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CHAPTER ONE

CHRISTY opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the garden The air s the crisp scent of it, and looked at the leaden winter sky

A thin curl of sling with the greyness of the cloud Beyond the garden lay a vista of fields broken by clumps of woodland, backed by the slopes of the Border hills, their peaks already whitened by the first fall of snow Everything lay intensely still beneath the cold January air It was all so very different from London and the life she had lived there, but it was familiar as well After all, she had spent the first seventeen years of her life in these Border hills And the last eight away from them, apart from brief visits home

She reached the botto her father as he threw the last of the rubbish on his bonfire He earing the sae years, shabby and orn He turned and saw her, and smiled affectionately at her; a tall, mild-mannered ht

‘Lunch is ready,’ she told him

‘Good, I’ry I’ll just damp this fire down and then I’ll be in’

If her height had coreen eyes had come from her mother’s Celtic ancestors, like her rich banner of copper hair, and her quick telish had quarrelled and married across the Border for centuries, but her hlanders from Glen Coe, and she had often bemoaned the fact that Christy see spirit

Christy waited for her father to finish putting out the fire

‘You know, Christy,’ he said, ‘it’s good to have you hoh I wish it could have been in happier circumstances You don’t have to stay, you know Your mother…’

‘I want to stay,’ she interrupted firmly ‘I would have come home even if Mum hadn’t had to have that operation You know, in London it’s all too easy to get out of touch with reality, with everything that’s i her siven up my job, Dad’

There hadn’t been ti her of her ency operation for Christy to tell her father her os, but now that the danger was over and her mother was safely back at home, it was time for her to talk of her own plans

Noas her father’s turn to frown, and Christy looked away from him She could sense his surprise and concern, and bit down hard on her bottom lip

‘But you see for David Galvin,’ he said ‘When you came home last summer you seemed so happy’

‘I was But David has been asked to write the o out to Hollywood He asked o with him, but I didn’t want to, so I handed in my notice’

She prayed that her father would accept her explanation at face value and not press her any closer What she had told hireat deal that she had concealed from him

There was David’s desire for thehtly, a frisson of sensation running through her that had nothing to do with the cold She didn’t love David, but he was a very netic and masculine ht have been very teive in to him—and how she would have hated herself if she had done so She wasn’t blind, or a fool; she knew that David was almost consistently unfaithful to his wife Meryl, and that Meryl accepted his infidelities as the price of being married to a man whose artistic abilities had made him world-famous by the time he was thirty years old

The sort of affairs David indulged inin any emotional sense; he was an intensely sensual and sexual ly, she knew that there had been the odd moment when she had not been sure of her own ability to withstand him should he choose to use the full force of his sexual power against her

She had worked for him for four years, and had been accepted by Meryl and his children almost as an honorary member of the family She knehat his brief affairs did to the she wanted was to inflict further hurt on the possible: she had run away

He had flung that at her in their final confrontation She had told hi There had been no need for him to ask why, and she reer and mockery There was an al thwarted or denied anything he had set his heart on, and he had wanted her Consequently he had used that skilful tongue of hisher close to the edge of tears and total self-betrayal, but so on to her self-control A small, bitter smile twisted her mouth She knehom she had to thank for that self-control, for that hard-won ability to refuse to give in to her feelings It seemed that she was doomed to be unlucky in the men in her life

She had spent Christe Wimbledon house, as she had done at other Christmases, and then, just when she had felt that her loneliness and ive way, she had received a telephone call fro her of her mother’s collapse

She hadn’t wasted ahome, and now that she was here she intended to stay She felt cal ti after for at least a couple of oing to do with the rest of her life She could even work for her father in his busy country solicitor’s practice if need be; his secretary of thirty years was on the point of retiring She knew she had ht decision; the only decision If she had stayed in London, David o to Hollyith him after all, ostensibly as his personal assistant, of course…but she had known that her agreereement to their affair

So, instead, she had ruthlessly cut all her links with London, giving up her flat and her few friends It had been disturbing to realise ho friends she had to show for eight years in London, but then she had always been so anything of herself, and even more so after that disastrous summer when she was seventeen

Her ain as she opened the back door and went into the warm kitchen

Her parents’ home stood almost alone at the end of a narrow country lane, some ten miles outside the tohere her father practised They had coht himself into the partnership Now the other partners were either dead or retired, and her father ran the business alone wit

h the help of a young articled clerk

The house was solidly built of local stone, sheltered from the harsh winters that could affect the Borders by the se, with its school and church, was less than awinter trudges through the snow to the village bus stop, where as a teenager she had waited with the other children for the bus to take theood days; life had been simple then, and she had been happy, if so her ‘Carrots’ because of her red hair

What was past was past, she reminded herself as she dished up the lunch She had already been up to see her ht meal that was all she was allowed at present

‘I had ato say that the doctor would be out to see Mother this afternoon Do you still have Doctor Broughton?’ she asked her father as he sat down

‘No Didn’t your hton retired early just before Christe is our doctor now’

Christy’s arlad that she was facing the Aga and that her father couldn’t see her expression

‘Doht he was in America?’

‘So he was, but he decided to corandfather was the only GP here for a long ti up our present practice’