She was right about Bruno's reaction to the invitation. 'I'd love to come! I've been dying to know what's so special about the place.'
'You'll probably find it boring,' Liza told him frankly.
'If you go back there every weekend it must have something!'
'Oh, it does—but I'm just not sure you'll enjoy the peace and quiet as much as I do. After all, you rarely visit your family's place in Somerset, do
you?'
'Hartwell? Oh, but that's different,' Bruno said, making a horrible face. 'It's big and draughty and smells of damp, and whenever I'm there I have to talk to some pretty boring people. My uncle's involved in local committees of one sort or another; local politics, you know, dinner parties and tea parties, farmers come to shoot rabbits over the land, and my uncle drags me round the farms. When he isn't in London at the bank, he's in Somerset playing at farming and he'd like me to follow in his footsteps, but that's not my scene at all.'
'Well, you won't have to bother about local politics or dinner parties,' agreed Liza with amusement. 'We'll sail, though—I hope you're a good sailor. Can you handle a small dinghy, or haven't you sailed before?'
'Done a bit,' Bruno agreed airily. 'I won't let myself get bonked by the boom, don't worry, and you won't have to fish me out of the river. Very often, anyway.'
Liza laughed involuntarily. 'I can always tie you to the mast!'
'So that I can go down with the ship when you sink her? No thanks, think again.'
Liza felt more at ease with Bruno than she had ever done with a member of the opposite sex. Most men felt they had to make a pass at her; their macho self-respect demanded it. They always had to prove something; show they could 'pull a bird' who looked like her and had probably dated some very rich and powerful men. Too many men believed everything they read in the newspapers; they would have been incredulous if she had tried to tell them how quiet and hard-working and unglamorous her life had always been. Bruno didn't find that hard to believe because he, too, carried a label and a public image which didn't fit the man behind it.
Liza sometimes suspected that if she and Bruno hadn't met in a very odd way he would never have asked her out. He would have taken one look at her elegant facade—the smooth blonde hair pulled back off her face into a tight chignon, the classy, expensive clothes, the cool, English, go-to-hell remoteness of her features—and he would have run very fast in the opposite direction. But she hadn't looked like that when they had met; she had been soaking wet and windblown because she hadn't been able to get a taxi on a raw March day when rain poured down from the black cloud centred right over that part of London. By the time she had walked to the office her chignon had been ripped apart and her hair blown everywhere, her thin raincoat was sodden and her silk stockings splashed with mud from passing cars. She had run towards the entrance of the office block with her head lowered against the wind and Bruno had come running from the other direction. They had collided right outside the doors. Liza was the lighter of the two of them; it was she who went flying and fell full-length into the gutter. Bruno was too solid; he merely rocked and swayed a moment before he hurried to help her to her feet.
'I'm sorry,' he'd said. 'Come up to my office and I'll show you where you can wash and do something about your hair.'
'Thank you, I work here too, and I can do without your help,' Liza had snapped and marched away with a dignity somewhat marred by having to limp because the heel of one shoe had come off.
'Oh, come on, it was an accident, I'm very sorry,' Bruno said, pursuing her into the lift.
That was when Liza first caught sight of her appearance in the mirror on the wall in the lift. She stared and began to laugh, and Bruno joined in. He had followed her out of the lift, and into her life, that casually, and he was still here.
'Are we driving down?' Bruno asked her when they had dinner two days before the weekend. 'My car or yours?*
'Mine,' Liza said firmly. 'I know the way, you don't. Once we're off the main road it's easy to get lost along the winding marsh lanes, and it isn't easy to explain the route, even with a map.'
'I'm looking forward to it more and more,' Bruno said, grinning. But next morning, when Liza opened her paper at breakfast time, she found an old photo of herself splashed across an inside page and next to it a large picture of Bruno. The headline said it all. 'Romance for Jet-set Banker Playboy and Blonde Model', it ran, rather confusingly, since it had no punctuation and might lead some people to believe that Bruno was a blonde model! But Liza was in no mood to find that amusing. She read hurriedly, her face angry. There was nothing much in the story except cheap innuendo, but it did imply that she and Bruno were on the verge of getting married, and that was embarrassing to read. She wished she hadn't invited Bruno to the cottage for the weekend. What if he read this garbage and started wondering if she was trying to nudge him into proposing?
Or, even worse, trying to compromise him by having him at the isolated cottage alone with her?
She had lost her appetite. She drank a little strong, black coffee and left for the office. It didn't improve her temper to find the whole of her staff looking curious and fascinated, or to be met by grins every time she looked round.
She decided to ring Bruno and cancel the plans for the weekend, but as she was considering how to explain the change of plan the phone rang.
'Liza?' Bruno said miserably. 'Liza, I'm sorry, I can't come this weekend.'
'I see,' she said, and she did see—very clearly. Bruno had read the morning paper; he had been appalled by the innuendo and he was backing out as fast as he could. She couldn't blame him and she wasn't hurt, but she felt depressed about the whole thing.
'I've just had a phone call from my mother,' Bruno told her. 'I've been summoned down to Hartwell to talk to my uncle. Have you seen the paper today, that ghastly rag with the rubbish about us in it?' Liza made inaudible noises and cleared her throat to say she had. 'I thought you must have done,' Bruno said gloomily. 'Sick-making, isn't it? What loathsome brutes they are, they need shooting. Sorry about it, Liza, but don't brood over it. Lies, all of it, so that's what I'll tell Uncle.' He paused and groaned. 'God knows how he'll take it. He can be a cynical swine at times.'
'Can he?' Liza sounded doubtful, which she was, because she knew next to nothing about his uncle, the manipulating, string-pulling all-powerful G. K. Gifford who lived in the fabulous Hartwell, a country house in the dreaming depths of Somerset. Bruno had told her more about the house than about any member of his family. Hartwell was within view of Glastonbury Tor, he said, but Liza had once visited Somerset and driven all over Salisbury Plain and the surrounding countryside. She knew that you could see the dark, pointing finger of Glastonbury Tor for miles and miles in all directions, so Bruno's vague placing of the house didn't help much to fix it in one locality.
'God, yes,' Bruno groaned. 'He's worse than my mother, much worse. She runs straight to him if there's any trouble, and he always fixes it for her. They're very close, more like twins than anything else, so Uncle's always on her side.'
'What does the G stand for?'
'The G?' Bruno repeated in a bewildered way. 'What G?'
'G. K. Gifford,' she prompted, and he laughed flatly.