The Silver Bough (17 page)

“But then somebody told me that there were apple trees at Orchard House again, and I thought, I hoped…”

An involuntary wave of sympathy for him swept over her. She didn’t want to be the one to cut the line he was clinging to, his last, slender dream that the apple which had made his family’s fortune was not lost forever. How could she, when it was her dream, too?

Gently, she said, “I hoped to grow it myself. I did some research. I searched the Internet. I wrote to the Royal Horticultural Society—they’ve got over five hundred apple varieties in their collection—but they couldn’t help; they’d never had it.”

“No, of course not; it would never grow anywhere but here. So, did you manage to find it?”

She gestured at the open doorway. “Why don’t we go in? I’ll show you my trees. You can give me your opinion on one.”

She heard his tiny sigh of pleasure as he walked into the orchard behind her, and she warmed to him still more, recognizing a kindred spirit. “I think it must have been fruit orchards that gave people the idea of paradise,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“There couldn’t be a paradise without apple trees.”

They stood for a moment in silence, just drinking in the atmosphere, the heady scent of apples, of damp earth and growth and decay, the drowsy hum of bees like a note of music in the warm, still air.

Tentatively she said, “I don’t suppose you ever tasted an Appleton Fairest?”

“Of course I did. I used to eat them all the time when I was a kid.”

“Really!” She gave him a sharp look. He shrugged and raised his eyebrows at her surprise.

“I told you I grew up here. Why don’t you believe me?”

She couldn’t remember exactly when the orchards had been bulldozed over, but it could have been no later than the early sixties. If he remembered eating the Fairest—if he wasn’t lying—they must have been grown on trees elsewhere, maybe in private gardens. Trees from the 1970s and 1980s could still be bearing fruit today. The idea excited her.

“Unless you’re a lot older than you look—”

“I am a lot older than I look.”

“Do you remember
where
the apples came from? Who was growing the Fairest when you were a little boy?”

But his attention had been captured by a small espaliered tree, one of three she’d trained to grow against the wall. It was an Oslin, and she’d harvested its fruits back at the end of August, all except two that had stubbornly refused to ripen. Since then one had fallen, so that now the tree displayed a single, pink-streaked, primrose-yellow globe amid the green leaves. Ronan seemed to go tense at the sight of it, and then approached it with a curious, slow, stalking gait, until he came to an abrupt halt.

“The old Original apple,” he said in a flat voice.

He
did
know his apples. The Oslin was also called the “Original,” in the belief that it was the first apple ever grown in Scotland.

“You’ve left it very late.”

She bristled at this note of criticism and felt obliged to explain. “I picked the others a month ago. That one was late ripening.”

“It’s ready now.”

“You can have it if you want. Take it. I’ve got plenty inside the house.”

He didn’t respond; looking around, he’d spotted another solitary apple, her golden mystery fruit. “What’s that one?”

“I hoped maybe you could tell me.”

He moved to face her directly, and she saw, with a startled jolt of excitement, that he was aroused. His pupils were dilated, his lips slightly parted, his nostrils flared; his whole demeanor had been changed by desire. They were standing so close, it would have taken no more than a single step from both of them to bring them together. If they’d been in some club or bar in Glasgow, she wouldn’t have waited for second thoughts; she’d have made the move to tell him without words that she felt the same, and they’d have gone somewhere more private. She was aware of the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, and of a sweet, musky scent that seemed to belong to him. The drowsy, droning hum of bees in leaf-shadowed sunshine was like the buzzing of the blood within her veins. It seemed inevitable, foreordained, out of her control. A man and a woman alone among the apple trees…

Not in
her
orchard.

She took several swift steps away from him, walking backward, until she stumbled and nearly fell.

“No! Don’t touch me!”

He looked shocked and froze, his arm still outstretched to arrest her fall. “I was only trying to help. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” She blinked rapidly, trying to clear the spots from her vision, and moved cautiously to establish that she was on solid ground.

“I wouldn’t hurt you, Nell.”

She shuddered, and wished she’d never told him her name.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of…”

“I’m not afraid!” She glared at him angrily; then, because his gaze into her eyes was too intimate, too intrusive, ducked her head and ran a hand through her hair. It felt lank and greasy. “Look, I’m sorry, but I just remembered—I can’t hang around here all day; I’ve got company coming, and loads to do before then. You have to go now. You’ve seen the trees.”

“Didn’t you want to ask me something?”

She almost denied it. Bringing his attention back to that tree might bring them back to that dangerous moment of desire. But if it did, she would resist it again. She was not afraid. She had good reasons for sticking to the rules she’d set down for herself: sex only without complications, without commitment, away from home.

So she said, as calmly as she could, “I wanted to ask you if you recognize
that
apple.”

He was still standing beside the tree, which was slightly shorter than he was. He turned to regard it and, as she watched, he reached out a gentle hand to touch the branch from which the single golden apple hung. “I do.”

“Well?”

“Appleton’s Fairest is not extinct.”

“You’re saying…” She stared at it, caught between cynical disbelief and a tremulous hope. “But Appleton’s Fairest was a
red
apple.”

“Scarlet Kings,” he said. “And then, once in a lifetime, a single tree produces a sport: a golden queen.”

He’d certainly done his research. Or maybe he really was from the old orcharding family, and they’d brought him up on the ancient lore. “Well, thanks for your opinion. Now, I don’t want to be rude, but I’m going to have to—”

“Wait,” he said, looking distressed. “This is no ordinary apple. You can’t—”

“I know. It’s not to be sold for money, or left to rot, or eaten by a single person, only shared between lovers.”

The surprise on his face was almost comical. “You know?”

“I’ve read up on the mythology of apples as well as the facts,” she said coolly.

“So what are you going to do with it?”

Raising her chin, she gave him a challenging look. “I don’t think that’s any of your business.” She pointed at the door.

His shoulders sagged. After a long moment, when she refused to relent or respond to his pleading look, he moved. “Expelled from the garden,” he muttered, trying and failing to catch her eye as he went. At the gate, he lingered. “Can I come back another day?”

“I can’t think of any reason why you’d have to,” she said, and her look and her tone were implacable. He didn’t try to argue.

She knew that sending him away had been the right thing to do, not just regardless of the feelings he’d aroused in her, but
because
of them. Once upon a time, lust was a deadly, dangerous sin; it made people outcasts from society, broke up families, destroyed lives. These days…well, these days society could hardly function without it; lust was not merely acceptable, it was practically a
duty
. You could get by perfectly well without love so long as you were “in lust” with someone. People thought there was something wrong with you if you weren’t constantly moving from one object of desire to another. Maybe the word had simply become debased and misused, maybe it was greed or boredom that made people want so many things they didn’t need, but everything was so sexualized now. People “lusted after” clothes, cars, Godiva chocolates, and new gadgets in the same way that they shopped for new lovers. She’d been guilty of it herself, and she mistrusted the sense she had that, by comparison with what she’d just felt for a stranger in her orchard, her other urges were mere fantasies, nothing more than flickering shadows.

Later, when the image of Ronan came back to her while she was soaking in a hot bath, she banished regret by reminding herself of why it was necessary, why she could never, ever take the risk of letting someone get too close to her.

When she was five years old, her parents had died in a car crash for which Nell still felt responsible. Her mother had been driving, bantering with her husband, ignoring Nell in the backseat, who responded with increasingly noisy demands for attention. Technically, the cause of the accident—which had involved several vehicles—was a truck that had been (inexplicably) driven the wrong way down the freeway, but Nell had known then and always that her mother—a quick-witted and skillful driver—might have taken evasive action and saved her own and her husband’s life if she hadn’t been fatally distracted by her hysterical child.

She’d lived with relatives after that—people she could somehow never get really close to—and, as she grew older, had been sent to boarding school. She’d had friends there, and at college; she was never totally a loner—but there was no one who mattered to her in the way that (she supposed) her mother and father had, until she met Sam. A few years later, Sam was dead, and although she certainly hadn’t caused the accident that had sent him overboard (that was unlucky chance—plus a touch of carelessness on his part) she would always hold herself responsible for his death because she had been unable to save him from the sea.

She believed she’d been born unlucky and the worst thing about her bad luck was that it was directed dangerously outward. It brought her pain—but it killed the people she loved. And it was for this reason that she’d chosen to live without love. But she didn’t have to be deprived of a sex life as long as her lovers stayed, safely, strangers.

She thought of Ronan’s eyes, dark, the pupils dilated as he looked from the apple to her, and she shivered. As she got out of the bath and quickly toweled herself dry she imagined things she could have said to him: mocking, flirtatious, cruel.

So, you think I ought to share the apple with you? Don’t we have to be lovers first?

It doesn’t matter. Now, or later. There’ll be time.

She could practically hear him saying it, and found herself wondering if he was interested in her at all, apart from the apple.

What’s your heart’s desire?

You.

He would say that, the charming bastard. Could he really believe in that old wives’ tale about a magic apple? And yet, if he didn’t, why had he come here; how could she explain what had happened (or nearly happened) in the orchard?

Now tell me yours, Nell.

What I want’s impossible.

That’s OK. It’s magic.

I don’t believe in magic. All right, then.
(This would put out that smug, mocking light in his warm, dark eyes.)
What I want is for the past to be undone. No death. I want my parents back again. I want my husband Sam in my arms—not you.

Having satisfactorily routed and crushed her uninvited visitor, she went off to get dressed.

By the time Kathleen arrived, at the tail end of the day, Nell had worked herself back into a better mood. Thinking about life before Sam, she’d remembered the casual, satisfying friendships she’d had at school and in college—none of those people had come to an untimely end because of her, so far as she knew. Since Sam’s death she’d worked out a way of accommodating her sexual needs, but she hadn’t given similar thought to her social life. Discussions with tradesmen about paint, paving stones, or dwarfing rootstock, and exchanges about the weather with people she met from day to day was about the extent of it. She’d chosen not to join a church or the Women’s Institute or any local organization, and without a job or children, nothing threw her in the way of meeting people.

It was clear when Kathleen arrived, clutching a bottle of wine in each hand, that she shared her anxiety about the evening ahead. And recognizing her visitor’s nervousness, Nell was able to forget her own as she switched into hostess mode, working to put her guest at her ease.

“Oh, wow, this is a real farmhouse kitchen, isn’t it. So big!” Kathleen exclaimed, gazing around as Nell put her bottle of white wine into the fridge. “Is that an Aga? Did you paint the cupboards yourself? I love the garland and apple motif; I’ve never seen a stencil like that—where’d you find it?”

“It’s my own design.”

“Really? You’re good. And you don’t do this professionally? Oh, I love your big table!” She ran a hand over the smooth wooden surface, like stroking a horse. “I wish I had room for something like this.”

The long, sturdy table would have suited a large family. Nell had bought it because the size of the kitchen demanded a substantial table, and because it was a beautiful piece of furniture; she didn’t need it.