A Pretend Engagement. Jessica Steele

work-wise—he getting his business off the ground and she as well as working what were termed ‘unsocial hours’ taking on extra duties—their warming friendship had seemed to stay just that.

      Then Mrs Lloyd, the woman who’d cooked and cleaned for Grandfather Sutton at Aldwyn House, had rung to say she had found him collapsed on the drawing room floor and had called a doctor. Typically, he had refused to go to hospital, and Varnie and her mother had dashed to North Wales to see him.

      Varnie swallowed hard as she recalled that dreadful time. Grandfather Sutton had died three days later, and she had so loved him. She had been his only blood relation, and he’d liked her to spend all her childhood holidays with him. Johnny would come too, often, and her grandfather would treat them both the same, albeit that Johnny was in actual fact his step-grandson—her stepbrother.

      Johnny’s father was the only father Varnie had known. She had been an infant when her own father had died, and two years old—Johnny five—when his divorced father had married her mother. Varnie had kept the name Sutton, but felt fully a member of the Metcalfe family. Johnny’s father loved her like the father she had never known.

      Martin Walker had been there at the hotel when they had returned from Wales after her grandfather’s funeral, Varnie recalled as she motored on. Johnny had loved Grandfather Sutton too, and had been with them. Varnie knew she had been feeling emotional and vulnerable, so that when Martin had taken her in his arms and had told her that he loved her she had rather thought that she loved him too. She abruptly blocked her mind off to that, what she now knew to be a false memory, and attempted to concentrate on something else. What? Johnny?

      Johnny, her clever but butterfly-brained brother. He had wanted absolutely nothing at all to do with the hotel trade, and had made tracks for London as soon as he could. In actual fact he had a fine brain, and if he ever applied himself to go into business for himself—and stuck to it—it was a foregone conclusion he would make a success of it. But for all his bright brain, or maybe because of it, he was easily bored and never seemed to stay long with any one firm. Needing money, however, he would work for it. His last few jobs had seen him deskbound—until boredom had set in.

      ‘I’ve been made redundant,’ he’d said cheerfully, when his previous job had ended abruptly.

      ‘Oh, Johnny, I’m so sorry,’ she had sympathised.

      ‘I’m not.’ He had laughed. ‘Now what?’

      Oh, Johnny, Johnny. Varnie thought fondly. The fog was seeming to become thicker than ever, making driving conditions even more hazardous. It seemed she and her parents had spent most of their lives worrying about Johnny. He seemed to have the most uncanny knack of getting into twice as many scrapes as other men his age. How well she remembered the time he had written his car off, and how they had charged up to London, terrified of what he might have done to himself—only to find that he had discharged himself from hospital and gone for a pint at his local. Sometimes they were certain that Johnny must come from some other planet.

      Then, with the exception of her grandfather passing away, things had started to look up. The hotel had sold and their parents had purchased a new home, and, with money over, Johnny had been promised a lump sum when all finances were settled. Johnny had immediately made arrangements to go to Australia to spend a month with friends he had there.

      Shortly afterwards, and to put the icing on his particular cake, he had found the job he said he had been looking for all his working life. ‘It’s the job of my dreams, Varnie!’ he’d enthused, and she’d thought she would have to tie him to a chair if he got any more excited.

      The job was as peripatetic assistant to one Leon Beaumont. Apparently the great man was often out of the office, either travelling around Britain or abroad. But so keen, not to say desperate, had Johnny been to get the job, he had been ready to cancel his proposed Australian holiday. It had not come to that, because, having been offered the job, he’d found that Leon Beaumont was prepared to honour his holiday arrangements. As it happened those arrangements conveniently fitted in with a break he was thinking of taking himself.

      In actual fact Johnny’s Australia-bound flight had taken off earlier that day, Varnie reflected. But, not wanting to think about airports, she recalled how her father—stepfather, to be absolutely accurate—had wanted to give her a lump sum too. But by then she had learned that Grandfather Sutton had left Aldwyn House to her. And, though she knew she would not be able to afford the upkeep of the big old house, and would, reluctantly, have to sell it, she also realised that she would make a considerable amount from the sale, and did not therefore feel able to accept her father’s generous offer.

      She had little money of her own, but was heartily glad she had paid her own airfare to Switzerland. Though it would have served Martin Walker right if she had allowed him to pay for it—but in all probability he would have been able to cash her ticket in. Come to think of it, she could not recall him ever offering to pay her fare.

      It had been a very big step for her to have agreed to go with him in the first place. It wasn’t as if she had ever done that sort of thing before. But, what with all the upheaval that had happened, the trauma of losing Grandfather, she had been rather looking forward to a break herself. And, she reminded herself, don’t forget she had loved Martin.

      Had? That word brought her up short as, the foggy conditions not improving the least bit, she drove carefully on. Had she loved Martin? Grief, she must have done! Hadn’t she been thinking of getting herself some kind of a career in London so that she should be nearer to him, so that they might see more of each other?

      Yet what did she feel now? Anger, mainly. Fury that there were such ghastly men about. She felt duped, soiled, and it was none of her making. She felt a sort of numbness too, and wondered if that numbness was perhaps a precursor to the pain she was bound to feel when that numbness wore off.

      She knew then that she had made the right decision not to go home. She did not feel up to facing her parents’ concern for her, nor did she want them to be concerned. They’d had enough of an anxious time. Perhaps she could spend the two weeks she was supposed to be in Switzerland in getting herself together at her grandfather’s home. His death was so recent she still thought of Aldwyn House as her grandfather’s home.

      Varnie wanted her parents to have some quiet time with each other. Oh, how they had earned it. A time together with no hotel to worry them, a time of tranquility, with their children off on their own happy pursuits and without traumas various happening in their worlds.

      Varnie became aware that her eyes were feeling dreadfully gritty from her efforts of concentrating so hard on her driving in such diabolical conditions. At the very next opportunity she pulled off the motorway—to discover, when she went to search out a cup of coffee, that everyone else had the same idea.

      When she was eventually served she found a spare seat at a table and decided to stay where she was for a while. She did not fancy at all driving the tortuous mountain roads if this fog were a blanket over the whole country.

      But eventually, aware that other people were coming in all the while, she vacated her place and went to sit in her car. She was glad then to feel angry again that through no fault of her own—expect perhaps blind trusting gullibility—she was where she was anyway, and not safely tucked up in her own bed at home.

      Men! she fumed, though had to modify that when she thought of the sweetness that had been her grandfather, the loving generosity that was the man her mother had married—Johnny’s father—and Johnny himself, given that Johnny had always seemed to be getting himself into some sort of scrape or another. They were always honest scrapes, though. Well, she had to qualify, honest since he had left his boyhood behind. Which honesty was more than could be said for Martin Walker. How honest was it to tell one woman you loved her while married and still living with another? He even had children that she had known nothing about! Men! She’d had it with the lot of them.

      Why—look at Leon Beaumont! She had evidence for her own eyes in the paper today of what an adulterous swine he was. Varnie searched the recesses of her mind for information she would probably have given no heed to if her brother had not gone to work for him. Hadn’t