her eyebrows and commanded drily, ‘Go on!’
He had not done so, of course; there had been no need, and neither had Roberta been annoyed or jealous. She knew him far too well, and Fern as well. Now, if it had been Venice they had been discussing… There was a woman who would enjoy nothing more than the challenge of taking another woman’s man. Fern, on the other hand…
‘There are one or two children’s outfits here,’ Fern commented, interrupting her train of thought.
‘We’ll keep them separate from the rest,’ Roberta told her, ‘although I don’t think there will be very many. Most mothers these days seem to operate their own exchange system.’
‘Well, it does make sense,’ Fern pointed out. ‘Children’s things are very expensive and often they’re not in them long enough to wear them out.’
‘Mmm… it’s all very different from when mine were young,’ Roberta agreed. ‘These days it’s all designer trainers and the right kind of jeans virtually from the moment they can speak.’
Even with only a very short break for a sandwich and a cup of coffee, it took them until well into the afternoon to work their way through all the clothes which had been donated.
Fern’s knees ached from the draught coming in under the church hall’s ill-fitting doors when she eventually got to her feet. Outside the sun was still shining although it was chilly now inside the hall.
Nick had said that he wanted to leave at five, which meant that he would arrive at his London hotel in good time for dinner.
He hadn’t told her where he would be staying, though. Fern frowned as she remembered how tense and on edge he had been earlier… how irritable with her.
After she had left Roberta and started to walk home, she wondered tiredly why it was that she and Nick just could not seem to grow closer to one another. It was after all what they both wanted.
Was it? a small bitter voice demanded. If it was, why was Nick paying so much attention to Venice?
She was one of his clients, Fern reminded herself firmly, and Nick was after all human and a man. It was only natural that he should be aware of Venice as a woman. What man would not be?
But Adam had not looked at Venice with the same barely concealed sexual interest that she had seen in Nick’s eyes…
She tensed briefly, fighting off the wave of emotion she could feel threatening her.
As she had done on her arrival, she carefully skirted Adam’s office, keeping her head averted as she hurried past it on the opposite side of the square, increasing her walking pace as she left the town behind her.
If she didn’t linger too long, she just about had enough time to take in one of her favourite detours, to enjoy a special piece of self-indulgence. After all, if Nick was right, she wasn’t going to be able to do so for much longer, she reflected.
Broughton House lay on the outskirts of the town, close enough to her own house for her to be able to turn off into the quiet lane which led to it.
The railway which had led to the erection of their own small cul-de-sac had also heralded the end of the town’s busy prosperity, preserving it as it had been in the middle of the nineteenth century virtually so that it remained compact and neat, without the urban sprawl which had overtaken so many other towns.
Although it was less than a mile from the town, Broughton House was still surrounded by fields, with an outlook over open countryside, the builder having cleverly sited it so that the side overlooking the town had the least number of windows.
It had originally been built by a wealthy merchant, a ‘nabob’ returning from India, who, disdaining the existing properties, had commissioned himself a new one in the countryside surrounding the place which had been his original birthplace.
The grounds, which covered an area of almost four acres, had become overgrown during the last eighteen months or so of Mrs Broughton’s life, but Fern liked the soft wildness of the over-long grass with its sprinkling of spring bulbs; the moss which coated the paths and the general air of what to others might be neglect but to her gave the place more a sense of somehow sleeping mysteriously, waiting for the magical touch of an owner who would love it to restore it to its original splendour, but these were thoughts she kept to herself, knowing how derisive Nick would be were she to voice them to him.
As she walked through the formal rose garden, bare now at this time of year, she paused to watch the young heron standing on the mossy edge of the round goldfish pond.
Somewhere within its depths lurked a dozen or more fat lazy goldfish, but Fern suspected they were far too wise and knowing to risk surfacing in such cool weather, and that the young marauder for all his bravura would have a disappointing wait for his dinner.
Through the rhododendron bushes now gone wild and desperately in need of some attention Fern could see the house itself, but today the house wasn’t her destination.
Instead she turned away from it, finding her way through what had once been an attractively planted shrubbery.
Alongside the neglected path there flowered remnants of what must once have been a two- to three-foot-deep ribbon of spring bulbs naturalised in grass.
Today these survived only in broken patches and clumps.
It took Fern almost ten minutes to force her way through the tangled undergrowth obscuring the pathway to the small bowl-shaped enclosure at the centre of the shrubbery.
The stone seat set back from its rim was encrusted with lichen, the lion masks of the seat pedestals and arms badly weathered.
Today, at this time of the year, all that could be seen in the bowl were the emergent shoots of the lilies which when in flower filled the bowl with band after band of massed drifts of flowers in rings of colour from palest cream to deepest gold and from lightest blue to almost purple.
It was Mrs Broughton herself who had first brought her to this spot and told her its history, explaining to her how her husband’s grandmother had had the bowl made and planted, having fallen in love with the same design but on a much grander scale on a visit to America.
The lilies had been in flower then and Fern remembered how the sight of them had made her catch her breath in wonder, tears stinging her eyes, her senses totally overwhelmed by their beauty.
If Nick was right and Adam was part of a consortium planning to buy the house and use the land, this would be the last year she would be able to witness the small miracle of the lilies blossoming.
As she sat down on the stone seat, tears blurred her eyes.
Tears for the destruction of this small oasis of beauty or tears for herself? she wondered cynically as she blinked them away.
‘Fern!’
She tensed, automatically controlling and absorbing her shock, and, even more importantly, concealing it, knowing without having to turn her head to whom the quiet male voice belonged.
Why pretend to be shocked? an inner voice taunted her. You must have known that he might be here. That’s really why you came, isn’t it? Not to mourn the passing of the garden but because…
She got up quickly, her face tight with tension as she turned to face him.
‘Adam!’
Her voice betrayed nothing of what she was feeling; of the unending destructive war within her that was so much a part of her life that the wounds it inflicted on her had long ago ceased consciously to hurt and were something she simply accepted as part of the price she had to pay for her own culpability.
Automatically she retreated into the shadows of the shrubbery, carefully distancing herself from him, protectively concealing her expression, her eyes from him just in case…
‘So Venice was right,’ she said lightly. ‘You are planning to buy this place. What will you build here, Adam? Is it going to be a supermarket