Penny Jordan - Breaking Away

Everything was so quiet. Unlike London where the traffic never seemed to stop. Louise had told her scornfully that the silence would drive her mad and that she’d be back in London within six months, but she knew she wouldn’t.Already she found something indescribably soothing and peaceful about the vague, muted noises the house made as it settled down around her…already she was looking forward to her new life.

She frowned, fighting off sleep. She just wished she hadn’t met that man. His anger, his almost personal contempt of her, had struck a sour note she couldn’t hush. She felt stupidly as though she were in some way responsible for causing that contempt, as though he had looked at her, had found her lacking as a woman, and for that reason had shown his contempt of her. Which was all quite ridiculous when he had made it quite plain that he disliked women in general.

She was still trying to puzzle out why she should go on thinking about him when she fell asleep.

She woke up abruptly, confused by unfamiliar sounds and by the vividness of her dreams, her face slightly pink as she tussled with the extraordinariness of her sleeping thoughts.

She had been walking alongside a river, engrossed in watching its flow, her ears and eyes attuned to its sounds and sights, and then suddenly without warning as she turned a corner she saw a man coming towards her. He was dressed casually in jeans and a cotton shirt, and as he came towards her and she saw the way he was looking at her, she realised in horrified shock that she was completely naked.

Every instinct clamoured to her to conceal herself from him, but it was already too late, and above the now urgent sound of the river she heard him saying mockingly, ‘Now it’s your turn…See how you like it…’

She shivered as she sat up in bed, trying to dismiss the symbolism of the dream. Outside it was raining, and heavily, raindrops spattering against her windows; the cause of the ‘river’ she had heard in her dream, perhaps?

Angry with herself for allowing an incident which she ought by now to have dismissed completely from her mind to occupy so much of her attention, she swung her legs out of bed, and decided that it was time she got up.

The relocation company had provided a certain amount of food, but there were things she would need, a certain amount of stocking up to do, which meant driving to the nearest market town.

Breakfast first and then she would make plans later, she decided, finding and filling the coffee filter and switching on the machine.

Two mugs of fragrant coffee and a piece of toast later, she decided that she might as well brave the wet weather and investigate a little of her immediate surroundings. From the field at the bottom of her wilderness of a garden, ran a footpath that went from the village right through up into the hills. Harriet didn’t want to walk quite that far, but she decided that a breath of fresh air would help to settle her breakfast and her thoughts.

Pulling on her red boots, and adding a bright yellow shiny oilcloth jacket with a hood, she stepped outside.

Underfoot the ground was squelchy and muddy, and she was glad she had had the forethought to buy the boots. Her garden gate swung creakily as she opened it.

She walked through, across the lane and on to the footpath in the field beyond it.

HARRIET walked for almost half an hour without seeing or hearing anyone, in sheer bliss after London’s frenetic streets and busy, uncaring crowds. She had learned a long time ago that it was possible to be far more lonely in the midst of a great press of humanity than it was in solitude, but she knew that Louise could never have understood her feelings.

She wished her sister well in her new life, and felt that this time she had found in her American husband a man who would give her order and direction.

Wrapped up in her bright yellow oilskin and her waterproof boots, Harriet was not bothered by the heavy rain and cool wind, and, walking past her overgrown garden, she smiled a little ruefully, remembering how in London she had dreamily planned to spend those hours when she wasn’t writing in turning her small private wilderness into the kind of secret, romantic garden she had always dreamed of having.

Here, deep in this wet glade, it was impossible to look up clearly at the sky, but she suspected that the rain had set in for the day, which meant that, instead of wilfully wasting time walking, she ought to be at her typewriter. For the first of the four commissioned books her publishers had given her a deadline which should not prove too arduous to meet, but that did not mean that she could necessarily spend her time walking around dreamily in the rain, she told herself severely, deciding regretfully that it was time she returned to the cottage. She would have a certain amount of decorating to do over the next twelve months if she was to turn the cottage into the home she had envisaged, but decorating was a task she had set aside for the winter months.

Gardening…decorating…solitude…she was fast turning into the archetypal ‘old maid’ Louise had so often accused her of being. She would be thirty-five years old in three months’ time. Not old precisely, but not young either, and age was after all a state of mind, and while a man of thirty-five and even of forty might be considered to be in his prime, for a woman—even in these liberated days…She stopped walking, and found that somehow or other, without her knowing how it had happened, a mental image of a tall, dark, and very damp man had slipped into her head and refused to leave it. A very male man…a very angry man…a man who had plainly not seen her as a desirable woman at all, but rather as an object of irritation and contempt.

Would it really have hurt her to give him a lift? A neighbourly act of charity and kindness? Had the years of living in London, celibate, alone in so many ways, and with so many responsibilities, turned her into the kind of timid, over-imaginative single woman who thought that every man she met represented some kind of danger?

She didn’t like the picture her thoughts were drawing, and dismissed it as irrational. Of course she had been quite right to refuse his request. The police via the media were constantly warning women about the dangers inherent in exactly the kind of situation she had found herself in last night. No, she had nothing to reproach herself with, and yet—Her reverie was abruptly shattered as a large and very muddy chocolate-brown Labrador suddenly came crashing through the undergrowth towards her, hotly pursued by a small, slim red-haired girl, bare-headed despite the rain, and dressed in enviably well-worn and well-used dark green jacket, faded jeans and dark green wellingtons.

‘Come here at once, Ben,’ she shouted to the dog, her eyes rounding in surprise as she saw Harriet.

‘Oh! I didn’t know anyone else was here—I thought that Ben had got the scent of a rabbit. He never catches them, thank goodness, but I’m in enough trouble already, without having to spend half the morning chasing him all over the countryside. Oh, no, Ben…down, you bad dog!’

It was too late. Ben, evidently a gregarious animal, had flung himself enthusiastically at Harriet, almost knocking her over in the process, and was now proceeding to lick her, despite the girl’s attempts to call him to heel.

Harriet didn’t mind. She loved dogs and always had done. In London it had been impossible to keep one, but perhaps here…

‘Oh, dear, I am sorry,’ the girl apologised, rushing up to Harriet to rescue her from her pet.

She had wide-set hazel eyes, a retroussé nose, and the kind of warm smile that illuminated her whole face. She looked about sixteen or seventeen, and Harriet guessed probably had the kind of quick, almost intuitive intelligence that matched her manner. Altogether something of an enchantress, who would probably drive the male sex mad once she was old enough to recognise her own power, Harriet reflected, gently pushing the dog down and holding on to his collar for her.