Creature Comforts. Trisha Ashley

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СКАЧАТЬ make such a fuss about a dog, when there were children suffering so much poverty and hardship. In fact, he made no secret of it that he thought Debo’s Desperate Dog Refuge was a stupid idea altogether and a total waste of money.

      ‘Why take in dogs that aren’t suitable for rehoming?’ he’d asked, puzzled. ‘I mean, they must bite, or have some other antisocial behaviour, so putting them down would really be the only sensible option.’

      So no, he and Debo were never going to see eye to eye. And though I could see his point about the children, animals deserve better treatment, too, and they were where Debo’s heart lay.

      Apart from that one glitch over Debo’s Dogs, everything about our relationship had seemed entirely serendipitous, from our first meeting right up to the moment he introduced me to his parents for the first time …

      I flipped over, took a deep breath and then swam underwater to the other end of the pool, where I let myself slowly float back to the surface, looking down into the opaque depths. I always think coming up is a bit like being born again. One minute it’s dark turquoise murk and the next – out you pop into bright light and a birdsong ‘Hallelujah’ chorus.

      But this time, just as I was about to turn over, there was the sudden shock of an almighty splash right next to me and next minute I was wrenched out of the water, taking an involuntary gulp of it in the process, then upended inelegantly over someone’s arm. A hard hand thumped me between the shoulder blades and I choked and spluttered, then began to struggle.

      ‘You’re alive!’ said a deep voice, thankfully.

      Turning me the right way up, the man waded to the side and laid me down on the stone edging, before climbing out.

      I sat up, still coughing up water, and exclaimed indignantly, ‘Of course I’m alive, you idiot! I was swimming!’

      ‘My God,’ he said blankly, looking down at me from a great height, ‘I’ve rescued a pixie!’

      His hair was darkly plastered to his head and his clothes dripping, but there was something strangely familiar about him. Then, when he reached down and hauled me to my feet, I found myself staring up, stunned, into a distinctive and unforgettable pair of eyes the soft green of sea-washed bottle glass, edged with smudgy black around the iris.

      ‘Harry?’ I whispered, my heart suddenly stopping, then restarting, but faster and more erratically.

      It was he who broke the long eye contact, frowning and letting go of his grip on my arms so suddenly that I nearly sank down again.

      ‘I’m Rufus – Rufus Carlyle,’ he said, looking at me strangely.

      And of course, after that first brief shock I could see he was a total stranger. He might be much the same age as Harry, his half-brother, would have been by now, but other than the eyes, his face was entirely different, all planes and angles, with a cleft chin and a Roman nose that wouldn’t have looked out of place under a plumed helmet on the obverse of an ancient coin.

      In fact, it occurred to me that if he hadn’t been wearing clothes, he would have been a dead ringer for the fantasy Roman soldiers I’d often imagined sharing the pool with me.

      I felt a slightly hysterical bubble of laughter trying to escape my lips and clamped them together, but I must have looked weird, because he asked tersely, ‘Are you all right?’

      I nodded and then swallowed. ‘Yes. Or at least I was, until you started half-drowning me and bashing me around.’

      ‘Only because you were floating face down and looked drowned. What on earth were you doing in there, anyway? The place is closed to visitors until two. Did you climb over the fence?’

      He looked me up and down and then added, before I’d had a chance to get a word in among all the questions, ‘Presumably not dressed like that. You looked so small in the pool I thought you were a child – but now, obviously not.’

      I’d forgotten what I was wearing – or not wearing. My old and modest one-piece swimsuit appeared to have vanished in my absence, so I’d grabbed the first alternative that came to hand, the white bikini I’d bought years before when going on holiday to Corfu with Lulu and her parents. It hadn’t looked particularly skimpy when I was a skinny teenager, but I’d acquired a few curves since then and I have to admit it had been a struggle to fasten the top …

      I crossed my arms over my chest defensively. ‘I’m local, so I’ve got a token to get through the turnstile and Tom doesn’t mind my having a swim whenever I want one.’

      ‘So, who are you?’

      ‘I’m Izzy,’ I said reluctantly. ‘Isabella Dane.’

      He took a sudden step back, as if I’d offered him a poisoned chalice and suggested he take a tiny sip for his health’s sake.

      ‘You’re Izzy Dane? Dan Clew told me all about you, but he said you lived abroad.’

      ‘I bet he’s told you all about me,’ I said bitterly. ‘And I was living and working abroad, but now I’m back. For good. And we didn’t even know you existed till a few weeks ago. Debo thinks you’re probably an impostor,’ I added, even though I’d known straight away that he wasn’t.

      ‘Then she’s wrong,’ he snapped. ‘You think I wanted to discover the man I’d thought was my father all my life, wasn’t?’

      We stared at each other, and then I shivered violently.

      ‘Presumably even pixies can get pneumonia,’ he said. ‘Hadn’t you better get changed? Or do you walk around the woods like that?’

      I gave him a look and stalked off across the grass to the changing hut, slamming the door after me. The sun was well down now, one stray beam shining through the heart-shaped cut-out high in the door, like a celestial message. I only wished I knew what it was saying.

      When I came out, towelling my urchin crop into an even more pixie state, he was still there, dripping gently onto the short turf.

      He’d taken his fleecy blue sweatshirt off and was wringing it out, revealing a broad-shouldered frame tapering to a narrow waist. He wasn’t heavily muscled, but either he worked out, or wrestling heavy bits of garden antiquities about was more strenuous than I’d imagined.

      With some difficulty, he put the garment back on again. ‘I’m not sure that’s an improvement,’ he said.

      ‘I thought you’d have gone home: you’re going to catch your death, hanging about in wet clothes,’ I said, and this actually seemed a good idea to me, so I didn’t offer him my towel to dry his hair with.

      ‘We’re presumably going the same way, since I expect you walked through the estate from the Lodge?’

      ‘It’s actually an ancient right of way,’ I said defensively, wondering how it was that he constantly made me feel in the wrong. ‘It goes all the way from Middlemoss, across the main road at the bottom of the hill, and then up behind the pub to here. Then it cuts through the corner of your estate and comes out by the Sweetwell gates. That’s why there’s that wooden door in the wall just there.’

      He frowned. ‘Which door?’

      ‘You СКАЧАТЬ