The Price Of Deceit. Cathy Williams

will be returning, and there’ll be a ballet option. You should have received a letter from the school about that.’ He was still staring at her, and she felt herself getting hot and confused all over again.

      ‘It’s possible,’ he said, with a shrug of his broad shoulders. ‘I’m afraid I don’t manage to keep track of all those letters.’

      ‘I think she would enjoy it,’ Katherine said lamely. ‘It might do her good to see some of the other children out of the classroom.’

      ‘Fine.’

      ‘Well.’ She threw him an efficient smile. ‘I do hope everything goes well with your business. This may not be London, but I’m sure you’ll find the countryside just as pleasant.’ She couldn’t have been more bland if she had tried, even though she was quite sure that there was nothing he would find less appealing than rolling fields. He was not a man who would relish the peace that country life carried with it. He was too restless, too much a city animal. She wondered how long he would stay. Maybe just long enough for the subsidiary to be established, then he would return to the fast pace, the glamour, the constant demands of London or Paris or New York. Poor Claire. Would she become one of those children who were constantly transported around the world, who never tasted the roots of permanence? Or perhaps a lonely little child, sent to boarding-school because her father’s career left no time to play at being a parent?

      As she walked back to the school she heard the deep roar of the BMW as he started the engine, and she fought the temptation to look round.

      He was back, she thought, but this was no grand reunion. There was too much bitterness, too many unspoken secrets flowing under this bridge.

      She stopped to look at the girls playing hockey, remembering most of them from when they had been little four-year-olds, their minds waiting to be shaped, to be taught. This was her life and it had no room to house the past.

      She stared at the running figures and wished, with a kind of quiet desperation, that the past had not caught up with her.