It was late in the afternoon and she was sitting on a bench with Tottie beside her on a small headland just south of Heathcote homestead. It was an overcast day with a cool breeze that was lifting Tottie’s shaggy coat and causing the seagulls to plane on the thermals.
They’d been for a long brisk walk and were on their way home now.
‘So,’ Harriet said again. ‘It’s all off, Tottie. Your master has walked away without a word and I should be celebrating because I’ve always—almost—known I was playing with fire just by being anywhere near him.’
‘I’m not—’ she put her arm around Tottie ‘—celebrating, though. I’m miserable. I feel abandoned. I feel hard done by because he can come and go while I’m stuck here because of his mother’s collection, because of Brett, not that I hold Brett responsible for anything...’
She stared out over the silvery sea. It was a choppy seascape today with whitecaps that, if you knew anything about matters maritime, told you the breeze was running at about twenty knots.
How did I know that? she wondered. Must have been amongst quite a lot of the useless information I learnt from Dad. Is any information useless, though?
She continued to stare out to sea and grimaced as she saw a yacht sailing south and riding the waves a bit like a rocking horse. Then she felt Tottie stiffen and saw her nose quiver as she tested the wind. The final giveaway as the big dog bounded to her feet was the joyful bark she reserved for one person and one person only—Damien.
Harriet scrambled to her feet and there he was, climbing the headland towards them. Then she stood like a statue until he was right up to them and her eyes were wide and astonished because he wore a suit and a tie.
‘I thought...I thought you were in Perth,’ she stammered.
‘I had planned to be,’ he replied as he made a fuss of Tottie, ‘but something wouldn’t let me go.’
‘What?’ she asked huskily, her expression mystified.
‘You.’
She blinked several times. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You once believed you owed me an explanation. I’ve come under the same compulsion.’
He paused and loosened his tie and once again the way the breeze lifted his dark hair gave her goose bumps.
‘I thought it was best for us to—just cut this thing between us,’ he said then, his dark eyes resting on the riot of curls in her hair the wind had whipped up. ‘I thought that last night and right until I got to Sydney airport from Ballina this morning,’ he said dryly. ‘Then I changed my mind and flew back. Or, rather, it got changed for me by some arcane process I don’t quite understand, but anyway—’
He stopped and looked around. ‘Do you want to hear this here or back down—?’
‘Here,’ she broke in.
So they sat down on the bench and Tottie lay down at their feet with a look of pure contentment.
‘It’s about Veronica,’ he said. ‘She was, as Charlie insisted on putting it—’ he looked heavenwards ‘—just gorgeous. Not only that; she was bright. She ran her own IT consultancy business. We had an affair, then we got married.
‘I have to say,’ he went on thoughtfully, ‘that we fought as spectacularly as we did the opposite. But she wasn’t cut out to stay at home and run things like Isabel does. That was something I often found irritating and often—’ he shrugged ‘—held against her. Mind you, she had her own list of sins she held against me and, to be honest, the relationship was foundering. Then she discovered she was pregnant and, although she’d been rather secretive about it, I thought—it seemed to be a calming influence. I didn’t realise she was simply subdued and—worried.’