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‘She said that Jennifer went overboard for him. She cleared off, night after night. It petered out when he went back up north, he’s got a house in Yorkshire, she said, but it was the real thing—I mean it was a real affair.’

Duncan Keld was well known, his books and his photograph got big displays, he appeared on TV and his articles were printed in the heavier newspapers. But he was enough of a rogue figure to make the idea of him and Jennifer Stanley intriguing. Willie liked it. He set about checking, Duncan Keld was abroad, nobody knew exactly where, but all Willie had to do was mention his name and the date to Jennifer and she croaked, ‘Oh, my God, no!’ and began to threaten what would happen if they linked her name with his in any way. No, she said—no, he was not invited to the wedding, but well yes, all right, she had met him. Yes, she supposed they had in a way been friends.

So Willie ran a paragraph: ‘Missing from the guest list at next week’s society wedding of 28-year-old Nigel Poynton to stunning blonde beauty Jennifer Stanley is best-seller writer Duncan Keld. Strange that, as not so long ago the lovely Jennifer and Keld were very good friends. Maybe Nigel vetted the list.’

The next thing was that the wedding was off, presents were being returned and it was announced that both Nigel and Jennifer had had last-minute second thoughts. A week later Willie’s car hit a tree. At least that was his story when he arrived at the office with a black eye and a puffy countenance and he stuck to it, but all his colleagues knew that Duncan Keld had been looking for him and there wasn’t a scratch on the car. And a few days after that, when Pattie was eating her lunch in a pub round the corner from the office with several workmates, the man sitting next to her whistled, ‘Stewth, it’s Keld!’ and she turned to see this huge dark figure bearing down on them.

He was a big man and as he came through the chattering crowds he seemed to Pattie as menacing as though he carried a gun. He made straight for her and stood looking down at her and said, ‘Pattie Ross?’ and she nodded soundlessly. Nobody else said a word. Everybody who knew him and her waited to see what was going to happen next, and then he said, ‘I wanted to get a good look at you,’ and he smiled. Pattie was scared to death—then he said almost gently, ‘Thank your lucky stars you’re a woman or I’d have blacked your eyes too.’

He
knew she was the one who had come up with the story, but what he didn’t know, of course, was that she wished she hadn’t. It must have caused so much unhappiness and it made her realise that she hadn’t the stomach for this kind of journalism.

She never regretted changing jobs. Roz was as astute as Willie and kinder. Now Roz looked up from the picture of Jennifer Stanley and her new fiancé and said, ‘Quite a coincidence, because I’ve been thinking about him.’

The new fiancé? Pattie looked puzzled and Roz said, ‘Duncan Keld. He’s got a TV series in the summer. He’d make a good Man of the Month.’

Pattie gulped, ‘You mean you want me to interview him?’

‘Why not? I know he had it in for you over this business, but he’s probably forgotten all about it by now and he’s got all the qualifications we need. Our readers would love a date with him.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Pattie.

‘Why not?’

Pattie had no choice, she took the assignments she was given, but Roz was listening and she was hard put to explain how threatened she had felt when he came across that room looking for her. She shook her head. ‘I don’t like him. I don’t like rough tough men.’

‘You don’t know what you’re missing,’ Roz grinned, and Pattie said,

‘He might not want to talk to me.’

If he did she thought it would be a difficult session. She couldn’t imagine him co-operating as the others had done, anxious to make a good impression and get a good write-up. Roz was telling her, ‘Look on him as a challenge. A touch of antagonism wouldn’t hurt. Go for one who can be mean and moody for a change.’

‘You’ve just thought of this, haven’t you?’ said Pattie, and Roz admitted gleefully,

‘Yes—and I wonder I didn’t think of him before. Rough, tough, successful and sexy is a lovely combination.’

Pattie gave a deep sigh. ‘Well, I’m certainly glad I’m on holiday. I shall need at least a week in a good hotel to get my strength up if I’m due to start tracking Duncan Keld as soon as I get back.’

She was making the best of it and trying to joke, but she hated the idea. He couldn’t have forgotten what she had done. Even if he was no longer angry he would still in all probability tell her to get lost, and then she would have to admit to Roz that this was an interview she couldn’t deliver. That would make Roz even keener so that she might send someone else along, or go herself, and it would be a mark of failure against Pattie.

She was proud of her reputation for reliability. ‘You can depend on Pattie,’ her friends always said, and she was lucky that this was the first unpleasant assignment she had been given since she started here. It had all been smooth going, hard work but no hassles, and perhaps some of these Man of the Month articles had been a little cloying. Duncan Keld wasn’t Pattie’s idea of the man she would like to date, but Roz, who was happy and faithful in her marriage, had drooled over him. So, in the month the serialisation of his book started on TV, an article about him would appear, and with luck it would carry Pattie’s byline.

She went downstairs to the library to get out the envelope with his name on, as she always did before she interviewed celebrities. By the time she met them she aimed on knowing as much as possible about them, and hers wouldn’t be the first interview by a long way that had been written about Duncan Keld.

There were plenty of photographs too. She sat at one of the green-leather-topped tables, with the cuttings spread out before her, and he seemed to be looking back at her from every picture. He had dark eyes that photographed piercingly, but Pattie found her own eyes sliding away from the pictures and concentrating on the print.

There was the small gossip column paragraph linking his name with Jennifer Stanley dated this month last year, and she put that quickly back into the envelope. He got around. All over the world, going by this lot, mostly in the trouble spots. He had a flat in London and a hunting lodge on the Yorkshire moors. There was a photograph of him outside the lodge, hair ruffled by the wind, laughing. The black and white hills would have been purple and green
—
Pattie knew that place. She had never been to the lodge, of course, but she had had it pointed out to her across the hills during a motoring holiday in Yorkshire last summer, and it was such beautiful countryside.

‘Heathcliff with a Sense of Humour’ ran the headline to the article and Glenda, one of the girls in the library, giggled, passing the table and looking at the photograph, 'I wouldn’t kick him out of bed!’

‘Oh,
you!'
said Pattie, pretending to be shocked. Glenda was a pert and pretty teenager who tried hard to sound blasé and shocking, but although she smiled Pattie’s stomach muscles clenched in distaste. Her instinctive reaction to ‘Heathcliff with a Sense of Humour' had been ‘Yeuk!’

She made a list of his books and his TV plays, and took notes of tastes, opinions and background and his London address and phone number. Then she returned the envelope to its place on the shelves, and everybody wished her a nice holiday, and she went down to the car park and her little white Mini.

She bought two of Duncan Keld’s paperbacks on her way home. She never had read any of his books, but she had seen some of the TV adaptations and he could tell a story. The characters lived and the action raced, she would give him that, and if the weather stayed this cold she would be sitting by the hotel fire rather than wandering around the streets and lanes of the small town. She would need some reading matter.

She had missed the post this morning. Sometimes it arrived just before she left, often afterwards, and there was an airmail from her mother lying on the mat when she opened the door. She turned on a bar of the electric fire, and sat down in front of it to read her letter. Everything was all right. Her mother was leading the pleasant life that suited her, and described a few outings and a new silk suit she had bought the day before she wrote the letter. She sent her love, and the love of Pattie’s stepfather. ‘And give my love to Michael,' wrote Pattie’s mother, who had spoken to Michael on the phone and learned about him through Pattie’s letters. ‘And when are you going to get around to thinking about marrying him, because he sounds just perfect for you. So don’t let him get away.’

Her mother would like her married. She and her husband would fly over for the ceremony, although he was a busy doctor, and the ones who hadn’t met her before would be astonished when they saw Pattie’s mother. ‘She’s got to be your sister,’ they’d say. She did look young, but she didn’t look like Pattie. Michael was the one who looked like Pattie, and one day soon they were going to think about getting married. They had discussed it. He hadn’t proposed exactly, but they talked about a future together, and he had dropped hints about Pattie having an engagement ring for her birthday at the beginning of May'

It was the end of January now and if Michael did produce a ring she supposed she would accept it. She packed her mother’s letter, not to show Michael but to answer during the next few days, and then the clothes she would need for her little holiday. Packing didn’t take long. Her clothes were always bandbox fresh, and she rang the paper shop to cancel her paper, and switched off switches, then got out of London on to the M40 heading for Gloucestershire.

At this time of year she was sure she would be able to book into the hotel where Michael was staying. He might have booked for her anyway, he’d thought there was a chance she~ might come. She would be arriving several hours late but before dinner, so that should be all right, and she found the hotel without having to ask directions, in the main road opposite the church.

She didn’t know why she didn’t mention Michael’s name. She had meant to ask, ‘Has Mr Ames arrived?’ He should have done, unless he’d called on a client first, but instead she asked, ‘Have you a single room?’ and booked herself in, signing the register several lines beneath Michael’s neat sloping writing.

The single room was warm, impersonal but adequate, and Pattie unpacked and changed into a dress in soft blue jersey. She wore very small pearl ear-studs and a medallion on a long chain. The surround of white onyx was inset with gold filigree and Chinese symbols representing health and happiness. All her jewellery was genuine, and usually small and neat, but this medallion was her favourite. She would have traded all the rest in for this. It was the only piece that really mattered.

She would go down to the lounge fifteen minutes or so before dinner and see if Michael was there. He would be pleased to see her. If he was late she would try to get a table in the restaurant where she could watch the door, and she smiled and told herself what fun the surprise would be. That was why she hadn’t identified herself, because she wanted to surprise him. ‘Serve you right,’ Roz would have said, ‘if he’s brought another woman,’ but Pattie had no fear of that. She knew Michael and she trusted him as he trusted her.

She took extra care with her make-up, and dabbed on his favourite scent. It was her choice too. She always bought it, and he had recognised it and said how much he liked it. ‘But of course,’ she had smiled at him. ‘Isn’t that how it always happens? If I’d been choosing you a tie I’d have selected the one you’re wearing.’

I’m getting ready to meet my lover, she thought, breathing in the soft sweet perfume on the pulse point of her wrist, so why isn’t my heart racing? She frowned at her reflection in the mirror over the dressing table, as she had frowned this morning, with the same sensation of flatness. There wasn’t a thing wrong with her life. She loved her job, she loved Michael, but if she loved Michael why didn’t she feel excited about going down and surprising him and having dinner with him and being with him?

Perhaps it was the weather. She really hated the winter. Perhaps it was blunting her feelings, because usually she enjoyed being with Michael. And she needed her dinner. She would choose something absolutely delicious from the menu and she and Michael would have a feast.

He wasn’t in the lounge, which was full of armchairs covered in green cabbage-rose chintz, with a beamed ceiling and the big log fire she had been promised. The middle-aged men and women sitting around looked as though they were mainly here on winter bargain breaks, and Pattie got several admiring and enquiring glances as an elegant girl alone.

After one man with a very red face and a prodigious waistline tried to chat her up she took out Duncan Keld’s book and started to read. She looked less aimless that way, and from the first paragraph she was hooked. He was very, very good, and when she looked up again a waiter was hovering with a menu and she realised the time was passing, and the lounge was almost empty.

She ordered and took her seat. The dining room was about half full, but Michael wasn’t there, and that probably meant that he was eating somewhere else. She should have got in touch. She could at least have rung before he left and said she was following, although even while she was packing she had still been undecided. It would have taken hardly anything to make her change her mind again. And yet she wasn’t usually a ditherer.

She could see the door from where she sat, and she saw Michael come in with two other men when she was nearing the end of her meal. He didn’t see her, and when they reached their table he took a chair that meant he had his back to her, and he and his companions went on talking business.

She couldn’t hear them, they were at the other end of the room, but their gestures and expressions had all the signs of amiable discussion, and she looked at Michael’s shoulders and the back of his head and thought, he hasn’t a clue I’m here.

There was no reason why he should have, unless he’d looked in the register, and it was stupid to feel resentful because he didn’t know when she was near. If it had been the other way round and he had been waiting, and she had walked into a room, not looking for him and not expecting him, she wouldn’t have sensed his presence either. Worse than that, now that she did see him she had no urge to go over to him. And it wasn’t because they were talking business and she was reluctant to interrupt. It was because nothing was calling to her.