This Way Out (4 page)

He gripped her arm just above the elbow and pushed her ahead of him through the assembly, rather as though he were a tugboat controlling a liner. And like a tug's, his relative size belied his strength. The girl winced with the pain of his grip, but said nothing. When they reached their destination she allowed herself to be put aside.

‘How do you do, sir.' Her escort thrust out his hand to the elderly man who had just limped over to a chair and taken his weight off his lame leg. ‘I'm Hugh Packer – Colonel Hugh's godson.'

‘What?' Godfrey Lumsden, long-faced, grizzle-haired and with somewhat raffishly distinguished outcrops of additional grizzle high on either cheek, had been clutching his knee and grimacing. Surprised by a stranger, he peered suspiciously at the young man. Then, ‘Oh – oh yes, come to think of it I did hear there was a godson.' He gave the proffered hand a brief, firm shake. ‘How d'ye do.'

‘And this is my fiancée, Belinda Brown.' Hugh Packer pulled her forward. ‘Sadly, Belinda never had a chance to meet my godfather. I was going to take her to see him just at the time he fell ill. But I've told her so much about Colonel Hugh that she feels she knew him, and of course she wanted to join me at the thanksgiving service. And naturally I couldn't attend the service without paying my respects to the Colonel's family afterwards … Belinda, this is Mr Godfrey Lumsden – I think I've got that right, sir?'

‘Quite right, m'boy.' Godfrey Lumsden, having already appraised the girl's figure, heaved himself to his feet and took her hand, holding it rather longer than was strictly necessary. ‘Delighted, Miss -er-.'

Belinda blushed. ‘Please don't get up, Mr Lumsden,' she said. She sat down quickly, rather clumsily, partly to encourage him to resume his seat, and partly because she was suffering from the onset of particularly horrendous stomach cramps. She longed to disappear in search of the ladies'room, but Hugh hadn't given her an opportunity.

Her fiancé sat on the arm of her chair, his back half-turned to her, his hands spread confidently on his short muscular thighs. He had comparatively large hands, well-shaped and well-kept, with a gold signet ring on his right little finger. His wrists sprouted black hairs, some of which curled back against his white shirt cuffs, some of which advanced along the outer edges of his hands and reappeared on the backs of his fingers. The hands were conspicuous against the dark grey flannel of his suit, and Belinda sat staring at them as he talked to his godfather's cousin.

‘My late father had the honour of serving under Colonel Hugh's command in the first battalion of the regiment,' he said. ‘That was just after the war, when they were in the Middle East. In fact my father saved the Colonel's life on one occasion.'

‘
Did
he? Did he indeed? Splendid chap!'

‘I'm not clear about the details – my father was always very modest about it. I believe he said they were in Palestine at the time, being bombed and sniped at by terrorists. He wanted no recognition for what he'd done, of course, but he had such respect and admiration for the Colonel that when I was born he asked him to be my godfather. Hence my name –' Hugh Packer gave an unexpectedly delightful smile and his fiancée smiled to see it, as though her personal sun had just put in an appearance at the end of a long hard winter.

‘Splendid! Very glad to meet you both.' Godfrey Lumsden beckoned a waiter who was offering filled glasses from a tray. ‘Now, you must have some champagne.'

Belinda tried to refuse. She suspected – correctly, Mrs Cunningham having worked on the principle that while one bottle for eight people would be mean, three would be an unnecessary extravagance – that if she and Hugh accepted drinks, someone in the family would have to go short. But Godfrey Lumsden insisted on her having a glass, and Hugh needed no persuasion.

‘Let me wish you both a very happy marriage,' said the old man. ‘I say, Helen –' he called to his cousin, ‘I expect you know your brother's godson? He's just been telling me that his father was in Hugh's regiment. Saved his life on one occasion, too. And this is his fiancée, Miss-er-' Godfrey Lumsden's voice wavered as he contemplated the generous swell of Belinda's bosom.

The rest of the Lumsden family had fallen silent, turning to look as the uninvited guests rose to their feet, Belinda guiltily, Packer easily and with an engaging smile. He put out his hand.

‘How do you do, Mrs Cunningham? I don't know whether you remember me – Hugh Packer. We last met about ten years ago, when I was spending a weekend with Colonel Hugh.'

Helen Cunningham stood eye to eye with her brother's godson and looked at him with stately, ill-concealed disdain. ‘I don't think I recall it.'

Packer kept smiling, though more widely and with visible effort. His teeth were large and white and almost perfectly even, with the exception of one canine which – when, as now, he drew back his lips – was seen to be narrow and sharp as a fang.

‘May I introduce my fiancée, Belinda Brown,' he persisted. ‘She came with me to the service, of course. I'm sure my godfather –'

‘My brother Hugh,' Mrs Cunningham interrupted, ‘is alas dead. Thank you both for coming to the service, as so many others did – but
this
, as you see, is purely a family occasion. Good afternoon, Miss Brown. Good-
bye
, Mr Packer.'

His facial muscles tightened. He glowered, then drained his champagne glass and swaggered off to the bar. Belinda, hot with embarrassment and tormented by a relentless grinding in the region of her pelvis, stumbled away in search of refuge and relief.

For the past two weeks Belinda Brown had been desperate with anxiety. Her period was very late, and she was convinced that she was pregnant.

Her present pain should have been reassuring. It wasn't, because it was different from her usual period pains both in kind and in intensity. And so far, there was nothing to show for it. Sitting hunched in one of the bleak cubicles in the ladies' room of the Duke's Head hotel, she longed for her own warm bathroom, for the privacy of her single bed, and for the comfort of a hot-water bottle clutched to her stomach.

She really didn't want a baby, not yet anyway. Plenty of time to think about it … And with things as they were at home – Dad incapacitated by a stroke, and needing full-time attendance from herself or the nurse she employed when she needed a few hours off – she didn't want another helpless member of the family to look after.

And Hugh would be furious. That was her real fear. She hadn't been able to share her anxiety with him because he had been furious enough with her already, having only recently learned that she wasn't financially independent of her father. In fact until ten minutes ago, when he'd smiled and introduced her to Godfrey Lumsden as his fiancée, she hadn't been at all sure that Hugh wasn't about to break off their engagement. Telling him that she was going to have a baby might be just the thing to make him leave her; and she loved him too much to provoke a parting.

At least, she supposed it was love. It wasn't at all what she had thought love would be, in the days when she was the largest and dreamiest pupil at an expensive girls'boarding school, where she was unmercifully teased for her size, her common accent, and for having spots on her face. But then, Hugh was not the type of man who had featured in those old romantic dreams.

His comparative shortness was only a minor disadvantage. What made her unhappy was his attitude towards her.

Belinda had hoped to be wooed by a man at once kind and ardent. For someone who, while giving her the security of affection, the hugs and cuddles she had been deprived of by her mother's early death, would also provide the mysterious extra ingredient she had so often read about in romantic fiction: the special something that would make her heart beat so deliciously fast that she would know without doubt she was in love.

The churning emotion Hugh Packer aroused in her was quite different, a mixture of fascination and fear. He was inconsiderate, frequently off-hand, often verbally cruel and sometimes physically so. But Belinda couldn't bring herself to break their relationship because she had never recovered the self-confidence she lost at school. The fact that she had since got rid of her spots and practised to acquire a conventional accent, and that many men – older men in particular – now looked at her figure with admiration, had not been enough to revitalize her self-esteem.

Belinda felt grateful to Hugh for choosing her. He was so good-looking, so well-mannered and amusing in company. (‘There's exactly the same difference in age between myself and Belinda as there is between Prince Charles and Diana,' he liked to say, adding with a grin, ‘and as you see, exactly the same difference in height.') And because he was the only suitor she had ever had, and she was urgently in need of a husband's companionship and support, she was terrified of losing him.

She just wished that she wasn't, at the same time, scared by the thought of being married to him. She had tried to resist his pre-marital demands but Hugh had refused to be denied, and all she ever experienced in the process was shame and discomfort and anxiety.

Belinda dreaded the prospect of having to submit to Hugh whenever and wherever and however he chose. She was disturbed by his hairiness, and alarmed by the way his lips drew back to reveal his one sharp tooth as he scrutinized her naked body before swarming over her like a perverted ape, biting her tender flesh and prying into every orifice. Surely, she thought, making love ought to be
nicer
than this?

She hugged her stomach and moaned softly, partly from unhappiness, partly from pain. And then, thankfully, she discovered that her flow had started.

The couple left the Duke's Head and went to lunch at a spaghetti house further down the road. Hugh was self-employed, with more spare time than money, and Belinda's allowance from her father, though originally generous and still more than enough for her own needs, did not run to expensive meals.

Hugh was surprisingly cheerful.
‘Snobs,'
he had snarled dismissively of his godfather's relatives; but that was all.

Belinda knew what he meant. She had had to dodge back into the ladies'room cubicle at the Duke's Head in order to avoid an embarrassing re-encounter with Mrs Cunningham and another female member of the family, and had overheard them discussing her fiancé. Happy not to be pregnant, and to be out of pain, she had felt defensive on Hugh's behalf when she heard him described as ‘that
odious
little man.'

‘So pretentious,' Belinda had heard Mrs Cunningham's voice continue. ‘He left Godfrey with the impression that his father was one of my brother's company commanders, instead of merely his soldier servant! And as for having saved his life …'

‘Not true?'

‘
I
don't know. My brother never talked about such things. But I simply don't believe a word that upstart says.'

Belinda couldn't see that Hugh's father's army rank mattered a scrap. Her own father had been a corporal or something in the war, but who cared about that kind of thing now? She too had been prepared to dismiss the women's attitude as snobbery; but then Mrs Cunningham, raising her voice above the splashing of the washbasin taps, had given her something to worry about.

‘The man's a thief. My brother encouraged him to join the Army, in the hope of establishing him in a career, but he was cashiered for misappropriation of Mess funds. He used to visit Hugh regularly until about ten years ago, and apparently there was always something missing after his visits – loose cash, or anything that was easily pocketable and saleable. Eventually my brother caught him at it, though he refused to prefer a charge against his godson. He did ban Master Hugh from his house, though, and I'd hoped we'd seen the last of him.'

‘What colossal cheek, then, to come here today!'

‘Exactly. No doubt the little horror was sniffing round in the hope that he'd been left something in my brother's will, but as you know Hugh divided what he had between the family and the Cathedral.'

‘Quite right too. It would be wasted on that godson.'

‘And
what
a mistake his unhappy fiancée is making!'

‘Yes indeed.' The cousin's voice had become distorted, as women's voices do when they apply lipstick while they're talking. ‘No doubt he's marrying her for her money—her father's Sidney Brown, who became notorious in the eastern counties thirty years ago for having made a quick fortune out of surplus army equipment. He then set himself up as a racehorse owner, with considerable success … Oh yes, Master Hugh would have known what he was doing when he became engaged to Brown's only child!'

The women's conversation had distressed Belinda. Not the bit about Hugh wanting her for her father's money, because she had assumed it from the first – why else should such a good-looking man have sought her out? But she had never imagined that Hugh was a thief. The revelation had come as a shock to her. Almost as much of a shock, she supposed, as Hugh himself must have had when she'd confessed to him a week or two ago that she hadn't a penny of her own apart from her annual allowance; and that because of her father's incapacity, she could expect nothing more within his lifetime.

But now, as they ate spaghetti bolognese, Hugh seemed to have got over his resentful ill-humour about her lack of money. He was smiling at her again, and Belinda thought she had better try to forget about the theft. After all, the woman had said it was a long time ago.

‘I've decided,' said Hugh, twirling a practised fork, ‘that we might as well get married as soon as possible. I had thought, you see, that we'd be able to park your old man in a nursing-home and buy a house of our own near Yarchester, and it was a bit of a shock to find that you had no financial freedom. I certainly hadn't contemplated living with the two of you in that back-of-beyond place near Newmarket. But if the household bills really are all dealt with by the accountant …?'