LITMIR.BIZ

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had very occasionally been known to join one or two of the old regulars, but only for an anniversary perhaps, or for a birthday celebration: once or twice because they were so rich or famous that refusal would have been professionally undiplomatic. And of course, Alex did see them, and the expression on his pleasant, fastidious face told her that he understood her better than she understood herself.

      Meanwhile, as if it was the most usual thing in the world, Steve rested a firm dry hand on her leg under the table, and she, after a moment’s witless hesitation, put her own on top of it; their fingers intertwined; the attraction between them was like a powerful spring pulling navel to navel. To Kate it was all bizarre, the more so because it seemed so natural. Well, for God’s sake, it was natural; and when they eventually found themselves in bed together she realized, as most women do if they ever encounter it, that until this moment she had known nothing about sex, either as airborne ecstasy or remorseless quagmire.

      Later, peering at her in half-darkness, he said, ‘Have you got a thing going with the boss?’

      ‘No. But he’s in love with me.’

      ‘Figures.’ And, frowning: ‘You’ll probably think this is bullshit, but I’ve never … felt quite like this before.’

      She did think it was bullshit, but she didn’t care. To her brother she said, ‘It’s hopeless, I’ve just … gone overboard.’

      ‘Had to happen, didn’t it?’ He leaned forward and, at his most gentle, added, ‘Katie, you’re a smashing girl. Don’t think I expect to have you all to myself forever.’

      The gentleness struck her like a blow in the face, knocking all thought of Steve right out of her mind. She flared up in sudden Kate-like anger: ‘What the hell are you talking about. No one, absolutely no one, ever, will make any difference to us!’ In anger she looked for a moment quite beautiful, which seemed to her brother to make the words even less believable. People who have been ill and in pain for a long time possess enormous reservoirs of patience and resignation upon which they can draw at any time; he was amused but not surprised that his sister didn’t yet realize this. Grandmother Lydia had realized it all right, because she shared it; that was why she had treated him as a grown man, even when he was fourteen.

      As so often, Kate was aware of what was in his mind; her eyes strayed back to the staircase. She said, ‘We weren’t all that interested, were we? I mean, we heard that she’d fallen downstairs and killed herself, we didn’t do anything about it.’

      ‘She was never very nice to us, not after Father died. And anyway, I was in hospital yet again, you were virtually running a busy hotel, and Mother was married to Colonel Alistair in Aberdeen.’

      ‘She was always beastly to Mother.’

      ‘Always.’

      ‘We didn’t even come down for the funeral.’

      ‘I’m not sure we were asked.’

      ‘I hate funerals anyway, but that’s not the point. How did it happen, Daniel? And why wasn’t Sally around? Suddenly I want to know.’

      ‘Then pop up to the big house and ask The Cousins, they’ve probably got all the answers.’

      ‘The Cousins’ was their generic term, dating from childhood, not only for Giles, Lucy and Miranda Ackland who were in fact their first cousins, but also for Uncle Mark Ackland and Aunt Helen Ackland, his wife. The appellation had gained considerably in meaning when Kate and Daniel had come to read John le Carré and could appreciate the subtle, faintly derogatory manner in which, according to that writer, British Intelligence referred to American Intelligence as ‘The Cousins’. It exactly fitted their own uneasy relationship with the rest of their family.

      In answer to her brother’s suggestion, Kate replied, ‘I don’t want to ask The Cousins.’

      ‘Ditto.’

      ‘I don’t even want to see The Cousins.’

      ‘Ditto.’

      And, in unison: ‘The Cousins are rat-shit. Amen.’

      It was the old childhood litany, and still, so many years later, it made them both laugh.

CHAPTER 2

      In her ignorance of passion—that unbroken maverick which can confound even the most cold-hearted—Kate was irritated to find that she could lie in bed, sleepless, her mind filled with one single and overwhelming desire: to feel Steve’s nakedness against her own.

      After a time, a long time, she found that she could exorcise him by fixing her mind on another persistent dilemma: that strange letter. What bee in her grandmother’s bonnet could have produced so agonized, even panic-stricken a reaction from the unknown R of Salisbury? ‘You’d be opening a disastrous Pandora’s Box … If you do decide to take steps, for God’s sake talk to Andrew first … perhaps he can convince you to let sleeping (and perhaps dangerous) dogs lie.’ And why had the writer thought it necessary to ask Sally to burn the letter? It said nothing specific, was in fact maddeningly indefinite.

      As for Daniel, he’d been teasing her when he’d said that if she wanted to know the answers to any mystifying questions concerning Lydia Ackland she had only to ask The Cousins. He knew as well as she did that old Lydia had never been on anything approaching good or intimate terms with her elder son, Mark—quite the reverse. Kate was vague as to the details; her parents had probably discussed them, but she had been ten at the time of her father’s death, and the antagonisms between the two brothers and, particularly, those between their mother and Mark would have fallen into the pas devant les enfants department; all the same, she’d gathered that the relationship had always been uncomfortable and could at times rise to savagery. No, there’d be no answers from The Cousins, even if she’d felt like asking any questions; and she didn’t.

      Thinking about her family—as an antidote to Steve who had come bounding into her life with a flash of lightning like something out of pantomime—she realized that in fact she knew very little. If Grandmother Lydia had doted on her younger son, Kate’s father, and hadn’t a good word to say for his elder brother, surely this meant that Mark, in his youth, must have behaved very badly indeed. Now, on consideration, it seemed more than possible that this behaviour had led to his departure from England, a long time before Kate herself was born. Had he gone into voluntary exile, or had his mother and father brought pressure to bear on a black sheep? Pressure from Grandfather Robert would have been gentle, therefore bearable; pressure from Grandmother Lydia would have been absolute, possibly virulent.

      He must have left some time in the late ’60s, shortly after his marriage to Helen, and had not come back until the 1980s, by which time his brother had been killed, and his mother (as a direct result of her favourite son’s death, Kate had heard it said) was going blind. The banishment, if that’s what it was, certainly had nothing to do with his marriage; Helen had been thoroughly ‘suitable’, coming as she did from one of the grander, if impecunious, families in the south of England.

      All this was, to Kate, old old history, made more distant by her ignorance of the facts. What she, like everyone else, knew for certain was that Mark Ackland had now taken possession of his rightful heritage, donning the mantle of wealth and property which seemed to fit him very well. With his wife and children he lived up at Longwater in royal grandeur, for with the big house he had succeeded to the fortune and to the nearly three thousand acres that went with it. Since the estate was not far from Newbury, only fifty or so miles from London and therefore in an area much coveted by the well-heeled commuter, the value of those spreading acres was astronomical. He also owned villages and many farms, he even owned Woodman’s, graciously rented to Daniel, his crippled nephew, at a reduced rent. Apparently this was the ultimate extent of any family feeling; the old hostility towards his brother must have cut deep, and indeed, it seemed to have cut off that brother’s children from any familiarity whatever.

      Oh, The Cousins

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