The Marrying Game (58 page)

‘You’re anaemic,’ she announced. ‘I’m prescribing you some iron. And it looks as if you have an infection, so I’m giving you a short course of antibiotics – but for God’s sake, get yourself looked at properly. You might need a D and C, and I can’t tell without a full
examination
.’ She tore the prescription out of her book.

Rufa smiled, glad that the session appeared to be over. Her one free day was melting away. She held out her hand.

The doctor said, ‘Actually, I have to give this in at the desk. Mr Mecklenberg’s instructions.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s a private prescription,’ the doctor said gently. ‘He’s arranged to have it collected and paid for. Nothing for you to worry about.’

Rufa was impressed. ‘Isn’t he efficient?’

The interrogation was not quite finished. The doctor asked, ‘And how are you feeling now?’

A baffling question. ‘Well, I don’t know. Fine.’

‘Have you been depressed lately?’

‘I don’t think so.’ What did this mean? Being ‘depressed’ surely meant feeling very sad, and Rufa did not think she felt sad, exactly.

‘That could explain why you’re not eating,’ the doctor said.

‘I told you, I am eating. It just goes on and on.’

‘What does?’

‘You know. Life. Things. But I’m getting to grips with it now.’

‘Good,’ the doctor said, suddenly smiling. ‘Take it easy for a day or two, and try to eat a good lunch. I believe Mr Mecklenberg is waiting for you downstairs.’

Rufa went down to the dining room, wishing she had dressed with more elegance. Adrian was particular, and he would not care to be seen lunching at the Caledonian Hotel with a woman in jeans. If only she had worn the cashmere jersey – but she could get two thermal vests under her old blue guernsey, and the flat was arctic.

Adrian stood up at the discreet corner table where he had been reading the
Financial Times
. Rufa dropped a chaste peck on his clean, smooth cheek. ‘You’ve been so kind. I’m terribly sorry about all this.’

He tucked her chair underneath her, and sat down. ‘Please don’t apologize. Are you all right now?’

‘Absolutely fine. I can’t think what came over me.’ Rufa found, to her surprise, that she was rather glad to see Adrian. He was less stressful to talk to when you were not trying to marry him, and she was famished for conversation. She had not had a proper conversation for weeks.

‘I have to say it, Adrian – you’ve been tremendously nice to me. Far nicer than I deserve.’

He was, distantly, amused. ‘We won’t go into that. I’ve ordered you the tournedos, because you look as if you need something substantial. You’re considerably thinner than when I last saw you.’

He had last seen her at Berry’s, on the evening of her engagement to Edward. Rufa did not want to bring this up, and remained silent. Adrian did not expect a reply.

‘You’re altogether different,’ he said, ‘but you can’t disguise your hair – I knew you at once. Now, have a glass of wine and tell me what you’re doing in Edinburgh.’

‘Working, mainly,’ Rufa said carefully.

‘Where?’

‘I’m still doing my dinner parties. And I’ve got a job at a café just beside the Grassmarket – Nessie’s, after the monster. You wouldn’t know it.’

One of Adrian’s eyebrows moved slightly upwards, indicating surprise. ‘A café? What does your husband think of that?’

Rufa decided he had a right not be lied to. Briefly, sipping rich red wine, she sketched in the details of her catastrophic foolishness. She tried to keep her voice light and casual, remembering how Adrian liked his stories – neat, and to the point. She only faltered once, hurrying over her miscarriage. He listened impassively.

Their first courses arrived – a delicate terrine of smoked duck. Rufa admired hers, and made a determined effort to eat it. Chew, chew, chew, swallow. How did normal, fat people manage to do this all day?

Before she had finished, a man in a suit came to the table, with a white paper bag, which he handed to Adrian. ‘Your tablets, sir.’

‘Thank you.’ He passed it across the table to Rufa. ‘You ought to begin now, I suppose.’

Rufa opened the bag, taking out two plastic drums of pills. There were smooth brown ones, smelling like rusty wire. There were white capsules. She swallowed one of each. Adrian looked away disdainfully as she did so.

‘I still don’t quite understand,’ he said, ‘why you’re here. What on earth is stopping you from simply going home to your family?’

‘I can’t face them,’ Rufa said. She knew this sounded feeble, and struggled to explain. ‘The house – everything in it was paid for by Edward, you see. I made him do it, in exchange for marrying me. And now I’ve broken the agreement. I’ve dishonoured him.’

‘I seem to have missed a segment of the plot,’ Adrian said. ‘I gathered that you wanted to marry me for my money. But I also gathered it wasn’t as important as I had been led to believe. It seemed embarrassingly obvious that you were in love with Mr Reculver.’

‘Did it?’

‘I confess I was slightly annoyed to find that I had been used as a device to bring true lovers together.’

Rufa felt her face flaming. He made her sound cheap and silly, and he was right. ‘I know you don’t like apologies, but I am sorry for the way I behaved. I look back now, and I can hardly believe it.’

‘So you turned out not to love Mr Reculver after all?’

‘It’s not as simple as that.’ Rufa pushed a shred of duck around her plate, to make a new pattern with the unwanted food. ‘I do love him, actually. That makes it worse, doesn’t it? I love him and miss him more than anyone – and look how I treated him. He’s really far better off without me.’

‘Does he think that?’

‘I expect so.’ She risked a glance across at Adrian, and found him looking at her with the same expression of tolerant amusement. ‘Please – if you see anyone from home – please don’t give me away. Please don’t say you’ve seen me. I couldn’t bear it.’

The amusement was, once more, edged with distaste. ‘Rufa, try to remember that I’m not part of your circle, and certainly not in the habit of spreading gossip. I shouldn’t dream of interfering.’ He raised an eyebrow at a nearby waiter. ‘If you’re not intending to eat that, I suggest you move on to not eating the entrée. I’m leaving for the airport at three.’

‘Ah, Berry.’ Adrian, still in his overcoat, stepped into Berry’s shared office.

Berry jumped guiltily, horribly conscious that he had been caught in his braces and shirtsleeves, with a vacant
expression
on his face. He leapt to his feet. ‘Adrian. How did the meeting –?’

‘This isn’t to do with business.’ Adrian shifted his briefcase to the other hand. His grey eyes rested briefly on an empty crisp packet crumpled on the desk. ‘Or pleasure, now that I think of it. Do you still see that barmaid sister of Rufa Hasty’s?’

Berry felt his face turning a royal purple. ‘Yes. She – she works at Forbes & Gunning. I do go in there sometimes.’

‘Did you know Rufa had bolted?’

‘Yes, actually.’ A week ago, when he had rushed into the wine bar hours after his return from Frankfurt, the other barmaid – seeing how crestfallen he was that Nancy was not there – had told him the whole story of Rufa’s disappearance. His darling Nancy had, apparently, spent a whole night crying her lovely eyes out. The thought of this had given him actual physical pain. He ached for an excuse to take her in his arms and comfort her.

‘Well, tell her I’ve seen Rufa. I met her up in Edinburgh today, and had lunch with her. She’s working at a café called Nessie’s, in a street leading off the Grassmarket. I don’t know which, but there can’t be many.’

Berry was astonished. He tried not to gape. ‘Does she have a phone number?’

‘She didn’t give it to me,’ Adrian said. ‘She made me promise not to tell anyone I’d seen her.’

‘What made her change her mind?’

Adrian sighed. ‘She didn’t. I was lying to her. She looked so dreadful, I knew I would be forced to send someone to fetch her.’

‘Is she ill?’ This was alarming. Berry knew Adrian would never interfere unless he felt he really had no choice.

‘Yes,’ Adrian said crisply. ‘When she saw me, she fainted. She has, apparently, had a miscarriage.’ His eyelids wrinkled with distaste. ‘The doctor thought she was anaemic, and tried to tell me about infections and depressions – the entire experience was deeply annoying.’

‘Still,’ Berry said boldly, ‘it was awfully kind of you to take care of her.’

Unexpectedly, Adrian’s expression thawed into a wintry half-smile. ‘Don’t you dare accuse me of kindness. I’ve been hijacked into it, against all my better instincts. May I now consider my hands washed?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Berry said quickly. ‘I’ll go round to tell Nancy at once.’ He grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair. ‘And I’m sure she’ll want me to say thanks.’

‘Tell her to send that silly girl back to her husband,’ Adrian said. He left the office without another word, the window he had allotted to Rufa now closed.

Berry knew the matter was urgent, but stopped in the gents on his way out, to smooth his mad hair with water and straighten his tie. It was evening, and the crowds along Cheapside were thinning. The opulent, oddly sterile glitter of the Christmas tree in the foyer of Berry’s building forced his mind back a year, to the enchanted night he had first seen Nancy.

It was like remembering someone else’s life. This time last year he had been living with Polly, confidently expecting to do so until one of them died. He had been plump and complacent; Polly had been snugly poised to slip her page into Burke’s
Peerage
. And that one chance
meeting
with Ran Verrall, last Christmas Eve, had overturned everything – his entire world, and Polly’s; even Adrian’s.

Nearly a year later, Polly was hiding her fury at the home of her intensely horsy parents, near Petersfield. She had caught Ran in bed with his ex-wife, and virtually stripped his house down to the brickwork as revenge (the other barmaid had supplied these details). Berry, meanwhile, had spent the year wearing himself out with unrequited passion, until he was as wiry as he had been at school. At last the ordeal was ending. The happy ending was written in the stars. Nancy had to be there this evening. Since he had finished his stint in Frankfurt the previous week, he had haunted the wine bar in vain. The other barmaid, whose name was Fran, had explained that Nancy was only doing two days a week at the moment, and spending most of her time down at Melismate. Today was one of Nancy’s days. And though he knew it to be a little mean, he could not help reflecting that bringing the news about Rufa would be the perfect doorway to intimacy.

The bar was decked with silvered vine leaves, and packed with festive drinkers. In one corner, early as it was, an entire trading floor from some nearby bank had donned paper hats for the first leg of their Christmas binge. Berry saw Nancy’s red head flashing between the rows of square charcoal shoulders. She was working like a Fury, cramming bottles and glasses on to trays, throwing notes into the till. Berry was tempted to return when the place was quieter, but nobly resisted – Rufa was ill, and her family needed to know as soon as possible.

He bent his head, and battered his way through the
scrum
. It took muscle, and he had to clutch at the rim of the bar to stop himself being forced out of his space.

Nancy beamed at him. ‘Hello – what can I get you?’

‘Nothing – hello – I need to talk to you –’

‘What?’

With one more determined push through the shoulders, he leaned right across the bar towards her. ‘It’s about Rufa. Adrian met her up in Edinburgh today.’ As concisely as he could, through the roar of male conversation, Berry gave her the news headlines. Nancy listened in perfect stillness. When he got to the part about the miscarriage and the fainting and the illness, her blue eyes flooded with tears. His longing to comfort her was intense.

She said, ‘I must phone Edward,’ and hurried off without another word.

Berry gamely held his position, battered by elbows and squeezed against the mahogany. Nancy needed him. He refused to leave her now – he was all the more determined when he saw her hurrying back, wiping her eyes.

He asked, ‘Did you get him?’

‘Yes.’ She smiled through the tears. ‘I’m glad you’re still here.’

Out of the corner of his eye Berry saw Simon, working in an apron alongside his troops, looking suspiciously at Nancy. ‘I’ll order something now,’ he said. ‘A bottle of house champagne, please. And two glasses.’

‘Oh. You’re with someone.’ She was – unmistakably – disappointed.

‘Yes. I’m with you.’ Berry hoped he was keeping his voice free of unsuitable jubilation. ‘And you need a drink.’

‘I can’t – we’re too busy.’

‘When do you finish?’

‘Not till eleven.’

‘Couldn’t you take a break?’

Simon edged his way towards them. ‘Get a move on, Nancy - no time for you to hold court today.’

‘Sorry.’ Two more tears dripped from Nancy’s lashes. Her lower lip buckled.

Berry felt a tremendous, soaring, exultant surge of power. He could have slaughtered a lion. ‘Excuse me –’ He tapped masterfully at Simon’s arm with his credit card, as he had seen other men do. ‘Nancy’s had some bad news. Family stuff. I think I’d better take her out of all this for a minute. Is there somewhere we can go?’