Force of Feeling

A historic area it might well be, but it was also a cold, wet N

ovember afternoon, with mist hanging low over the landscape, and rain dripping miserably from the bare branches of the scrubby trees that grew on the sites of the once powerful castles, whose remains Guy insisted she should see.

Even so, it was possible to imagine what they must have been, and it was most probably the weather that caused her to leave them with an awareness of melancholy and pain.

They stopped in Haverfordwest to buy food, and Guy insisted on dragging her into a local bookshop, where they found two copies of her last book.

They bought paperbacks and magazines, and Guy even insisted on buying a complicated and enormous jigsaw puzzle.

‘We always used to get one of these for Christmas,’ he told her when she teased him about it in the car on the way back. ‘I suppose Ma thought it was a good way of keeping us occupied during the school holidays. She always seemed to choose one with lots of trees, reflected in water…’

‘Yes, I know the kind you mean.’

‘The twins used to lose patience with them.’

Campion glanced at him, and saw the way his face softened.

‘What about you?’

‘I often felt like giving up, but something always made me keep on until it was finished. Pride, I suppose. I’ve never liked admitting defeat.’

Why did she have the feeling that she had just been given a warning? A warning about what? Had she been younger, less intelligent, had Guy been a different type of man, she supposed she might have wondered if he had deliberately set out to seduce her because she represented some sort of challenge, but Guy wasn’t that type of man; he did not possess that particular shallowness of nature. They were lovers, and if anything she was grateful to him for breaking down her barriers and showing her how very much of a woman she actually was.

While he had been buying some wine, she had noticed a small shop tucked away almost out of sight, and she had gone into it on impulse.

Her purchases were tucked away underneath the books they had bought, and she was still not sure what had prompted her to make them, or how Guy would react.

‘Tonight we’re going to celebrate,’ Guy told her. ‘This time, I’ve bought champagne.’

They had also bought fresh salmon and other luxuries, Guy insisting he would show Campion how to cook them.

It was dark when they got back, the cottage lights glimmering welcomingly as they turned into the yard.

It took Campion several minutes to analyse the sensation inside her as she got out of the car and, when she did, tears shimmered in her eyes.

What she had experienced was a sense of coming home, of being in a place that was special, of being with someone who was special, she recognised, as Guy placed his arm round her shoulder and they walked together to the door.

Unlike her father, Guy was a very physically affectionate man, a man whose compassion and caring in no way detracted from his intense maleness, but rather added an extra dimension to it. She felt safe with him, Campion realised; safe, cherished and protected.

Perhaps it was silly of her to feel those things; after all, she was a modern woman: self-supporting, capable and intelligent, who did not need to look for security of any kind in a man.

Perhaps some instincts could never be entirely lost, she mused as she walked into the kitchen; a woman’s dependence on a man went back to those first cavedwellers, where woman was, by virtue of her ability to bear children, unable to hunt and fend for herself as freely as a man.

She was so deep in thought that Guy had to speak to her twice before she realised what he had said.

‘The book again?’ he asked.

‘Sort of…’ It was true that her thoughts had led her on to wonder how Lynsey would have dealt with this ancient instinct that still ran so strongly beneath the surface of the female psyche.

‘I see. So you’re going to desert me again, are you?’

He was only teasing her, but Campion didn’t like the need she could feel within herself to please him, and so she reacted defensively, her body tautening slightly as she said, ‘That was what I came here for—to work, and I seem to remember that you were the one…’

Guy put down the parcels he was carrying and came over to her, taking hold of her hands, and keeping them loosely within the grasp of his own.

‘Hey, hold on, I was only teasing! Of course you must work, if that’s what you want to do. As a matter of fact, it would give me an opportunity to do a little work of my own.’

He picked up the carrier containing the paperbacks they had bought, and fished out a handful.