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      ‘And where is he?’ he asked stonily.

      ‘Gone to the vet’s with the dog.’

      ‘The blasted man could have called and asked us to drive up another day,’ he muttered darkly to Alice, not much caring whether the girl at the door heard or not.

      ‘A bit of an emergency, it was,’ the girl explained helpfully, straightening up. ‘Anna, that’s the dog, got into some bother with one of the fences out towards the paddocks and the vet said to bring her down immediately. He should be back, he said, in about forty minutes and in the meantime I’m to show you where you’ll be staying.’

      She had now turned her frank appraisal to Alice, but after a few seconds she resumed her fascinated inspection of Victor, who had stuck his hands in his pockets and was scowling.

      ‘Brought any bags?’ the girl said brightly, and Alice smiled at her. It wasn’t her fault that she had to deliver a perfectly acceptable message to someone whose tolerance level of other people was close to zero. It had also cheered her up, momentarily, not to be confronted with James.

      ‘In the car,’ she said. ‘Shall we fetch them?’

      ‘And I’ll show you up. By the way,’ the girl said, focusing a little more on Alice and steering clear of the gloweringly silent Victor, ‘I’m Jen. I come up here to clean twice a week.’

      ‘Must take you for ever,’ Alice said as Victor strode towards the car to get their bags. ‘I’m surprised there aren’t any...staff...’ What on earth happened to all of them?

      ‘Used to be. God, I hate chewing-gum after a while.’ She removed a piece of tissue from her jeans pocket, folded the chewing-gum inside it, and returned it to her pocket. ‘But now there’s just me, and of course the gardeners. Actually, it’s not too bad. I only have to clean part of the house; the rest is closed off. And James, that’s Mr Claydon, isn’t fussy. In fact, he’s hardly up here. Comes and goes. You know.’

      She led the way up the stairs, relishing the break in whatever it was she had been doing, chatting interminably the whole way up and finally depositing them in their bedrooms.

      ‘I’ll be seeing you later,’ she said cheerfully to Alice, who looked around her room, grateful that it had not been her old one.

      ‘What?’ She looked vaguely at Jen.

      ‘I’m here for a couple of days. Cooking, you know.’ She propped herself against the door-frame and grinned. ‘Home economics was the only thing I did well at school. My cooking’s a darn sight better than my cleaning.’ She flicked the duster unenergetically at the door-frame as though swatting a fly. ‘More fun, too.’

      As soon as she had disappeared, Alice positioned herself by the bedroom window and sat on the windowseat, staring out. The house, she thought, hadn’t changed internally at all. It didn’t seem as though even an ornament had been rearranged. But thoughts of the house were not on her mind. She wanted to wait for James. As soon as his car pulled up, she intended to run down to meet him so that she could steer him clear of mentioning anything to Victor that might indicate that they once knew each other. That, she decided, had the saving grace of both safeguarding a part of her life which she had no intention of exposing, and doing away with the awkwardness of a meeting neither of them would have wanted.

      She had rehearsed the conversation in her head a million times by the time the Range Rover pulled up outside. It seemed like for ever, but when she looked at her watch she realised that it had been under forty minutes.

      For a few seconds she watched as he got out of the car, released the dog from the boot; then she headed down the stairs quickly, taking them two at a time and looking around to make sure that she wasn’t being observed by Victor.

      Why, she wondered, did it matter so much whether Victor found out about her past or not? Everyone had a past and nearly everyone’s past had a skeleton of sorts in it.

      But, for some reason, it did. For some reason she found the idea of him knowing too much about her unsettling. It was as if some part of her suspected that if the distance between them was eroded, then something would be unleashed, although she wasn’t sure what.

      She almost ran into James as he was tossing his jacket over the huge mahogany table in the hall. He spun around at the sound of her footsteps, no doubt expecting it to be Jen, and whatever it was he had been about to say became a strangled gasp of shock. They stared at one another, speechless, and finally he said. ‘My God! Alice Carter! What on earth are you doing here?’

      Confronting your fears was always easier than fearing the confrontation. Alice looked at him and thought, He’s just a man, a jigsaw piece in a puzzle that has its place amongst all the other pieces. And her memories of him had somehow given him a status that reality, now, was quickly dissipating. He was neither as tall nor as good-looking as she had remembered. He looked weaker than she remembered, less of a force to be reckoned with. She hardly even felt bitter now, although time might well have succeeded in accomplishing that.

      ‘I have to have a word with you, James,’ she said urgently, glancing over her shoulder.

      ‘But what...what are you doing here?’ He looked dazed.

      ‘In the kitchen,’ Alice said, grabbing his arm and halfpulling him in the general direction of the kitchen.

      She half-expected to find Jen there, relaxing with a cup of coffee and probably smoking a cigarette, but when they got there it was empty. She looked around her, struck by the familiarity and the strangeness of it all. The same weathered bottle-green Aga, the same solid wooden units, the same huge pine table, even. Nothing was out of place. It looked as though it was seldom used, as no doubt was the case if what his cleaner had said was true.

      ‘I can’t believe it’s you, Ali,’ he said, regaining his power of coherent speech. ‘My God, you’ve changed. You’ve had your hair cut!’ He made it sound as though, in four years, having one’s hair cut was a reckless adventure.

      ‘Sit down, James.’

      He sat down and continued to stare at her in the manner of someone who was looking at a ghost. The fact that he had been caught off guard also helped to boost her confidence. She had spent days agonising over what her reaction would be when she finally saw him for the first time in years, dreading the memories that would surface. A sense of purpose had melted all that into the background.

      ‘You look great,’ he said, observing her with the same boyish enthusiasm that had won her over in the first place; except now it did nothing for her at all. Oh, he had been enthusiastic all right, until it had come to the crunch. Was it any wonder that her impressions of men tended to be a little jaded? If and when she ever found a man, she would make sure that he was a solid, dependable type. Charm was something that she would steer well clear of.

      ‘I’m here with Victor Temple,’ Alice said, cutting short any temptation he might have had to go over old times. ‘I work for him.’

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