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“I don’t—”

“Well, I do!” He reached out for her and kissed her without fuss. “Was that so bad?”

“N-no,” she admitted.

He slapped her lightly on the rear. “You’d better make the best of your opportunities, my dear. There won’t be any in Chaddoxboume, not if Robert Chaddox is a sample of the local talent! You won’t get any kisses out of him!”

Sarah ran up the stairs, listening for him to shut the door. At least, she thought, Chaddoxboume had something to recommend it if she didn’t have to suffer any more embraces like that one. She had liked Alec Farne until that moment, but she had not liked his kiss. In fact she had disliked it very much indeed.

MADGE DRYDEN took another turn about the room, looking distraught.

“Darling, you don’t understand how difficult it is for
me
! Why, your father and I have hardly ever been separated before. Every time I went on tour he came with me.
He
always made it his life’s work to make me happy—and now this!”

“Well, you could come too.”

Real tears formed and fell down Madge’s cheeks. “Of all the people I know, I thought
you
would understand !” she said tragically.

“I do,” Sarah assured her.

“You’re getting very hard,” her stepmother informed her. “I never would have thought it of you when you were a little girl and absolutely
devoted
to me!”

“I’m pretty devoted now,” Sarah sighed. “I must be, or I wouldn’t be burying myself in the country—”

“That,” Madge said with dignity, “is because of your devotion to your father. I was speaking of how fond you used to be of
me
!”

Sarah tried to smile, failed, and settled for looking amused instead. “Isn’t it rather difficult to quantify such things?” she asked.

Madge took another turn about the room, now angry as well as tragic. She looked for all the world like a ruffled hen, squawking her displeasure at the world. “I don’t believe you love me at all!” she claimed.

Becoming irritated in her turn, Sarah merely looked sulky. “Is this why you asked me to come today?” she asked.

Controlling herself with an effort, Madge sat down on the sofa and stared silently at her stepdaughter. “You haven’t an ounce of proper feeling!” she burst out indignantly. “I’m so unhappy it isn’t true! I thought we were a
family
?”

“I’m sorry, Madge.”

“Sorry!
You’re not a bit sorry or you would think about how I feel at the prospect of being all alone week after week.” The tears began to fall thick and fast. “I shall have to be brave, that’s all.” Madge sighed heavily. “Your father is no better either with all this worry going on all round him. I shall be glad when we have everything settled and we all get a bit of peace. I shall be having asthma myself if I have to watch him wheezing away much longer!”

Sarah hesitated to interrupt her stepmother’s thoughts, but there had to be some reason why she had been so peremptorily sent for that morning. It had been highly inconvenient to drop everything she had been doing and make the rather difficult journey from Fulham, where she had her room, to St. John’s Wood. She had been having lunch with a friend and had had some difficulty in putting her off, and she was tired anyway, though what from she couldn’t imagine as she hadn’t had to turn up to rehearsals, or auditions, or—or anything!

“Sarah, there’s nothing to keep you in London now, is there?”

“Not a thing.” Sarah managed to erase the bitterness she was feeling from her voice and thought that her technique was improving now that she wasn’t going to have to make use of it.

“Good. You’ll have to go down to Chaddoxboume and get the house ready. I’m bringing Daniel down next Sunday.”

“Oh,” said Sarah.

“I’ll bring him down in the car—”

“Is that wise?” Sarah interrupted. “I mean, I don’t think he should be driving, do you?”

“Sarah, mind your own business. I’ve been married to Daniel for a good many years and if I don’t know what’s best for him by now, I never will!
Your
part is to get the house ready and make everything comfortable for us by Sunday. Daniel will need a room to himself, of course, so that means three bedrooms. Nobody seems to know if we’ve hired bedding along with the house, or what. I thought you could go down tomorrow.”

"Tomorrow?”
Sarah was jerked out of her own thoughts with a bang. “But I can’t! I haven’t given up my room yet! ”

Madge shrugged. “It won’t take you more than an hour to pack up your things. Those things that you don’t need you can leave in your old room here—if you can find room for them in there. I don’t believe you’ve ever thrown anything away since you were a schoolgirl!”

“I’d forgotten all about leaving my stuff here,” Sarah admitted. “I think it’s mostly books.”

“Very likely. You’d better bring your other things over this evening and then you can make an early start tomorrow.”

“But I haven’t sorted anything—”

“You can do all that later. You won’t have long to get the house organised as it is. You realise that it’s Thursday tomorrow, don’t you?”

“I—I hadn’t thought,” Sarah admitted.

“Daniel says Thursday is early closing in Canterbury, but I expect you’ll find some way round that if you put your mind to it. How will you go, dear? In your car? I suppose it is still going?”

“Yes, it’s still going.”

“I can’t think how you afford to run a car as you do,” her stepmother complained. “It was ridiculous of Edith to give it to you !”

Sarah remembered her godmother with affection. “She didn’t exactly give it to me,” she reminded Madge. “She died and left me enough money to buy the car, and a little over to run it too. Aunt Edith probably thought I’d spend it on clothes—”

“In her salon!” Madge crowed. “She would!”

Sarah said nothing. Edith Hyams had been an unlikely choice of godmother in many ways, but she had been a great friend of her mother’s and had remained as a link with the parent whom Sarah couldn’t even remember. She had been worldly, amusing, and had disliked Madge as much as she had liked the first Mrs. Blaney. Sarah quite frankly had adored her.

“I’d better go, if I really have to go to Canterbury tomorrow—if there’s nothing else, Madge?”

“What else could there be?”

Her stepmother’s pained surprise made Sarah want to laugh.

“I thought there might be,” she said. “You could have told me about getting the house ready on the telephone.”

“I don’t like the telephone when it comes to my own family,” Madge retorted. “It isn’t a comfortable way of speaking to anyone!”

Sarah merely smiled, kissed her stepmother, and escaped before Madge decided to ask her to make tea, or do one of the hundred other little jobs that she spread around the people about her. Standing in the doorway, she hesitated. “Madge, you won’t let Daddy drive on Sunday, will you?”

"Oh, darling, don’t
fuss
! Anyone would think I wasn’t interested in your father’s health, but I am. Why, I’m going to come down every Sunday morning and stay over until Monday afternoon just to see how you’re both getting on. You’re not the only one to be making sacrifices! Now, off you go, love. I probably shan’t see you this evening, will I?”

“Probably not,” Sarah agreed.

Looking round her room when she got back to it, Sarah was suddenly very sorry to be leaving. True, it was an attic room, with high windows that she couldn’t see out of, and fading wallpaper that had flattened her when she had first seen it, but she had grown used to the chubby cupids on the wall just as she had grown used to toiling up and down the three flights of stairs that led up to the room. She had seldom been in her room in the middle of the afternoon, however, and the heat beat down on her mercilessly as the sun crept round the sky sending long sticky fingers in through the paint-sealed windows.

Sarah tried to ignore the increasing discomfort of the unaccustomed warmth. She packed her clothes in one suitcase and the few ornaments and books she had gathered in the last few years into another, ready to stow it away in her room in her stepmother’s house. The room that had been her home for the past few months looked strange and ugly without her personal things to catch her eye. Perhaps she would enjoy living in the country after all, she thought, and longed for the clean air and traffic-free spaces, picturing to herself what the village of Chaddoxboume would be like, complete, as her father had told her, with medieval bridge and a watermill. Oh well, tomorrow she would see it for herself—and she might even see the mysterious Robert Chaddox who was descended from the Saxon kings, though why she should think of him at such a time, she really couldn’t imagine.

In the morning, she said goodbye to her landlady and was a little surprised when that lady kissed her warmly and assured her that she would always be ready to welcome her back when she wanted to come back to London.

“You have to be bred to the country to take to its ways,” she said dourly. “There’s not a thing to do if, like yourself, you’re used to doing as you please about going to cinemas and things. You’ll be back sooner than you think!”

“I do hope so !” Sarah had responded. “When I come back it will mean that my father’s better!”

“Poor man!”

Sarah had winced away from the sympathy in her landlady’s eyes and had hurried out to her car, stowing her single suitcase on the back seat. Her landlady came after her, her unsmiling face peering in through the windows of the car.

“You mind yourself in that traffic! Hear it’s bad going down to the Channel ports.”

“I will,” Sarah had promised.

“See that you do!”

Sarah drove away with a sinking feeling of failure that she couldn’t shake off as she made her way through the length of London, across Vauxhall Bridge and slowly out through the New Kent Road, into what had once been part of Kent but which was now considered part of London, and straight on down Shooters Hill to where the fast road began that led eventually to the motorway to Canterbury.

Despite the open windows, it was blazing hot in the little car. Sarah would have liked to have stopped half way, but the only place on the motorway had been taken over by a convoy of coaches and, anyway, seemed to have little to recommend it, so she decided to go on to Canterbury and have lunch there.

To her surprise, it was relatively easy to find somewhere to park in the city. All she had to do was to follow the signs and wait for a few short minutes to get into the car park. What was more difficult was to find her way round the city after that. Canterbury had been badly bombed in the war and much of it had been rebuilt since, which was sad when one thought of the old hostels that had once lined the streets and the bow-fronted shops of a later era, all of which had now given way to the utility styles of the present century. Here and there though a glimpse of the past still remained and was perhaps all the more appreciated because it was less commonplace than it had been before.

On the advice of the car-park attendant, Sarah chose a restaurant a little way away from the Cathedral and the main body of tourists that thronged the narrow surrounding streets. She was unaccustomed to going into a restaurant by herself and she braced herself unconsciously as she pushed open the door and went inside.

“I’m afraid we have no free tables just at the moment, madam. Are you on your own? Would you mind sharing?”

Sarah smiled at the pretty girl who had accosted her and shook her head. "If the other person doesn’t mind," she murmured as the girl led her towards a minute, spindly table that looked even smaller than it was because of the coiled length of man that was already in possession of it.

“You don’t mind sharing, do you, sir?”

The man started, half rose, thought better of it, and shook his head silently. Sarah hurried forward before he could change his mind, her eye firmly fixed on the vacant chair on the other side of the table. It was unfortunate that at that moment another customer pushed her chair back from her table, knocking into her, and she in turn ricocheted into her own table, jogging the arm of the man. With wide eyes she watched the red stain of his tomato soup drip slowly down his uncannily white shirt and flowered tie.

“Oh!” she exclaimed.

He glanced up at her, his eyes grey and wintry. Without saying anything at all, he picked the table up bodily and motioned with his head for her to pass by and sit down. She did so hastily, colouring a little.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said.

He nodded, dismissing her apology and reducing her to silence. She watched him as he took out a spotless handkerchief and dabbed at his shirt-front, feeling flustered and breathless. It wasn’t only that she had made a fool of herself, there was something electric in the long length of man opposite her, in his ice-cold grey eyes, and in the wiry way his hair grew from his scalp. Sarah looked away from him hastily, uncomfortably aware that she was blushing and that he knew that she was.

When she could bear his silence no longer, she leaned forward a little and cleared her throat.

“Could you tell me how to get to Chaddoxboume?” she asked him.

For an instant his eyes met hers. “Chaddoxboume?”

“Y-yes. It’s a village near here ”

“Have you got a car?” he cut her off.

She nodded helplessly. “It’s in a car park. The one by the theatre.”

To her surprise his lips parted in a faint smile. “Well,” he drawled, “if you manage to get it out of the car park still intact, you turn right at the main road, go across the island and on through the lights. Turn left about a mile out of town and then follow your nose.”

Sarah blinked, realising that she hadn’t listened to a single word of his instructions. “I drive quite well!” she heard herself say.

The man grunted. “I doubt it, unless you show a better judgement of space and distance on the road ”