Betrayal (21 page)

I could only stare at her.

‘I didn’t go to Provence,’ she explained. ‘I drove down to find you.’

I looked into her face, I saw the slight shame there, and the hurt, and knew it was true. ‘Oh, Ginny.’

She was straining to breathe but when I tried to fetch her inhaler she grasped my arm and held me back. ‘I saw you go to the boat too. I saw you sailing off. But Hugh, I wasn’t the only one. Someone else saw you go – someone at the inn – and they told David, and David asked me if it had been me on board, and I told him it was. I said it was me!’ As if to impress this on me, she shook my arm again. ‘And then Mary asked me as well, and I told her. I told her it was me. So that’s what we’ve got to stick to, Hugh,’ she urged through the labouring of her lungs, ‘that’s what we must swear to! We must say that it was
me
.’

I felt an inner crumbling, a sudden loss of will. The idea of committing myself to more lies was bad enough, but to try and carry off such fragile deceits seemed utterly futile. ‘It’s no good, Ginny. It’s no good.’

‘What do you mean?’ And her grasp was very tight.

‘They’ll find out. Honestly, Ginny, it’ll only make things worse.’

‘No!’ Her vehemence took me by surprise. ‘
No!
What are you thinking of!
What are you thinking of!
’ She was trembling again.

‘It’ll be better to tell the truth. They’ll find out anyway!’ And the thought sent me into a new chasm of despair.

‘You can’t! You can’t!’ She knelt in front of me and clasped my face in her hands so that I was forced to look into the fierceness of her eyes. ‘Think of
me
, Hugh! Think of
me!
’

The tears sparkled angrily in her eyes, she cried for breath. Hurriedly I fetched her inhaler. As she pulled the drug into her lungs her gaze didn’t leave my face.

‘Ginny, I’m sorry,’ I said wearily. ‘I’m so very sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry,’ she gasped angrily, ‘be brave! Be
brave!
For me, Hugh.
Please
. Do it for
me!
’

I
’
VE FORGOTTEN
what excuse I found for going back to Dittisham that first time. To sort out attics, to do some work on the boat. It didn’t matter, really, because Ginny soon got the message that I wanted to be on my own. Coming on top of my late-night flight from the house party, this did little to ease the tension between us. Ginny wanted explanations and reassurances which I could not give her, while I dreamed of solitude and peace of mind, longings which I dared not voice for fear of making things worse.

We were meant to be having dinner with some friends from New York on the Friday, and Sunday lunch with neighbours, but I said I couldn’t face people, which was true, and suggested Ginny go without me, which I knew full well she would never do.

I had a conscience about that, but it got lost in the desperation to get away. That week I had been on a two-day whistle-stop to some of our major customers in France and Belgium, I had been fighting the banks tooth and claw on a daily basis to extend our loan arrangements, and at an acrimonious meeting the HartWell board had outvoted me and passed Howard’s motion to open formal merger discussions with Cumberland. By Friday I was drained of small talk, I was incapable of putting on a front for other people and pretending that things were just fine. Things were far from fine, and I knew that the greatest crisis of all was in myself.

Sylvie had been drifting through my mind ever since the swimming incident two weeks before, yet I told myself I wasn’t going back to Dittisham to see her. I told myself I was going back to Dittisham to sort myself out, which contained more than enough truth to placate my conscience.

I reached the house after midnight on Friday and slept through until six, which in those insomniac times was something of a record. Then, seized with the fierce energy that exhaustion brings, I drove into town and took the ferry to Kingswear and, parking up on the cliffs, walked the coastal path until my legs ached. On the way back I took a detour into Brixham and, finding a dingy cafe near the harbour, devoured a plate of limp bacon and crusty eggs, washed down with bitter tea.

On returning to the house I made a half-hearted attempt to sort through Pa’s books, but restlessness soon had me wandering aimlessly from window to window and back again. Eventually I put the books to one side and walked down the garden to the edge of the water. Down river, beyond the ferry, I could see the old-fashioned cutter with the bowsprit that Sylvie’d told me she and her friends took out most weekends. This Saturday the boat floated at its moorings, devoid of life.

I sat on the bank, watching the tide creeping in and the gulls squabbling in the sky above
Ellie Miller
and the scurrying ferry as it carried the hikers and holiday-makers across to Greenway. I stayed for almost an hour, finally trudging back up the hill when heavy clouds covered the sun. Approaching the house I heard the phone ringing, but something prevented me from hurrying to answer it and by the time I got inside it had stopped.

Still unable to settle, I went into town again and drove the streets until I found the pottery shop where Sylvie worked. It was a small place squeezed into a row of handicraft shops in a narrow street near the harbour. Brightly coloured pots and bowls lined the shelves that straddled the window. Through the open door I could make out a fiftyish woman in an ethnic dress sitting by the till, reading a newspaper. She seemed to be alone. I drove on to the supermarket, roaming desultorily among the shelves, buying whisky, milk and breakfast cereal, before ending up in a pub and passing an unsatisfactory twenty minutes with a beer and a solid meat pie.

As soon as I got back to the house I went upstairs to David’s old room and looked down river.

The cutter had gone.

I felt a ridiculous sense of aggrievement, as if I had been unfairly excluded. I searched the house for binoculars and, finding none, strode down to the water’s edge to take another look. There was no doubt: the cutter had gone, leaving a squat wooden dinghy at her mooring.

My resentment burned on childishly. When I made sense of this absurd emotion, I realised it was based on envy, a naive and sentimental longing to be part of Sylvie’s adventure, to sail off to God knows where, as we had done in the languorous days of that endless summer long ago, to some quiet cove maybe, or France, or nowhere very much at all. I yearned for the simplicity of those days, when we were faced by nothing more challenging than a trick at the tiller or a change of sail. Most of all perhaps, I yearned for the love and laughter we had shared, and which seemed to have faded inexorably from my life.

I had told Ginny I would be back by the following evening but I found reasons to put off my departure. Sorting Pa’s books took a lot longer than I’d thought – or I made sure it did – then I persuaded myself that I needed to get out to
Ellie Miller
and pump her bilges. In the soft summer afternoon I collected oars and rowlocks from the garage and walked through the village to the quay.

I found the dinghy underneath two others in a stack of tenders jostling for space on the end of the ferry pontoon. Setting out, I didn’t take my usual route to
Ellie
, which was to run parallel to the mud flats until the river widened a little and I could cross where the current was weakest, but rowed straight into the ebbing tide which would carry me close by the cutter’s mooring. When I reached the mooring, there was nothing to see, of course, just the buoy and a battered plywood dinghy with badly chipped gunwales and a gash down one side.

Ellie
had quite a bit of water in her, so I guessed David hadn’t been aboard for a while. Once I had pumped her dry I looked around for other jobs to do: anything to delay my return. I pottered about for an hour or so, running the engine, doing odd bits of maintenance; and all the time I was keeping an eye out for the cutter’s return.

Closing the engine compartment, on the point of packing up and going home, I looked out through the main hatch and saw the top of a mast in movement. I climbed up the companionway for a better view, and there was the white cutter, coming up to her mooring. I counted four people on board. Even at that distance Sylvie’s slim figure was unmistakable.

It was then that I should have understood the nature of my secret hopes for Sylvie. My agitation should have warned me, and the unwarranted hostility I felt at the sight of the two men in the group, one of whom I immediately cast as Sylvie’s lover.

The four were in a hurry to get ashore. If they had a mainsail cover they didn’t put it on, and they forgot to tighten the halyards, let alone tie them off to the shrouds. As they pulled the dinghy alongside and started to load it, Sylvie stood in the cockpit, hands on hips, and I had the idea she was arguing with one of the men, a tall figure with bushy fair hair. The second man, a wiry figure with dark shoulder-length hair, got into the dinghy and took the bags handed down by the other woman.

I reached into the companionway for the binoculars. By the time I had focused on Sylvie, she had moved to the side deck. If she wasn’t arguing with the fair-haired man then she was putting her message over pretty forcefully, weaving expansive gestures in the air, and I almost laughed to watch her, her body was so expressive. The fair-haired man seemed to make a point of turning his back on her before climbing down into the dinghy. Finally, after another exchange of words, Sylvie chucked a dismissive hand in the air and, with apparent bad grace, joined her companions in the dinghy.

Up until that moment I might still have held back, I might have persuaded myself to keep my distance, but as the fair-haired man rowed the dinghy towards the quay Sylvie twisted in her seat and, in a pose that would have looked utterly affected if it hadn’t been so typical of her, thrust a hand into the water and, turning her head as if to watch the ripples, let her cheek fall against her shoulder.

Quite suddenly I felt sure she was looking at me. It was as though she had known from the beginning that I was there and had expressly engineered this scene for our benefit.

I lifted my hand and waved to her, and though I couldn’t be absolutely sure it seemed to me that she returned my smile before turning back to her companions. This small inconsequential smile rapidly took on a mammoth significance in my mind. My pulse quickened, I felt a foolish excitement. It was then that I knew I must see her again.

By the time I reached the quay she and her friends had disappeared. I hurried back to the house and, sitting at Pa’s desk, spent half an hour composing a note. I would love to see her again, I wrote; our meeting on the boat had been all too brief, I would be down the next weekend, would she be interested in going for a sail . . .

In my new mood of calculation I realised it would be better to meet on the boat where there was no danger of David or Mary walking in on us, where the exigencies of finding crew members often threw the unlikeliest of people together. Even then I recognised that any relationship I might have with Sylvie, however innocent, would need to be discreet. Sylvie carried her sexuality too blatantly for anyone to believe she was capable of anything so casual as friendship. Even at fifteen, her style, her indifference to opinion, had attracted misunderstanding and gossip.

I found an envelope and, sealing the note, drove into town and posted it through the pottery shop’s door before heading back to London.

The week brought a succession of crisis meetings. Galvanised by inflammatory talk of imminent financial disaster from Howard the board voted to rush the takeover proposal straight to the shareholders, which was little more than a formality when half the shareholders sat on the board, and the rest were married or related to them.

Facing almost certain defeat, I functioned in a schizophrenic state of acceptance and despair. I threw myself at problems, as if by sheer force of effort I might find some miraculous solution to HartWell’s difficulties. I rarely got home before ten and then it was only to work until late in the night. Conversations with Ginny seemed to be confined to the subjects of meals, transport and laundry.

I tried not to think about the weekend, yet the idea of seeing Sylvie glittered quietly in the back of my mind like a distant beacon across a dark sea.

By Friday what I had discounted as unshakeable tiredness had turned into the first flutterings of fever. That didn’t stop me from driving down to Dittisham, of course. I told Ginny I needed to work away from the telephone.

There was no message from Sylvie at the house, no answering note on the mat.

I had a bad night, sweating heavily and periodically kicking the covers off, only to wake cold and shivering a short time later. I came to at nine the next morning, my mouth parched and my forehead burning. I found some aspirin in a medicine cabinet and took a couple. Then I dragged a duvet and pillow down to Pa’s study, and, pulling the sofa in front of the open windows, lay propped up against the arm so that I could see down the length of the garden to the river. Armed with a jug of water and a book, I dozed sporadically.

I woke to see a figure standing in the window. It was Sylvie.

You’re ill, she said with a small sniff.

You don’t sound very sympathetic, I smiled.

No, I’m not, she declared, because it means we won’t be able to go sailing and the weather’s perfect.

You would have come? It was the foolish question of an anxious lover.

She gave that laughing shrug of hers. Yes, why not?

I offered: I might be well enough by tomorrow.

But that prospect didn’t seem to interest her.

I couldn’t stop looking at her. I had forgotten the way her hair clouded out from her head and fell softly to her shoulders. I had forgotten the fullness of her lips and the way she pushed them forward whenever she finished speaking, so that every statement, however mundane, seemed to contain an invitation.

Next weekend, I said. Let’s make it next weekend.

She lit a cigarette and sniffed again. Leaning back against the window frame, she gave me a sideways look, her almond eyes slanted like a cat’s. Can we go to France? she said.