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And flattered you, Amanda thought suddenly, but didn’t say it.
She sat staring at the carpet while her mother continued her diatribe, naming Nigel’s manifold perfections and desirability as a son-in-law.
She wished she could tell her the whole story, but it was impossible. The first thing her mother would want to know would be why she’d gone to Calthorpe in the first place. And that was unanswerable. One of the cornerstones of Mrs Con-roy’s philosophy was that unmarried people did not sleep together. The permissive society had only served to strengthen this firmly held belief, although Amanda suspected with wry affection that, as far as her mother was concerned, sex, even for married people, was not a major priority.
A broken engagement was enough of a disappointment for her mother to cope with. Mrs Conroy didn’t need to know that her only child had been about to kick over the traces so shamelessly.
Suddenly Mrs Conroy paused, and stared up at the ceiling. ‘There’s someone moving around upstairs.’
‘Only Mr Ambrose. He’s mending a broken window in my room.’
Mrs Conroy’s eyes widened. ‘How on earth…?’
‘I was doing some cleaning, and I had a slight accident, that’s all.’ Somehow, her mother had to be protected from the truth here, too.
‘Oh, I don’t understand any of this.’ Her mother looked on the verge of tears. ‘You seem determined to smash everything about you,’ she added unfairly. ‘And you don’t even consider the work you’re giving me. All kinds of arrangements will have to be cancelled—I only hope they haven’t actually started printing the invitations. It’s all too bad.’
Amanda touched her shoulder. ‘Why don’t you put your feet up, and let me make you some tea?’ she urged gently. I’m sorry you’ve taken it like this, but you’ve got to believe that I can’t be happy with Nigel. And I’d really rather not talk about it any more.‘
It was a miserable weekend, Mrs Conroy kept her verbal reproaches to herself, but the long-suffering looks and sighs she sent in Amanda’s direction were almost worse than a direct onslaught.
Amanda went for a long walk, and on Saturday afternoon occupied herself with some furious digging in the garden, using her inevitable weariness as an excuse for an early night.
She awoke on Sunday morning to the drowsy reflection that she only had a few more hours of silent recrimination to endure before she could go back to London and lose herself in her job. She wondered sleepily what her flatmates would have to say about her broken engagement and decided that, although Fiona and Maggie would treat it as a nine-day wonder, Jane wouldn’t be altogether surprised.
She was shocked out of her somnolence by her mother’s thin, wavering scream from downstairs.
What’s Nigel done now? was Amanda’s first thought as she threw back the bedclothes. Probably a dead cat through the letter-box!
But the hall seemed mercifully free of felines, alive or dead, as she arrived downstairs, tightening the sash of her robe. Mrs Conroy seemed to be confronted by nothing more startling than the Sunday papers.
‘What in the world…?’ Amanda began wearily, then stopped as her mother turned horrified eyes on her.
‘Amanda,’ she said emotionally. ‘Oh, dear God—the scandal—the disgrace! I can’t believe it.’
‘What can’t you believe?’ Amanda was totally bewildered.
Mrs Conroy thrust a paper at her with a trembling hand. ‘Read it,’ she said with a sob. ‘See what you’ve done.’
The tabloid headlines were quite unequivocal. ‘Rally-driver’s heartbreak!’ screamed one. And ‘Jilted Nigel says, “I forgive her,” another proclaimed.’
Nausea rose in Amanda’s throat. She whispered, ‘He couldn’t have done this. Oh, God, he couldn’t…’
She began to scan the first story with feverish concentration. ‘While rally-driver Nigel Templeton was celebrating a personal best at Calthorpe this week, he was unaware that heartache awaited in his love-life’ the opening paragraph ran emotively. ‘For his fiance, lovely twenty-year-old Amanda Conroy, was enjoying a secret love-tryst with Nigel’s own brother, Malory Templeton, millionaire owner of Templeton Laboratories. And yesterday, a stunned Nigel revealed that the couple intend to wed.’
‘Oh, my God!’ Amanda couldn’t read any more.
Mrs Conroy was weeping openly. ‘Poor Nigel, poor boy. No wonder you didn’t want to apologise to him. You were too ashamed. Meeting his brother in “a hideaway love-nest”.’ She invested the words with horrified scorn, then struck the paper she was reading with her fist.
