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It was only when she was halfway down the aisle with her shopping trolley that she realised that she was still trembling. You’re over-reacting, she warned herself, but that warning did no good. She wasn’t used to being the object of people’s prurient speculation and curiosity and she discovered that she did not care for the idea that she might be.
She loathed the thought of people talking about her and Silas—discussing them with the same kind of cynical destructive cruelty with which she had heard them discussing others. It made her feel besmirched, dirty—it made her feel… She shook her head, telling herself she was behaving like a fool, but the feelings of anger and misery Sheila’s comments had caused refused to go away. They were still with her several hours later, when Silas walked into the kitchen just when she was in the middle of preparing supper.
The unexpectedness of seeing him, when she had grown accustomed to his spending most of the day away from the house, made her freeze.
‘Is something wrong?’ he queried frowningly, looking at her.
‘I just wasn’t expecting to see you.’
‘No, I can see that,’ he agreed, and there was a note in his voice that made her tense even more, a bitter, almost derisory note that was so unlike his normal manner that it was as abrasive, as harsh as sandpaper against her sensitive nerves.
‘I came back because there’s something I want to tell you.’
She stopped what she was doing and watched him. Her heart was already beating far too fast. She was aware of a sensation of doom, of misery hanging over her. She wanted to stop him from speaking, from telling her whatever it was he wanted to say, because she knew already that it was something she did not want to hear.
‘I’ve found somewhere else to stay.’
He said it abruptly, challengingly almost, so that the shock of it was increased.
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t react at all, other than to stare at him in stunned silence.
‘It seemed to be the best thing to do in the circumstances,’ he added roughly when she didn’t respond. ‘I’ll move my stuff out this evening.’
Hazel knew she ought to say something, make some response, but she simply could not trust herself to speak. If she did she was terrified that she would simply go to pieces and break down completely, but she had to say something, had to pretend that she didn’t care, that she didn’t mind—that he wasn’t tearing her heart apart. The habits of a lifetime, ingrained so deeply by her father, flooded through her now, and she heard herself saying in an unfamiliar, metallic-clad voice, ‘I won?
??t make you any supper, then.’
The banality of what she was saying made her want to scream out loud with hysteria, but somehow she just managed to restrain herself, to stop herself from doing so.
Silas was going, leaving. And it was all her fault. All her fault. If she hadn’t reacted like a fool—if she hadn’t shown him so plainly how totally besotted she was with him… But what was the point of berating herself now? What was the point of trying to cling on? Where was her pride, her self-sufficiency? Where was her backbone?
CHAPTER EIGHT
IT WAS a question she was forced to ask herself over and over again in the twenty-four hours that followed, and she was forced to watch in silence while Silas loaded his things into his car, and then gravely sought her out to thank her for everything she had done for him.
Just before he left, he moved towards her, almost as though he was going to take her in his arms, but immediately he checked the gesture, turning on his heel and leaving without even saying a formal goodbye.
She waited until she was sure he had gone before giving way to her grief. Not in floods of tears, but in a silent anguished agony, which had her curling her body into a tightly withdrawn ball and rocking it silently back and forth as she tried to find some means of easing the agony she was suffering.
Just before he had left, Silas had given her his address, just in case, he had told her, she needed to get in touch with him for anything.
He was apparently renting an empty cottage several miles away in a small village.
He had paused just before he left, as though there was something he wanted to say to her, but she had turned her back on him, and so he had gone.
What after all could he have to offer her apart from his pity, which was the last thing she wanted?
It took her three days to pull herself together sufficiently to return to her work, albeit in a lacklustre, unenthusiastic manner, but it was marginally better than lying in bed for half the day, unwilling to open her eyes and face up to life, and then staying up until well into the early hours because she was too emotionally wrought up to sleep.
What she needed, she told herself, was a simple but strict routine, rather like someone recovering from an extremely debilitating illness, which was after all what she was doing, wasn’t it? Only as far as she could see recovery was still merely an impossible chimera—the best she could hope for was simply to exist.
She was glad that Katie hadn’t telephoned. She didn’t think she would be able to conceal her emotional condition from her daughter, and the last thing she wanted was to upset or worry her, and then, three days after Silas had left, and just as she was promising herself that this evening she would have her supper, do some work on her latest commission and then go to bed at a reasonable time, she heard a car pulling up outside.
Her senses were so acutely attuned that they recognised the sound of Silas’s car engine immediately.
Telling herself that it was impossible, that he couldn’t have come back, she tensed, staring avidly at the back door.
When she saw his familiar shape passing the kitchen window, she panicked and would have turned and fled if he hadn’t already seen her.
