known whether to thank or curse Aunt Emily. Orphaned in the first months of her life, when a freak storm had overturned her father’s small boat, killing both her parents, she had been brought up by her only living relative. Being brought up by an elderly spinster, who was more properly her dead father’s aunt and not her own, did not equip one for life in the eighties, she had reflected miserably at the time. Another girl would have pushed aside her moral scruples and taken what life offered, but Susannah wasn’t like that. David was committed to someone else, and so, heartbreaking though it had been at the time, she had announced to Aunt Emily that it was time she spread her wings, and had started looking for a new job in London.
She had been lucky, thus confirming the old adage about those unlucky in love, or so she had told herself at the time.
In eight months, she had come a long way from the miserable twenty-three-year-old who had left Leicestershire feeling that nothing in life was worth while.
Richard, her boss, had practically adopted her. He had a keen eye for up-and-coming young reporters, whom he took a pride in nurturing and encouraging. She was lucky to have found a job working under him, so she had learned on the newspaper grapevine, and she was forced to concede that it was right. She was just beginning to get back her self-confidence, just beginning to feel that life, after all, might be worth living, albeit a different sort of life from the one she had envisaged that she and David would share, when David himself had shown up in London.
How he had inveigled her address out of Aunt Emily, Susannah didn’t know. He had arrived late one cool summer night, when it hadn’t stopped raining all day. She had been feeling tired, but exultant. A piece she had done, from an interview with a girl who had accidentally got caught up in a siege situation, had been highly praised by Richard and, as if to confirm that she was at last finding her feet in the fast-paced world of the city, two of Susannah’s female colleagues had insisted on her joining them for lunch. They were older than she was, and far more experienced and sophisticated, and it had been a heady experience to have them including her in their conversation as an equal.
She was, they had informed her, marked out as a woman who would go far.
‘We owe it to our sex to help and encourage one another. It’s time we found a way of beating the Old School Tie male system.’
Susannah had come away from the lunch feeling both elated and drained at the same time, her mind made up. From now on, she was going to concentrate on her career. From now on, no more men for her, married or unmarried.
To open her front door and find David standing there, and, what was worse, to feel her heart lurch in the old familiar way, had been dauntingly depressing.
He had insisted on coming in. He had left Louise, he had told her. Their marriage was over, and he was now free to start a new life with her.
She had been tempted. It was no good pretending that she hadn’t. David had wanted to spend the night with her, and she had almost given way. Only the uncomfortable memory of how Aunt Emily would look at her if she knew what Susannah was doing had stopped her. It was ridiculous in this day and age to have such Victorian scruples, but she couldn’t help it. Aunt Emily had done her work too well. As a teenager, Susannah had believed that, once she met the man she loved, all her moral doubts about the rights and wrongs of premarital sex would simply fade away, but it wasn’t as easy as that.
‘What are you trying to tell me?’ David had demanded incredulously. ‘That we can’t make love until we’re married?’
Put like that, it sounded archaic, and worse, scheming—as though she was bartering her body for a wedding ring.
‘No … It’s just that I’m not ready yet, David … I can’t explain …’
She had been perilously close to tears, shaking her head to try and blink them away, but to her relief David hadn’t been annoyed. Instead he had laughed and taken her into his arms.
‘What a fraud you are,’ he had teased her. ‘What would the world think if they knew that Ms Susannah Hargreaves, that champion of free will and women’s rights, is really a timid little virgin?’
She had been too relieved then to feel angry at his aura of sexual superiority; that had come later. She shivered a little, remembering the glitter of anticipation in his eyes. How much had David wanted her because he genuinely loved her, and how much because he saw her as a challenge?
What did it matter now? There could be nothing between them any more. She had made that abundantly clear to him.
Her flat wasn’t large enough for David to stay. It only had one small bedroom, so he had returned to Leicester, telling her that he would be back at the weekend and that they would sit down and make plans for their future together.
Only, before he came back, she had had another visit. This time, from David’s wife. Susannah knew her by sight, a small blonde woman, who looked permanently harassed.
The sight of her body, bloated by a very obviously advanced pregnancy, had shocked Susannah even more than her visit. Wordlessly, she had allowed her to walk into the flat, to sit down and to tell her in a savagely bitter monotone that David was demanding a divorce and leaving her with their unborn child. At first, Susannah hadn’t been able to take it all in. David’s wife pregnant … carrying his child? She wasn’t completely naïve; she knew that men—for a wide variety of reasons—made love to women for whom they felt little or no emotion. But this child must have been conceived before she had left for London, and now David wanted to pretend that it had never happened. He wanted to turn his back on his wife and child and simply walk away from them. In that moment, Susannah knew that no matter what she felt for him, she couldn’t marry him.
Looking into Louise’s white, bloated face, she wasn’t sure which of them she pitied and despised the most: Louise, for wanting her husband so desperately that she was prepared to beg like this for him, David, for being so weak that he had allowed his wife to become pregnant and then discarded her, or herself, for not realising the weakness that lay behind that charming smile of his. Well, she realised it now. Aunt Emily had once said to her, when Susannah asked her why she had never married, that she had never found a man she considered worthy of her respect and her trust. Susannah had laughed then, as teenagers do, not understanding what her aunt was telling her, but she understood it now. She loved David, and wanted him, but she did not respect him; she could never lean on him, never trust him.
The interview that followed was burned into her heart for all time. David had pleaded with her, wept tears of frustration and regret, but somehow she managed not to weaken. She had no idea whether or not he intended to go back to his wife. Somehow, she felt that he would, and she sincerely pitied the other woman for all that her life with him would probably be.
She told herself that she had had a narrow escape, that she was the fortunate one, that hers had been the choice, but somewhere deep inside her she still ached and wept for the love she had lost.
And it had been in that mood of bitter self-contempt and misery that she had gone to the Sunderlands’ ‘do’ on Saturday evening.
The Sunderlands were the closest thing she had to godparents. Neil Sunderland had been at school with her father. She had spent many holidays with the family, both at home and abroad, and now that their own two sons were married and living away from home, one in Canada, the other in Australia, she made a point of visiting Neil and Mamie just as often as she could.
Neil had retired earlier in the year from the merchant bank of which he was a director, and they had given up their London house and moved to a small village on the outskirts of Gloucester. Susannah had visited them there several times during the summer and, even though it was the last thing she felt like doing, she knew she would have to go to Mamie’s sixtieth birthday party.
Paul and Simon and their respective wives and children were all coming over for the occasion. Susannah was expected to stay the weekend; the house was a large one, with an extensive garden, and Susannah already knew all about the lavish plans for Mamie’s party.
Mamie was half-American, which accounted not just for her name, but very