepted by Meryl and his children almost as an honorary member of the family. She knew what his brief affairs did to them, and the last thing she wanted was to inflict further hurt on them, so she had done the only thing possible: she had run away.
He had flung that at her in their final confrontation. She had told him just before Christmas that she was resigning. There had been no need for him to ask why, and she remembered how his mouth had compressed with anger and mockery. There was an almost childish side to him that loathed being thwarted or denied anything he had set his heart on, and he had wanted her. Consequently he had used that skilful tongue of his mercilessly to destroy her defences, bringing her close to the edge of tears and total self-betrayal, but somehow she had managed to hang on to her self-control. A small, bitter smile twisted her mouth. She knew whom she had to thank for that self-control, for that hard-won ability to refuse to give in to her feelings. It seemed that she was doomed to be unlucky in the men in her life.
She had spent Christmas alone, refusing Meryl's pleas to join them in their huge Wimbledon house, as she had done at other Christmases, and then, just when she had felt that her loneliness and misery might cause her to give way, she had received a telephone call from her father telling her of her mother's collapse.
She hadn't wasted a moment in racing home, and now that she was here she intended to stay. She felt calmer, safer, more secure than she had felt in a long time. Her mother was going to need careful looking after for at least a couple of months—plenty of time for her to think about what she was going to do with the rest of her life. She could even work for her father in his busy country solicitor's practice if need be; his secretary of thirty years was on the point of retiring. She knew she had m
ade the right decision; the only decision. If she had stayed in London, David might have found a way of persuading her to go to Hollywood with him after all, ostensibly as his personal assistant, of course… but she had known that her agreement to go would have been her agreement to their affair.
So, instead, she had ruthlessly cut all her links with London, giving up her flat and her few friends. It had been disturbing to realise how few friends she had to show for eight years in London, but then she had always been something of a loner, cautious about revealing or giving anything of herself, and even more so after that disastrous summer when she was seventeen.
Her mouth compressed again as she opened the back door and went into the warm kitchen.
Her parents' home stood almost alone at the end of a narrow country lane, some ten miles outside the town where her father practised. They had come here shortly after their marriage, when her father had bought himself into the partnership. Now the other partners were either dead or retired, and her father ran the business alone with the help of a young articled clerk.
The house was solidly built of local stone, sheltered from the harsh winters that could affect the Borders by the small valley in which it stood. The village, with its school and church, was less than a mile away, and Christy could vividly remember the long winter trudges through the snow to the village bus stop, where as a teenager she had waited with the other children for the bus to take them to school. Those had been good days; life had been simple then, and she had been happy, if somewhat alone. The other children had often teased her, calling her 'Carrots' because of her red hair.
What was past was past, she reminded herself as she dished up the lunch. She had already been up to see her mother and supervise the very light meal that was all she was allowed at present.
'I had a message from the surgery this morning to say that the doctor would be out to see Mother this afternoon. Do you still have Doctor Broughton?' she asked her father as he sat down.
'No. Didn't your mother tell you? Alan Broughton retired early just before Christmas. Dominic Savage is our doctor now.'
Christy's arm jerked and she spilled some carrots. She was glad that she was facing the Aga and that her father couldn't see her expression.
'Dominic? I thought he was in America?'
'So he was, but he decided to come back. I suppose it's only natural in a way. His grandfather was the only GP here for a long time, and he was responsible for starting up our present practice.'
'But Dominic always seemed so… so ambitious…'
'People change.' Her father smiled, and there was a slight twinkle in his eye. 'Look at you, for instance. I seem to remember a time when we couldn't mention Dominic's name without you colouring up like a sunset.'
She fought down the panic and pain clawing through her stomach and summoned a brief smile.
'Yes, I was rather obvious in my adolescent adoration, wasn't I? Thank goodness we all grow out of that sort of thing! I must have driven you all mad, especially Dominic…'