Sara Craven - Past All Forgetting

But there had been no sign of weakness about Mrs Tempest that night. She had driven Janna home, her back straight as a ramrod, her gaze fixed unerringly on the road ahead. At her gate, she had said, ‘You are quite well, Janna? Then I will bid you goodnight.’ She had driven away and Janna had never seen or heard from her again. It had only been a few weeks later that the house had been shut up, and the Colonel and his wife had moved away. There was speculation, naturally, but it did not take the form that Janna had feared. It was taken for granted that Mrs Tempest’s health would not stand up to another northern winter. Someone in the post office had even remarked that she’d ‘been showing her age lately, poor lady’.

No one, luckily, had linked Rian’s abrupt departure several weeks before with the Colonel’s decision to close the house and move. Rian was a law unto himself. He came and went when and where his job took him. Everyone knew the Colonel had been disappointed because his nephew hadn’t followed him into the Army, but it was accepted that Rian had a mind of his own, and no one could say the Colonel wasn’t proud of the way the boy had turned out. More like a son than a nephew, people said, and that was the way it should be as Rian had no parents of his own any more.

A much younger Janna had always been among the crowd of worshippers when Rian, who played cricket for his university, turned out for the local club during the summer vacation. She had begged his autograph once on the corner of a score card and treasured it until it literally fell to pieces.

There had been a quality about him even then which had set him apart from the rest, although she had been too young to analyse it. His movements were unstudiedly elegant and economical, and although he certainly wasn’t good-looking in the film or television star mould, there was a latent attraction in his dark, saturnine features. When he smiled, his charm was magical, almost wicked. It hinted that its owner was not disposed to take anything really seriously, especially you, no matter how delightful he might find you, and it was irresistible. Or Janna had found it so.

She stepped forward to the edge of the terrace, wrapping her arms tightly across her body. The wind was blowing straight off the Pennines, and its force had an added bite.

‘Darling, what on earth are you doing out here? It’s freezing.’ Colin’s voice sounded rather plaintive as he made his way out through the french windows to join her.

‘Blowing the cobwebs away,’ she said, and heaven knew it was the truth. But would it work?

Colin, to her relief, took the remark at its face value.

‘The place could do with an airing,’ he remarked. ‘But I can’t smell any damp, can you? It all seems in pretty good nick. Shall we have a look upstairs?’

‘You go ahead,’ she said. ‘I’ll join you in a minute. I want to enjoy this view for a while. It’s a long time since I’ve seen it.’

A long time—seven years, to be exact. Seven years since she had come out of that antique auction further up the dale with her father and found herself face to face with Rian, come to collect his aunt who had been bidding for some china figures. For a moment she had barely recognised him. He had always been thin, but now his face was harder and older, the dark eyes under their lazily drooping lids suddenly wary. He had answered her father’s jovial greeting with a smile and a handshake, and then had turned to her, his smile widening.

‘Of course I remember Janna,’ he responded to her father’s query. ‘I’m waiting impatiently for her to grow up.’

It was the teasing, slightly flirtatious remark that he might have made to the schoolgirl daughter of any old acquaintance. She could see it now. Why couldn’t she have seen it then?

Because I didn’t want to, she thought, gripping the terrace balustrade with suddenly shaking hands. Because in that brief instant, on the heels of his joking remark, she had found a focus for all those barely understood adolescent yearnings. Still half a child, every demand of her awakening womanhood had become crystallised in Rian. And her egotism, burnished by the knowledge of her legion of admirers in the local Sixth Form and the Young Farmers’ club, had done the rest.

She wanted Rian, so it must follow as the night did the day that he wanted her.

Janna winced, recalling how simple it had all seemed then. It had not taken her long to find out why Rian was in Carrisford. He was on an extended sick leave recovering after a fever contracted in a jungle war, but the fact that he was officially convalescent did not prevent him throwing himself into the social life of the district.

Just how fully Janna only realised at breakfast one morning, when her father casually remarked to her mother, ‘I see young Tempest has taken up with Barbara Kenton. Bit of a lass, isn’t she?’

‘You could say that,’ her mother had replied with a repressive glance in Janna’s direction.

Janna had pushed away her cereal bowl with a sudden sick feeling. She knew all about Barbara Kenton. Within the limitations of the area, Barbara was fairly notorious. In her last years at school, there had always been jokes about her, and comments scribbled on walls. Then, she had been a tall, sleepy-eyed blonde whose clothes always seemed just too skimpy for her voluptuous body. Now she was working as a receptionist in the White Hart, and making little attempt to conceal her overt sexuality.

Her father was speaking again. ‘Well, you can’t blame the lad. Plenty of time before he needs to think of settling down. But I bet he hasn’t told his uncle. Bit of a Puritan, the old Colonel, if you ask me.’

Janna got up from the table, feeling her cheeks beginning to burn angrily. Collecting her school bag from the hall, she told herself vehemently that Rian couldn’t like Barbara Kenton. He just couldn’t! She was so vile and obvious. But that evening at the Midsummer barbecue she was given plenty of evidence to the contrary. Rian was there, and Barbara was with him, clinging to his arm at every opportunity. They left the barbecue early, and Janna overheard a few of the ribald remarks when their departure was observed. It was her first real experience of jealousy, and it was cruel and hurtful. The evening was ruined for her, and as she lay in bed that night, tossing restlessly in a vain attempt to capture some sleep, images of Rian with Barbara kept superimposing themselves on her mind.

It wasn’t a great consolation to find that Barbara could not consider him her exclusive property either. She was just one of a long list of girls that Rian escorted to dances and parties, and drove to dinner in his sports car as June lengthened into July. But Janna, to her chagrin, was not.

They met everywhere, of course, and he always spoke pleasantly to her, but at the same time he made no attempt to further their acquaintance. To her dismay, she realised that he was treating her as he would any other of the youngsters. She did everything she could to get him to notice her, abandoning her own crowd of friends and hanging about on the fringes of his, flirting outrageously with anyone who gave her any encouragement, and dancing without a trace of inhibition with any partners who offered themselves. Rian did not offer. Occasionally she caught him watching her, an expression of faint amusement in his dark eyes, but he always held maddeningly aloof.

But at last her chance came. There was a Young Farmers’ buffet dance, and Janna managed to wangle herself an invitation from Philip Avery, who was only a couple of years Rian’s junior. Her parents did not approve, she knew, but they could not forbid her to go without offending the Averys. Besides, Philip was eminently respectable, and his eight years’ seniority to Janna was the only real complaint they could make against him.