Read the book: «A Pretend Engagement»

CHAPTER ONE

HER thoughts were many and varied during that long drive from Heathrow airport to North Wales. Nor were her thoughts the happiest. It did not cheer her one whit that fog had descended, making it a truly murky, damp and miserable November night. The night matched her mood.

She had hoped to make the journey to Aldwyn House in Denbighshire in record time, but poor visibility made any chance of driving at speed out of the question. To speed in these conditions would be utter madness.

Not that she had intended to drive to Wales when she had first left the airport. Her initial thought, an unconscious thought, had been to drive back to her home near Cheltenham. An hour into the drive, however, and Varnie had recalled all the stresses and strains her overworked parents had endured recently. The last thing she wanted to do, now that they were retired and sailing in calmer waters, was to give them cause to be upset or anxious again—especially about her.

They’d had more than enough to worry about, first with her brother, Johnny, crashing his car—though it was true he always seemed to be about an inch away from some disaster or other—and then her father being diagnosed with high blood pressure. Johnny had walked away from his car crash with barely a scratch, but they had all worried about him. On top of that the hotel they owned had started to lose money, and they had decided to try and sell it. And then Grandfather Sutton had died. One way and another it had been a pretty anxious time.

But, looking on the brighter side, the hotel had at last sold and, wonder of wonders, Johnny, at twenty-five—and something of a misfit—had at last found his niche, and was finally settled in a job he absolutely loved. So, all in all, their parents should now be able to look forward to the stress-free life that they so thoroughly deserved.

No way, Varnie had realised, could she go back home to lick her wounds. With the best acting in the world she knew she had no hope of hiding how very let down and upset she was feeling. And, on fretting about it, Varnie had just known that she had no need to go home; her parents were not expecting to see her again for two weeks anyway!

Varnie had changed course and felt distinctly out of sorts as she’d dwelt on how only that morning her parents had stood on the drive of their new home and waved her a smiling goodbye. She had been smiling too, experiencing quite a flutter of happy anticipation at the prospect of sharing a whole two weeks in Switzerland with her boyfriend Martin.

Because he worked so hard, holidays were a rarity for Martin. He was only able to take this trip now because he was able to combine it with some business. But when he was not engaged in business they would be together, and it would be a chance for them to really get to know each other—so she had thought.

Varnie was not smiling now. In fact she was feeling far from happy as she headed for Wales. By sheer good fortune she had popped her keys to Aldwyn House into the glove compartment of her car on her last visit there.

Oh, what a fool she had been! What a total and complete idiot! How could she…? My heavens, if she had not started to grow a bit fidgety when Martin Walker had been three-quarters of an hour adrift from the time they had arranged to meet at the airport, she would even now be on some plane with him about to land in Switzerland!

It was only because he was meant to be partly on holiday that she had broken his ‘Don’t-ring-me-at-the-office. We’re-so-busy-and-I’m-always-dashing-all-over-the-place, and-they’ll-never-find-me’ rule. But she had tried ringing his mobile—it was switched off.

She had fidgeted some more. Walked around a little—with luggage. And eventually, with the view of trying not to keep a fixed gaze on the entrances into the departures area, she had gone and purchased a newspaper. On opening the paper, however, her mind for a very brief while had been taken away from Martin Walker. Because there on the very front page was a picture of one man felling some other man—with a headline telling her that the man doing the felling was none other than her brother’s new boss, Leon Beaumont. The photographer had caught him just after he had thrown his punch and as the other man hit the ground. Good heavens!

Swiftly she’d read what it was all about. Apparently, and ‘allegedly’, in newspaper speak, which meant there was probably very little doubt about it, Leon Beaumont had been making out with one of his female executives—there was a picture to the side of one very elegant and attractive thirty or so brunette, name Antonia King—and her husband had got to hear of the liaison.

Why Neville King was the one on the floor, a hand going to his recently thumped jaw, and not the other way round, was not stated. But Leon Beaumont looked angry enough to give him more of the same once the cuckolded husband managed to get to his feet.

Varnie had lost interest. She didn’t think much of men who went around knocking other men to the ground—even if this particular pugilist was the employer her brother admired so much. Oh, where was Martin? If he didn’t soon arrive…

She had checked her watch for the umpteenth time, and had known that if she were going to make that call to his office that she had better do it now. The firm’s switchboard would be closing in ten minutes. She had given it another three, and still no Martin.

She’d had enough. He was supposed to be on holiday, for goodness’ sake. She’d taken out her phone—she would make just the one call, then she would switch her phone off too, ready for the flight.

Glad she had thought to take a note of Martin’s number, a number she had never before called, Varnie had pressed out the digits. Martin had a new secretary; she hoped she wasn’t the sort who took off ten minutes early on a Friday night.

She wasn’t. The telephonist had soon put her through.

‘Oh, hello,’ Varnie said brightly, conjuring up the female’s name from somewhere, ‘Is that Becky?’

‘That’s me,’ answered a sweet girlish voice.

‘Martin isn’t there by any chance, is he?’

‘Oh, no. He left ages ago!’ Becky replied, much to Varnie’s relief. But before she could thank her, say goodbye and switch off her phone, Becky was enthusiastically enquiring, ‘You and the children got to Kenilworth all right, then, Mrs Walker?’

‘I’m not…’ Mrs Walker! His mother? Children? ‘Mrs Walker?’ Varnie enquired evenly—five years in the hotel trade had taught her to mask any slight feeling of inner foreboding, even though she knew she had not the smallest need to feel in any way disquieted.

‘I’m sorry,’ Becky apologised at once. ‘You’re not Mrs Walker, are you?’ and, going on without pause, she excused, ‘Only, Mrs Walker—Melanie—and the children were in here just after lunch. She and the little ones were just going off to stay with her mother while her husband’s away on business.’

Feeling shaken to the roots of her being, Varnie was speechless—and disbelieving! Her brain wasn’t taking in what it very much sounded as if Becky was trying to impart. ‘Er—Martin is married to Melanie?’ she managed when, knowing she must have misunderstood, she got her breath back.

But, ‘That’s right,’ Becky answered cheerfully. ‘Such a happy couple together. Martin hated having to leave her, but business is business and—’

Varnie abruptly ended the call. Without another word she switched off her phone and sat totally stunned. There was some mistake! There must be. For heaven’s sake, Martin had told her he loved her and that this trip, this two weeks, would be a time of them getting really close. She had been excited at the idea. Martin was always so busy that the only times they had been able to see each other had been when he’d been Cheltenham way on business and had stayed overnight at her parents’ hotel.

Why, her parents had liked him! Had wished her well when she had explained that this trip was about her and Martin making up for all those weekends when he had been too busy to see her. Her parents knew all about busy weekends. The hotel business was a seven-days-a-week business.

But doubt, small at first, suddenly started to creep in. Varnie pulled her suitcase nearer to her and tried to think of one single, solitary weekend that she’d had free at the same time as Martin. She could not think of one!

The significance of that, when partnered up with his secretary Becky’s remarks just now, started to creep in. Was Martin busy every weekend—or was it that he had to spend his weekends with his wife and children? Children!

Unable to take such thoughts sitting down, Varnie got abruptly to her feet. ‘Martin is married…?’ she had asked. ‘That’s right. Such a happy couple together.’ And don’t forget ‘the little ones’. And do not forget ‘Martin hated having to leave her’. Her—his wife!

Varnie had moved two steps when she saw Martin, a huge grin on his face when he saw her, come dashing in. ‘I’m so sorry, my sweet darling,’ he apologised, simply oozing charm. ‘The traffic was a—’ He broke off when he saw that Varnie was looking more frosty than loving. ‘What—?’

‘Tell me straight,’ Varnie cut in. ‘Are you married?’

‘I—um…’ He started to bluster, and Varnie went cold. She had somehow fully expected a swift and outright denial. ‘Hey—what’s this?’ he asked, recovering, his boyish grin blasting out as he attempted to take a familiar hold of her arm.

‘Are you?’ Varnie insisted, while at the same time hating herself that, had he said no, she would still probably have believed him. ‘Are you?’ she repeated firmly.

‘Well—um…We’re separated.’ He quickly got himself together. ‘We’re going to divorce. I haven’t seen her in ages, but I’m planning to get my solicitor to contact hers the minute you and I get back to…’

Varnie went from merely being cold to icy. She stooped to pick up her suitcase. ‘Goodbye, Martin,’ she said, and guessed that her expression must have told him that anything else he had to say could be said to the air, that she was not interested in him or his lies, because he did not try to stop her from leaving.

Nor was she interested in anything else he had to say. She felt wretched. She felt sick. And she was having the hardest time in accepting just how easily she had been duped. How easily her parents, too, who were far more worldly-wise than she, had also been so taken in by Martin Walker’s smooth charm.

Varnie went in search of her car with her mind in a turmoil.

He was married! Martin Walker was a married man and—all too plainly—still living with his wife! He—they—had children! And her—he had been dating her!

True, their dates had been more kind of snatched moments when he was in the Cheltenham area. But—she had been going to go away with him, for goodness’ sake.

She felt frozen up inside and bitterly betrayed. He had fooled her, and he had fooled her parents.

Her thoughts started to wander and she went back to when they had first met Martin. He had stayed overnight at their smart but modestly priced hotel. She had served him drinks in the bar and they had got talking. He was thirty-four, he had openly told her, and was working all hours trying to make a go of his own business. She had relayed that to her parents. They had approved. Hadn’t they done the same? Were they still not doing the same? And until the hotel, then recently put on the market, found a buyer, they would go on doing the same.

Purchasers for small independent hotels were not that thick on the ground, and they had all still been beavering away three months later—with Martin Walker now a frequent overnight guest. He’d begun to take an interest in Varnie. She’d liked him. Her parents had smiled on when occasionally he would spend two consecutive nights at their hotel; they’d more or less left her to deal with him.

Somehow she and Martin had become a couple. He would phone her daily, usually around three in the afternoon, when she was in the office typing up menus or doing some bookkeeping. Varnie made a point of being in the office at that time, though she was used to ‘filling in’ whenever some member of staff rang to say they had child-minding problems, toothache, or whatever misadventure had befallen them so they could not work their shift.

But because both she and Martin were fully stretched work-wise—he getting his business off the ground and she as well as working what were termed ‘unsocial hours’ taking on extra duties—their warming friendship had seemed to stay just that.

Then Mrs Lloyd, the woman who’d cooked and cleaned for Grandfather Sutton at Aldwyn House, had rung to say she had found him collapsed on the drawing room floor and had called a doctor. Typically, he had refused to go to hospital, and Varnie and her mother had dashed to North Wales to see him.

Varnie swallowed hard as she recalled that dreadful time. Grandfather Sutton had died three days later, and she had so loved him. She had been his only blood relation, and he’d liked her to spend all her childhood holidays with him. Johnny would come too, often, and her grandfather would treat them both the same, albeit that Johnny was in actual fact his step-grandson—her stepbrother.

Johnny’s father was the only father Varnie had known. She had been an infant when her own father had died, and two years old—Johnny five—when his divorced father had married her mother. Varnie had kept the name Sutton, but felt fully a member of the Metcalfe family. Johnny’s father loved her like the father she had never known.

Martin Walker had been there at the hotel when they had returned from Wales after her grandfather’s funeral, Varnie recalled as she motored on. Johnny had loved Grandfather Sutton too, and had been with them. Varnie knew she had been feeling emotional and vulnerable, so that when Martin had taken her in his arms and had told her that he loved her she had rather thought that she loved him too. She abruptly blocked her mind off to that, what she now knew to be a false memory, and attempted to concentrate on something else. What? Johnny?

Johnny, her clever but butterfly-brained brother. He had wanted absolutely nothing at all to do with the hotel trade, and had made tracks for London as soon as he could. In actual fact he had a fine brain, and if he ever applied himself to go into business for himself—and stuck to it—it was a foregone conclusion he would make a success of it. But for all his bright brain, or maybe because of it, he was easily bored and never seemed to stay long with any one firm. Needing money, however, he would work for it. His last few jobs had seen him deskbound—until boredom had set in.

‘I’ve been made redundant,’ he’d said cheerfully, when his previous job had ended abruptly.

‘Oh, Johnny, I’m so sorry,’ she had sympathised.

‘I’m not.’ He had laughed. ‘Now what?’

Oh, Johnny, Johnny. Varnie thought fondly. The fog was seeming to become thicker than ever, making driving conditions even more hazardous. It seemed she and her parents had spent most of their lives worrying about Johnny. He seemed to have the most uncanny knack of getting into twice as many scrapes as other men his age. How well she remembered the time he had written his car off, and how they had charged up to London, terrified of what he might have done to himself—only to find that he had discharged himself from hospital and gone for a pint at his local. Sometimes they were certain that Johnny must come from some other planet.

Then, with the exception of her grandfather passing away, things had started to look up. The hotel had sold and their parents had purchased a new home, and, with money over, Johnny had been promised a lump sum when all finances were settled. Johnny had immediately made arrangements to go to Australia to spend a month with friends he had there.

Shortly afterwards, and to put the icing on his particular cake, he had found the job he said he had been looking for all his working life. ‘It’s the job of my dreams, Varnie!’ he’d enthused, and she’d thought she would have to tie him to a chair if he got any more excited.

The job was as peripatetic assistant to one Leon Beaumont. Apparently the great man was often out of the office, either travelling around Britain or abroad. But so keen, not to say desperate, had Johnny been to get the job, he had been ready to cancel his proposed Australian holiday. It had not come to that, because, having been offered the job, he’d found that Leon Beaumont was prepared to honour his holiday arrangements. As it happened those arrangements conveniently fitted in with a break he was thinking of taking himself.

In actual fact Johnny’s Australia-bound flight had taken off earlier that day, Varnie reflected. But, not wanting to think about airports, she recalled how her father—stepfather, to be absolutely accurate—had wanted to give her a lump sum too. But by then she had learned that Grandfather Sutton had left Aldwyn House to her. And, though she knew she would not be able to afford the upkeep of the big old house, and would, reluctantly, have to sell it, she also realised that she would make a considerable amount from the sale, and did not therefore feel able to accept her father’s generous offer.

She had little money of her own, but was heartily glad she had paid her own airfare to Switzerland. Though it would have served Martin Walker right if she had allowed him to pay for it—but in all probability he would have been able to cash her ticket in. Come to think of it, she could not recall him ever offering to pay her fare.

It had been a very big step for her to have agreed to go with him in the first place. It wasn’t as if she had ever done that sort of thing before. But, what with all the upheaval that had happened, the trauma of losing Grandfather, she had been rather looking forward to a break herself. And, she reminded herself, don’t forget she had loved Martin.

Had? That word brought her up short as, the foggy conditions not improving the least bit, she drove carefully on. Had she loved Martin? Grief, she must have done! Hadn’t she been thinking of getting herself some kind of a career in London so that she should be nearer to him, so that they might see more of each other?

Yet what did she feel now? Anger, mainly. Fury that there were such ghastly men about. She felt duped, soiled, and it was none of her making. She felt a sort of numbness too, and wondered if that numbness was perhaps a precursor to the pain she was bound to feel when that numbness wore off.

She knew then that she had made the right decision not to go home. She did not feel up to facing her parents’ concern for her, nor did she want them to be concerned. They’d had enough of an anxious time. Perhaps she could spend the two weeks she was supposed to be in Switzerland in getting herself together at her grandfather’s home. His death was so recent she still thought of Aldwyn House as her grandfather’s home.

Varnie wanted her parents to have some quiet time with each other. Oh, how they had earned it. A time together with no hotel to worry them, a time of tranquility, with their children off on their own happy pursuits and without traumas various happening in their worlds.

Varnie became aware that her eyes were feeling dreadfully gritty from her efforts of concentrating so hard on her driving in such diabolical conditions. At the very next opportunity she pulled off the motorway—to discover, when she went to search out a cup of coffee, that everyone else had the same idea.

When she was eventually served she found a spare seat at a table and decided to stay where she was for a while. She did not fancy at all driving the tortuous mountain roads if this fog were a blanket over the whole country.

But eventually, aware that other people were coming in all the while, she vacated her place and went to sit in her car. She was glad then to feel angry again that through no fault of her own—expect perhaps blind trusting gullibility—she was where she was anyway, and not safely tucked up in her own bed at home.

Men! she fumed, though had to modify that when she thought of the sweetness that had been her grandfather, the loving generosity that was the man her mother had married—Johnny’s father—and Johnny himself, given that Johnny had always seemed to be getting himself into some sort of scrape or another. They were always honest scrapes, though. Well, she had to qualify, honest since he had left his boyhood behind. Which honesty was more than could be said for Martin Walker. How honest was it to tell one woman you loved her while married and still living with another? He even had children that she had known nothing about! Men! She’d had it with the lot of them.

Why—look at Leon Beaumont! She had evidence for her own eyes in the paper today of what an adulterous swine he was. Varnie searched the recesses of her mind for information she would probably have given no heed to if her brother had not gone to work for him. Hadn’t Leon Beaumont been involved in some divorce scandal only recently? Hadn’t he been toting around some other married lovely, whose marriage had ended in divorce on account of him?

Somehow she found that she could not get thoughts of Leon Beaumont out of her head. Which was odd, because until she had seen that picture of him today, having just thumped Neville King and waiting for him to get up so he could give him another one, she’d had no idea of what the man her brother admired so much looked like.

He was tall, that much was obvious, even when bent over from decking the man on the floor. Good-looking too—dark-haired, athletic-looking—and loaded. As Johnny had said, as bachelors went, they didn’t come any more eligible. Varnie was unimpressed—she was off mid-thirties men, and Leon Beaumont looked only a year or two older than Martin Walker.

But where Martin was trying to build up a business—if what he said was true—Leon Beaumont, head of an international design and development company in the field of communication systems, had already done that.

That was according to Johnny who, while waiting to know if he had got the job as Leon Beaumont’s assistant, had never ceased singing the man’s praises.

Apparently the man already had a PA who was little short of brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that when she’d married last year, and then started to fret about being apart from her new husband when called to go on the many trips out of London and out of the country, Leon had taken action. Rather than lose his gem of a PA, he’d decided she could stay office-bound and he would create the new position of peripatetic assistant, who, when they were both in the office, could give her a hand.

Johnny was well versed in office routine, a wizard with his laptop and anything to do with computers. Plus, he had a pleasing personality and having learned something of a lesson from his car crash, was a very good driver.

To start with he had truly believed the position advertised would go to some female, but he’d felt he had interviewed well. There had then followed a period of him phoning home every day in panic that he had heard nothing, and they’d been in no doubt, as the days had gone by, that he would feel totally crushed if he did not get the job.

‘I’d work the first three months for nothing if only he’d give me the chance,’ Varnie remembered him saying one time. That, she realised, from a brother who never seemed to have any spare cash, just proved how desperate he had been to have the job.

The day he’d rung to say he had actually been offered the job, actually had the letter in his hand, Varnie had been so glad for him. Though she had thought that some of his enthusiasm might wane when he had been in the job for a month.

But, no, not a bit of it. Leon Beaumont could do no wrong, it seemed. Johnny drove him all over the country—and learned a great deal by just watching the man in action. Leon was this, Leon was that, and, though he did not suffer fools gladly, Johnny had never met a more fair-minded man. He took neither nonsense nor favours from anyone. In business he was his own man, and would not be indebted to anyone.

Johnny had driven him to one of their plants—the technology was absolutely amazing. He had been enthralled, and had subsequently taken notes at some high-powered meeting and, having prior to his interview taken an emergency course in speedwriting, been little short of ecstatic that he had got it all typed back perfectly and accurately.

Given that Johnny had a harum-scarum tendency, they had always known he had a fine brain—when he cared to exercise it. But, in short, having so desperately wanted this job, having got it, he was so happy, and was determined to do everything to keep it and to make his employer think well of him.

Which, she decided, with the hotel sold, Johnny settled and her parents settled, made her the only odd one out. Her parents thought that everything would now be fine and that they could sit back and relax—so how could she go home now and ruffle the calmer waters of their life?

Feeling glad she had made the decision she had, to drive by Cheltenham and head for the Welsh mountains, Varnie knew even so that she would not be sorry to reach Aldwyn House and her bed.

The moment she hit those twisting mountain roads though, she had little space to think of anything but where she was heading. She felt as though she had been driving for a dozen or so hours, and it was in fact after midnight when she at last hit a straightish run of road where she had space to once again let her thoughts in. But oddly, while her family and Martin Walker had their fair share in her thoughts, it seemed as though Leon Beaumont, a man she had never met, was determined to have an equal part in her head.

‘Oh, clear off,’ she actually muttered aloud, when the picture she’d seen of Leon Beaumont in the paper jumped into her mind’s eye. He might be scrupulously fair in his business life, but it was a pity he didn’t run his personal life so scrupulously!

It was one in the morning by the time she passed the little clutch of cottages that were the nearest neighbours to Aldwyn House. A quarter of a mile further on and Varnie climbed stiffly from her car to open the gates to the property. She drove through, but felt too weary suddenly to bother to close them behind her.

‘Have a wonderful holiday,’ her parents had bidden her. Varnie had not visualised then that she would be spending the next two weeks not skiing, but here at Aldwyn House.

She left her car standing in front of the garage. All at once she felt too used up to try and do battle with the heavy garage doors—she would put her car away in the morning. Similarly, the front door sometimes stuck in the damp winter months. She was too tired to contemplate finding the energy to wrestle with it.

With her house keys and flight bag in one hand, her suitcase in the other, and with some vague notion to take a shower prior to falling straight into bed, Varnie went to the rear of the house and let herself in through the kitchen door.

She noticed at once as she snicked on the light that someone had been there. She didn’t mind. Johnny had a key. He was a kind soul, and while she and their parents had been dealing with packing that which the new owners of the hotel were not taking over he had volunteered to come and empty her grandfather’s wardrobes and drawers.

Switching lights on and off as she went, Varnie left the kitchen, having noted that while Johnny had not got around to putting away the cup and saucer he must have used when he’d made himself some black coffee, he had rinsed them and left them drying on the draining board. She went up the stairs and to the room she always used when she visited. It was a pretty room, with a lovely view, and though not as large as the master bedroom it was a room she preferred.