Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [616]
It was hard, he considered, for people in a wartime romance to know how serious it was; for how could anyone know anything under such conditions? Perhaps this one would last – but there was only one way to find out.
He would ask her out to dinner again in a month or so.
He was a good fisherman.
The staff car bumped along the road over the rolling ridges of Salisbury Plain, suddenly emptied, once more, of its unaccustomed traffic.
THE SPIRE
1985: APRIL 10
Already the crowds were gathering in the close.
It was not often that the city of Salisbury had a royal visit: and this one, besides, was probably the most important for the cathedral in seven hundred years.
On the station platform, Lady Forest-Wilson smoothed her skirt. She had sent the three other members of her little house party into the close ahead of her, and now she was waiting.
She wondered if her tweed suit was a wise choice. She was an elegant woman, but as she grew older she had developed a dread of looking frumpish. She pulled the little pocket mirror out of her bag, glanced in it quickly, and dropped it back again. She was still good-looking. Grey of course, but she liked the way her hairdresser had teased her hair forward, giving it more wave and body. Did it make her look a little square and severe? No. She reassured herself: it was just a good bone structure.
It was hard not to be nervous after forty years.
Her nervousness had showed that morning. Her daughter Jennifer noticed it at once. Her son-in-law hadn’t. But then, she thought privately, Alan Porteus never noticed anything that wasn’t a number on a balance sheet.
“I know several accountants who aren’t dreary at all,” she had confided to Sir Kersey Godfrey the day before. “I’ve never been able to understand why she had to marry that one.”
Kersey had noticed of course. Dear Kersey noticed everything. He had said nothing at first, just quietly read the paper at breakfast. But when Jennifer had gone out, that handsome, grey-haired man asked, with a mischievous smile:
“Is he married?”
“Who?” But she had blushed.
“The American you have to meet today.”
“His letter mentions a wife.”
“Good.”
He had turned back to his paper. She had watched him for a moment.
“Kersey.”
“Yes?”
“Damn you.”
He had been staying at the house at Avonsford for three weeks. It was an experiment. Since Archibald had died ten years ago, she had been entirely alone there, except for Jennifer’s occasional visits and she was not sure how she would take to having a man about the place again. To her relief, it had been a very agreeable experience. Jennifer, of course, had asked the inevitable question.
“Do you?”
“None of your business.”
“People think you do.”
“My dear, I simply couldn’t care less. The village always thinks something about everyone, in any case.”
As for the next question, was she going to marry him, she was quite straightforward.
“Would you mind if I did?”
“Not at all.”
“Well, if he asks me, and I think he will, then I shall say yes, so long as we spend four months a year here at Avonsford.”
Not that Kersey’s own home at Melbourne wasn’t infinitely grander. There was the property an hour’s flight away and the huge house in Melbourne with its wonderful art collection. She had visited Sir Kersey Godfrey’s establishment and admired it for what it was: three generations of highly successful businessmen, building patiently and with taste and culminating in Kersey, who had done so well he had earned a knighthood. He had taken her to see the small sheep farm the family had owned in the last century, too.
“I respect his roots, and he respects mine,” she explained. She had spent all her married life with Archibald Forest-Wilson at Avonsford: and her family had been Sarum people before that. She could not bear to lose all contact with the place, and she had every hope that Kersey Godfrey would agree to her request. He was retired now.