Kingfisher Morning

'Yes, I liked the rocking horse too,' Robin agreed with quiet enthusiasm.

'Uncle Ross will be cross,' Tracy said.

'Why should he?' Robin demanded scornfully.

'If Mummy had wanted us to go to see our grandfather, Uncle Ross would have taken us there,' Tracy replied.

Emma felt a pang of bitter alarm at the words. Tracy was unanswerably right. Ross would have done so, of course.

Ross was at the cottage when they arrived. He came slowly down to the gate as they climbed out of the limousine. Emma saw his unreadable face, the eyes watching without giving anything away, and her heart sank. Was he going to be angry? She began to marshal her arguments hurriedly—she had not intended to visit the house, it had been a chain of unforeseeable accidents which had led them there and brought them into contact with old Mr Daumaury.

Robin walked up to his uncle calmly, like an early Christian facing the lions.

'Hallo, Uncle Ross. We've been to see our grandfather,' he said in his direct manner. 'I like him.'

Ross looked down at his nephew thoughtfully, then up at Emma, eyes narrowed. 'So? Have you, indeed? How did that come to happen, I wonder?'

She began to explain hastily, stammering, 'We went f-f-for a walk, you see, and we found ourselves in a lane we'd never seen before, and there was…'

'A little fairy gate,' Donna offered sweetly, sliding her hand into her uncle's and smiling beatifically at him. 'And out came our grandfather and we went to see his house, but it was too big. Then we saw where his rocky horse lived and we liked that…'

'Rocking horse,' Tracy corrected.

'A big rocking horse,' Robin breathed ecstatically. 'Donna and me galloped on it.'

Ross looked at Emma, neither frowning nor smiling, his face oddly blank. 'You have had a busy day, haven't you?' he murmured to the children.

Lunch was a subdued affair. The children were tired, and having eaten, went off to rest upstairs, with books to look at and orders to try to take a nap for an hour if they could. Tracy was a little contemptuous at this—she was too old for such baby treatment, she implied, but Robin and Donna did not argue. They were yawning and pale, ready for a little sleep.

Ross helped Emma with the washing up in silence at first, but she was under no illusions. She could feel the tension under his skin as he moved about. Sooner or later he would say what was in his thoughts.

It came at last, in a quiet question. 'Don't you think you should have been more discreet in what you knew, I imagine, to be a delicate situation?'

'I know nothing,' she said. I've been told nothing. I had to follow my instincts.'

'And what did they tell you?' He was scornful.

'They told me to bring the children home at once, and I would have done so had Donna not run off before I could catch her—it was out of my hands before I could decide how to tactfully get away.' She was suddenly angry. She had been deliberately left in the dark, yet he was blaming her for something she had been unable to avoid. 'It was an impossible situation in which I found myself, anyway. How could I be rude to Mr Daumaury? I didn't know what to do, what to say.'

'Amanda tells me—' he began, and then her temper flared.

'Amanda! She rang to warn you, I presume? She was furious to see the children there, of course. She detests them.'

'Be quiet!' Ross commanded, in a tone so quelling that her own voice froze in her throat and she began to shake slightly.

After a slight pause, he said less formidably, 'I think you're being less than fair to Amanda. Far from detesting the children, she's been working eagerly to re-establish relations between them and their grandfather. Amanda desires nothing more than to see the family together again.'

Emma bit her lip and did not reply. What could she say? Her own experience of Amanda had certainly been less than happy. The other girl had always been cruel-tongued, hostile and malicious towards her, and, so far, she had not shown much more pleasant behaviour towards the three children. Emma remembered that first meeting—the splash of green mould on Amanda's lovely clothes, the other girl's furious reaction, her vicious reaction towards Robin particularly—and she wondered if Ross knew Amanda at all.

She looked at him sideways. He was looking concerned, anxious. Was he wondering how he was to explain this to his sister?

'Of course,' she said, 'I take full responsibility. I'll tell Judith it was my fault.'

He laughed oddly. 'Silly girl! Be quiet, Emma. Be quiet.' Flinging down the tea towel, he walked out of the room. She watched him go with burning indignation beneath which ran pain, love, weariness.

It hurt that he should speak to her in that dismissive voice. A silly girl—that was how he saw her. That's what I am, she thought. Silly…A fool to fall in love with this tough, arrogant man who was too blind to see the traps laid for him by a girl like Amanda. He had boasted that he would not make a mistake about love, that he saw Amanda clearly—yet by his own words just now he was obviously completely fooled by her. Or else Emma had mistaken what she saw and heard.

She frowned out of the window at the afternoon sky, windblown and storm-driven. Rain blew fiercely against the glass, clouding her view. Or was it her own tears blinding her as she wept silently, her hands gripping the kitchen sink, her cheeks as wet as the windowpane?