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‘Oooh!’ Janet pulled a gleeful face. ‘If I wasn’t a happily married woman I’d wish I’d thought of that myself.’ She gave a hoot of laughter, and Pattie knew it was useless insisting that she had only been pursuing Duncan for an interview.

She would have stayed on at the lodge if he had given her the chance, but he hadn’t. She wasn’t even sure if she was going to see him again, so there was really nothing at all between them, and she couldn’t stay in this house where people were going to talk about him, and ask questions about him. She said, ‘I have to get to London. Have you any idea when I could catch a train?’

‘You don’t want to wait a bit?’ Janet sounded disappointed. ‘You’re more than welcome to a bed.’

‘That’s very kind of you, but I must go.’ There was nothing to wait for. Duncan wouldn’t be coming. Pattie would be asking to be hurt if she ever started waiting for Duncan. She said, ‘I must look terrible, I’ll just put on some make-up,’ waved her make-up bag and went into the bathroom.

When she saw her bedraggled reflection she could understand why Janet hadn’t contradicted her about looking terrible. I’ll bet the nice little fair-haired girl was a knock-out, she thought; and she washed her face and began to smooth on moisturiser. She was fairly satisfied with her appearance when she had finished. There was colour in her cheeks and lips, and her eyes looked brighter with dark sweeping lashes and highlight on the browbone. She would fasten her hair back with a scarf, there were a couple in her case, and altogether she was almost the old Pattie.

But not entirely. Getting snowed in at the lodge with Duncan had made changes in her, altered her attitude to a number of things. She hated leaving him because it had been good between them. It couldn’t have meant so much to him or he wouldn’t have been so willing to say goodbye, but it was a new experience for Pattie. She had never, as a woman, been so relaxed or uninhibited, and she was grateful for that. Even if they didn’t meet again for years she would always think of him with affection.

They told her she was lucky the trains were running once more, and she was certainly lucky that Janet was willing to drive her to Darlington, although all the way Janet would keep chattering about Duncan. He had been a good friend of Barney’s ever since he first came looking at the lodge and decided to rebuild it. ‘Of course nobody had heard of him much then,’ Janet declared, driving carefully over the still treacherous roads. But now he was famous and his neighbours were proud of him.

She talked about how he and Barney were mates, about visitors to the lodge, and Pattie longed to ask more about the girls who came. Like who were the special ones? But it was none of her business. It was Duncan’s life. She was on her way to pick up the threads of her own life and her involvement with Duncan Keld was probably at an end.

When her train arrived in London it was dark. The heating in the carriages had been erratic and she had regretted leaving Duncan’s coat behind at the farm and wearing her own, because her own had been damp. It was still damp. When she stepped out on to the platform everything seemed damp and cold and miserable.

She stood, with her case at her feet, looking up and down as though somebody might be there to meet her, which was stupid when nobody was expecting her.

She took a taxi and climbed the stairs to her flat, passing shut doors. Her phone was ringing and she fumbled with the key, hurrying, and ran in leaving her case in the passage outside. Then she stopped and turned and came back for her case and let the phone ring itself out. She wasn’t up to talking and explaining yet. She needed a cup of tea, she wanted to get the heating going. She didn’t admit, even to herself, that because it wouldn’t be Duncan on the phone she didn’t want to answer it.

It rang again in about ten minutes. By then she had her tea, and she had turned the electric fire on high so the room was warming. She was sitting by the fire and she got up reluctantly and went to the phone.

‘Pattie?’ said a woman’s voice. ‘This is Clare Rene.’

Clare had taken Pattie’s job on the gossip column. Pattie hardly knew her, and it was surely no coincidence that she was ringing now. ‘We’ve just had a call from our man in Yorkshire,’ Clare explained. The reporter Pattie, had met at the Bruntons’ farm had been making a little lineage money. ‘He said you’ve been holed up in Duncan Keld’s hunting lodge for the last five nights.’

‘Four days,’ said Pattie, and Clare laughed, ‘It’s always more fun to count the nights. When are you seeing him again?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Pattie wearily. ‘And don’t turn this into a big production, because it isn’t.’

‘You honestly did go up there just to interview him and you both got snowed in?’

‘Yes.’

She could imagine Clare’s incredulous expression when she said, ‘Really? Well, I know there was a time he was threatening to black your eye like poor old Willie’s, but I thought things must have changed for the better between you since then.’ She meant she’d presumed that Pattie Ross and Duncan Keld were having a discreet affair, and Pattie said slowly and clearly,

‘I never saw him again after that barney in the pub until the other day at the lodge.’

‘So there’s no romance at all?’

Pattie wanted to put the phone down, but if she did that would be interpreted as no comment because there was something to hide, so she said crisply, ‘Never set eyes on the man in the last twelve months, I told you.’

‘So you did,’ said Clare. ‘All right, I believe it. You didn’t go up there together. But you were together, and there was nobody else, and he’s a virile sort of chap and you’re a good-looking girl, so what did you do to pass the time?’

‘He’d gone there to write,’ said Pattie, ‘and he did. I cooked a few meals and did some writing myself. We weren’t up there for a month, you know. Oh, and the chimney caught fire.’

She heard Clare laugh. ‘Only the chimney?’

‘ ’Fraid so,’ said Pattie.

‘Sounds as though you missed your chance, sweetie,’ said Clare. ‘I wish I’d been in your shoes. And,’ she added pointedly, ‘your bed.’

‘You’d have been welcome,’ said Pattie lightly. ‘I was glad to see the snowplough.’ In fact she hadn’t seen the snowplough, and when she’d heard the voices of her rescuers her heart had sunk like a stone.

‘Know what I think?’ said Clare. ‘I think you’re a very dark horse.’

But Pattie wasn’t being drawn. ‘I can’t imagine what gives you that idea,’ she said, and this time she did say goodbye and put down the phone.

She knew that call had set the pattern of other calls, so she took the phone off the hook and began to unpack her case, draping clothes around to air. Duncan’s two paperbacks were in the case, but she didn’t think she would read them just yet, although her holiday wasn’t over. She had more than a week left before she was due back at the office and she remembered her plan to redecorate. It would take more than a roll of wallpaper to turn this place into a home, she thought, and was astonished at herself because it
was
her home and she had always liked it well enough.

But tonight she was lonely in it. She was starting a streaming head cold to add to her miseries. There was a harshness at the back of her throat and her eyes, and she took aspirins and hot milk and went to bed, and she was lonely there too. She lay huddled in the darkness, wrapping her arms around herself, racked by a terrible feeling of loss.

She had a crush on Duncan Keld. This raw, aching yearning had never happened to her before, and it would pass because it would have to. But there were times when she thought the night itself would never pass, the luminous fingers of the clock were hovering around four before she finally fell asleep.

She woke to the ringing of her doorbell and sat up sneezing, in two minds whether to answer. The ringing stopped while she was groping for a dressing gown, but started again almost at once, and she went slowly to the door.

Michael looked as dapper as ever, carrying briefcase and umbrella and with a pained expression. He said testily, ‘Your phone’s been engaged a hell of a time.'

‘I took it off the hook last night,' she explained, and stepped aside to let him in. As he passed her he asked, ‘Have you seen the morning paper?'

‘No.'

He opened his briefcase and took out a newspaper, turned it to Willie's gossip page and spread it flat on the table. There was a photograph of Duncan and a smaller rather smudged one of her that Pattie remembered from a snapshot. She read, ‘Marooned by snowdrifts in a hunting lodge on the Yorkshire moors for the last five days, Duncan Keld, TV personality and best-seller writer, and glamorous reporter Pattie Ross. Pattie it seems went along to interview Duncan for her monthly column and had to stay until the snowploughs got through. Asked how they passed the time all on their own she said, “Writing, and the chimney caught fire.'' Pattie is now back in town, but Duncan remains in the hunting lodge. Can't wait to hear his version of the fire.'

‘What on earth is that all about?' asked Michael, not unreasonably.

Pattie sneezed again. ‘I did go up there to get an interview.'

‘To the middle of the Yorkshire moors? In
this
weather? What made it so urgent?'

She saw through the window that it was trying to snow again. So much for the thaw. Duncan should be safe from interruptions this time, and she must stop remembering what it was like inside the lodge and feeling homesick for it She said, ‘It wasn’t snowing when I went.’

‘You never mentioned it to me. I was hoping you’d join me.’ Michael’s eyes were narrowed. ‘Mother,' he said, ‘thinks you were very indiscreet. She doesn’t like Duncan Keld’s books.’

Pattie felt her lips twitching. ‘‘If she'd mentioned that sooner I’d have told Roz I couldn’t possibly consider interviewing him.’

‘I think you were indiscreet,’ said Michael, as though that clinched it. ‘What did happen up there? That’s what folk are going to ask. These days they’ll all take the worst for granted and it’s going to make me a laughing-stock.’

Michael would hate anyone sniggering around him. He was very sensitive to ridicule, and she said cynically, ‘Then you’d better keep away from me until the fuss dies down. Give it about a month. Nobody’s going to remember it much longer than a month.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ he snapped. ‘Of course they will.’ He seemed more concerned about what people were going to think than with what actually happened and she almost told him, ‘There was one bed up there, and on three nights we shared it,’ but that would be as bad as slapping him across the face. She couldn’t hurt his pride like that, and she said, ‘I didn’t plan to stay. I was going to book myself in at the Plough in Grimslake.’

‘I know that.’ But he still sounded aggrieved. ‘And I know that nothing happened between you and Keld.’

‘You do?’

‘Of course I do. No man would get far with you in just a few days. You’ve got too much self-respect. You’re not one of the wild ones, you’re more on the frigid side.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ she said, and he hastened to explain, ‘It’s a compliment. My folks have always said you’re a lady.’

‘Even this morning?’

‘They thought you were indiscreet, that it was an odd thing to do, but they know there’s no question ’ Michael left it at that, frowning and shaking his head, then checking his watch, ‘I’m due in the office, I’ll see you later.’

As he went to kiss Pattie goodbye she sneezed and he backed away. ‘Sevenish?’ he asked. ‘I’ll call for you.’

It was the kind of day she had expected. Everybody who knew her seemed to have read the paragraph. As soon as she replaced the phone it started ringing, and although she explained that she had intended her visit to the lodge to be fleeting she doubted if any of them believed her. They were surprised all right, but most of them took Clare Rene’s attitude that Pattie Ross had been a very dark horse, managing to keep her affair with Duncan Keld such a secret.

Even at the office, where they knew she had been told to interview him, they couldn’t understand why she had taken off for the Yorkshire moors in such terrible weather, and without telling a soul. And what had gone on while she and Duncan were snowed in alone? Roz chuckled, ‘It ought to be a smashing article, although I don’t know how much of it we can print,’ and Pattie wondered how she could write it.

She was as sure as she could be that she had seen the last of Duncan for a long time, and she was pretty sure that before their paths crossed again she would be over the worst of her infatuation. The depression of her first night had lifted by next morning, so that when Michael left her she grimaced and shrugged and answered the continually ringing phone without getting too niggled by it.

She didn’t care much what the callers thought. She stuck to her story, that there had never been an affair and there wasn’t now, and that was true enough and she had no regrets.

She was still on holiday, and she got out and about. Usually with Michael in the evenings, although she knew that that relationship was near its end.

Even before she had gone up to the lodge it had been dawning on her that nothing in Michael reached down to the depths in her, and now she was grateful for the cold that had developed into sniffs and sneezes keeping him literally at arm’s length. He was something of a hypochondriac and these days the most he attempted was a peck on the cheek.

She woke each day with a feeling of anticipation, and wherever she went around London, eating out, wandering through shops, parks, city streets, she kept scanning faces. Not searching for anybody in particular of course, just looking.

A week after she returned from Yorkshire Willie phoned to tell her that Duncan was back in his London apartment. Willie had rung him, and been told that he had no plans for meeting Pattie, and Pattie confirmed that, ‘We’ve no plans—no, why should we have?’

But she had four days left of her holiday and she suddenly decided she would redecorate after all, and bought some Laura Ashley wallpaper and set about prettying up the living room in a Victorian pattern of small rosebuds. She ate at home too. She hardly went out at all, and the phone rang several times and every time her heart missed a beat, but it was never Duncan.