Sara Craven - Dark Summer Dawn

She heard her mother say to her new husband, ‘He’s very like you,’ and she wanted very badly to cry out a denial, because surely Jennifer knew—could see that they weren’t a bit alike.

Oh, they were both tall and very dark, but Dane was a much leaner version of his burly father. His face was thinner too, its lines arrogant where Charles’ were genial. His eyes weren’t blue like his father’s either, but a wintry grey, and his mouth was hard.

She had been looking forward to seeing Stoniscliffe, the big grey stone house which her stepfather had told her about. She wanted to meet Julie too.

‘She’s been lonely for someone to play with,’ Chas had told her. ‘I daresay you’ve been a bit lonely too.’

But all the excitement, all the anticipation she had been feeling had been dampened by the arrival of this cold hostile stranger. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to go north to Stoniscliffe if he was going to be there.

She tried to forget about Dane Riderwood and enjoy the reception. People spoke kindly to her, and exclaimed admiringly about her long hair. Chas even gave her a sip of champagne, in spite of her mother’s laughing expostulations.

She was just beginning to enjoy herself when Aunt Enid came towards them. Jennifer and Lisa were standing on their own for a moment and she had obviously seized her opportunity.

‘Well, you’ve certainly done all right for yourself,’ she hissed to Jennifer. ‘Something to do with electronics indeed! You forgot to mention that he owned his own factory. I suppose you’ll be off north with never a backward glance, never a thought for the people who fed you and housed you when you had nothing.’

Lisa saw her mother go pale, saw all the pretty, happy, excited colour fade from her face. She said in a low voice, ‘Enid, please keep your voice down. I don’t expect you to believe me, but I didn’t know until today. Oh, I knew Chas wasn’t on the breadline, but all this—’ she paused and gave a little painful laugh—‘all this was as big a shock to me as it has been to you.’

‘Oh, of course,’ Enid Farrell sneered. ‘We always knew we weren’t good enough for you. Even my poor brother wasn’t that. You always did fancy yourself, with your airs and graces—too good to work or to want. Well, you’ll never have to bother about either again!’

Lisa flinched. There was real venom in Aunt Enid’s voice. It wasn’t just the habitual carping that she and her mother had silently learned to accept. And she had noticed something else too. Dane Riderwood was standing not too far away and judging by the expression of distaste on his face he had heard the tail end if not all of the sordid little passage.

She thought resentfully, ‘I wish he hadn’t heard. He doesn’t like us anyway, and now he’ll just think that we’re as horrible as she is.’

She saw her stepfather coming towards them, beaming, and Aunt Enid moved away then, and not long after that Lisa was relieved to see her and Uncle Clive leaving. All of a sudden she was glad she was going to Stoniscliffe because it meant, she hoped, that she would never see either of them again.

The reception seemed to go on for ever, and Lisa was tired of the new faces and voices going on endlessly above her head. After a while she wandered into the adjoining bedroom. There was a sofa there too, drawn across the window, and she curled up on it, lulled by the distant noise of traffic and the murmur of talk and laughter in the next room.

She didn’t know what woke her, but she opened her eyes, blinking drowsily to realise she was no longer alone in the room.

Somewhere near at hand a man’s voice was saying, ‘Bit of a surprise to all of us, actually. He didn’t tell you?’

‘Not a word, until it was too damned late for me to do anything about it.’ It was Dane Riderwood’s voice, molten with fury. ‘My God, it’s sheer lunacy! He takes a holiday and comes back with some gold-digging little typist and her brat. Heaven knows no one expects him to live like a monk, but surely he didn’t have to pay for his fun with marriage!’

Lying, hidden by the high back of the sofa, Lisa felt sick. She didn’t understand all that was being said, but she could recognise the cold contempt in ‘typist and her brat’. She wanted to jump up and run to Dane Riderwood, to punch him and kick him, and make him sorry, but even as the thought crossed her mind, caution followed. If she did so then other people would come, and they would ask her why she was behaving like that, and she would have to tell them, and her mother’s happy, shining day would be spoiled, some instinct told her. Aunt Enid had been bad enough, but this was a hundred times worse.

This was her new family of which Dane was to be an important part, and he didn’t like them. He didn’t want them. She buried her face in the cushion and put her hands over her ears. She didn’t want to hear any more.

She was quiet some time later when Chas and Jennifer came to fetch her, to take her up north to Stoniscliffe. They were having a delayed honeymoon, because Chas wanted to show Jennifer his home, and wanted Lisa to settle in there too.

They looked at her pale cheeks and the wariness in her eyes and decided privately that it was over-excitement and nervousness, and didn’t press her for any explanations. It had been a relief to know from chance remarks they had let fall that Dane wouldn’t be joining them at Stoniscliffe. He was going back to America.

Perhaps he’ll stay there, the child Lisa had thought passionately. Perhaps he’ll never come back.

The woman she had become could smile wryly at such naïveté, looking back across the years. Of course he had come back, and gradually the situation had begun to ease although Lisa told herself she could never like him or even wholly trust him, and she was slightly on her guard all the time when he was around.

Grudgingly, she had to give Dane his due. He had never, she was sure, given her mother any distress by even hinting at his true feelings about his father’s second marriage. But then he had no reason to do so, she reminded herself. Chas and Jennifer had been very happy—even someone as prejudiced as Dane would have been forced to admit that. He was always civil, if rather aloof, to Jennifer, and he took hardly any notice of Lisa at all. But then, she thought, he had never bothered with Julie either, who had always shown a strong tendency to hero-worship him.

Sisterly devotion had never been Dane’s style, Lisa thought with a curl of her lips. He had girl-friends, of course—a lot of them. Some of them even came to stay at Stoniscliffe to run the gauntlet of Chas’s indulgently critical appraisal. But it was clear they were for amusement only. Dane showed no signs of becoming serious about any of them, although they were all beautiful and glossy and self-assured—good wife material for a man who stood to inherit a thriving family firm and would need a smooth and practised hostess in his private life.

Julie and Lisa discussed the girls between themselves, tearing their appearances, their manners, their clothes apart mercilessly. Later, they wondered about their sexual potential as well, with avid adolescent curiosity. At least Julie had done most of the wondering. Lis wasn’t that interested in the partners Dane chose for his sexual athletics, although she had little doubt he was an expert in that as he was at everything else.

Locally, he was the golden boy, already managing director of Riderwoods which was expanding rapidly and surely. Chas was proud of him, calling him a chip off the old block, but Lisa thought there was more to it than that, unless the original block had been granite, because there was a ruthlessness about Dane that chilled her.

That was why, quite apart from the original dislike and distrust, she had never been able to accord him the admiration which Julie lavished on him. He wasn’t Lisa’s idea of a hero. She saw no warmth in him, no tenderness.