A Pretend Engagement (2 page)

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 thewhile, 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 MartinWalker. 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 Leon Beaumont been involved in some divorce scandal only recently? Hadn't he been toting around some other married lovely, whose marriage had ended in divorce on account of him?

Somehow she found that she could not get thoughts of Leon Beaumont out of her head. Which was odd, because until she had seen that picture of him today, having just thumped Neville King and waiting for him to get up so he could give him another one, she'd had no idea of what the man her brother admired so much looked like.

He was tall, that much was obvious, even when bent over from decking the man on the floor. Good-looking too-dark-haired, athletic looking-and loaded. As Johnny had said, as bachelors went, they didn't come any more eligible. Varnie was unimpressed-she was off mid-thirties men, and Leon Beaumont looked only a year or two older than Martin Walker.

But where Martin was trying to build up a business-if what he said was true-Leon Beaumont, head of an international design and development company in the field of communication systems, had already done that.

That was according to Johnny who, while waiting to know if he had got the job as Leon Beaumont's assistant, had never ceased singing the man's praises.

Apparently the man already had a PA who was little short of brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that when she'd married last year, and then started to fret about being apart from her new husband when called to go on the many trips out of London and out of the country, Leon had taken action. Rather than lose his gem of a PA, he'd decided she could stay office-bound and he would create the new position of peripatetic assistant, who, when they were both in the office, could give her a hand.

Johnny was well versed in office routine, a wizard with his laptop and anything to do with computers. Plus, he had a pleasing personality and having learned something of a lesson from his car crash, was a very good driver.

To start with he had truly believed the position advertised would go to some female, but he'd felt he had interviewed well. There had then followed a period of him phoning home every day in panic that he had heard nothing, and they'd been in no doubt, as the days had gone by, that he would feel totally crushed if he did not get the job.

'I'd work the first three months for nothing if only he'd give me the chance,' Varnie remembered him saying one time. That, she realised,From a brother who never seemed to have any spare cash, just proved how desperate he had been to have the job.

The day he'd rung to say he had actually been offered the job, actually had the letter in his hand, Varnie had been so glad for him.Though she had thought that some of his enthusiasm might wane when he had been in the job for a month.

But, no, not a bit of it.Leon Beaumont could do no wrong, it seemed. Johnny drove him all over the country-and learned a great deal by just watching the man in action. Leon was this, Leon was that, and, though he did not suffer fools gladly, Johnny had never met a more fairminded man. He took neither nonsense nor favours from anyone. In business he was his own man, and would not be indebted to anyone.

Johnny had driven him to one of their plants-the technology was absolutely amazing. He had been enthralled, and had subsequently taken notes at some high- powered meeting and, having prior to his interview taken an emergency course in speedwriting, been little short of ecstatic that he had got it all typed back perfectly and accurately.

Given that Johnny had a harum-scarumtendency, they had always known he had a fine brain-when he cared to exercise it. But, in short, having so desperately wanted this job, having got it, he was so happy, and was determined to do everything to keep it and to make his employer think well of him.

Which, she decided, with the hotel sold, Johnny settled and her parentssettled, made her the only odd one out. Her parents thought that everything would now be fine and that they could sit back and relax-so how could she go home now and ruffle the calmer waters of their life?

Feeling glad she had made the decision she had, to drive by Cheltenham and head for the Welsh mountains, Varnie knew even so that she would not be sorry to reach Aldwyn House and her bed.

The moment she hit those twisting mountain roads though, she had little space to think of anything but where she was heading. She felt as though she had been driving for a dozen or so hours, and it was in fact after midnight when she at last hit a straightish run of road where she had space to once again let her thoughts in. But oddly, while her family and Martin Walker had their fair share in her thoughts, it seemed as though Leon Beaumont, a man she had never met, was determined to have an equal part in her head. `Oh, clear off,' she actually muttered aloud, when the picture she'd seen of Leon Beaumont in the paper jumped into her mind's eye. He might be scrupulously fair in his business life, but it was a pity he didn't run his personal life so scrupulously!

It was one in the morning by the time she passed the little clutch of cottages that were the nearest neighbors to Aldwyn House. A quarter of a mile further on and Varnie climbed stiffly from her car to open the gates to the property. She drove through, but felt too weary suddenly to bother to close them behind her.

`Have a wonderful holiday,' her parents had bidden her. Varnie had not visualized then that she would be spending the next two weeks not skiing, but here at Aldwyn House.

She left her car standing in front of the garage. All at once she felt too used up to try and do battle with the heavy garage doors-she would put her car away in the morning. Similarly, the front door sometimes stuck in the damp winter months. She was too tired to contemplate finding the energy to wrestle with it.

With her house keys and flight bag in one hand, her suitcase in the other, and with some vague notion to take a shower prior to falling straight into bed, Varnie went to the rear of the house and let herself in through the kitchen door. She noticed at once as she switched on the light that someone had been there. She didn't mind. Johnny had a key. He was a kind soul, and while she and their parents had been dealing with packing that which the new owners of the hotel were not taking over he had volunteered to come and empty her grandfather's wardrobes and drawers.

Switching lights on and off as she went, Varnie left the kitchen, having noted that while Johnny had not got around to putting away the cup and saucer he must have used when he'd made himself some black coffee, he had rinsed them and left them drying on the draining board. She went up the stairs and to the room she always used when she visited. It was a pretty room, with a lovely view, and though not as large as the master bedroom it was a room she preferred.

Seated on the side of the bed, she eased off her shoes and reflected on one of the worst days of her life. But, bed calling, she got up, glad she had left the bed made up from her last visit. But when she went to unlock her suitcase she suddenly felt too weary to remember in which of the many compartments of her flight bag she had put the key.

`Oh, hang it,' she mumbled, and stripped off. Deciding for once not to obey the habit of a lifetime and shower before bed, she climbed into bed-and went out like the proverbial light. As weary as she had been, however, she was awake at her usual time of six o'clock. She lay there in the pitch darkness and was briefly surprised that after all that had happened yesterday she had slept at all.