Infatuation

CHAPTER SEVEN

SHE met Lake as she got out of the lift next morning. He looked at her, his eyes penetrating. 'You still look pale—didn't you sleep last night?'

'Yes, hank you.' she said coldly. Some demon made her ask him: 'Did you?' Or had he been awake half the night, making love to Baba?

'Yes, I was exhausted after my four hours of tedium with that old fool Wentlow. I dropped Baba at her flat and went home and straight to bed. I slept like a log.'

'Oh. ' said Judith, suddenly lighthearted. 'Good.'

'She's flying to the States again tomorrow, she tells me, but I can't see her tonight, I've got to fly to Sydney this afternoon. I'll be away for a few days. You can manage while I'm gone, can't you? I'll keep in touch on the phone, but I'd be glad if you'd ring my mother everyday and tell her what's been happening.'

'Of course.' Judith said, wondering if that was to please his mother or to keep a check on her.

She was kept very busy all day and was still hard at work when Luke came into her office that afternoon, his Burberry over his arm.

'I'm just off. Don't work too hard while I'm away.' His eyes held a wry intimacy. 'I don't want to hear you've been having any more migraines—especially as I won't be here to deal with them!'

Judith tried to smile and couldn't. Luke stood there, watching her, his grey eyes full of a feeling she couldn't miss but dared not admit she noticed.

'Welt have a good flight,' she said huskily.

'Thank you.' he said, his mouth twisting, then he turned and walked out, and she stared at where he had been with eyes that had blurred. Eye strain again, she told herself; she must see an optician if this went on.

While Luke was in Australia, he rang Judith, every day; his voice coming and going in a buzz of crackle so that she lost the odd word. 'Yes, everything's fine here,' she would yell, and he would say in dry amusement, 'No need to shout, I can hear you as if we were in the same room.' And then she would turn her head in superstitious uneasiness half expecting to see him behind her. She got to know when he was smiling from the sound of his voice; when she rang off she would sit staring at the phone and seeing his grey eyes with that smile in them. 'My mother says you keep in touch every day,' he said once. 'Thank you for taking the trouble, I know you're up to your ears at the moment.'

'I'm going down to see her on Sunday,' Judith told him.

'Good, give her my love.'

'I will,' she said, hoping her voice didn't sound husky. If she ever had Luke's love, she thought, the last thing she would do was give it to anybody. 'When are you getting back?'

'Monday, if I'm lucky, I'll have to see how things go.' She looked at the calendar on her desk and counted the days like a child waiting for Christmas. When she had put the phone down she had to force her mind back to work, but it wasn't easy.

She had her grandmother to dinner on Saturday night. Robert was the other guest and helped Judith in the kitchen before Mrs Murry arrived. He opened the door wearing an apron and Mrs Murry was quite shocked. 'Poor Robert, you shouldn't make him work for his dinner,' she scolded Judith. Mrs Murry had never once asked her husband to peel carrots or make a salad dressing. 'Our generation didn't,' she said. 'I wouldn't have wanted him in the kitchen, anyway, that was my province. If men get into the kitchen, there'll be nowhere private to go, you know.' Judith listened, smiling; she didn't argue, but her grandmother knew very well she did not agree.

Robert chimed in: 'I've had a whale of a time, Mrs Murry—cooking is fun. Who do you think cooks my meals? I'm a pretty good cook, although I say it myself.'

'You need a wife,' Mrs Murry told him firmly, and Judith moved away, her face impatient.

'Now why didn't that occur to me?' said Robert, laughing. 'You're very bright, Mrs Murry, that's what I need, all right—a slave to do all my domestic work for me.'

'Don't look at me,' Judith said over her shoulder, then wished she hadn't said it.

'Is that a proposal? I accept,' Robert said with amusement, and her grandmother looked from one to the other of them, obviously wondering how serious the discussion was meant to be.

'Forget it.' Judith teased, laughing. She did not want her gra

ndmother to get the wrong idea, nor did she want Robert to think the wrong things, either. 'At least I get paid for my slavery at work. Unpaid slave is a job I'm not applying for.'

'Feminist!' Robert jeered, and she bowed.

'Thank you. ' She pointed to the sink. 'For that you can do the washing up.'

When she was alone again that night the flat seemed oddly empty and silent; she lay listening to the sound of traffic, the noise of people walking along the road outside, and felt lonely. There was a queer, persistent ache inside her. She switched on the radio and a female singer with m sob in her voice began to moan out her longing, Judith angrily switched off again—the woman sounded like a cat on a moonlit night, sitting on a roof and wailing at the stars. Judith could do without that. She curled up in the warm bed trying to get to sleep…but the words of the plaintive love song sang inside her head; the lyric was hardly pure poetry, but the simple, poignant words kept on being repeated, they seemed to mean something, but she wasn't sure what, she only knew they got to her, they really got to her, and that made her angrier than ever.

For years she had kept calmly to the path she had laid out for herself, contented enough with her work, her friends, her well-organised days. Sometimes she had stopped to think: is this all? Sometimes she had felt a lack, an empty space somewhere inside her, she had been briefly nostalgic for something she had never had and could not even put a name to—but after that pause for thought in the midst of a lively day she had gone on enjoying what she was doing, whether it was casting an assessing eye over a company balance sheet or sitting in a theatre on Broadway watching a black comedy with someone who would take her on to supper afterwards. Those instants of personal doubt had never lasted, Judith had too much sense to dwell on them, she had instinctively felt that to do so would be to look down from a high wire. The probable result would be a fall, so she always coolly looked up again and went on unwaveringly.

What was happening to her now was much worse. She knew she was walking that high wire unsteadily, sinkingly aware of the abyss beneath. She knew what it was that she needed to fill the empty space inside her and she knew she could not have it. The feeling obsessing her was not so much frustration, although she certainly felt grimly conscious of the fact that what she wanted was out of reach and always would be—it was a seeping sadness because the one man she had ever felt like this about should be forbidden to her, and she knew it was a hundred to one against her ever finding anyone remotely like him.