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CHAPTER ONE

‘DARLING, I DO HOPE you’re going to wear so a little ot the Bensons co and he is one of your father’s best clients Chris is back by the way’

Sophy had only been listening to her mother with half her attention, too overwhelmed by the familiar sense of depression, which inevitably overcaer than an hour in the latter’s company, to resist the tidal flood of maternal criticism but the moment she heard Chris Benson’s name mentioned she tensed

They were sitting in the garden on the small patio in front of the iarden was her father’s pride and joy but to Sophie it represented everything about her parents and their life-style that had always heightened for her the differences between theto a set middle-class pattern of respectability

She had spent all her childhood and teenage years in this large coe and all that tiainly cuckoo in the nest of two neat, tiny wrens

She didn’t even look like her parents; her mother was five-foot-three with iure, her father somewhat taller, but much in the same mould; a country solicitor, who had once been in the army and who still ran his life on the orderly lines he had learned in that institution

It was not that her parents didn’t love her, or weren’t kind, genuinely caring people It was just that she was alien to them and them to her

Her height, the ungainly length of her legs and arh cheekboned, oval face with its slightly tilting gold eyes; these were not things she had inherited from her parents, and she knew that her mother in particular had always privately hter was not like herself, another peaches and crealish rose

Instead, her physical characteristics had coreat-grandfather had inally the Marley family had come from Bristol They had beena srandfather had been the captain of one of these

All that had been destroyed by the First World War, which had destroyed socompanies and Sophie knew that her parents felt uneasy by this constant reminder of other times in the shape and physical appearance of their only child

Her ainly daughter did not look her best in pretty embroidered dresses with frills and bows

She had disappointed her mother, Sophy knew that Sybil Rainer had been married at nineteen, a mother at twenty-one and that was a pattern she would have liked to have seen repeated in her daughter Once too she

‘Of course, Chris is married now’

Herthe hint of reproach in her ht that you and he’ her voice trailed away and Sophy let it, closing her eyes tightly, thinking bitterly that once she too had thought that she and Chris would marry Chris’s father was a wealthy stockbroker and she had known hi his son in the way that teenage girls are wont to do

She had never drea other than the daughter of one of his father’s oldest friends The year he ca her ‘A’ levels, he had come home

They hada s she excelled at; she had the body and the strength for it and, she realised ry hindsight, he could hardly have seen her in a

He had asked her out; she had been overwhelmed with excitementand so it had started

Her mouth twisted bitterly It was not how it had started that she was thinking of now, but how it had finished

It hadn’t taken her long to fall in love—she was literally starving for attentionfor someone of her own and she had been all too ridiculously easy a conquest for him Of course she had demurred when he told her he wanted to make love to her but she had also been thrilled that he could want her sono beauty or desirability in her own appearance, she could not understand how anyone else could either