And I’d certainly wanted to kiss him back, until I came to my senses.
It seemed there was a whole world of what-might-have-beens out there, like one of those films with several alternative parallel realities.
But it was all a long time ago and now we were both older, wiser and, it seemed, destined to be friends.
I hoped Lex would now be able to cast off the shackles of guilt. The ghost of Lisa, beautiful and sad, would always be there, but she wouldn’t have wanted her death to blight his life.
Lex’s brief kiss before he drove me back last night had been meant to mark the end of hostilities and the start of a new relationship … of some kind.
Kissing cousins … Mark certainly thoughthewas! I’d have to disillusion him about that pronto, before Sybil called the banns and Flora decided I was her love rival.
I wriggled down a little further under the warm duvet and remembered the scene when Lex and I had arrived back at the Red House last night. It had struck me as odd that nobody asked what had kept us so long.
‘Oh, there you are,’ Clara had said casually, with a beaming smile. ‘Just in time for a late dinner, or early supper. Den and Tottie are just putting the finishing touches to it, whatever it is.’
‘Cheese and onion pie, with winter slaw and red cabbage,’ River said. ‘Blackberry crumble and custard.’
‘Very hearty and warming,’ approved Clara.
‘It’s starting to snow hard out there,’ Lex told them. ‘Just as well it wasn’t like this earlier, or we’d have had a struggle to get up to the Stone for the ceremony.’
‘We’ve never postponed one yet, even if it’s only been the performers who made it to the top,’ Henry said, then added to River, ‘I’m afraid you might not be able to leave in the morning, but you’re very welcome to stay as long as you like.’
River thanked him and said it was in the hands of the Goddess and he would wait and see how she directed things. I had a mental image of her as a kind of celestial Traffic Officer.
Teddy said anxiously, ‘Will Mummy make it tomorrow?’
‘Yes,’ Lex assured him, ‘even if I have to borrow Uncle Henry’s skis and carry her here on my back.’
Teddy had thought that very funny and he was quite talkative and lively during dinner, until the excitement of the day caught up with him and he’d have gone face down in his dessert, fast asleep, only Tottie caught him in the nick of time.
I’d felt a bit self-conscious with Lex – OK, alotself-conscious – and tried to avoid looking in his direction, but on the one or two occasions when I did glance his way I found him smiling at me with a kindness that I found more difficult to bear than the animosity that had gone before.
It hadn’t stopped me eating as if I’d been famished for a month, though. That must be what a near-death experience, followed by a lot of soul-baring, does for you.
Everyone seemed to know I’d had a fall, but no one mentioned it as anything other than an accident.
I couldn’t lie there for ever and it was starting to get light, so I showered, finding a few more bumps and bruises down one side, though you could barely see the thin thread of the scratch on my face, or the surrounding bruise, and my hands were only a little pink and puffy from the gorse, thanks to Sybil’s ministrations.
As I reached the bottom of the stairs, giving the now-familiar wooden eagle a friendly pat on the head, Henry and Lex came in through the front door, stamping off the snow in the porch.
‘Is it still snowing?’ I asked Henry, avoiding Lex’s eyes, because I felt even more shy this morning than I had last night, having had time to think about it all.
‘It’s snowed a lot during the night, but it’s stopped now and the sun’s trying to break through.’
‘Some of the farmers have been out gritting the road through the village, so it’s passable from here to Underhill,’ Lex said. ‘It gets steadily deeper as you climb up towards the moors, though, so they’re going to see if it thaws out a bit this morning and then try the snowplough later.’
‘Yes,’ Henry said, ‘even if they can’t get all the way through to Thorstane, they’ll still need to take feed to the sheep, one way or another.’
They’d already had breakfast, but I found most of the others still in the kitchen and I apologized for my lateness.
‘I wasn’t even asleep, just lying there, too snug to get up.’
‘That’s all right, all our usual routines are slowly dissolving into the Christmas spirit,’ said Clara. ‘Tottie’s only just gone to let the hens out.’
‘If we had a pond, we could have a duck,’ Teddy suggested.
‘What do you call a duck at this time of year?’ asked Clara.