to find him, slumped over his desk in his study, and the shock of that discovery was still with her, adding a new vulnerability to her shadowed eyes and full mouth.
Having assured Maureen Anstey that the decorations would be completed in time, she returned to the sitting-room. For once, the sight of it failed to soothe her. The sitting-room was her favourite room in the small rectory her parents had bought when they first moved down to Durminster. All the downstairs rooms had open fires, and this room, with its collection of comfortably old furniture and its general air of being very much a family room, had an immediate ambience of warmth.
The cat miaowed plaintively, reminding her that it was tea time. She would have to take Meg out for a walk before it got too dark.
The old collie thumped her tail on the kitchen floor as Heather walked in. Meg had been a thirteenth birthday present to her. A shiver suddenly touched her skin, as memories she would rather not have had slid, betraying, to the surface of her mind. How clearly she could picture that birthday morning. Her parents’ faces, happy and expectant, the excited yaps of the small puppy; it should have been the most perfect of memories, but it was marred by another face, sharp and haunting still, after all these years.
As she had reached out to take hold of the puppy, her mother had said warmly, ‘Of course, you must share Meg with Kyle, Heather.’
And instantly she had dropped the little pup back into her box. Even now, down the years, she could still hear the truculent bitterness in her childish voice as she’d said bitterly, ‘I don’t want her, then. You can give her to him, because I’m not sharing her.’
Even now, the memory had the power to make her suffer a wild see-saw of emotions, some of them so complex and still so only partially understood by herself that she could scarcely bear their oppressiveness.
She had been jealous, of course. Bitterly and immensely jealous, and the remnant of that jealousy and what it had led her to do still haunted her.
One of her closest friends at art school had accused her of being motivated by guilt when Heather had explained to her why she felt she must go home and work with her parents, and she had been partially right. Deep in her heart, she knew that nothing she could ever do could wipe out what she had once done; there was no going back and, even though her actions had been those of an immature child, their repercussions still echoed through all their lives.
She had been seven when her parents first mooted the idea of fostering a teenage boy. She had hated the idea right from the start, resentful of their need to introduce someone else into their small family circle, but she might have grown to accept the idea if she had not happened to overhear someone commenting that they suspected that her mother had never really got over the loss of the baby boy she had been carrying before Heather’s own birth.
Until that moment, she had never known that she might have had an elder brother, and with that knowledge had come the first seeds of doubt about the strength of her parents’ love for her.
While they talked about their fortunate circumstances and the value of sharing them with someone less fortunate, she had grown more and more bitterly resentful of the as yet unknown male intruder who was apparently more important to her parents’ lives then she was herself.
And her resentment and fear had grown, so much so that, well before the social worker had brought Kyle to see them, she had already hated him.
She had steadfastly refused to go with her parents on their visits to the children’s home, bitterly resentful of their determination to carry out their plans in the face of her own strongly voiced and expressed disapproval.
She knew now that her disapproval had only increased her father’s determination, and that he had been disturbed by her displays of temper and jealousy, for her own sake. At the time, she had simply seen, in their calm continuation with their plans, a total lack of regard for her and her feelings, which had increased her fear that she wasn’t loved or wanted and that this stranger would supplant her in her parents’ lives.
They had known none of this, simply seeing in her resentment and anger an only child’s lack of vision and narrowed upbringing. Both of them had been only children themselves, and were far more aware of the pitfalls that could lurk ahead than Heather herself, but she had not known of any of this.
The seeds of resentment and hatred had been sown, and when Kyle had finally arrived she’d been determined to hate him.
And hate him she had. It hadn’t been hard. For one thing, he was obviously bigger and more powerful than she was, a whole six years older, and thirteen to her seven; for another, he was a whole lot cleverer as well, talking with her parents on a level that totally excluded her.
Now, of course, she could see that Kyle had felt just as insecure as she had herself, that the fact that he had totally ignored her had sprung from feelings very close to those she was herself experiencing, and not a desire to cut her out of her parents’ love.
She also knew now that love was something that wasn’t necessarily apportioned; and that it was something that grew rather than diminished when it was shared with others. Yes, she knew all these things now. Now, when it was too late.
She frowned and reached for her hooded duffel coat. It was cold outside. Snow threatened; she could smell it in the air.
Meg barked excitedly as she opened the door. At the back of the rectory garden was a stile and a footpath that led through the fields. It had been a clear, bright day, and as she climbed over the stile the fields lay spread out against a winter skyline, the sky that deep, dense dark blue that only occurred on very cold and clear winter evenings. The full moon illuminated the scene brilliantly, and her breath hung on the air in steamy puffballs of vapour. The sharpness of Meg’s yaps was intensified by the crystal clearness of the air, and far away a farm dog heard it and set up a bark in response.
From the copse Heather heard the unearthly cry of a dog fox, and Meg pricked up her ears. Some instincts never died, Heather acknowledged, shaking her head at the collie as she crouched, belly down, on the crisp frosted field.
It was just the right sort of evening for a brisk walk, the sort of evening she would normally have thoroughly enjoyed. She knew that her parents sometimes worried about her solitary state; her mother was constantly urging her to join in the village’s extremely varied social gatherings, but so far she had not experienced any desire to find a mate and settle down, and she knew herself well enough to accept that a string of casual relationships was not for her.
She was frightened of committing herself in a male-to-female relationship, she knew that. Her experiences of the intensity and depth of her capability for emotion had affected her in the same way a small child reacts to an accidental burn when faced with the threat of a real fire: she shied away, apprehensive and alarmed, remembering past pain.
The relationship between her parents, its stability and longevity, had spoiled her; she could not adopt the careless manner of her contemporaries towards the commitment of marriage, and she doubted that she would ever find a man who could and would commit himself to her with the wholeheartedness she knew that she would crave if she ever allowed herself to fall in love.
That being the case, she was better off not allowing herself to do so. The heady sixties with its laissez-faire attitude towards casual sex had gone, and in its place was a new awareness, a new carefulness about the use and abuse of the human body. One was no longer considered odd if one did not agree to go to bed with a man on a first date, and Heather preferred things that way.
She did date occasionally—boys, now adult, whom she’d known from school, men she met through her work—but so far there had been no one special in her life; no lover.
Frost crunched underfoot as she took the familiar path. Meg darted off to investigate a long empty rabbit burrow. This route was well known to both of them, and yet she always found something new about it, Heather acknowledged, her heavy thoughts dismissed momentarily as her artist’s eye was caught by the black and silver tracery of bare branches illuminated by the moon.
The weather men were predicting snow for Christmas. Maureen Anstey had commented