Tony’s face creased in concern. “Do you mean they would have left you penniless?”
She smiled. “It’s not quite so melodramatic. I was expected to work for my brother when the time came. He would have given me a wage.”
“But there was no question of you sharing the farm?”
“No chance.” To shift the attention from her family, she asked Tony about his work. She already knew a certain amount. He was the new money, a marshland millionaire, the owner of a fleet of digging machines that stacked sliced blocks of peat in tidy walls. He lived in an architect-designed villa in the Brue Valley and he had a bigger house in Gloucestershire. He was thirty-four, not bad-looking, curly-haired, dark and as tall as she would have wished.
“Here’s a confession. I got my start through inheritance,” he told her with a flicker of amusement, “but I didn’t cut out any sisters. I don’t have sisters. My Dad saw the potential of peat years ago, before the price jumped, in the days when they called it turf-cutting. He was in there before Fisons, or any of them.”
The peat that was Tony’s fortune is the principal asset of the moors. Where there is shallow water, there are reeds, and the reeds of five thousand years ago fell into the swamps, rotted down and were compressed. Many generations later, mankind discovered that the soggy brown fibrous stuff had a use. It was cut from the ground, stacked, dried and used mainly for fuel. Some clever entrepreneur even shipped it to Japan to be used in distilling whisky. But what transformed peat-cutting into an industry was the nineteen-sixties’ boom in natural fertilizers. Millions of people living in tidy suburban homes with patches of garden at front and back wanted the peat to nourish their soil. In the new wood-and-glass garden centres all over the country it was stacked high in bright plastic sacks, and the profits were high as well. An acre of Sedgemoor that you could have bought for five pounds in 1939 was worth at least ten thousand now.
And no one had ever seen Tony with a wife.
After the meal they drove through the lanes to a village at the west end of Bridgwater Bay that smelt of the sea. A bulwark of enormous quarried stones had been heaped along the front to keep back the highest tides. They clambered up and found a place to sit among the stones and watch the sunset. It would lead to some kissing, at the least, Alison assumed. First, there were things she wanted to know. “Have you brought anyone here before?”
He shook his head. “Never been here.”
“How did you know it was here, then?”
“I didn’t. The lane had to lead somewhere.”
They listened to the mournful, piping cry of a curlew and stared at the sunset reddening the shallow channels that lay on the vast expanse of mud. Down by the water, the tiny figure of a fisherman was manoeuvring a sledgelike structure across the mudflats, bringing in his catch of shellfish from the nets further out. Soon the tide would turn. Along this coast the Bristol Channel has a rise of nearly forty feet and the water rushes in at the rate of a galloping horse, so timing is crucial for the fishermen.
Alison picked up the conversation again. She had not forgotten the lipstick mark on the paper tissue. “Where do you take your girls, then?”
“What do you mean — ‘take my girls’?”
“Women, if you like. Birds, or whatever you call us. Where do you take them after dinner in that restaurant?”
Tony turned to face her. A hurt look clouded his features. “I’m not the playboy you seem to think I am.”
She asked the big question, trying to sound casual. “Married?”
“Do you think I would be here with you if I was?”
It was as good an answer as she was likely to get without spoiling the evening. She guessed there was something he didn’t want to discuss at this minute, like a recent divorce, or a failed relationship. She didn’t mind if he had a past, as long as it was over for good. You expected a man to have experience. She had a certain amount herself, come to that.
As if that cleared the way, he kissed her for the first time. He held her bare shoulders and traced the line of her neck. She could feel the links of his gold bracelet heavy and cool against her flesh. She pressed close and rested her head in the curve of his neck and shoulder. But they did not have sex, there in the setting sun, or later. She was not ready to suggest it, and nor, apparently, was Tony. They returned to the car and Hugh the chauffeur drove them back to Bridgwater. After being so direct with her questions Alison half-wondered if she would be invited out again, but Tony suggested another meal the next week.
Over the next days she gave sober thought to her needs, sexual and material. No amount of wishful thinking was going to transform this man into a great lover. He seemed content with kisses and cuddles so toe-curling that she was reminded of her pre-teens. So she considered the trade-off. Whoever got hitched to Tony need never work again. She pictured herself in the designer clothes she had seen in expensive magazines at the hairdresser’s. With her looks and figure it would be an injustice if she never got to wear such things. She thought of the holidays advertised in the travel agent’s window. She weighed the other advantages: being driven about in the car; the choice of two houses; a swimming pool; meals in posh restaurants.
I wouldn’t be ashamed of him, she reflected. His looks are all right, quite dishy, in fact. He must be intelligent, to be running the business. He treats me with respect. I haven’t noticed an aggressive side to him. And his work keeps him busy. Wicked thought: if I felt the urge to go out with blokes who appealed to me more, I could probably get away with it.
At the pub where she worked was a man Alison knew from experience would make a more passionate partner than Tony. She had slept with Matt Magellan more times than she cared to admit. Matt understood her needs. He was a tease and an out-and-out chauvinist, but when it came to sex he treated her right. He seemed to know instinctively the fine mix of flattery and passion that inflamed her. His touch was magic. She’d known him since childhood, which was a pity, because she could remember him at fourteen when he didn’t come up to her shoulder and she’d refused to go out with him for fear of making an exhibition of herself. He had put on some inches since then, but he was still below average height. A lovely mover, though, comfortable with his physique, beautifully co-ordinated on the dance-floor, regardless of what sort of dancing it was. More than once, she had caught herself wondering if she loved him. But how can you love a slaughterman who drinks in the pub each night and has about as much ambition as the cattle he kills?
“Fill them up, Ally,” he called over to her. His round.
She went to his table to collect the glasses.
“Have one thyself?” he offered.
“No thanks.”
“A half, then?”
“Not even a half.”
“Saving thyself?”
She reddened. “What do you mean?”
“Isn’t that obvious? Who were treated to a tasty supper out Stockland Bristol way the other evening?”
One of Matt’s drinking friends, John Colwell, a particular enemy of Alison’s, said, “Tasty supper and tasty afters, I reckon.”
Her contempt came as a hiss. She could neither confirm nor deny that kind of remark with any dignity. After filling the glasses she carried them to the table and made sure she slopped Colwell’s cider when she placed it in front of him.
Matt said, apparently for the amusement of his fellow-drinkers, but not without bitterness, “She’m given up cider for champagne.”
Every barmaid is used to suggestive remarks from the customers and Alison generally laughed them off. This was not like that. It was edged with malice. She said witheringly, “It isn’t the cider I’m sick of.”