SAPPHIRE DELIBERATELY dawdled getting dressed, not wanting to face Blake. As she had hoped, when she walked into the kitchen half an hour later there was no sign of him, but the sight of Alan sitting morosely at the table, a mug of coffee in front of him brought her to an abrupt halt.
‘So you “hate” him do you?’ he sneered bitterly. ‘Some way you have of showing it! And to think I held off taking you to bed because I didn’t want to stampede you! Oh, it’s all right, Sapphire,’ he grimaced, the anger deserting him, as he raked tired fingers through his hair. ‘He’s told me all about it; how the two of you decided to give your marriage another try. I just wish I heard it first from you that’s all.’
‘I’m sorry, Alan.’ Shakily Sapphire sat down, knowing that Alan had every right to feel angry and resentful. ‘I didn’t tell you over the phone because … because I didn’t think it was the right thing to do. I didn’t realise that Blake intended us to be re-married quite so soon.’
‘You’re happy with him?’ His voice was abrupt, tight with a pain that made Sapphire’s heart ache in sympathy.
‘I do love him,’ she told him, avoiding the question.
‘And obviously sexually you’re extremely compatible,’ Alan shocked her by saying. ‘Come on, Sapphire, I’m not a complete fool,’ he told her roughly, ‘when a man comes down for breakfast, looking like a well-fed predator, it isn’t hard to guess what’s put the smile on his face.’
She wanted to protest that he was wrong, but sensibly did not. Perhaps it might make it easier for Alan to accept the situation if he believed that she and Blake were lovers. Sadly she knew that their friendship was now over, and that once she and Blake had parted there could be no going back to Alan. She would miss him as one always missed good friends, but she did not love him, she acknowledged, her feelings from him came nowhere near to those she felt for Blake.
After he had breakfast Alan insisted on leaving. When he had gone Sapphire felt restless. On impulse she decided to go out for a walk, glimpsing Blake working in one of the snow-covered fields—just a small dark figure by a Land Rover, with something familiar in his stance that tugged at her heart.
Shivering in the cold wind she walked back to the house, still too restless to settle. She would go and see her father; she decided visiting him might help to keep her mind off her own problems.
Flaws farmyard was deserted when she drove in. Someone had cleared the worst of the snow away, and although the kitchen was redolent with the yeasty smell of baking there was no sign of Mary.
Terror, sharp and paralysing, gripped her for a second, a dreadful vision of her father, motionless, dying, rising up before her. The vision cleared and she hurried upstairs, her heart thumping; her pulses racing in aching fear as she pushed open the door to her father’s room and came to a full stop.
Far from lying close to death’s door on his bed her father was standing by the window, dressed in a pair of disreputable old trousers and a thick woollen jumper. He looked thinner than Sapphire remembered, but otherwise he was still very much the father of her late teens, his weatherbeaten face turned towards the window, his eyes on the distant snow-covered line of hills.
‘Back already,’ he commented without looking round. ‘I’ll just have a cup of coffee Mary and then …’ He turned and saw Sapphire, shock and something else she couldn’t understand leaping to life in his eyes.
‘Sapphire!’
The room started to tilt and spin and Sapphire heard a roaring sound in her ears, increasing in volume until it drowned out everything else. Dimly she was aware of her father calling for Mary, of blackness coming down over her, and then a thick, suffocating darkness that seemed to press down all around her.
When she opened her eyes she was sitting in her father’s chair, Mary standing anxiously at her side.
‘My, you gave us all a shock fainting like that,’ she told Sapphire worriedly. ‘Are you a
ll right now?’
‘Dad …’ Sapphire croaked unevenly, ‘when I came in and everywhere was so quiet, I thought …’
Shock, and something else she couldn’t name shadowed Mary’s eyes. She was about to speak when the door opened and her father walked in. Walked in, Sapphire noted dazedly, carrying a mug of tea.
‘Come on, drink this,’ Mary instructed her. ‘It will help allay the shock.’ The ‘phone started to ring and as Sapphire took the mug from her father Mary said briskly, ‘I’d better go down and answer that.’
When she had gone Sapphire looked at her father. ‘Sorry about this,’ she apologised huskily, ‘but you gave me such a shock …’
‘Aye, I’m sorry too, lass.’ Her father looked sad and disturbed. ‘I thought …’ He shook his head. ‘No, we won’t talk about it now, Sapphire. You’re in no fit state. You stay here and rest for a while and I’ll …’
He broke off as Mary came in her round face creased into a thoughtful frown.
‘That was Blake,’ she told them both. ‘In a rare old state, wanting to know if we’d seen anything of you.’ She looked at Sapphire and smiled. ‘That must have been some spat the two of you had to generate so much concern, and the pair of you not a week reconciled yet.’
Knowing that her father was watching her Sapphire summoned a light smile. ‘Blake wasn’t too pleased when Alan turned up last night,’ she told them, hoping she would be forgiven her small fib, but not wanting to let them guess at the real state of affairs between herself and Blake.
‘Jealous, was he?’ her father laughed. ‘Aye well, I suppose it’s my fault for sending the laddie over to you, but I thought it best.’
‘He’s gone now,’ Sapphire told them, and explained briefly.
‘I’d better get back,’ she told her father. She couldn’t put off facing Blake for ever. From somewhere she would have to find the determination to remind him that their marriage was a strictly platonic one. Not that he could really want her, she reminded herself bitterly.
‘You stay right here,’ Mary scolded her. ‘You’re in no fit state to be driving after that faint. Blake’s coming to take you home. He’s getting one of the men to drive him over in the Land Rover. He’ll be here in ten minutes or so.’