AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Tomorrow whe would have to do some shopping. She could do it after she had dropped the girls off at school…which reminded her…
She went upstairs and knocked briefly on the school-room door before walking in.
‘Washing,’ she announced briefly. ‘I need to wash some of my own things tomorrow. Lara, my flatmate, is going to send on the rest of my clothes, but until they arrive I’m stuck with what I’ve brought with me. And while we’re on the subject…what kind of routine did Mrs Nesbitt have?’
‘Routine?’ Susie queried, nibbling the end of her pen. Her hair needed trimming, Maggie noticed absently, and perhaps even reshaping in a different style. Her school skirt was also far too short, almost indecently so.
‘Yes, you know…when did she do the shopping and the washing? Which days?’
Susie’s forehead cleared.
‘Oh…oh, she didn’t have one. She just did things when she felt like doing them, didn’t she, Sara?’
Maggie was astounded that Marcus had put up with such a ramshackle state of affairs, especially when she remembered the way in which his mother had run the house.
It seemed that she had taken on a bigger task than she had imagined. She would be needed for four years, Marcus had warned her, and suddenly her mouth quirked in unexpected amusement. Four years to teach them all the feminine skills it had taken her half a lifetime to learn? Well, why not? It would give her a purpose in life…a cause…a reason for being. It would answer a need in her which had remained hungry and unappeased for far too long. She would enjoy being a surrogate mother to these cousins of hers, she recognised on a sudden shaft of self-knowledge. They would fill the space in her heart left empty by the children of her own she would never have. She was needed here and she needed to be here, and she wasn’t going to let anyone or anything drive her away.
CHAPTER FIVE
IT WAS almost ten o’clock before she was free to make her way to the study in response to Marcus’s earlier command. The reason for the delay had nothing to do with any reluctance on her part to face Marcus alone, she reassured herself as she went downstairs.
During term-time the girls were apparently expected to start preparing for bed at about ten o’clock unless some special occasion necessitated them staying up later, and she had, of course, needed to find out from them as much about their everyday routine as she could, which had kept her upstairs in the school-room with them until almost ten.
Their rooms were not on the same floor as hers, but one floor above, the nursery floor, where they had apparently been quite happy to remain. They had separate rooms, but shared a bathroom and a room which had originally been their playroom, but which they now referred to as the ‘den’. It was comfortably furnished, with an ancient, sagging settee and two equally old chairs, and although Maggie’s housewifely eye noticed that the same film of dust so much in evidence downstairs covered this room as well, she remembered enough of her own teenage years not to make any comment.
Pop records and tapes jostled quite happily for space alongside more classical music; a pair of tennis racquets in their presses were leaning up against one of the walls; what looked like at least half a dozen assorted pairs of tennis shoes were discarded next to them.
Both girls rode and played tennis, but it was Sara, the younger sister, who had the musical ear, Susie explained to her as she talked to them, drawing them out about their hobbies and how they spent their spare time.
It was obvious from their conversation that they both thoroughly enjoyed attending their local convent school. Although they were in different classes, they both seemed to have a large circle of friends, certainly far more than she could ever remember having, and in fact they were both extremely well-rounded and mature young people. Far more so than she remembered being at the same age.
It appalled her now to recollect that at sixteen, Susie’s age, she had been so firmly convinced of her love for Marcus that her whole world had narrowed down so that she had virtually excluded everyone else from it.
The death of her parents when she was just entering her teens, the fact that she had been too shy to make many new friends at her new school, the shocking deaths of her aunt and uncle, her grandfather’s poor health…all these things had exacerbated the situation, but the original fault had lain with her, a massive fault in her personality, which had enabled her to blinker herself to reality.
She recalled abruptly one hot summer’s day some time after the death of her aunt and uncle. Marcus was working in the garden, shirt off, the sunlight playing on the hard muscles of his back and arms. She had been sitting watching him, totally absorbed in greedily filling her senses with the sight and scent of him…so much so that she hadn’t realised they had a visitor until Mrs Hayes, the then vicar’s wife, had touched her on her shoulder.
She remembered how she had spun round in shock and anger, not wanting anyone to interrupt her precious moments with Marcus. She had given the vicar’s wife a fierce look of resentment as she stood up, and it was only now, with the maturity and wisdom of her much older self, that she was able to realise that the look she had surprised on Mrs Hayes’s face had been one of intense concern. A kind-hearted woman, she had called quite frequently in those early days of her aunt and uncle’s death, Maggie remembered. She had even suggested that Maggie might like to stay at the vicarage for a while. The older woman had perhaps seen the danger which Maggie herself had been totally oblivious to, in her intense devotion to Marcus.
She remembered how she had burst into tears the moment Marcus had suggested the visit, demanding to know why he wanted to send her away. He had always hated to see her crying, and she had known it and played on that knowledge, she admitted wryly, and of course the visit had never materialised. Perhaps her whole life would have been different if it had. She might have found a good friend in the vicar’s wife, and that friendship might have distracted her from her emotional dependence on Marcus.
Thank goodness neither Susie nor Sara showed any signs of sharing her own teenage intensity. They were much better adjust
ed than she had ever been…everything that parents always hoped their teenage daughters might be, although she suspected they were quite capable of the odd tantrum and sulk now and again.
At the moment she and they were very much in the honeymoon period of their relationship. It remained to be seen how they would get along when they had had more opportunity to get to know one another. She had fortunately had some experience of teenage girls, having worked for a brief space of time some years earlier at a private school in London, taking the art classes during the illness of the regular art teacher. That experience had helped her to see how very abnormal in many ways her own teenage life had been, centred exclusively as it had been on Marcus and Deveril.
That had been her fault and not his. There had been opportunities for her to make friends, but she had shunned them all, so very protective and possessive of her relationship with Marcus, so determined that one day he was going to look at her and return her love, that she had deliberately excluded everyone else from her life. That was why it had been so easy for her to slip from reality into fantasy…into a world where Marcus did, in fact, already love her…and not as a child, but as a woman. And once she had found the door to that fantasy world, she had opened it more and more often, so that there had eventually come a time when in her subconscious mind the fantasy became fact.
She now saw that time, that experience as a dark pit from which she had only just managed to drag herself free. She shuddered a little as she closed the girls’ sitting-room door behind her and headed for the stairs. What would have happened to her if it hadn’t been for the catalyst of Marcus announcing his engagement? Would she have gone on deluding herself until eventually… Her mouth went dry as she contemplated the consequences of such folly.
It was two floors down to the study. It had been in that room that Marcus had told her that he was going to get engaged, and with those words had broken the spell of her fantasy world for her.
She had screamed out at him that it was impossible, that he loved her, and her grandfather, passing outside the room, had come in, and she had turned to him and begged him to stop Marcus from betraying her.
She stood at the top of the stairs with her hand on the worn wooden rail, lost in the past. She had said things that even now she couldn’t bear to recall…made allegations in the furnace of her passion and pain which, had they been true… She shuddered coldly. But of course they hadn’t been true, and Marcus had forced her to admit as much. And she, unable to bear not just the burden of the truth but the added and far heavier burdens of her grandfather’s shock and Marcus’s hatred, had fled rather than face up to reality.
Reality had its own way of making itself felt, though, and in London she had been forced to come to terms with what she had done…to leave behind her comfortable fantasy world and see life as it really was.
