A Reason for Being

‘Darling, I wish there was something I could do…but I’m not your guardian and Marcus is…’

‘There is something,’ Susie told her, sniffling and pushing her damp hair out of her eyes. ‘You could stay here and look after us, and then Isobel wouldn’t have any excuse for sending us away…’

‘Stay here?’ Maggie was stunned, and at first completely lost for words. ‘But, Susie, I can’t do that…’

‘Why not? You could work just as easily up here as you could in London, and you said yourself you don’t have a boyfriend or anything…’

It came to Maggie as she listened to her that this was what Susie had wanted all along, that she had had the whole thing worked out, and she looked at her cousin with grim respect. She had forgotten just how Machiavellian and single-minded in their determination teenage girls could be, not hampered, as the more mature were, by the ambiguous gift of being able to see other points of view that might contrast with their own, and she surely, more than anyone else, ought to have remembered…ought to have known the dangers of that single-mindedness.

‘Susie, it just isn’t possible.’

‘You don’t have to stay forever… Just a few months, just until we can find a proper housekeeper to look after us. You see, since Mrs Nesbitt had to leave, no one wants to come and work here, because Marcus gets so bad-tempered, and Isobel is so horrid to them, always poking her nose in where it isn’t wanted. Please stay, Maggie. We need you.’

‘We need you.’ How sweet a temptation it was to give in. Deep in her heart Maggie knew there was nothing she wanted more than to stay here, to stay close to…to her family, she told herself, ignoring the betraying lurch of her heart. She couldn’t do it, though. Marcus would never let her, and even if he did, it could only be a temporary solution. Sooner or later he and Isobel would marry, and when they did…

Lost in a confusing maze of thoughts, she heard Susie say something and automatically nodded, and then to her shock she heard her give a whoop of pleasure and get to her feet, saying, ‘You will? I knew you would! Just wait until I tell Marcus.’

And she danced out of the room before Maggie could stop her, leaving her to race down the stairs after her, and arrive out of breath at the study door just as Susie bounced through it and announced happily, ‘Marcus, guess what… Maggie’s going to stay and look after us, so that we don’t need to go to boarding-school. Isn’t that great?’

From outside the room, Maggie heard Marcus’s grimly furious, ‘Oh, she is, is she?’

And out of nowhere, like a whirlwind conjured up out of nothing to devastate everything that lay in its path, came a thrill of anger so intense that she was through the door and in the room before she realised she had moved, her voice throbbing with the force of her emotions as she announced fatally, ‘Yes, I am, and before you start, there’s nothing you can do about it, Marcus. This is still my home, just as it is the girls’.’

At Marcus’s side, Susie started and looked up at him as though about to speak, but his hand on her arm restrained her.

‘I take it that nothing I can say or do will make you change your mind?’

‘Nothing,’ she replied fiercely, and it was only as the sound of her refusal died away on the tense air of the room that she realised that she had just deliberately closed her last escape route and that she was trapped. Trapped into staying…trapped into living here with Marcus…trapped in a situation she would have given the earth to avoid.

Fear flashed through her eyes and, as her gaze was drawn to focus on Marcus’s grim face, she saw in the cynical smile he gave her that he had seen her fear.

‘I’ve got several phone calls I need to make,’ she told him coldly, her chin tilting, only her pride keeping her standing where she was instead of fleeing.

What would he say if he knew that she had got herself into this mess more out of desire to protect him…to prevent him from suffering the trauma of a broken engagement a second time, than anything else? Would he even believe it? To judge from the look he was giving her, it hardly seemed likely.

CHAPTER FOUR

OF THE two sisters, Susie was very evidently the more forceful, Maggie reflected, listening without appearing to to the conversation between the two girls as they helped her to prepare supper.

She had been appalled to discover that, since Marcus’s accident, they had been virtually living on tinned and frozen food, neither girl, it seemed, having been taught to cook—something which Maggie intended to rectify just as soon as she possibly could. She was all for her sex forging its way in the world of commerce instead of being relegated to the supportive role of housewife and mother, but she saw no virtue in the girls’ inab

ility to put together a simple meal.

As she remembered how painstakingly her own mother and then theirs had passed on their domestic skills to her, she could have wept for all that Susie and Sara were missing. Why had it not occurred to her before that she might be needed here? That she might in some small way be able to repay the love and kindness she had received from her aunt and uncle after her own parents’ death by passing them on to their daughters?

Because she had been blind to everything but her own anguish…her own fear…her own inability to find the slightest excuse for what she had done.

All these years she had suffered nightmares of horrendous proportions in which she was forced by Marcus to confront the past and all that it held, and yet now that she was here he had made no reference to it. It was almost as though in some way he too preferred to forget what had happened. She could never forget…never…

‘What are you doing?’ Susie asked her curiously, interrupting her painful reverie.

‘Making pastry for a steak and kidney pie,’ she told her obligingly. She had found the tin of meat in one of the cupboards and, remembering the mouthwatering pastry her aunt used to make, had decided to use it to make the tinned meat a little more appetising. Marcus had always loved his mother’s steak and kidney pie, and the first time she had made one he had praised it generously, despite the fact that it had not rivalled her aunt’s.

‘But why are you doing that?’ Sara asked her as she skilfully dabbed small pieces of butter on to the pastry she had rolled out.

‘Because this is how you make puff pastry,’ Maggie told her, and then asked thoughtfully, ‘Didn’t Mrs Nesbitt make it this way?’

‘She always used to buy frozen pastry. She said making it herself was a waste of time,’ Sara informed her, adding, ‘She wasn’t a very good cook, was she, Susie?’