Penny Jordan - Mistaken Adversary

It was only when she was finally sliding gratefully into an exhausted sleep that she remembered that she hadn’t told her aunt about Mitch Fletcher. Tomorrow, she would tell her tomorrow. No, it would be today now, she recognised in a confused manner, impatiently blaming Mitch Fletcher for the fact that, infuriatingly, although she was both mentally and physically exhausted, as soon as he had slipped into her thoughts all desire to sleep had somehow evaded her.

* * *

As she was discovering more and more often these days, her sleep was brief and not very relaxing, and her first thoughts when she opened her eyes were, as always, for her aunt. Perhaps her inability to sleep properly lately was a legacy of those weeks when her aunt had herself been unable to sleep and when she, Georgia, had—ignoring the protests—sat up with her, talking to her and trying to help her to overcome the intensity of her pain. Now her aunt was receiving the benefit of the hospice’s care and experience in helping people to control and live with such pain, but Georgia herself could not get back into the habit of sleeping deeply and well.

Long before seven o’clock she was up and had eaten her breakfast—or rather had attempted to eat her breakfast, pushing away her cereal barely touched. Now, as she wandered through the garden, ignoring the discomfort of the early-morning dew soaking into her trainers, she paused to study the buds on one of the rose bushes she and her aunt had ordered the previous autumn. These were special roses, old varieties which they were growing for their scent rather than for the perfection of their blooms. As she looked at them, carefully examining them for any signs of greenfly, her throat ached with the pressure of the tears she dared not allow herself to cry.

When she returned to the kitchen for a pair of scissors and a basket and carefully cut a half-dozen or so buds, it was an impulse decision, and one which made her hands shake with emotion when she carefully placed the buds into the basket. Why was she picking them when surely her aunt would soon be able to come home and see them for herself? What was her subconscious mind trying to tell her? For a moment she was almost tempted to destroy the buds, to trample them into the ground, so that she could forget that strong current of awareness that had compelled her to cut them; as though some deep part of her was already acknowledging that her aunt would never see them blooming in their natural setting. A sharp, agonising dart of pain shivered through her. No...that wasn’t true! As she tensed her whole body, bracing it to reject the strong current of her own thoughts, she saw someone walking across the grass towards her.

It took her several seconds to recognise Mitch Fletcher, and then several more to pull herself together sufficiently to wonder what he was doing. She hadn’t been expecting to see him until this evening.

He, like her, was wearing a pair of trainers, hence his unheralded approach. He was also wearing a dark-coloured tracksuit, and he explained briefly, ‘I run this way most mornings, and when I saw you were in the garden I thought I’d stop to ask you if you minded if I brought my stuff round this afternoon instead of this evening? The hotel need my bedroom and they’d like me to check out before lunch...’

As she mentally calculated the distance from the town’s one decent hotel to the cottage, Georgia reflected that it was no wonder he looked so tautly muscled and fit if he ran that kind of distance most mornings.

A lot of people used the footpath that went past the cottage to the farm, both for walking and running, and she had become so used to them going past that she scarcely noticed them now, hence the reason she had not spotted him before. His abrupt intrusion into her sombre and painfully reflective mood left her feeling jarred and on edge, exposed somehow, and anxious for him to go, and yet somehow still too saddened by what she had been thinking to make a snappy quick response to his question.

There was no reason why he shouldn’t move in during the afternoon: she would be at home after all, working, and yet she wanted to say no to him. Did she want him lodging with her? She had no option now, and it would be stupid to allow her own emotions to cut her off from such a valuable source of much-needed income. She had kept from her aunt her worries about their financial resources, wanting the older woman to concentrate all her mental energy on fighting her cancer, not worrying about her niece.

‘Old-fashioned shrub roses. My grandmother used to grow them.’ The bleak, almost hard comment broke through her guard. She focused on Mitchell Fletcher as he leaned forward to examine the nearest bush.

Something in his voice made her question, ‘You didn’t get on with her?’

The look he gave her was sharp and prolonged. ‘On the contrary,’ he told her, ‘she was the one source of stability during my childhood. Her home, her garden were always somewhere I could escape to when things at home got out of hand. She was my father’s mother, and yet she never took his side. I think in many ways she blamed herself for his promiscuity, his lack of loyalty. She had brought him up alone, you see: her husband, my grandfather, had been killed in action during the war. She found great solace in her garden, both for the loss of her husband, and for the faults of her son. She died when I was fourteen...’

Unwillingly, Georgia felt her emotions responding to all that he had not said, to the pain she could tell was cloaked by the flat hardness of his voice. ‘You must have missed her dreadfully.’

There was a long pause, so long that she thought he must not have heard her, and then he said even more flatly, ‘Yes, indeed. So much so that I destroyed her entire rose garden... A stupid, pointless act of vandalism which incurred my father’s wrath because by doing so I had seriously brought down the value of the house, which was by then up for sale, and caused another row between my parents.

‘My father was in mid-affair at the time—never a good point at which to annoy him. We could chart the progress of his affairs by his moods, my mother and I. When a new one started, there was a general air of bonhomie and cheerfulness about him. As the chase hotted up and the affair began to develop, he would become euphoric—almost ecstatically so when the affair eventually became a physical reality. After that would follow a period when he was like someone high on drugs, and woe betide anyone who in any way, however inadvertently, came between him and his need to concentrate exclusively on the object of his desire. Later, in the cooling-off period, he would be more approachable, less obsessed. That was always a good time to get his attention.’

Georgia listened in silent horror, wanting to reject the unpleasantness of the words being delivered in that flat, emotionless voice, knowing how much pain, how much anguish they must cover, unwillingly finding herself in sympathy with him.

Abruptly he shrugged, a brief flexing of his shoulders as though he was actually throwing off some burden, his voice lighter and far more cynical as he added, ‘Of course, as an adult, one realises that no one partner alone is responsible for all the ills in a marriage. I dare say my mother played her part in the destruction of their relationship, even though as a child I was not aware of it. Certainly what I do know is that my father should never really have married. He was the kind of man who could never wholly commit himself to one single woman...’

He leaned forward and looked into her basket. ‘Roses... A gift for your lover?’ His smile was very cynical. ‘Haven’t you got it the wrong way round? Shouldn’t he be the one giving you roses, strewing them dew-fresh across your pillow in the best of romantic traditions? But then of course I was forgetting he can never be here for you in the morning, can he? He has to return to the matrimonial pillow. I’m not surprised you want to keep this place. It’s ideal as a lovers’ retreat: tucked away here, cut off from the rest of the world, a secret, secluded, private paradise. Do you ever ask yourself about her—about his other life, his wife? Yes, of course you do, don’t you? You couldn’t not do. Do you pray for him to be free, or do you pretend that you’re content with things as they are, gratefully taking the small part of his time that is all he can give you, believing that one day it will be different—that one day he will be free?’