I wasn’t happy about the lid of my jam jar – I couldn’t decide what I wanted it to look like. The picture in my head was fuzzy. And I stared at the specs for the longest time, trying to work out what was wrong with them.
Someone knocked at the door to the passage, and I jumped and dropped my pen. I was the only one in the room, as a few minutes before I’d managed to convince Colette that it would be all right to put down her endless knitting of winter stockings and leave me alone for the time it took to go and prepare some tea and sandwiches for lunch. Colette is fully ten years younger than my recently widowed grandmother, so only sixty-nine, but she is much more of an old woman, all timid fuss and flutter. No matter how strenuous the task, Mémère usually insists, ‘I could if I had to.’ But it always takes a firm hand to stop Colette fretting, and she was reluctant to leave me alone.
Now her worst fears were realised, ha-hah! At the sound of the knock, a false feeling of wild freedom swept over me. I realised it could be the first time since the day of my injury that I’d had any whiff of contact with the outside world, and I got up to open the door full of eager anticipation, hoping vaguely it was going to be somebody I’d never seen before with a special problem that only I would be able to solve.
Well, it was only a little problem, but such a somebody I’d never seen before.
I opened the door and found myself facing the most splendidly attractive man I had ever met. It is true I am not terribly experienced, but he had all the devil-may-care athleticism of a certain ski instructor my school chums swooned over last winter, coupled with considerably more age and sense, which I liked. Clean-shaven, in smart office clothes but without his jacket and with his tie and collar loose, he looked as if he’d spent the morning trying to work and had been constantly interrupted. His hair was brown and wavy and threaded with silver, as if someone had lightly sprinkled Christmas tinsel over it. He was so much taller than me I had to tilt my head back a little to look at his face, and that made me feel rather childish, so I stepped away from him.
He stepped away from me as well, backing a foot or two into the corridor. He opened his mouth as if he’d been about to say something and made a mistake, then shut it. For a moment I thought he was going to dash off in the other direction.
I made a guess about who he might be.
‘Dr Housman?’
‘I … no!’ he said explosively. Then pulling himself together very suddenly, he offered a hand for me to shake. ‘Miss Murray?’ he addressed me.
Unfortunately this made me laugh. I am acquiring aliases by the barrow-load! Alexander Murray is my maternal grandfather, so even though I consider myself a Murray, it is not my name.
Unoffended by my laughter, he still held out the offered hand, and I took it. His clasp was firm and warm and strong. He held on a moment longer than I expected him to, gazing down at me assessingly, and I waited for him to let go first, not wanting to show any signs of backing away again. His eyes were the grey-green of a winter sea.
‘Is it Miss Murray?’ he asked, and then, without waiting for an answer, he introduced himself, a bit nervously. ‘I’m Francis Dunbar. I’m the chief contractor for the building work that’s to be done to Strathfearn House on behalf of the Glenfearn School.’ He let go of me and quickly put his hands in his pockets, as if he were banishing them in disgrace for being so forward. ‘I organised the recent alterations to this house, the ramps and handrails, for the late Earl of Strathfearn, and his widow …’ He hesitated, and added, ‘That’s your grandmother, I believe? She recommended me to the Glenfearn School trustees to manage the current renovation.’
I should have corrected my name straight away, but no, I was so smitten with his physical beauty and his communist approach to speaking to me as his equal that I just launched into conversation with him. He appeared to have forgotten why he was here, and seemed to need prodding.
‘Can I help you with something?’ I enquired politely.
‘Oh! Yes. I’ve been trying for weeks to get the terrace doors in my office to open. The heat is asphyxiating in the morning when the sun’s shining in. It’s the room adjoining this one. I … I hoped that someone who knows the house better than I do might help. Is there a trick?’
‘Probably!’ I said cheerfully, hoping he’d let me do it myself rather than change his mind and wait for one of the adults to come back. ‘Shall I come through and see?’ I was charmed by the vulnerability of a ‘chief contractor’ who couldn’t work out how to open his office windows.
‘Thank you.’
He gestured me politely ahead of him down the passage with an open hand. His office was a twin to the morning room, a mirror image, the two being divided by a partition of oak panels that folded up like an accordion to make it into one large reception space opening on to the terrace above the lawn. Francis Dunbar crossed to the French doors of his half of the twin rooms and twitched back the heavy curtains in irritation, trying to let in more light through smudged glass panes that hadn’t been opened or cleaned for a good long while.
‘Sorry about the dust in here,’ he said. ‘This room was closed off for some time when I took it over in May.’
That must have been barely a month after my grandfather’s funeral. I didn’t want to create more awkwardness by mentioning how quickly the property had been sold; I just launched into an attack on the doors.
‘There’s a third catch – bolts at top and bottom and then others there between the panels.’ I pointed; I couldn’t reach the upper catch. In the morning room next door we never bothered to fasten it. I stood back so Mr Dunbar could get at the high bolts himself, again self-consciously aware of the difference in our height and how young it could make me look if I drew attention to it.
‘Ah!’ He threw the hidden bolt. Light and air flooded into the room, as next door.
Francis Dunbar put his hands in his pockets again, gazing out over the disrupted and busy lawn for a moment, then turned to look at me standing there, frail and boyish with my chopped hair, wearing my mother’s serge. His face was a little shadowed; mine was in the light. I considered how to prolong the moment. He did it for me, taking a hand out of a pocket and holding out his cigarette case to me.
‘I should have offered earlier,’ he said.
My heart swooped. He hadn’t taken me for a child.
Probably I ought to have refused, having only on one occasion let tobacco pass my lips, on that same highly educational skiing holiday last winter. But I’d learned to make smoking look natural by the end of that evening, and now I just couldn’t resist being treated with such sophistication. Also, Francis Dunbar was so very beautiful, and I liked him, and I wanted to see how much I could get away with. I was beginning to hate being treated like porcelain.