The Marrying Game (44 page)

Reality dimmed, as the pictures took over her mind – visions of Edward, of the Man, of Tristan, always rushing away from her, leaving a world utterly bereft of love.

She sat down, buried her head in her arms, and cried until she lost consciousness.

Chapter Five

SHE WOKE, WITH
a racing heart, to the shrilling of the phone. Snapping suddenly back to consciousness, she found herself lying with one cheek pillowed on the kitchen table, almost glued to it with dried snot and tears. Sunlight poured in at the window over the sink. Rufa jumped up, staggering slightly because one leg had gone to sleep. If this was Edward, she must do her best to sound normal.

‘Hello?’ It came out as a croak.

‘Ru, it’s Tristan. And before you say a word, I’m sorry about last night. I was a shit to you, and I’ll never be able to make it up.’ His voice was rapid, pleading and full of energy. ‘I should be dragged through the streets and publicly flogged. You have every right to slam the phone down and never speak another word to me ever again – I mean, obviously, it would utterly break my heart, but I’d deserve it. Hello? You are there, aren’t you?’

Rufa felt she had been reborn in Technicolor, after months in miserable monochrome. The world clicked back into its right place, and she was suddenly aware of the morning’s shimmering beauty. ‘Yes, I’m here – where are you?’

‘Cirencester. It’s a long story. Basically, I need a lift home and I need my credit card – it’s on the dresser, in my wallet. Could you bring it?’

She laughed. ‘What on earth is going on? Why do you need a credit card?’

‘Because – look, please don’t be furious – I’ve had a bit of a problem with Edward’s car, and I need to pay the guy who towed it to the garage.’

‘A bit of a –?’

‘Come and fetch me, and I’ll explain everything,’ Tristan said. ‘To know all is to forgive all. Are you really not cross?’

‘How cross should I be?’

‘Well, very cross indeed, if I’m honest.’

Laughter bubbled up inside Rufa. She was suddenly ridiculously happy, in a way she had not been for God knew how long. She did not realize she had forgotten how to be happy like this, until she remembered it now. It was like a veil lifting, or a mist clearing. ‘You’d better tell me where you are,’ she said.

He was waiting on the forecourt of a garage near the public car park. The moment she saw him, Rufa’s heart contracted with longing. His white jeans and shirt were streaked with grime, and one side of his long hair was matted and blackened. There was a square of lint taped to his forehead. He looked beautiful. She saw all this as she braked her Renault beside the carwash.

Tristan ran over, she leapt out. They did not know how to greet each other, and stood awkwardly looking at the ground.

A young man in overalls, with a lumpy head shaved to stubble and an earring, ambled over to them. ‘This is her, is it?’

Tristan looked up. ‘Yes, this is Mrs Reculver. It’s actually her husband’s car.’

‘Oh, right.’ The young man grinned at them significantly. ‘You’ll have some explaining to do.’

‘This is Ken,’ Tristan said. ‘He very kindly towed me here and took my credit card on trust – did you bring it?’

‘Tristan, what happened to your head? Are you all right?’ Rufa lightly touched the plaster on his forehead.

‘He’s got stitches,’ Ken said. ‘I had to pick him up from casualty.’

‘Casualty? For God’s sake, why can’t you tell me what happened?’ She was alarmed.

‘You’re going to do your nut when you see the car,’ Ken said, still grinning.

He led them round the side of the main building into an oily, echoing shed, with tufts of coarse grass poking through the cracks in the concrete floor. Rusting oil drums and thick coils of wire were stacked along one wall. Directly in front of them was a wrecked car, lacking a windscreen and one door. The bonnet had buckled like a concertina, and the airbag drooped limply off the steering wheel. Rufa suddenly realized she was looking at Edward’s Land Rover Discovery. The world reeled.

Tristan quickly took her hand. ‘Sorry, I should have warned you.’

‘God almighty,’ she said. The colour had drained from her face. ‘You – you could have been killed.’

‘He’s the lucky sort, this one,’ Ken said, staring at Rufa. ‘He walked away from this mess with just a couple of stitches.’

‘Rufa, I’m so sorry,’ Tristan said. ‘But you should be able to collect on the insurance, because I wasn’t pissed or anything.’

‘It’s not the car I care about, you idiot.’ She was recovering. ‘It’s you. I nearly lost you.’

‘Would you have minded?’

‘Don’t be stupid. It would have destroyed me.’

‘Oh, my darling –’ He was radiant. It was settled, and there was no need to say any more. Tristan gently took Rufa in his arms. She wrapped her arms around his neck, holding him close to feel the beating of his heart. The dreadful nearness of death terrified her. A single second could have stilled all the glorious life that pulsed through him. She wanted to hold him for ever.

Ken coughed elaborately. ‘Where’s that credit card, then?’

Rufa and Tristan disengaged, and climbed down from the realm of the angels. Rufa produced Tristan’s wallet. They went into a small office, full of heaped ashtrays and dented filing cabinets, and Tristan paid the bill.

Then they were free. They walked out of the garage hand in hand, happy for the moment just to be together and in love.

Tristan glanced at his watch. ‘Half past ten. Can we have a coffee somewhere?’ He smiled into her face, his own face so close that her vision was swamped by his clean, glistening eyes. ‘I always seem to be saying this to you, but I’m absolutely starving.’

‘I’ll buy you some breakfast,’ Rufa said. ‘Then you can tell me the whole sordid story – and we can dream up a version that will be acceptable to Edward.’ It was strange how theoretical Edward seemed at this moment. If her mind rested on him for too long, the pain was unbearable – the man who had married her because he thought her family deserved his money more than his long-term lover; who had, apparently, resisted having
sex
with her because he felt he was being unfaithful to Prudence. It was far safer, and far more pleasant, not to think about Edward at all.

They found an old-fashioned café, its panelled walls crammed with horse brasses and speckled engravings. Rufa sat down at the table in the window. Tristan went to wash the dried blood out of his hair.

‘How’s that?’ he asked, when he returned to her. ‘Less like Rab C. Nesbitt, I hope?’ Rufa thought he looked like a young cavalier, wearing the mud of Naseby or Edgehill.

She laughed. ‘You’re dirty, but moderately respectable. That’ll do. The Man used to come in here barefoot.’

They ordered tea, croissants, English muffins and a toasted bacon sandwich. Tristan fell upon this savagely – he had not eaten, Rufa remembered, since she fed him cheese sandwiches on the motorway, the night before. Yesterday seemed another era.

‘I was mad,’ Tristan said. ‘I hardly even knew I was driving. I kept thinking how you’d pushed me away. I was convinced you hated me. I hated myself for what I said to you – which I didn’t mean.’

Rufa looked down at the surface of her tea. ‘Some of it was quite accurate.’

‘No, it was all totally childish.’ He was forceful. ‘I should never have jumped on you like that. I had no right to assume anything.’

‘Where did you crash?’

‘I went into a stone wall near Hardy Cross. It was on a bend, and I didn’t see it in time.’ The colour rose in Tristan’s face. He took her hand across the table. ‘Actually, I didn’t see it because I was crying.’

She looked up quickly. ‘So was I. How ludicrous, to think of us both crying, when all I had to do was admit the truth.’

‘The truth that you love me?’

‘Yes. I don’t know why I got so scared.’ This was not true. Rufa did know. She was scared of losing her anchor; the person whose good opinion mattered most in the world.

Tristan said, ‘Because of Edward,’ as if Edward were a tiresome obligation.

She added quickly, ‘I’m not saying I’m scared of
him
.’

‘God, I am,’ Tristan said. ‘Particularly now that I’ve fallen in love with his wife and trashed his car. He’ll probably get me in one of those SAS tackles, and garrotte me.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ Rufa was sharp; annoyed to be put in the position of defending Edward, and slightly annoyed by Tristan’s levity. At this stage, she did not need any more reminders of his glaring youthfulness.

She was silent for a moment. ‘You have to understand how much I love you,’ she said. ‘You have to see how it hurts me to betray Edward. But I’ve gone too far now. And if I can’t love you, it’ll kill me.’ She was starving to be loved. It made her light-headed with desire to be with a man who made passionate speeches and professed a readiness to die for her.

Tristan withdrew his hand. ‘You’re always talking about dying, and being killed.’

‘Am I?’

‘You’re so intense, feelings are like knives to you. I knew that the first evening we spent together – when you cooked that fabulous Italian meal. You were impossibly beautiful, but I had a tremendous sense that you were
unhappy
. Sort of lost inside yourself. That’s how you got to me.’ He reached blindly for the other half of his sandwich, took a wolfish bite, and hurried on with his mouth full. ‘I don’t know how it happened, or whether I even like it. You haven’t given me a choice. When I drove off last night, I thought the world had ended – I couldn’t bear to live without you. The second before I crashed, I think I felt rather noble, because I was dying for you.’ He smiled radiantly – as far as he was concerned, everything was happily settled now. ‘Then I wasn’t dead, and I just felt like a prat. The door was bent, or something, and I couldn’t get out.’

‘Were you there for long?’

‘Well, it seemed like ages. Apparently some old biddy in a bungalow heard the smash and didn’t dare to come out and look, because she thought I’d be a mangled cadaver.’

Rufa winced. ‘Don’t.’ He was extraordinarily cool about it, as if the crash had proved him immortal.

‘She called out every service short of Mountain Rescue – I had the flower of Gloucestershire’s manhood swarming all over me. The Fire Brigade got the door off, the police breathalysed me, the ambulance took me to hospital.’

‘Did the police charge you with anything?’

Tristan, gulping tea, shook his head. ‘I wasn’t drunk, and you can’t book a guy for driving while sobbing uncontrollably, can you? As a matter of fact, they couldn’t have been sweeter. They all said it was obvious you really loved me.’

Rufa could not help laughing. ‘Oh God, how much did you tell them? I’ll never be able to look a policeman in the eye again.’ Tristan had managed, while trapped in
a
wrecked car, to charm them. She was reminded of the Man – always being arrested, and on terms of positive affection with half the law in the county. Dozens of policemen had turned out for his funeral.

‘I didn’t give any names,’ Tristan assured her.

‘That’s a comfort, anyway.’

Behind her, there was a brisk tapping on the plate-glass window. Rufa turned, and saw the wild head of Rose, beaming and mouthing something incomprehensible above the strip of gingham curtain. The last person she wanted to see, when all her defences had been torn away. She smiled and waved, doing her best to look delighted.

‘My mother,’ she muttered to Tristan.

‘Oh.’

‘She’s coming in. Just agree with whatever I tell her.’

They both stood up as Rose came crashing into the café, laden with clinking shopping bags. If Rufa had had her wits about her she would never have brought Tristan to this place. It was not at all discreet, but it had not occurred to her, until now, that she had anything to hide.

The middle-aged waitress behind the counter greeted Rose as an old friend. ‘Well, look who it is, we haven’t seen you for ages. And we’ve got some of those long doughnuts you like.’

‘Oh, yes please – and a cup of coffee. No, tea. No, definitely coffee.’ Rose embraced her daughter. ‘Darling, how lovely to see you. I was just thinking, I must ring you to say what a duck Linnet looks in the yellow frock you bought her – she insisted on wearing it today.’ She beamed at Tristan. ‘And you’re Tristan. Liddy’s been singing your praises. She says she never
knew
a man could behave so well in shops. What on earth have you done to your head?’