Sara Craven - Past All Forgetting

‘Yes,’ she said quietly, ‘we’ll do that, if you wish.’

Conversation was desultory as they drove back through Carrisford, and parked outside the school gates. Colin took her hand. ‘Dinner tonight?’

She hesitated. ‘I don’t think so. I ought to wash my hair.’

‘It looks fine to me,’ he said. ‘But you know best. I’ll ring you tomorrow.’ He lifted her hand to his lips.

She stood on the pavement and watched the car drive away, feeling as if her entire world had been turned upside down. The safe walls of security and convention that she had built so painstakingly up around herself over the past few years showed every sign of tumbling around her, and it was an uncomfortable feeling at the least.

Colin was right, of course, she thought miserably. The house had everything to recommend it. If it had been any other house anywhere in the locality she would have shared his enthusiasm. She had always known that it would be part of her duties as his wife to entertain his guests and have foreign buyers to stay, and she had looked forward to it.

But the house—that house—did not belong to them and never could, no matter how much money Colin’s father might put up. It was the Tempest house, and it belonged by rights to Rian Tempest, and it was her fault and hers alone that Rian had not inherited it. Her fault that it had stood empty for all these years. No one had ever accused her, but she knew it just the same, knew that Rian had left his uncle’s house seven years before in bitterness and disgrace because of her, and that the Colonel had died without forgiving him.

And the fact that the knowledge of her guilt was confined to her and only one other person in the world now did not ease her conscience in the slightest.

Faintly in the distance, she could hear the bell for afternoon school begin to ring, and she turned and began to walk up the drive. Over in the playground, the children were being lined up by the teacher on duty, and Janna turned slightly to watch, not noticing where she was going.

She did not hear the sound of the car’s engine. The first warning of its presence was the blare of the horn, and she stepped hurriedly out of its way, flattening herself against an adjacent wall with a word of apology on her lips. She glanced at the driver’s seat, wondering incuriously who the owner of such an exotic vehicle might be and what business brought him to a small country school in the middle of the day. She couldn’t think of any of the parents whose finances would run to a supercharged machine like that. The half-smile died on her lips. For one incredulous moment, she thought she must be dreaming, that it must be an image created by her overcharged emotional state.

The car braked softly beside her, and the driver’s window rolled noiselessly downwards, at the press of a button, she thought hysterically, digging her nails into the palms of her hands. A pair of dark eyes met hers expressionlessly, then moved slowly and consideringly downwards, lingering on her white face, and the trembling limbs she could neither control nor dissemble.

‘Hello, Janna,’ said Rian Tempest.

Then the car accelerated forward, with a low, fierce growl like some huge menacing beast, and he was gone.

JANNA shut her bedroom door and sank down on the bed with a heartfelt sigh of relief. Her head was throbbing painfully, and her confused state of emotion, coupled with apprehension, had made her feel physically sick.

She did not know how she had managed to get through the afternoon with a semblance of normality. She had sat in the darkened hall with her class, watching the film show with unseeing eyes, laughing obediently when everyone else did at the technicoloured cavortings without the slightest realisation of what was going on. Luckily the Walt Disney adventure and the cartoons which preceded it had occupied everyone else’s attention, so Janna’s wan appearance and tightly gripped hands passed unnoticed.

Her mother, however, was not so easily to be put off. She had watched with puckered brows while Janna pushed her evening meal, uneaten, round her plate, but had accepted her halting explanation that she thought she might be starting a migraine. Mrs Prentiss had been a migraine sufferer all her life and was always eagle-eyed to detect incipient signs of it in anyone close to her. She had tutted distressedly over Janna, pressed some painkillers on her, and recommended that she lie down in her darkened room. Janna was thankful to accept the medicine and the advice.

Now that she was alone, at least she did not have to pretend any more. She turned and lay full-length on her stomach across the bed, pillowing her chin on her folded arms.

Rian Tempest was back in Carrisford. After all these years without a sign, a word even, he had returned, and now her peace of mind had gone for ever.

She closed her eyes, trying to erase from her mind the memory of that long look he had given her before he had driven off. It had emphasised more clearly than words could do that he had not forgotten anything which had passed between them seven years before. Not forgotten—and not forgiven either. But what else did she expect? What she had done to Rian was unforgivable. She had always known that.

She shivered, pressing her body further into the yielding softness of the eiderdown as if she was seeking some kind of sanctuary. When she had been a child, and there had been some small disaster to be faced, it had always been a comfort to drag the bedclothes round her—even over her head—and tell herself that no one would ever find her now.

Yet Rian had found her, she thought, as she had always feared that he would even with the false sense of security the passing years had given her.

But why had he come back? she asked herself almost despairingly. Now that his aunt and uncle were both dead and he must know for certain that the house and estate were not his, what was there to draw him back to Carrisford? The possibilities that suggested themselves were too disturbing to contemplate.

She turned restlessly on to her side, wishing for the first time in her life that she had a sleeping tablet. Something that would blot out thinking and reasoning—and above all remembering for a few hours. The adult equivalent of drawing the bedclothes over one’s head, she told herself wryly.

What did he intend? she asked herself, but no immediate answer was forthcoming. Rian had always been totally unpredictable, she thought. That was why she had continued to pursue him, confident that he was not as impervious to her as he had tried to maintain. She had the memory of his reaction to her while she had been in his arms to buoy up her hopes as well. He might have spoken of his own indifference, but his body had betrayed him with its instinctive response to her proximity. And there was an element of challenge in the affair now. She would make him admit that he wanted her, in deed as well as word. She would make him grovel.

Janna gave a groan and buried her face in her hands. Why, oh, why had she been so sure she could do so, when all the evidence suggested the contrary? God knew she had received fair warning, so she could blame no one for what had happened subsequently but herself.

She had seen little of Rian in the week following the dance, do what she might. It had been during this time that she had paid her abortive visit to Carrisbeck House with the parish magazines, she recalled with a pang. But he seemed to be avoiding his usual haunts, or at least avoiding her while she was there, and she had to be content with a couple of unsatisfactory glimpses of him driving his car, once with Barbara Kenton’s blonde head conspicuously close to his dark one.

Her obsession was beginning to be noticed by her friends, and a few sly hints were dropped, which she ignored in spite of the feelings raging inside her. Geoff Christie, whom she had been dating in a desultory manner before Rian’s return, soon became peeved at her indifference and began taking out one of her friends. From being the centre of attention, Janna began to find that she was now becoming an outsider among her contemporaries, but she told herself defiantly that she did not care. If she was lonely, then she had chosen to be so, and anyway nothing mattered except Rian.