Anne Mather - The Longest Pleasure

Her first encounter with Rafe took place in the gazebo. After spending a rather lonely winter couped up in the house, she had been granted permission by her grandmother to play in the gardens. Wrapped up warmly against the cool April air, she had been walking her dolls in the rose garden when she had espied the domed, ornamental roof of the summer-house. Set beyond a hedge of cypresses, it had looked exactly like an enchanted castle to the infant Helen, and it had been something of an anti-climax to find it was already occupied. A boy of perhaps ten or eleven was sprawled on the floor of the gazebo, reading, and Helen had regarded him without liking and with a definite air of superiority.

‘Who are you?’

The boy started, evidently unused to being disturbed, but with the advantage of hindsight, Helen realised he had not immediately jumped to the offensive. ‘Rafe Fleming,’ he answered. ‘Who’re you?’

‘I’m Helen Michaels. Lady Elizabeth Sinclair’s granddaughter!’ Helen remembered the words now with a grimace of distaste. ‘This is my house, and my garden. And I want you to go.’

‘Do you?’ Rafe had made no attempt to obey her childish instructions, rolling on to his back and supporting himself on his elbows, regarding her with what she now knew had been a mixture of humour and insolence. ‘Well, well! And are you going to make me?’

He had been good-looking even in those days, Helen reflected. Tall for his age, with lean features and ash-fair hair, and thin wrists jutting from the sleeves of his jerkin. But she had not realised it then. At that moment, she had wanted nothing so much as for her grandmother to appear and order him out of the summer-house. Little as she was, she knew she had no chance of displacing him herself, and the longer he lay regarding her with narrowed mocking eyes, the more frustrated she became.

‘You’re not s’posed to be here,’ she insisted, standing her ground, but Rafe was not impressed.

‘Get lost,’ he retorted, turning back to the magazine he had been reading, and it was all Helen could do not to stamp her foot in fury.

Of course, she had been obliged to leave him then, with tears welling up in her eyes and threatening to disgrace her. But she had gone straight to her grandmother and reported the matter to her, secure in the knowledge that Nan would sort it out.

However, her grandmother had proved to have a blind spot where Rafe Fleming was concerned. ‘I expect you startled him,’ she assured her indignant granddaughter, after drying Helen’s tears and consoling her with a stick of aniseed. ‘After all, Rafe has lived at Castle Howarth most of his life, and I suppose he feels he has a privileged position. His father works for me, you see, darling, and until you came, there were no other children on the estate.’

Helen didn’t see how that gave him the right to order her about, but her grandmother would not be pressed, and in the weeks and months that followed, her resentment grew. He always seemed to be around when she didn’t want him, teasing her and mocking her, and making fun of her, particularly when she attempted to put him in his place. That first encounter had set the seal on their relationship, and nothing she could say or do could change the situation. Which was a pity because she liked Mr Fleming, her grandmother’s estate manager, and Rafe’s adopted father.

She had learned Rafe was adopted quite by accident one afternoon, when she came upon her grandmother talking to him by the lily pond. Lady Elizabeth was asking how he was getting on at school, and Rafe was admitting, not without some aggression, that he wasn’t interested in education.

‘Why not?’ Lady Elizabeth wanted to know, and Helen, crouched behind the rhododendrons, listened with some amazement to his reply.

‘Why should I be?’ he had countered indifferently, plucking the head off one of the blooms hanging above his head, and shredding its delicate petals. ‘You don’t need any brains to plough a field or muck out the cowshed! What do I want with learning? I can pick up all I need to know right here.’

Helen had been shocked that he should dare to speak to her grandmother so insolently. She had waited in anticipation for Lady Elizabeth to tell him to apologise, maybe even to box his ears—an expression Paget was prone to use, when referring to a more corporal form of punishment—but her grandmother did neither. Instead, she had laid a hand on Rafe’s shoulder, and said quietly:

‘You’re going to Kingsmead, and there’s an end of it. The Flemings may have adopted you, but you are not going to waste the brain God has given you. I’ve spoken to Tom. Term starts in September. Be ready.’

After that, Helen had some peace, in term time at least. Kingsmead, she learned, was the local boys’ public school, and although Rafe did not board, he was too busy with homework and school activities to spend much time baiting her. For her part, she attended a kindergarten in the nearby town of Yelversley, and then, when she was old enough, she was sent to a girls’ school in Kent.’

‘Why do I have to board?’ she had objected, when she first learned of her grandmother’s plans. ‘Rafe Fleming doesn’t. Why can’t I go to Ladymead?’

‘Because you are my granddaughter, and your mother went to St Agnes,’ replied Lady Elizabeth firmly. ‘Now, run along and take Hector for a walk, there’s a good girl. He’s getting fat and lazy, and I don’t have the energy to take him out as often as I should.’

Hector was her grandmother’s pekinese, a fluffy scrap of orange-coloured fur, who could still terrorise the postman when he chose. Curiously enough, the dog had never gone for Rafe’s ankles, even though he had called Hector a lot of unsavoury names. He preferred real dogs, he once told her, when she had run across him exercising his father’s golden retriever at the same time she was taking Hector for a walk. Not poor imitations, he had added, laughing at her flushed resentful face, and Helen had wished she had a Dobermann, with all the instincts of a killer.

Then, three years ago, Rafe had gone to university in Warwick. To begin with, Helen had not noticed much difference. He was still home for the holidays when she was—at Christmas and Easter, at least—and although at Christmas they didn’t have much contact, she had been aware of him watching her with a distinctly jaundiced eye, when she helped her grandmother distribute the gifts at the party Lady Elizabeth gave for the estate workers. Helen knew he would not have been there at all had her grandmother not asked him to help with the tree. But she had, and afterwards he had been obliged to stay, unable to make his escape without offending the old lady.

The Easter following, he was home again, but this time he was not alone. He had brought another young man with him; one of his friends from college, her grandmother informed her, after granting the boys permission to use the tennis court. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Helen?’ she ventured, as an afterthought. ‘I’m sure they’d give you a game, too, if you asked them.’

Helen would have cut off her right arm before asking Rafe Fleming for anything, but her grandmother was not to know that. So far as the old lady was concerned, their initial antagonism towards one another had long since been forgotten, and Helen knew she would have been most disturbed if she had suspected the hatred her granddaughter still felt towards the young man she obviously favoured. Though why her grandmother should favour Rafe, when he treated her so offhandedly, Helen couldn’t imagine. She could only assume it was her friendship with Tom Fleming that gave his adopted son such licence.

When she arrived home for the summer holidays, however, Helen discovered Rafe was not there. He had taken a job in France for three months, her grandmother told her, a faint trace of disapproval in her voice, and Helen guessed the old lady was disappointed because he had not chosen to work for her.