Force Of Feeling. PENNY JORDAN

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      It was almost six o’clock, and she still had to go to the supermarket. It was a long drive to Pembroke … She almost decided to delay her departure until the morning but, if she did, Guy French would probably be on the telephone, telling her he had already found her a secretary. He was that kind of man. No, she needed to leave now, while there was still time.

      While there was still time … She frowned a little at her own mental choice of words. It was almost as though she was frightened of the man; almost as though, in some way, she found him threatening. She shrugged the thought aside. Guy French was a bully; she had never liked him and she never would.

      The media considered him to be the glamour boy of publishing, although at thirty-five he hardly qualified for the term ‘boy’, she told herself scathingly. He represented everything male that she detested: good looks, charm, and that appallingly apparent raw sexuality that other women seemed to find so attractive, and which she found physically repellant.

      She had seen his eyes narrow slightly this morning as he came to greet her, and she had instinctively stepped back from him. He hadn’t touched her, letting his hand fall to his side, but she had still flushed darkly, all too conscious of his amusement and contempt.

      No doubt to a man like him she was just a joke: a physically unattractive woman with whom he was forced to deal because it was part of his job. She had seen too many men look at her and then look away to be under any illusions. She wasn’t like Lucy—pretty, confident. Craig had destroyed for her for ever any belief she might once have had that she had any claim to feminine beauty. Ugly, sexless—that was how he had described her in the cruel, taunting voice of his, and that was how she saw herself, and how she believed others saw her as well.

      But there were other things in life that brought pleasure, apart from love. She had found that pleasure in her work. Had found … Until Guy French had started tearing her novel apart, and with it her self-confidence.

      That was what really hurt, she admitted—knowing that he was right when he described her characters as unanimated and without depth. But she had been commissioned to write a historical novel with a factual background, not a love story dressed up in period costume.

      She could, of course, always back down and admit defeat; she could tell Guy French to inform the publishers that she was backing out of the contract. They wouldn’t sue her she felt sure and with withdrawal would stop Guy from hounding her. There were other books she could write … Moodily, she stared out of the window. Her flat was one of several in a small, anonymous, purpose-built block, with nothing to distinguish it from its fellows. Once, as teenagers, she and Lucy had talked of the lives they would lead as adults, of the homes they would have. She remembered quite sharply telling Lucy that she would fill hers with fresh flowers, full of colour and scent.

      Fresh flowers! It had been years since she had last bought any … the wreath for her parents’ funeral.

      Impatient with herself, Campion went to get her coat and her car keys, and then headed for her local supermarket.

      CHAPTER TWO

      SHE must have been mad to have attempted this long journey so late in the evening, Campion admitted bitterly as she stared out into the dark night.

      Somehow, out here in the middle of Wales, the darkness seemed so much more intense than it had in London. Almost it felt as though it was pressing in on her, surrounding her. She shivered despite the warmth inside the car, wondering why it was she should be so much more aware of the fact that it was late November, and the weather wet and cold and very inhospitable, than she had been when she had first left.

      Perhaps because when she’d left her mind had been full of Guy French, and how angry he would be when he found that she had escaped.

      So he thought he could force her to complete the book by taking on a secretary, did he? Scornfully she grimaced to herself. Well, he would soon learn his mistake!

      She came to a crossroads and slowed down to check the signpost, sighing faintly as she realised that it, like so many others she had driven past, had been a victim of the Welsh language lobby.

      Luckily, she had had the foresight to buy a map that gave both the Welsh and the English names for the many tiny villages dotted about the Pembroke.

      At night, the terrain might seem inhospitable but, as she remembered from short summer weekends she had spent here with Helena, the coastline was one of the most beautiful she had ever seen, with mile upon mile of unspoiled countryside, and narrow, winding roads, between deep banks of hedges that were vaguely reminiscent of Cornwall and Dorset at their very best.

      Helena’s cottage was rather remote, several miles away from the nearest village, in fact, down a narrow, unmade-up road. She had been left it by a distant relative, and had some claim to Welsh blood. She had spent childhood holidays in the area, and had been able to supply Campion with many interesting facts about it.

      The Welsh scornfully referred to Pembroke as being more English than England itself, and certainly a succession of English monarchs had been very generous to friends and foes alike when it came to handing out these once rich Welsh lands.

      Sir Philip Sidney, the famous Elizabethan poet and soldier, had been Earl of Pembroke, and there had been others; some sent here as a reward, some as a punishment.

      Her imagination suddenly took fire, and she found herself wondering what it would have been like to have been dismissed to this far part of the country, especially for a young girl, more used to the elegance of court living. A girl like Lynsey, for instance.

      Within seconds, Campion was totally involved in the plot she was weaving inside her head. She reached automatically for the small tape recorder she always carried with her, the words flowing almost too quickly as she fought to keep pace with her thoughts.

      Why was it that she found it so incredibly easy and exciting to imagine the emotions of her young heroine in this context, but, when it came to making her fall in love and having a sexual relationship, her brain just froze?

      Impatient with herself, she pressed harder on the accelerator. Nearly there now, surely. She glanced at the dashboard clock. One in the morning, but she didn’t feel tired; at least, not mentally tired. Her brain had gone into overdrive, and she was itching to sit down at her typewriter and work. It would mean altering several chapters she had already done, but that wouldn’t be any problem, and it would add an extra dimension to her book.

      Angrily, she dismissed the sudden memory she had of Guy telling her that her manuscript lacked a very important dimension. What was she trying to do? Prove to him that she could make the book work without the sexual content he deemed so necessary? And so it would, she told herself mutinously. But, deep down inside herself, she knew it was not just the lack of sexuality to her heroine, but the lack of emotional responsiveness to the men around her that made the book seem so flat. Campion was not a fool, some of the most emotionally and mentally stimulating books ever written—books that caught the imagination and held it fast, books that conveyed a quality of realism and involvement that no one could deny—did so without any reference description of physical lovemaking between the main characters. But what they had, and what her manuscript lacked, was the special, vibrant awareness of the characters’ sexuality. A vibrant awareness which she herself had never experienced, other than that one briefly painful episode with Craig.

      She was so deeply immersed in her private thoughts that she almost missed the turn-off for the cottage. Braking quickly, she turned into the unmade-up lane.

      Surely it had not СКАЧАТЬ