The Longest Pleasure. Anne Mather

root. She discovered there was a world of difference between a friendship formed in school—compounded by school activities and school discipline—and one that relied on a genuine liking for one another and a shared enjoyment of mutual interests.

      Helen and Tracy, it transpired, had little in common. Having been brought up in the country, Helen enjoyed country pursuits. She rode well; she enjoyed taking long walks with the dogs; she had a natural love of nature. Tracy didn’t. Her interest in animals only stretched to the mink coat she intended to own one day, and horses frankly terrified her.

      Helen liked sports, too. She played hockey and tennis at school; she belonged to the local squash club; and she had even learned how to play golf, after accompanying her grandmother to the club for the past three years. Which was just as well, she had reflected on occasion. Having a weakness for stodgy foods, she found getting plenty of exercise helped to alleviate its effects, and she often put on leg-warmers and a leotard and worked-out until her body was soaked with sweat.

      Tracy, meanwhile, was unnaturally thin, and any kind of physical activity bored her. She liked nothing so much as to lie on the couch watching television all day, eating sweets, or surreptitiously puffing on the forbidden cigarettes she bought at the shop in town. She would have bought them in the village, except that Helen had objected. She knew if her grandmother discovered Tracy smoked there would be the devil to pay, and she seemed to spend her time that summer flapping her arms in rooms where Tracy had been, trying to get rid of the smoke.

      The worst moment had come when Rafe had arrived home the weekend before all of them were due to return to their studies. He had obviously turned up to spend a few days with his parents before going back to college, but apparently he felt obliged to come up to the house to see Lady Elizabeth.

      It was a wet day at the end of September, and for once Helen was confined to the house, too. Tracy had been watching television, as usual, but she had joined Helen on the window-seat only moments before Rafe came riding up the drive on his motorbike. Helen hadn’t even known he had a motorbike, and she watched with almost as much interest as Tracy as he flicked down the metal rest and parked the bike on the gravelled forecourt before approaching the house.

      He was wearing leathers, and the slick black material suited his dark complexion. As he crossed the forecourt, he tipped his chin and removed the concealing helmet, and Tracy’s lips parted as his silky thatch of silvery pale hair was revealed.

      ‘Who’s that?’ she exclaimed, pressing her face against the windows, and as she did so, Rafe looked up and saw them. Helen wanted to die at the look of derision that marred his lean features as he recognised her. Then, he lifted his hand in a mocking salute before disappearing through the gate that led into the yard at the back of the building.

      She didn’t see him again, even though Tracy grew very impatient at her obstinacy. ‘Just because you’ve got some kind of grudge against him doesn’t mean I can’t find him attractive, does it?’ she argued angrily. ‘The first decent boy I’ve seen since I came to this dump, and you won’t even introduce me!’

      ‘Introduce yourself,’ retorted Helen tightly, holding on to her temper with difficulty. ‘And in case you hadn’t noticed, he’s not a boy; he’s a man! He’s nineteen, Tracy. Hardly likely to be interested in a kid of thirteen!’

      The Christmas after, Helen herself didn’t come home. She spent the holiday skiing in Switzerland, and then joined her grandmother at an hotel in London for a long weekend before returning to St Agnes. At Easter, she didn’t see Rafe at all, and the summer after that, Rafe again found employment on the continent.

      By the time this summer had come round, Helen had begun to believe there was to be no further contact between herself and Rafe Fleming. Oh, she had occasionally seen him when she was home, but only from a distance, and it was years since they had had any real conversation. He was twenty-one now, of course, and probably past the age when he could take a delight in making fun of her. In any case, she was older too, and she firmly believed that nothing he said could ever affect her again.

      Until this summer, that is. Chewing ruminatively on the straw between her teeth, Helen had to admit that she had been wrong. But wrong in the nicest possible way, she amended. From the minute she had seen him at Yelversley station, sent, he told her, by her grandmother to meet her off the train, she had been aware of him in a way that was entirely new to her. To date, she had had little to do with the opposite sex, and she had listened with wonder to the stories her schoolfriends told about boys they had gone out with. It had seemed to her a great deal of fuss over nothing, and she had adapted to her maturing body’s needs without even considering the emotional upheaval taking place inside her. But that was before she met Rafe again.

      It had all been so amazing, thought Helen now, wrapping her arms about herself in an excess of excitement. She had been dismayed when she saw him, and yet as soon as he spoke to her, as soon as he showed he didn’t regard her as a child any longer, everything had changed.

      Of course, she had been suspicious at first. Who wouldn’t be? The boy who had pulled her hair and hid her toys and called her names was still too fresh in her thoughts. But when Rafe spoke to her openly and without malice, when the mocking smile he always seemed to wear in her presence didn’t appear, she started to relax, and her burgeoning femininity could not remain immune to his undoubted sexual attraction.

      And he was attractive, she reflected, her breathing quickening as it always did when she contemplated his lean physique. He was tall, about six feet, she surmised, with a taut muscled body that looked good in the thin cotton shirts and tight-fitting jeans he wore about the estate. Because he had worked outdoors all summer, his skin was darkly tanned, a stunning contrast to the ash-pale lightness of his hair.

      He was really dishy—that was the expression Sandra Venables had used when Helen overheard her discussing Rafe with Mrs Pride, the cook. Sandra was her grandmother’s new maid, and Helen didn’t really like her. She was too sly; too knowing; too conscious of her own appearance, which Helen grudgingly had to admit was quite something. Small, no more than five foot one or two, Sandra made up for her lack of height in other ways. She had a narrow waist and shapely legs, and the most enormous breasts Helen had ever seen. Top-heavy, thought Helen disdainfully, viewing her own more modest curves with some resignation. Nevertheless, she envied the other girl’s self-confidence, and she suspected she would never have the courage to wear the bodice of her dress unbuttoned so that the dusky shadow between her breasts could be clearly seen.

      Helen had noticed Sandra always took particular notice of her appearance when Mrs Pride asked her to take a flask of tea out to Billy Dobkins, the gardener. Not that Billy Dobkins would notice how she looked. He was too old and crippled with arthritis to pay attention to anyone except himself. But he had a son; young Billy, he was called, though Helen knew he was in his thirties now and married himself. He sometimes came to help his father, to supplement the wages he earned driving a delivery truck for the local supermarket, and Helen had surmised that it was young Billy who had attracted Sandra’s interest.

      She really was man-crazy, decided Helen, not liking the direction of her thoughts. The other girl might only be a couple of years older than she was, but Sandra was years older in experience. She probably knew more about boys now than she ever would, reflected Helen ruefully. But, she had a mind to change at least a part of that—with Rafe’s assistance.

      Of course, she wasn’t at all sure her grandmother would approve of what she planned to do. It was one thing to encourage her and Rafe to be friends, and quite another to accept the fact that her granddaughter was attracted to the son of her estate manager. And yet, Lady Elizabeth never seemed to object when she and Rafe were together. Because Rafe was working at the home-farm, he was often about, and Helen had fallen into the habit of always making herself available whenever he was around. They had even played tennis together once or twice—though he always beat her—and her grandmother occasionally invited him to tea, to discuss his future now that he had got his degree.

      On those occasions, Helen had been quite content to sit and listen, drinking in the sight of his lazily attractive features, imagining how he would react if she reached out and ran her fingers through the sometimes unruly thickness of his hair.