Daphne Clair - Dark Mirror

She halted abruptly at the sight of him, and said, ‘Have you come to see her at last?’

He shook his head. He looked grim and slightly uncomfortable. As well he might, she thought.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Actually I hoped to see you.’

Her head went up sharply. ‘Why?’

‘I thought...we should talk about your daughter.’

A group of visitors brushed past them, carrying flowers and magazines, and he lightly took her arm, moving her to one side.

Fler pulled away from him, her mouth tight.

He said, ‘Can I buy you a cup of coffee? Somewhere that we can talk with a bit of privacy.’

She said, ‘I’ll buy my own coffee, thanks.’ She didn’t want to take anything from this man. ‘But I’d like to talk to you, too.’ She had a few home truths to tell him.

* * *

They walked to a coffee bar. He seemed to know the area, and while the place he chose wasn’t upmarket it was clean and cosy and the coffee was good. He led her to a booth and saw her seated before he slid in opposite her. He asked her what the doctors had said, and she told him that they didn’t expect any permanent after-effects.

He nodded and said formally, ‘I’m glad. That must be a burden lifted for you.’

Fler didn’t answer. The booth was small, and she was conscious of his masculine aura, a sense of controlled power, of assurance about the straight dark brows, the clear-cut mouth, the broad shoulders under a faultlessly cut charcoal suit. Today he wore a grey tie patterned with tiny red diamonds, and his paler grey shirt was pristine. When he spooned half a teaspoon of sugar into his coffee she saw a gleaming cufflink in his sleeve, a tiny dark red stone set into one corner of an initialled gold square. Not many men of his age used cufflinks these days. His hands looked smooth but strong and masculine, and he wore no rings.

Although not spectacularly handsome, he had an indefinable low-key attraction. She wasn’t surprised that Tansy had fallen for him. It had probably been all too easy for him to dazzle her, not least because a lecturer was someone she would naturally look up to.

He sat thoughtfully stirring the drink in front of him. When he leaned back and put down the spoon he asked abruptly, ‘Just what did Tansy tell you about me?’

Was he anxious about his job? she wondered. It wouldn’t look good for him to be known to have caused one of his students to attempt suicide. There’d been a time when Tansy had told her everything, but lately they had tacitly refrained from discussing him.

‘Does it matter?’ she asked. ‘You needn’t worry that I’m going to make trouble. For myself, I’d love to see you come thoroughly unstuck. But Tansy’s welfare is my main concern, and I don’t think she needs any more stress right now.’

‘Is it any use telling you that I’m not responsible for what she did?’

‘Legally, I’m sure you’re in the clear. Morally—’

‘Is she getting help?’

‘Help?’

‘Psychiatric help,’ he said bluntly.

‘It’s good of you to be so concerned—at last,’ Fler said. ‘The hospital crisis team talked to her.’

‘Crisis team?’

‘Nurses who liaise with a psychiatrist, but they didn’t feel it was necessary for her to see him.’

‘No?’ He was looking at her in a slightly bothered, undecided fashion. ‘She’s not normal, you know.’

Fler gave him a hostile stare. She’d seldom heard anything so ridiculous. Tansy wasn’t the only girl in the world to over-react when her first love-affair went wrong. No one had suggested she was mentally ill. ‘If you mean that she’s mad to think that you are worth trying to kill herself over, I’d have to agree.’

She saw him quell a spurt of temper. He said levelly, ‘It’s not just that. She’s been—’ he spread his hands ‘—fantasising about things.’

‘About you.’

‘Well...yes.’ He bent his head, almost as if embarrassed, and rubbed a hand briefly at the back of his neck. ‘It’s...a difficult situation,’ he said.

‘You mean, since you lost interest in her.’

‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ he said less patiently. ‘Whatever Tansy likes to think, there was never any great love-affair.’

‘I see. Just a sordid little encounter or two, a bit of harmless fun?’ Her voice was raw with resentment. It hurt to think he had taken so lightly what Tansy had so generously offered him.

‘There was nothing sordid about it,’ he said shortly.

Tansy certainly hadn’t thought so. She’d thought it was the love-story of the century. ‘And it wasn’t harmless either,’ Fler said swiftly, ‘for Tansy.’

‘Look,’ he said, his eyes holding hers. ‘For what it’s worth, I suppose I handled it badly. I tried at first to let her down lightly. It didn’t work. In the end maybe I was too—brutal. What you don’t seem to understand is how unreasonable she was. I couldn’t let it go on. And there was nothing in it. It was all totally one-sided.’

‘Are you saying she imagined all of it?’ This was unbelievable. ‘That you never took her out, never touched her?’

He was silent for a moment. ‘I went out with her,’ he admitted. ‘A couple of times. I didn’t know then that she was a student,’ he told her.

Fler allowed her brows to rise fractionally in disbelief, but said nothing.

He said, ‘She looked all of twenty-five when we met. It was a party. We talked. I took her home. The point is—’

‘The point is, you don’t want anything more to do with her.’ He was obviously bent on denying any real involvement, any culpability.

He hesitated only briefly. ‘In a nutshell, yes. But I’d like you to understand—’

‘I understand perfectly. You’ve been playing my daughter for months like a fish on a line. Now the game’s suddenly turned serious and you want out! Your career might suffer if this story gets about. You even feel a little—just a little—guilty. Are you married?’ It was a suspicion she’d entertained for some time, been afraid to voice to Tansy.

He looked startled at that, and angry. ‘No, I’m not married! If I had been I’d never have gone near the girl in the first place.’

Fler let her scepticism show. His type didn’t change their spots with marriage. He’d probably still be running after nubile students when he was in his dotage, and not able so easily to persuade them into falling in love with him.

‘She’s a nice young woman,’ he said quietly. ‘I liked her. But the whole thing got out of hand.’ He shook his head. ‘I think you ought to persuade her to have some kind of counselling.’

The nurses had suggested it, but when Tansy rejected the idea they hadn’t really argued. The consensus seemed to be that she’d over-reacted and given everyone, including herself, a nasty fright, but that it was unlikely to be repeated.

‘Would that salve your conscience, Mr Ranburn?’ Fler asked him. ‘It’s easy for you, isn’t it? Turn her over to other people to pick up the pieces, and find yourself some other poor little innocent whose life you can wreck.’

He leaned across the small table, the hazel eyes greening with temper. ‘ I have not wrecked anyone’s life !’

Ignoring the denial, Fler went on, her own temper rising, her skin heating and the nerve-ends prickling. ‘Is Tansy the first one to go this far? Maybe I should talk to the university board about your activities with female students. People like you ought to be stopped before they do any permanent damage.’

‘I’ve tried to explain,’ he said tightly. ‘But you don’t want to listen—’

‘Has it occurred to you,’ she asked him, going much further than she had ever intended, ‘that Tansy might be pregnant?’