CATHY WILLIAMS - Too Scared To Love

‘I take it that was a “hands off” remark?’ he asked with amusement. Any minute now, Roberta thought with hostility, he’ll start referring to me as quaint, or an oddity.

‘If by that you mean that I don’t intend to discuss my personal life with you, then yes, you’re absolutely right.’

She began to move towards the door when his speculative drawl stopped her in her tracks.

‘Same colour hair, same eyes, but you really are nothing like my late wife at all. Unless, of course, you’re an extremely fine actress.’

Roberta didn’t turn around. She found his words offensive, because when she thought of that woman in the portrait she thought of everything that was wild and exciting. To have the differences between them pointed out to her was tantamount to telling her that she was as dull as dishwater.

Nobody likes to think that they’re dull, do they? she told herself.

‘If I were an extremely fine actress,’ she said, staring straight ahead of her, her back to him, ‘I wouldn’t be an au pair. I’d be in the acting profession.’

‘I hope so,’ he said, conversationally enough, ‘because, as I said, I can be ruthless when it comes to gold-diggers.’

There was no answer to that one, and Roberta left the study, shutting the door quietly behind her, quickly running up the stairs until she got to her bedroom.

It was late, and she hadn’t slept for hours, what with the long flight and the inevitable waiting around at airport terminals, but she didn’t feel tired at all. Her mind felt as though it had been suddenly thrust into overdrive, and as she undressed and lay on the huge bed her thoughts flitted tantalisingly and aggravatingly back to Grant Adams. Odious man. Not only had he seen fit to insult her, but he had also seen fit to laugh at her.

She had only met a few North Americans in her life. They had been full of joie de vivre and terribly extrovert. She wasn’t like that, but her natural reserve wasn’t a matter for amusement, was it?

She had always been quite reticent. She wondered now whether that hadn’t increased over the past eight months.

She cast her mind back over everything that had happened to her recently, for the first time not feeling her stomach contract at the thoughts racing through her mind.

Her mother’s death she could face now with less of that desperate sense of loss. The pain was duller, more of a lingering sensation of sadness.

She had been very close to her mother. From as far back as she could remember they had been a twosome. Her father had died when she was only eighteen months old, and her mother had never remarried.

‘It could never be the same,’ she had once told her. ‘I loved him too much to ever give my heart to someone else. It would have seemed like a betrayal.’

So they had tackled life together, hand in hand, and when she died quite suddenly nine months ago Roberta had been shattered.

Now, looking back, she could see that Brian’s entrance into her life had come when she least needed it. She had been vulnerable, unprepared, emotionally in need of support, and he had swept through her like a whirlwind. Blond, handsome, charming, he had wooed her with flowers, surprised her when she least expected it.

Roberta stared upwards at the ceiling, allowing her mind to roam freely for the first time over her huge mistake, not trying to shut it away somewhere safe where it couldn’t touch her.

We all make mistakes, don’t we? she told herself.

How was she to know what he really was? She had had no experience of men, after all. Physically, her life had been a closed book as far as that was concerned. When he didn’t pressure her into sleeping with him, she had been relieved and delighted. It had been one more point in his favour, so his requests to borrow some money, small amounts to start with, had hardly caused a ripple.

He had told her that he was an actor, struggling to get parts.

Now, as she lay in bed, she found that she could actually think of his lies with a certain degree of resigned cynicism, instead of with that choking bitterness.

Of course he hadn’t been an actor, though he should have been one. His performance with her was deserving of an Oscar. He had softened his borrowing with little, thoughtful, romantic gestures, and like a fool she had swallowed it all hook, line and sinker.

She had let herself be lulled into a false sense of security, had even begun discussing marriage, and he had encouraged her in that. So, when he raised the subject of buying a house together, it had seemed reasonable enough to her. He had persuaded her that she could keep on her mother’s place, renting it out, as an investment, and they could use the better part of the money left to her to buy into a new property.

They would be cash buyers; they would have no problem finding somewhere. The market was depressed; they could find a bargain.

His arguments rang in her ears as though they had been spoken just yesterday instead of three months ago.

And she had fallen for them.

‘You make the cheque over to me,’ he had told her. ‘I have some money of my own in savings. I’ll make one cheque out to the solicitors. No point in creating unnecessary paperwork.’ He had worked out in detail how much money they jointly had, and his tone of authority, his tender, clucking dismissal of her shadowy doubts had persuaded her in a way that nothing else could have.

The memory of it made her flush with bitter shame. How could she have fallen for someone so obvious? But she had. Like a naïve fool, only realising that she had made a massive error of judgement when he abruptly vanished from her life. She had tried calling him, but the number had been disconnected. She had gone round to his bedsit, but he had flown the coop.

The new tenants had stared at her and shrugged their shoulders. This was London, they had said, of course we don’t know where he’s gone, we were only happy to have got the flat.

Disillusionment had given way to anger, and then to bitterness. Of course, she had eventually gone to the police, but by then she had resigned herself to the fact that she had kissed sweet goodbye to her money.

She could recall the interview with the chief inspector in minute detail, and it still had the power to make her cringe. She had known precisely what had been going through his head. Gullible dupe who has no experience of life, or of men, and gets taken in by the first clever conman who comes along and plays upon her insecurities. He had seen her as pathetic. She was convinced of it and she had looked at herself through his eyes with humiliation.

But, she now thought, didn’t every cloud have a silver lining? She thought of Grant Adams, and of that glimpse of suffocating charm that had flashed across his face. If there was one thing that Brian had done for her, it was to make her immune to men like Grant Adams.

Even before Brian, she had always been a self-contained person. Now she guarded herself and her emotions with rigid control. She might have been a fool once, but lessons were there to be learnt from. She would never be a fool again.

It was late the following morning before she woke up, after the sort of restless night that came from sleeping in different surroundings.

It was warm in the room, but as she drew back the curtains she could see the cold outside clutching at the trees and buildings.

Emily burst into the room as she was preparing to get dressed, and Roberta said automatically, ‘There’s such a thing as knocking.’

Emily’s long black hair had been dragged away from her face and was hanging down her back in a pony tail, but her face still wore that suspicious, defensive expression.

‘You work here,’ Emily replied. ‘Why do I need to knock?’