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CHAPTER ONE
THE sitting room was strewn with pieces of dissected fir tree, and the reel of scarlet tartan ribbon the cat had unrolled made bright pools of colour against the dark background of the carpet. Heather noticed these details as she walked into the room, just as she saw how the flickering flames from the apple logs in the fireplace threw cheerful shadows to lighten the dreariness of the darkening winter’s afternoon. She couldn’t help noticing them—that was how she had been brought up, to observe and then store what she had seen for use later on—but today she noticed them absently, without her normal enthusiasm.
She had just finished speaking to her mother, and what she had heard had not reassured her. It was hard to believe that it was less than two days since her father had been rushed into hospital.
Neither she nor her mother had known there was anything wrong. Gordon Burns was a lean, tanned man in his late fifties, with a boundless energy for life that nothing seemed to quench.
Even now, when his shock of once dark hair had turned iron-grey, Heather still had difficulty in accepting the fact that he was growing older. She frowned and nibbled tensely at her bottom lip. They had always been such a closely knit family.
Many of her contemporaries found it odd that she should not only be quite content working for her parents, but that she should also voluntarily choose to live at home. At twenty-three, she supposed she was rather unusual, but she had never felt any desire to share their so-called independence.
The phone rang sharply and she hurried to answer it, her heart racing. It could be her mother again from the hospital. They had agreed she would ring only when there was anything to report. So far, her father’s condition was stable, although there was talk of the necessity of an operation to bypass some of the damaged arteries, and avert the danger of further heart attacks.
Only last night the specialist had cautioned them about the seriousness of her father’s condition. Such an operation would have to be carried out privately, Heather knew, and again she gnawed distractedly on her bottom lip. A tall, slender girl, she took after her father more than her petite blond-haired mother; she had his colouring and his dark red hair, but in temperament she was like neither of her parents. A throwback to the MacDonald clan, with its reputation for fierce pride and intense emotions, so her father often teased her, and it was true. As a child and a teenager, the intensity of her own bewildering emotions had often left her disturbed and defensive. Now, as an adult, she had learned, if not to control them, then at least to understand them.
She picked up the receiver, her mouth dry with apprehension, but it was only Mrs Anstey, the mainstay of their small village population and the uncrowned head of the local Women’s Institute.
‘Heather, my dear, I’m sorry to bother you at a time like this, but how are you doing with the decorations?’
Many years ago, Heather’s father had worked in London’s top store as a departmental manager, and it was while he was there that he had conceived the idea of starting up his own business to make and supply to small shops the kind of window-dressing and design service normally only available to stores large and profitable enough to afford an in-house window-dressing team.
In retrospect, even Gordon Burns had been surprised by the success of his small venture. Within two years of starting up in business, his wife had joined the company, and then, once she left art school, Heather had been co-opted on to the team.
Normally, she loved her work. There was something immensely satisfying about being given a relatively small budget and then asked to create the impossible.
Over the years her father had been approached several times with offers to buy him out, but he had insisted that he liked his business the way it was, small and modestly successful.
If her father had one fault, it was that he was too soft-hearted; too generous, Heather acknowledged wryly; and the Christmas party for the old folk’s home was a prime example of his generosity.
When Maureen Anstey had approached him about decorating the church hall for the party, he had immediately thrown himself into the preparations with vigour and enthusiasm, and Heather knew from past experience that, when it came to submitting his invoice, the sum quoted would have very little bearing on the actual cost of time and materials.
They had always had a comfortable life-style, but she knew that her parents had no savings, nothing to finance something as expensive as the open-heart surgery it now seemed her father was going to need.
She had been the one to find him, slumped over his desk in his study, and the shock of that discovery was still with her, adding a new vulnerability to her shadowed eyes and full mouth.
Having assured Maureen Anstey that the decorations would be completed in time, she returned to the sitting-room. For once, the sight of it failed to soothe her. The sitting-room was her favourite room in the small rectory her parents had bought when they first moved down to Durminster. All the downstairs rooms had open fires, and this room, with its collection of comfortably old furniture and its general air of being very much a family room, had an immediate ambience of warmth.
The cat miaowed plaintively, reminding her that it was tea time. She would have to take Meg out for a walk before it got too dark.
The old collie thumped her tail on the kitchen floor as Heather walked in. Meg had been a thirteenth birthday present to her. A shiver suddenly touched her skin, as memories she would rather not have had slid, betraying, to the surface of her mind. How clearly she could picture that birthday morning. Her parents’ faces, happy and expectant, the excited yaps of the small puppy; it should have been the most perfect of memories, but it was marred by another face, sharp and haunting still, after all these years.
As she had reached out to take hold of the puppy, her mother had said warmly, ‘Of course, you must share Meg with Kyle, Heather.’
And instantly she had dropped the little pup back into her box. Even now, down the years, she could still hear the truculent bitterness in her childish voice as she’d said bitterly, ‘I don’t want her, then. You can give her to him, because I’m not sharing her.’
Even now, the memory had the power to make her suffer a wild see-saw of emotions, some of them so complex and still so only partially understood by herself that she could scarcely bear their oppressiveness.
She had been jealous, of course. Bitterly and immensely jealous, and the remnant of that jealousy and what it had led her to do still haunted her.
One of her closest friends at art school had accused her of being motivated by guilt when Heather had explained to her why she felt she must go home and work with her parents, and she had been partially right. Deep in her heart, she knew that nothing she could ever do could w
ipe out what she had once done; there was no going back and, even though her actions had been those of an immature child, their repercussions still echoed through all their lives.
She had been seven when her parents first mooted the idea of fostering a teenage boy. She had hated the idea right from the start, resentful of their need to introduce someone else into their small family circle, but she might have grown to accept the idea if she had not happened to overhear someone commenting that they suspected that her mother had never really got over the loss of the baby boy she had been carrying before Heather’s own birth.
Until that moment, she had never known that she might have had an elder brother, and with that knowledge had come the first seeds of doubt about the strength of her parents’ love for her.
While they talked about their fortunate circumstances and the value of sharing them with someone less fortunate, she had grown more and more bitterly resentful of the as yet unknown male intruder who was apparently more important to her parents’ lives then she was herself.
And her resentment and fear had grown, so much so that, well before the social worker had brought Kyle to see them, she had already hated him.
She had steadfastly refused to go with her parents on their visits to the children’s home, bitterly resentful of their determination to carry out their plans in the face of her own strongly voiced and expressed disapproval.
She knew now that her disapproval had only increased her father’s determination, and that he had been disturbed by her displays of temper and jealousy, for her own sake. At the time, she had simply seen, in their calm continuation with their plans, a total lack of regard for her and her feelings, which had increased her fear that she wasn’t loved or wanted and that this stranger would supplant her in her parents’ lives.
They had known none of this, simply seeing in her resentment and anger an only child’s lack of vision and narrowed upbringing. Both of them had been only children themselves, and were far more aware of the pitfalls that could lurk ahead than Heather herself, but she had not known of any of this.
The seeds of resentment and hatred had been sown, and when Kyle had finally arrived she’d been determined to hate him.
And hate him she had. It hadn’t been hard. For one thing, he was obviously bigger and more powerful than she was, a whole six years older, and thirteen to her seven; for another, he was a whole lot cleverer as well, talking with her parents on a level that totally excluded her.
Now, of course, she could see that Kyle had felt just as insecure as she had herself, that the fact that he had totally ignored her had sprung from feelings very close to those she was herself experiencing, and not a desire to cut her out of her parents’ love.
She also knew now that love was something that wasn’t necessarily apportioned; and that it was something that grew rather than diminished when it was shared with others. Yes, she knew all these things now. Now, when it was too late.
She frowned and reached for her hooded duffel coat. It was cold outside. Snow threatened; she could smell it in the air.
Meg barked excitedly as she opened the door. At the back of the rectory garden was a stile and a footpath that led through the fields. It had been a clear, bright day, and as she climbed over the stile the fields lay spread out against a winter skyline, the sky that deep, dense dark blue that only occurred on very cold and clear winter evenings. The full moon illuminated the scene brilliantly, and her breath hung on the air in steamy puffballs of vapour. The sharpness of Meg’s yaps was intensified by the crystal clearness of the air, and far away a farm dog heard it and set up a bark in response.
From the copse Heather heard the unearthly cry of a dog fox, and Meg pricked up her ears. Some instincts never died, Heather acknowledged, shaking her head at the collie as she crouched, belly down, on the crisp frosted field.
It was just the right sort of evening for a brisk walk, the sort of evening she would normally have thoroughly enjoyed. She knew that her parents sometimes worried about her solitary state; her mother was constantly urging her to join in the village’s extremely varied social gatherings, but so far she had not experienced any desire to find a mate and settle down, and she knew herself well enough to accept that a string of casual relationships was not for her.
She was frightened of committing herself in a male-to-female relationship, she knew that. Her experiences of the intensity and depth of her capability for emotion had affected her in the same way a small child reacts to an accidental burn when faced with the threat of a real fire: she shied away, apprehensive and alarmed, remembering past pain.
