CATHY WILLIAMS - A Suitable Mistress

He wasn’t looking at her. He was busy doing something that involved chopping and opening of cans, but he expected a reply. She sensed rather than knew that.

‘Yes, he was a wonderful cook,’ she agreed, feeling that lump in her throat again. She fished inside her handbag and took out a block of chocolate, doing it surreptitiously. She wasn’t accustomed to talking about her father. She had bottled up her emotions inside her ever since his death and it was painful to voice her memories, even when the questions asked were so detached.

She lapsed into her memories and licked her fingers absent-mindedly after she had finished eating the chocolate. She was only aware that Dane was looking at her when she glanced up, her eyes dry, and she said defensively, ‘I’m going to go on a diet.’

He didn’t say anything, which annoyed her more than if he had. He just nodded to two of the cupboards, asked her to set the table, and then returned to what he was doing.

Suzanne got up, feeling instantly lumpy after that forbidden piece of chocolate, and began putting plates and cutlery down.

‘I know that I’ve put on a bit of weight,’ she said into what she thought was a critical silence. ‘It’s simply that I’ve got into the habit of snackıng recently.’ Well, for months, she said to herself. Eating all the wrong things and justifying it by telling herself that she would start a sensible diet tomorrow. She tried to neaten her hair with one hand and decided that it was an impossible task. Her hair never did what it was told.

‘There’s no need to justify yourself,’ he said, bringing food to the table. He deposited two saucepans, one of which contained spaghetti and the other a red sauce smelling of garlic. He had opened a bottle of wine and he poured them both a glass, then sat down so that he was directly facing her.

‘I wasn’t justifying myself,’ Suzanne began, confused. ‘I was simply explaining...’ Her voice trailed off and she helped herself to some of the pasta and the sauce. ‘I happen to like the way I look,’ she continued.

Why did he insist on making her feel so defensive and indignant? she wondered. Why couldn’t he have left her to muddle along to her own devices? She didn’t need his help to pull herself together. She would have done it quite completely on her own. After a while. Why did he have to come along and feel sorry for her? She didn’t want to be an object of pity. He didn’t owe her anything and she wished that he had just left her alone. Just because he had known her since she’d been in nappies didn’t mean that he now owed her something.

‘You’ve changed too, you know,’ she said accusingly, after a while.

And she was taken aback when he leaned back in the chair and said with an amused, lazy smile, ‘Have I? Tell me how.’

Suzanne stared at him with the drowning feeling of having got into something that was beyond her depth.

She tried not to look addled but the only thing her mind would tell her was that, if anything, he had become even more devastatingly handsome than she remembered. His dark good looks had hardened, taken on the indefinable edge of power and control.

‘You look older,’ she said lamely.

‘I am older.’ He waited, amused.

‘Of course, you’re still—still...an attractive man...’ She gave her full attention to a mouthful of spaghetti, thinking what an undignified meal it was, especially when only one of you was doing the eating.

He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Dear me, how embarrassed you sound saying that!’ He eyed her as though she was a charming curiosity. ‘Anyone would think that you had no dealings with the opposite sex.’ The grey eyes fixed on her face speculatively.

Suzanne felt her face go hot. Try as she might, she couldn’t find any serious recollection of dealings with the opposite sex. Nearly twenty-one and still a virgin. Boyfriends, yes. Her father had always been very indulgent about boyfriends; maybe, she thought now, because he could see that, despite the parties she went to occasionally and the boys she brought back home occasionally, she was still as innocent as a wide-eyed child.

Dane Sutherland had been the only one who had stirred her imagination. Everyone else had been little more than a bit of childish fun. True, when she was nineteen, she had had a fling with a man, someone who had worked with her, but she had never felt that driving passion which she had always associated with a serious affair, and she had not slept with him, despite his persistence. In fact, it had mostly been his persistence that had ended their relationship.

‘I’ve been out with men, yes,’ she told him coolly.

‘Slept with any of them?’

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘Just curious.’ He shrugged and laughed, not at all taken aback by her reply.

‘I don’t ask you about the women in your life,’ Suzanne muttered, irritated as much by his attitude as by his line of questioning.

‘Feel free to,’ he said, folding his arms and shrugging again. She caught his eyes and was struck, as she had been years ago, by his magnificent ability to make it seem as though one hundred per cent of his attention was focused entirely on her. A trick of sorts, she knew, a talent for pretence, but how she had once let it work on her. She couldn’t think back to her adolescence without cringing.

‘I’m not that interested,’ she said, wondering whether she should scrape her plate clean or whether that would appear greedy. The food had tasted wonderful—full of tomatoes and herbs. Far better than anything she could whip up. She had never been at her best in a kitchen. Things always seemed to go wrong whenever and wherever they possibly could. Sauces always curdled, or else became lumpy, meat always seemed to burn, and she always managed to forget whatever was boiling until the smell became unavoidable.

She stood up and began clearing away the dishes, vaguely piqued to realise that if she was uninterested in his women then he was even less interested in her response.

He employed, he told her, a woman who came in and cleaned every other day. She also did his ironing and cooked if and when he wanted her to.

‘Lucky old you,’ she said, watching him as he fixed them cups of coffee and nodded briefly in the direction of the lounge.

‘Shall we clear the air, Suzie?’ he asked with a resigned sigh. ‘Do you dislike me personally, or do you simply dislike the family I represent?’

He sat down on the chair opposite her and stretched out his long legs, crossing them loosely at the ankles.

‘How can you expect me to give you an honest answer to that question, when I am not renting a room in your house?’

‘Because,’ he said steadily, his expression shuttered, ‘you haven’t yet learned the art of deception. You would like to maintain some kind of dignified coldness, I imagine, but your need to express yourself trips you up constantly. Am I right?’

‘You’re always right, aren’t you?’

‘I think that that’s one reason why you’ve let yourself go so utterly for the past few months. You’ve not spoken to anyone about your father’s death. Instead you’ve bottled up your emotions, which is alien to you, and the result is that you’re still as maudlin and confused as you were the day he died.’

‘I am neither maudlin nor confused,’ she denied hotly.

‘You seem to think that I washed my hands of your father the day I left the house,’ he said, in a cool statement of fact. ‘I did write to him, you know, and a little over a year ago I sent him a cheque in case he needed money. I knew that he had put aside the small legacy my father left him for you. He returned my cheque with a friendly enough letter saying that he was fine.’

Suzanne stared at him, floored by this revelation about which she had known nothing. ‘Pride,’ she managed to say, recovering her power of speech.