Forbidden Places Page 3

  ‘Well, that would be very kind. If you’re sure—’

  ‘Of course. Follow me.’

  He led her through some French windows into the drawing room, which, although very nicely furnished and with a fine fireplace, was rather less grand than she, and certainly her mother, would have expected, and out into the hall where the phone stood on a low table alongside a very large pile of Country Life.

  ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘go ahead. Look’ – he hesitated – ‘we might even go for a drive before I take you home. If that would be all right with your parents.’

  ‘Oh – well yes,’ said Grace, more relieved that he wasn’t dying to get rid of her than anything else. ‘Yes, I’ll ask them.’

  They drove away from the house in silence, down the narrow, high-hedged lanes. It was a lovely evening. ‘I thought we might go up to Old Wardour,’ said Charles. ‘Would you like that?’

  ‘Yes. Yes I would.’

  Old Wardour Castle was a much-revered local ruin, set high on a hill above the exquisite house built in the eighteenth century to replace it; its walls still standing, it looked austerely beautiful against the dusky sky.

  ‘Nice old place, isn’t it?’ said Charles. ‘I used to come up here on my pony when I got home from school every holidays, first thing I did. Did you have anywhere like that?’

  ‘I used to head for Shaftesbury and the bright lights,’ said Grace. ‘On the bus,’ she added and laughed.

  ‘You mustn’t mind my mother,’ he said suddenly. ‘She can’t help being such a snob. It was how she was brought up. But she’s a wonderful person really.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t mind,’ said Grace untruthfully. ‘I thought she was very nice. And your father. He was so sweet showing me his garden.’

  ‘Yes, he obviously liked you. So did old Robert. Bit of a wandering eye, Robert. Florence has a rather difficult time with him, as far as I can gather.’

  ‘Does she?’ said Grace. It seemed to her it would be Robert who had a difficult time.

  ‘Yes. Oh God, I shouldn’t have told you that. There’s something about you’, he said, looking at her intently, ‘that invites confidences. My father obviously felt it too.’

  ‘Is there?’ said Grace. She felt herself blushing.

  ‘Yes. You’re what the Italians call simpatico. Ever been to Italy?’

  ‘No. I’ve never been abroad. I’d love to.’

  ‘Well, if all this nonsense in Europe gets any worse, it won’t be safe to go anyway. My father thinks war’s inevitable.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Grace.

  ‘No, not really. Not inevitable anyway. I think Chamberlain might be a slightly better man than he’s given credit for. What does your father think?’

  ‘The same as yours,’ said Grace. She waited for him to ask what she thought, but he didn’t.

  On the way home, they passed the gates of Old Wardour Cemetery, final resting place for the Arundell Estate and indeed the entire village of Wardour.

  ‘That’s my favourite place,’ said Grace, looking in at it almost wistfully, the iron gates, the tangle of trees, the ghostly clusters of headstones.

  ‘What, the cemetery? Bit of an odd place to like,’ said Charles, sounding amused.

  Grace flushed. ‘I know. But I think it’s so romantic. And beautiful.’

  ‘Well – yes, OK. Each to their own, I suppose.’ He smiled at her. ‘Got time for a drink?’

  ‘Oh, yes. That would be very nice.’ They had a couple of drinks in a pub near Swallowcliffe, and then Charles drove her home.

  ‘I would ask you in but—’ said Grace.

  ‘No, no, of course not. I have to get back. My mother expects me and anyway I have an early start tomorrow. When you work with – for, who am I kidding? – your father there’s no room for slacking. And we’ve got a big caseload at the moment.’

  ‘Do you enjoy being a solicitor?’ said Grace.

  ‘Yes, it’s quite good fun,’ he said, ‘and especially in a small town like Shaftesbury. The firm’ll be mine one day, of course, and I look forward to that. Especially the London practice. That’s great fun.’

  ‘How often do you go up there?’ said Grace.

  ‘Oh, not very often, unfortunately. Father goes up for a couple of days each week, and it’s my job to keep the home fires burning. But in the fullness of time I hope to spend quite a lot of time up there. I’ll be making a few changes altogether.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh good Lord, you don’t want to hear about that. Look, I ought to get you back. Thank you so much for coming over today. It’s been a very good afternoon.’

  ‘Thank you for asking me,’ said Grace.

  He shook her hand and she got out of the car; there was no mention of another meeting. Grace let herself into the house feeling just slightly depressed.

  ‘Before you say a word,’ she said to her mother who was hovering excitedly in the hall, ‘I really don’t think he likes me very much, his mother is an old witch, and his sister made it clear that she saw me as so much beneath her I had no business even in the same room. Which I suppose I am. Beneath her I mean,’ she added, trying to smile.

  ‘How exceedingly rude,’ said Betty Marchant. Two bright spots of colour rose in her cheeks; she was clearly upset. ‘Well, I certainly don’t want you marrying into that family.’

  ‘Mother,’ said Grace wearily, ‘I do assure you there is absolutely no question of my marrying into it. Unless perhaps I ran away with dear old Mr Bennett.’

  ‘Grace, you know I don’t like that kind of talk,’ said Betty Marchant.

  Clifford Bennett was in his study listening to the nine o’clock news when the phone rang in the hall. ‘I’ll get that,’ he called to Muriel. ‘Worried client. Told him he could ring tonight.’

  Five minutes later he went into the drawing room, where Muriel sat by the fire working on her latest tapestry, a design of her own, based on her father’s coat of arms.

  ‘I have to go up to London first thing, Moo my dear. Catch the milk train, I think. Just thought I’d warn you.’

  ‘The milk train! What on earth for? And why a Monday, you never—’

  ‘I told you I have a very worried client. Difficult case. I want to see him early and then brief Counsel.’

  ‘Clifford, I do think it’s time you eased up a little on your workload,’ said Muriel. ‘You’re sixty next year. And you seem to be taking more and more on. You did say you were going to ease out of the London office, train Charles into it, but I haven’t seen much sign of that.’

  ‘I know, my dear, I know. But John Reeves is desperately overstretched, poor old boy. And, between you and me, a bit out of his depth, particularly on this case. It’s a most interesting one, a matter of fraud, my client took out a life assurance policy two and a half years ago and—’

  ‘Clifford, you’re in my light. Well, go if you must. But I think you really must be firmer with John Reeves in future. He’s taking advantage of your good nature.’

  ‘All right, my dear. I’ll try.’ He paused, sipping at his whisky. ‘Sweet little thing this afternoon, wasn’t she?’

  ‘What, the Marchant girl? All right, I suppose. A bit – ordinary. I wish Charles could find himself some really suitable girl and settle down. Amanda Bridgnorth for instance, she’s charming, and so pretty, and she looks wonderful on horseback—’

  ‘Moo dear, I hope and trust Charles would be looking for a little more in a future wife than her skill on horseback. And I would personally greatly prefer Grace Marchant as a daughter-in-law to Amanda Bridgnorth.’

  ‘Oh, don’t let’s even think about the possibility,’ said Muriel with a small careful shiver. ‘I can just imagine what her mother must be like. Apparently she makes curtains for people.’

  ‘Moo, really!’ said Clifford, shaking his head even as he smiled at her. ‘I’m going to do some work on this case now. I’ll sleep in the dressing room tonight, so I don’t disturb you in the morning. Goodnight, my dear.’<
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  He went back into his study and phoned the London number, to confirm that he would be there in the morning.

  ‘I don’t think I want to do that again,’ said Robert Grieg, putting his foot down rather hard on the accelerator as the car finally pulled onto the London road.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Come all this way, just for a weekend. It’s too far, and I’m exhausted in the morning.’

  ‘But Robert, we don’t do it very often. The last time was Easter, when we could have stayed longer. And it was you who didn’t want to—’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I find it very tedious, after a day or so. I really don’t like the country—’

  ‘Robert, you like going to the Whittakers. Or the Bedfords. They live in the country.’

  ‘Yes, well, they have a little more to offer. They always arrange a proper dinner party, and there are plenty of people our own age. The entertainment at Thorpe is listening to your mother’s views on life and watching your father in the garden.’

  ‘That is so unfair!’ said Florence. ‘They often ask people to dinner, or Sunday lunch, and you can always play tennis.’

  ‘Florence, I loathe tennis, as you ought to know. And the people on offer are hardly the most scintillating. Look at that funny little thing today.’

  ‘She was all right.’

  ‘You didn’t behave towards her as if she was all right, if I might say so. Anyway, that’s not the point. Now can we stop this please, it’s extremely boring. I really don’t want to spend any more weekends down there. All right?’

  ‘What do I say if – when they ask us?’

  ‘Well, obviously, make some excuse. They must be able to see it’s a long way.’

  Florence stopped arguing. She had learnt the value of silence.

  Chapter 2

  Summer 1938

  Grace was beginning to think she might be in love.

  She had done a lot of reading of romantic fiction lately, including the book everyone was talking about, Gone with the Wind, to try to compare how the heroines felt with what she was experiencing, and had even reread Jane Eyre in search of more lofty descriptions, and while she didn’t think what she felt for Charles was quite the fierce passion nurtured by Scarlett O’Hara for Ashley Wilkes or by Jane for Mr Rochester, she was certainly aware of a whole new set of emotions: longing when she was going to see him, a lovely warm happiness and a feeling of rightness when they were together, and a strange, choking tenderness when he held her hand and just looked at her and didn’t say anything. She liked being kissed by him too; it was an awful lot nicer than when her other boyfriends had done it, when she had, quite honestly, found it a bit disgusting, the tongue bit anyway.

  With Charles it was different; his mouth was firm and strong, and she felt her own responding under it in a way that was almost unconscious, and not only her mouth, but her whole body; she felt warmed and sweet and somehow softened, it was impossible to explain, and he was clearly very moved by it too. He would lean away from her afterwards in the seat of the car or in the long grass up by the castle which had become their special place, and just look at her, his eyes probing into hers, and she would feel, even more than when he was actually kissing her, a wonderful flooding tenderness and something else, something stronger, something physically strange, a kind of moving in the depths of her. She supposed that was how you felt, only more so, when you actually Did it, as they had called it at school when they were talking about it. She thought about Doing it rather a lot these days; for the first time she could actually imagine wanting to, and her mother’s rather halting and embarrassed descriptions (over more than one glass of sherry) began to make some kind of sense.

  Charles hadn’t actually told her he loved her, of course; she only knew that when they were together he was very romantic. But it had been from the very beginning erratic, to put it mildly. There had been the first few bleak days after the tennis game, when she had been quite sure she would never see him or hear from him again, that she was far too dull and unsophisticated for him, that he had only asked her because someone else had dropped out. Then on the Thursday evening, as she sat unpicking the hem of a dress that was beginning to look unfashionably long, the phone rang and it was him.

  ‘Hallo,’ he said, ‘this is Charles Bennett’ – as if she needed to be told; ‘I wondered if you’d like to go and see a film on Friday.’ And she had for a fraction of a second considered saying she was busy as everybody always said you should, because sounding too available scared them off, and then she knew she couldn’t and she thanked him for asking her and said she’d love to.

  They had sat in the cinema in Shaftesbury, surrounded by couples kissing or at least holding hands, and he had sat most politely away from her and then afterwards had driven her home, chatting about this and that, and she was just thinking despairingly that he really couldn’t like her very much, and certainly didn’t find her attractive, when he had stopped the car, leant forward and said, ‘You’re so pretty, Grace, may I kiss you?’

  She hadn’t said anything, just smiled uncertainly, and he had kissed her, very gently, and then said, ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ and she had said, ‘Nothing whatsoever!’ and he had said he would like to take her out to dinner. They went to the Grosvenor in Shaftesbury, which was very expensive and grand, and where her father was taken at Christmas by really important customers but she and her mother had never been, and she had got rather drunk after a sherry and two glasses of wine, and when he had kissed her in the car that night it had been quite different for both of them.

  ‘I hope this is all right,’ he said to her tenderly, breaking off after a while, and she said it was quite all right, more than all right, and he had smiled and started again. That was the first time she had felt the strange moving in the depths of her.

  And so it all began. But it was never quite the straightforward affair that her friends seemed to enjoy: daily phone calls, twice-weekly outings, the assumption that they were, informally at least, a unit. There were times when she didn’t hear from him at all for up to ten days, others when he wanted to see her almost every night. He was always rather vague about his absences; very often of course they were because he had to go to London, to the legal practice up there, but there were other times when she knew he was around and he made no attempt to contact her, she would see the MG parked outside the offices in Shaftesbury day after day, and feel sick. Sick with misery and sick with jealousy. Grace was in any case very easily given to jealousy; it was, she knew, the flaw in her otherwise sweet nature. She became jealous not only when boyfriends danced and flirted with other girls, but when girlfriends excluded her – however innocently – from some outing, or she heard her boss praising one of the other secretaries at work. It was partly due to her lack of self-confidence, but also to a desire to have a special place in the hearts of everyone about her; from her earliest years she had come to recognize and dread the slightly sour hot misery that took her over, distorting her perception of things, destroying an otherwise happy occasion. And she found herself enduring it rather a lot at the moment, at Charles Bennett’s rather cavalier hands.

  In the early stages, she was sure that each time he had simply lost interest in her, that he was going out with someone else, probably several girls, she would think morosely; after all he was extremely eligible, free as air, there was absolutely no reason for him to launch into some kind of commitment with her, just because he had taken her out once or twice. Sometimes she got angry, swore she wouldn’t see him again, would listen to her mother and her friends telling her he was playing around with her, that she should show him she wasn’t prepared to put up with it, and sometimes she would defend him, to herself as well as other people, saying they enjoyed each other’s company, they had a good time, why should either of them feel they had some kind of a hold on the other?

  But she did like him, very much, and she liked being with him; it was hard to say no, to risk losing him just for the sake of her pride, when
he always said he was sorry he hadn’t contacted her, he’d been in London, or Bath, at the courts there, or just very busy. It was easier to believe him, to laugh, to perhaps tease him a bit and then say yes, she’d love to go to the cinema or whatever. And there certainly wasn’t any evidence of other girls: not that she’d know, she supposed miserably when her spirits were low and she hadn’t heard from him for a week or more; she was hardly in the same set as he was. She was more curious about girlfriends he might have had in the past, but he was very cagey about those, discouraged her whenever she tried to ask him, so she told herself it was nothing to do with her, and tried not to think about it.

  So she settled for enjoying what she could – which was quite a lot of the time very nice and great fun – and struggled to keep her pride intact. They both liked the cinema and he took her to all the latest films; he didn’t like music at all, which she found sad, but they occasionally went to the theatre in Bath, they went out in the car for drives and he had begun to give her some rudimentary lessons, which was wonderful and very generous, she felt, as she was quite likely to drive the MG into a tree. If anything was to convince her she was more than just a bit of amusement to him, it was the way he put his beloved car in her hands – literally. And they both liked sitting in pubs and just talking – she found him surprisingly easy to talk to, and he was certainly interesting to listen to; he had wonderful stories about past cases of his father’s and even his own, ‘but mine are pretty mundane still, most of the time,’ about his childhood, which seemed to have been very happy, about his schooldays at Harrow – ‘great place, a real privilege to have gone.’ And then he would take her out to dinner at least once a month, somewhere expensive, and tell her she was the nicest, the prettiest, the most interesting girl he knew, and there would be a great deal of kissing in the car on the way home, and she would lie in bed afterwards thinking how lucky she was, and wondering why she had to look for more when what she had was so nice.

  And Charles was not only romantic and fun and charming and attentive, but extremely gentlemanly; he clearly enjoyed kissing her, but he had never tried to do anything else, anything worrying. She was never afraid when they were alone up by the castle or in the car late at night that he would get Carried Away (an event which several of her friends and her mother had rather darkly hinted at). Sometimes, when they were especially close, she would feel his hand on her thigh, an intent probing pressure that was pleasurably and sweetly disturbing, but that was only through her dress; he had never tried to push it up, or unbutton it. Once he had started to kiss her throat, begun to move down towards the top of her dress; she had felt just faintly worried then, but was enjoying it too much to let the worry take over, when he suddenly pulled away from her and said, ‘I’m sorry, Grace, sorry, it’s just that you’re so lovely.’