‘I’m sorry, Hugh, I was so angry I didn’t think,’ Julia pleaded, trotting to keep up with him.
‘You never do. Where in God’s name am I safe from you?’
‘In the kitchen,’ said Julia automatically, almost in tears at her helplessness. ‘I never have accidents there. Please…’
They had reached the back door. Hugh stopped and swung around on her, forestalling her offer. ‘No! Go away, Julia. Just GO AWAY.’
‘I won’t hurt you, I promise. What are you afraid of?’
He looked her up and down. ‘Death!’ he said, succinctly, and strode inside, shutting the door. Julia hovered for a few minutes, aching to go in; make up in some way for her carelessness, but she didn’t dare. She made herself go back to the car and unload her shopping, feeling a little sick herself as she remembered those poor crushed fingers.
‘Julia? What’s the matter?’ She turned to see Michael Marlow climbing easily out of the large, low window of his study. ‘You look like a tragedy queen. What’s happened? Where’s Hugh?’
‘I shut his fingers in the car door,’ Julia wailed, glad for somebody to confess her guilt to.
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‘Is he all right?’ asked Michael, concerned.
‘He won’t let me near him,’ Julia complained sadly. ‘He shut me out of the kitchen.’
‘Well, if he’s ambulant it can’t be too bad,’ he replied consolingly. ‘Don’t take it so hard, Julia, he was the same as a boy. If ever he was hurt he used to retreat like an animal, it took years for Connie to convince him to accept comfort, but I’m afraid the habit of stoicism is deeply ingrained. I’ll check on him later, if you like. You look a bit green yourself, come into the study and have a shot of brandy.’
He made to go back through the window but Julia was stricken to the spot by the thought of Hugh suffering his torment in silence and loneliness. ‘I keep doing these terrible things to him,’ she mourned, and then, the final straw. ‘He shouted at me, he thinks I’m trying to kill him!’ She could hold back no longer. Right there, in the middle of the driveway, with a bucket of crayfish clacking at her feet, she burst into tears.
Michael, who had lived and worked with volatile women all his life, took it in his stride. He let her bawl loudly into his sympathetic shoulder while he absently patted her head—and wondered …
CHAPTER SIX
HUGH didn’t come down to dinner that night. Visions of him starving on his bed of pain were banished by Michael, who sidled up to her after supper and informed Julia out of the corner of his mouth that the patient, bandaged and aspirined, had his nose back to the grindstone.
‘Is he in much pain?’ she ventured fearfully.
‘He didn’t say … he was a mite bad-tempered, though, when I enquired.’
Julia could imagine. ‘Oh, why do I get myself into these things,’ she moaned, guilty all over again.
‘Swings and roundabouts, Julia,’ Michael told her calmly. ‘You’re in the pink with the rest of my sons.’
Little did he know, thought Julia, sinking deeper into gloom. With Charley, sure, but she was fed up with the other two. And their antics over the next few days only strained relations even further. Hugh had been right, damn him, but it was too late to heed his advice. Romeo was revelling in his hot-headed temperament and Steve had decided that it was his duty in life to protect Julia from his ‘shop-soiled Casanova’ of a brother. The game of one-upmanship had got totally out of hand.
What worried Julia most was that Steve might be transferring some of his dependence to her … using her as the kind of crutch that he had so adamantly rejected as being no cure at all. He had regained some of his old fire, and had even furtively begun composing again (‘it’s dedicated to you, Julia love’) but the demons still lurked close by. How was she supposed to wriggle out from between the twins and still leave their pride and feelings intact? She didn’t want to have to forfeit her friendship with them by being brutal. If only she had listened to Hugh, instead of leaping down his throat, she might have nipped things in the bud!
One afternoon, in a fit of grim determination, Julia accepted an invitation to accompany Richard and Steve to Hot Water Beach, intending to make a last-ditch effort to reconcile the brothers. She sat between them in the front seat of Steve’s Zephyr and kept up a rolling chatter that drowned out the occasional snidery from either side and when they reached the beach she obediently carried the towels while the twins forged ahead, shovels in hand, to find the right spot. This, of course, meant another argument.
The tide was at its lowest ebb and a sharp breeze swept up the wide slope of the beach, buffeting their warmly clad bodies with cold as they finally selected a site just below the high-tide line. Even in this they have to compete, thought Julia with a sigh, as she watched the furious way in which the twins set to their task. As the hole deepened, steam began to rise, to be whipped away by the breeze, and the water began to seep at quickening rate. Julia took off her boots and thick socks and dipped her toe into the gathering pool.
‘Ouch, it’s hot!’ She pulled a face when there was no answer from the dogged workers. As they widened and deepened the rapidly filling pool Julia took the towels up to the protective overhang of a towering clay and rock cliff and stripped down to her magenta bikini. The short dash back down the beach raised a good crop of goosepimples.
She murmured with sensuous pleasure as she lowered herself into the water, stretched out full-length in the silky hotness. The combination of heat and cold was delicious and Julia could see from her cosy cocoon that there were a few other people dotted around the beach in the pattern of the heated underflows, enjoying themselves in the same way. If it were summer they would all be making intermittent forays into the cooling waves of the Pacific Ocean.
Richard and Steve went up to pull off their clothes and came racing back, stride for stride. Richard won the place beside Julia, but Steve got his revenge by taking the other end and thrusting his legs back up between them. Julia pretended not to notice the sly jostlings as she rehearsed her little speech.
‘OK you two, I’ve got something to say,’ she launched into the glaring silence. ‘I didn’t come here to watch you two sit and scowl at each other …’
‘I’m not scowling—he is,’ objected Richard immediately. ‘If you’ll remember, I was the one who suggested this little outing. I didn’t ask him to come along and get on everybody’s nerves with his self-pitying sulks.’
‘I’m not the one who gets on Julia’s nerves,’ Steve snapped back. ‘It’s your hammy sentimentality that’s driving her crazy … quoting all those second-hand emotions as if she was another one of your gullible groupies.’ A kick received a vicious jab in exchange. They were deaf to Julia’s entreaties and she was beginning to feel desperate.