CHARLOTTE LAMB - Haunted Dreams

Are you crazy? she asked herself, even pinker now, and breathing twice as fast. He’s almost twice your age, sophisticated, very experienced…he wouldn’t even look at you!

‘How old is he?’ she had asked her grandfather as they drove back from Ambrose’s home on Saturday, and Grandpa had shrugged indifferently.

‘Must be getting on for forty now, I suppose.’

She had realised he must be much older than she was, but…forty? She had sighed. Her father wasn’t much older than that!

‘Late thirties, anyway,’ Grandpa had said, and that sounded much better. Her spirits had lifted.

She had let a minute pass before asking, in what she hoped was an idle, offhand way, ‘Has he got children? I suppose there is a Mrs Kerr?’

‘I’ve never heard of one. Plenty of women in his life, though, if you believe the gossips. Sophie was one of them, I gather.’

Emilie had felt a stab of shock. ‘Sophie?’

Sophie? Sophie and him? she had thought, shaken and dismayed. She had had no idea. Sophie had never said a word to her about him, but then Sophie never said much about her private life to Emilie.

‘They were seen around together for a few months,’ George Rendell had said. ‘Then it fizzled out, and I would put money on it that it wasn’t Sophie who backed off.’

Emilie had stared out of the window, biting her lip. ‘Do you think she’s in love with him?’

Grandpa’s voice had been dry. ‘I think she fancied being Mrs Kerr.’ He could be quite cynical at times, and Emilie had frowned. Grandpa had continued, ‘Sophie takes after her mother, my cousin Rosa. They use their heads, not their hearts, those two women. So sharp they could cut themselves, both of them.’

‘I like them both,’ Emilie had said quietly, and her grandfather had given her a very different look, his face softening. She’d smiled at him and said, ‘Sophie and her mother have been very kind to me.’

She would always be grateful to them for their friendliness when she had first arrived in England.

Her father’s family had never been very interested in her and, now that he had sons, neither was her father. A hardbitten journalist, he had never spent much time at home even before her mother died. He had remarried shockingly soon after that.

Emilie suspected that he had been having an affair with Marie-Claude while her mother was alive. Had her mother known about it? She flinched at the thought.

Maman had never said a word to her, if she had known—but when she hadn’t known you were looking, the sadness in her face could have wrung your heart. Her mother had had so much to bear: a long, painful illness, which she knew would end in death, made harder by loneliness because her husband was never at home. Emilie hated to think that she might have been hiding the anguish of knowing that her husband was betraying her too.

Maman had wanted to send Emilie away to England in those last months, when she could no longer hide what was happening to her, but Emilie had clung to her, refusing to leave. They had been close; in those last two years even closer than mother and daughter usually were, just because they had both known their time together was going to be short. Emilie still missed her.

Her father’s remarriage had been a shock of a different sort. Marie-Claude had worked on his newspaper; they had known each other for years, Emilie realised. Marie-Claude was in her early thirties, very French, sophisticated, elegant in that French way, understated and witty. Marie-Claude’s clothes reflected Marie-Claude’s mind. It would have been easier if she had been openly hostile—but Marie-Claude was far too clever for that.

She was very polite and gracious whenever she saw Emilie. She bought her new clothes, she suggested a change of hairstyle—as if they were going to be friends. But there was no warmth in her. As soon as she was pregnant with her first child she sent Emilie off to boarding-school. Her visits to her father’s new home were always brief; after a week or so she would be sent off on some activity holiday—skiing in winter, horseriding in summer. After leaving school she was despatched to a residential college in England, to take business studies. When she completed her two-year course Emilie began working for her grandfather at the paper-mill in Kent. She knew she would never live with her father again.

She had accepted it, yet there was always a sadness at the back of her mind. She tried to bury it by concentrating on her new life, on her grandfather and her job.

Emilie was learning the business by moving around the departments; she had spent some months on the most important process—production—moved on to a brief spell in packing and despatch, and was now working in sales.

She was at a very low level, of course. All she did was sit at a desk doing paperwork. Her grandfather didn’t employ any women on the actual sales team; he didn’t think it was a woman’s job, travelling the roads across the country alone by car, staying at cheap hotels. He certainly wasn’t prepared to let Emilie do it. She had to learn all about sales from processing orders as they came in from the salesmen and answering the phone, coping with enquiries.

She enjoyed dealing with people, she liked the other girls she worked with, and she was beginning to be very interested in their product, in the history of the paper-mill, in her mother’s family. After a rather lonely period of her life she felt she had come home, she belonged here, and Sophie Grant and her mother were family too, as well as being the first people she had got to know here, except her grandfather. She would never want to hurt either of them, especially Sophie.

She frowned. Why was Grandpa so cynical about Aunt Rosa and Sophie? They seemed so fond of him.

Emilie hadn’t seen Sophie since Saturday, since that party, in fact. When she did, she could hardly ask her if she was in love with Ambrose!

I’d better not mention him, in fact, she thought, getting dressed. It would be tactless to say much to Sophie about him. She might have been badly hurt when they broke up.

Why had they broken up, anyway? Had Ambrose ever been in love with Sophie?

She stopped brushing her hair, bit her lip, then glared at herself in the mirror. What’s it got to do with you what happened? Stop thinking about him—he’s twice your age, he probably has another woman now, a man like him isn’t going to be alone for long—I bet he’s forgotten he ever met you!

She ran downstairs to breakfast at a quarter to eight, and found her grandfather already at the table, in his faintly old-fashioned dark suit, with a stiff red-striped white shirt and maroon silk tie, eating toast and marmalade and drinking coffee, his normal weekday breakfast.

He looked up and smiled, his eyes approving of her crisp cream cotton blouse and dark grey pleated skirt, of the way her sleek brown hair swirled around her face, the brightness of her eyes and smile.

George Rendell had lived alone for years; loneliness had been engrained in his mind, had got under his skin. He had almost forgotten how it felt to live with someone else, to have someone running up and down the stairs, talking on the phone, watching television. He had forgotten what it was like to look across the breakfast-table each morning and see another face, meet a warm smile.

Emilie had changed his life. He had wondered at first if it would work for her to live with him, if he would be irritated and bored having a young girl around all day, but within a week it was as if she had always been there.

More than that, he felt a strange new happiness welling up inside him. He wasn’t the type to show his feelings, but the sun came out whenever he saw her come into a room. She called out all his protective instincts—she was young and small and helpless, and George would have killed anyone who hurt her.