Liz Fielding - Wedded in a Whirlwind

‘How on earth do you know that?’ he demanded.

‘There’s a callus on your thumb. Here.’ She rubbed the tender tip of her own thumb against the ridge of hard skin. ‘This is the hand you use first. The one you reached out to me when I couldn’t make it across that last gap.’ She lifted it in both of hers and said, ‘This is the hand with which you held me safe.’

It was the hand with which he’d held her when she’d cried out to him to let her fall because she was not worth dying for. Because once, young, alone, in despair and on the point of a breakdown, she’d considered terminating a pregnancy?

Had she been punishing herself for that ever since?

‘You are worth it, Manda,’ he said, his voice catching in his throat. Then, ‘No, I hate that. You deserve better than some childish pet name. You are an amazing woman, Miranda. A survivor. And, whatever it is you want, you are worth it.’

‘Thank you…’ Her words were little more than a whisper and, in the darkness, he felt the brush of silky hair against his wrist, then soft lips, the touch of warm breath against his knuckles. A kiss. No, more than a kiss, a salute, and something that had lain undisturbed inside him for aeons contracted, or expanded, he couldn’t have said which. Only that her touch had moved him beyond words.

It was Miranda who shattered the moment, removing her hands from his, putting clear air between them. Shattered the silence, rescuing them both from a moment in which he might have said, done, anything.

‘Actually, I’m not the only one around here with an interesting nose,’ she said. Her voice was too bright, her attempt at a laugh forced. ‘Yours has been broken at some time. How did that happen?’ Then, archly, deliberately breaking the spell of that brief intimacy, ‘Or, more interestingly, who did it to you?’

‘You saw all that in the flare of a match?’ he asked.

‘You were looking at your temple. I was looking at the bad-tempered drunk I was unfortunate to have been trapped with.’

‘I was not drunk,’ He protested, belatedly grabbing for the lifeline she’d flung him. Stepping back from a brink far more dangerous than the dark opening that yawned a few feet away from them.

She shook her head, then, perhaps thinking that because he couldn’t see, he didn’t know what she’d done-and how had he known?-she said, ‘I know that now, but for a while back there you didn’t seem too sure.’

‘A crack on the head will do that to you.’

‘Concussion?’

‘I hope not. The treatment is rest and plenty of fluids.’

‘Thus speaks the voice of experience?’

‘Well, you know how it is.’

‘Er, no, actually, I don’t. I suspect it’s a boy thing.’ Then, presumably because there really wasn’t anything else to say about that, ‘And, actually, no, I didn’t see your nose. I felt it.’

‘Yes…’

That was it. How he’d known she’d shaken her head. He could feel the smallest movement that she made. Without sight, every little sound, every disturbance in the air was heightened beyond imagining and his brain was somehow able to translate them into a picture. Just as every tiny nuance in her voice was amplified so that he could not only hear what she was saying, he could also hear what she was not.

The air moved and he saw the quick shake of her head, the slide of glossy, sharply cut hair. He touched her face and saw a peaches and cream complexion. Kissed her and-

‘I felt it when I cleaned the dust from your face,’ she said, her rising inflexion replying to some uncertainty that she’d picked up in his voice. It was a two-way thing then, and he wondered what image came into her mind when he moved, spoke. When she touched him…

‘As noses go,’ He said, ‘I have to admit that it’s hard to miss.’

‘Oh, it’s not that bad. Just a little battered. How did it happen?’

She was back in control now, her voice level, with no little emotional yips to betray her. She’d clearly trained herself to disguise her feelings. How long had it taken, he wondered.

How long before it had become part of her?

How long had it taken him?

‘At school,’ He said. ‘It was at a rugby match. I charged down a ball that was on the point of leaving another boy’s boot.’

‘Ouch.’

‘I was feeling no pain, believe me,’ he said, remembering the moment, even so many years later, with complete satisfaction. ‘I’d stopped an almost certain last-minute drop goal that would have stolen the match. I don’t think I’d have noticed a broken leg, let alone a flattened nose. I was just mad that I had to go to A and E instead of going out with…’

He stopped, his pleasure at the memory tripping him over another, spilling his own emotional baggage.

‘Out with?’ she prompted, then, when he didn’t respond, ‘It was your father, wasn’t it? He’d come to see you play.’

‘Yes…’

How could that one small word have so many shades? he wondered. In the last few moments it had been a revelation, a question, reassurance and now an acknowledgement of a truth that he could barely admit. Because she was right. His father had been there. Even with an election looming, he’d taken time out of a packed schedule to be with him that day.

‘Yes,’ He repeated. ‘My father had come to see the match.’

‘Good photo op, was it?’ she asked dismissively. ‘Senior politician with his son, the blood-spattered hero of the sports field. I bet it looked terrific in the papers the next day.’

‘No!’ he responded angrily. That touch of derision in her voice had him leaping to his father’s defence. How dared she…?

‘No?’ she repeated, but this time the ironic inflection didn’t fool him.

‘There was no photograph,’ he said, his voice flat, giving her nothing.

‘No photograph? But surely you said that was all it ever was?’

She was pure butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth innocence, but he knew that it had been a deliberate trip-up. That she’d heard something in his voice-his own emotional yip-and had set out to prove something.

‘So-what?’ she persisted, refusing to let him off her clever little hook. ‘He turned up just to see his son play for his school like any other proud father? No agenda? No photo opportunity?’

She did that thing with her fingers-making quotation marks-and he grabbed at her hands to make her stop.

‘You are a witch, Miranda Grenville.’

‘I’ve been called worse,’ she replied, so softly that her voice wrapped itself around him.

‘I can believe it.’ Then, her hands still in his, he said, ‘It was my birthday that week. My eighteenth. Dad came down from London to watch the match before taking me out to dinner.’

‘You missed your birthday dinner?’

‘Actually, it was okay,’ he said. ‘We sat in A and E, eating sandwiches out of a machine, surrounded by the walking wounded, a couple of drunks, while we waited for someone to fix me up. Give me a shot.’

‘Waited? Are you telling me that as the son of a Government minister you didn’t get instant attention?’ she said, still mocking him, but gently now.

‘The doctors were busy with more serious stuff. It didn’t matter. We talked about what I was going to do on my gap year. About the election. It wasn’t often I got him to myself like that.’

‘So the evening wasn’t a total wash-out.’

‘Not a wash-out on any level,’ He admitted. It had been the last time they’d been together like that. His father had been given a high-powered cabinet job after the election. He’d gone to university.

Manda knelt back on her heels, her hands gripped with painful tightness as Nick, seemingly unaware of her, relived a precious evening spent with his father. Did he, she wondered, realise how lucky he was?