Page 17 of 2 Books in One Bundle

The thought was fleeting—disturbing. He put it aside. The Committal was ending, the vicar was intoning the final words, and a sob was audibly breaking now from Connie.

Instinctively, he put his arm around her shoulder, in an urge to give her the kind of natural human comfort she so obviously needed. He could feel the shaking of her body as she wept. It was strange to feel her so close to him—but it felt right, too. At his grandfather’s funeral he had stood completely alone...no one at his side. No one with any claim on him—or he on them.

The funeral was complete. Dante’s thoughts came away from his own memories to the present moment. It was time to leave the graveside, and he and the vicar guided Connie down the path across the churchyard. There would be no wake, as Connie had said she could not face it, and he understood.

They took their leave of the vicar at the lychgate and he walked her back to her cottage. Connie’s head was still bowed, tears undried on her cheeks, shoulders hunched. She looked, thought Dante with concern, shrunken and lost...

Inside the cottage he guided her into the little sitting room, helped her off with her coat. The black material of her mourning dress seemed to hang on her, too loose for any semblance of elegance. But what did appearance matter at a time like this? Her expression was haunted, eyes too large in her face.

A memory pierced him out of nowhere. Of how he’d first noticed, so incongruously, the vivid blue of her eyes on their wedding day all those long months ago. And then how they’d shone so brilliantly with excitement as the jet winging them to Milan had taken off, animating her face, lifting her features. Now they were smeared with tears, red-rimmed with weeping.

‘I will make you a cup of tea,’ he informed her.

It was the English remedy for all ills. Even grief...

When he came back, mug of tea in hand, and one of instant coffee for himself, she had not moved. She was sitting inertly on the sofa, gazing blindly at the armchair, empty now. Empty for ever. Memory hit him again—a different scene this time.

He lowered the mug of tea to the small table by the sofa. ‘When I went into my grandfather’s study the day of his funeral,’ he heard his own voice say, ‘I could not bear to see his chair behind his desk. To know he would never sit there again—’

He broke off. Swallowed. Death was hard. However it happened.

He sat down abruptly at the far end of the small sofa, curving his hands around his own mug. Connie turned her head, as if it weighed too much, and looked at him through her tears.

‘I see her there... Gran. In her chair. Though she has not sat there for weeks...’

Her voice was low, thready, exhausted.

Dante’s, as he answered her, was low as well.

‘It will ease in time. I promise you,’ he said. He frowned, looking away, down into his coffee. ‘In the end, there will only be good memories left.’

Even as he spoke he knew that was not completely true. He had many good memories, yes—but not all were good. His sense of hurt—betrayal—at the conditions in his grandfather’s will still remained like a canker. A jab of emotion came—bitter and harsh. His eyes lifted to the woman sitting there beside him. A woman he’d had to marry...who’d been a complete stranger to him.

But she was no longer a stranger...

She was once again shifting her gaze to the empty chair where her grandmother would never sit again, bleakness in her expression.

‘I miss her somuch,’ she said haltingly. ‘I cannot bear it that she’s gone. That I will never see her again—never...’

He saw tears filling her eyes again, misting the deep blue that he’d so seldom noticed, making them grey with grief.

Pity filled him.

She was a woman who, without the machinations of his grandfather’s malign will, he would never have known at all. Yet now she sat beside him, haunted in her grief, the most extreme of all emotions, calling echoes in himself.

We both lost our parents. Each only had a grandparent for so much of our lives. And now we don’t have even that.

Without realising it, he slipped one hand from cupping his coffee, moved it sideways, picked up one of the hands, lying so inertly in her lap. He took it into his. Her hand felt warm and soft. The sofa was small, and she was only a short distance from him. He’d only have to draw her against him, take her into his arms, to give her the human comfort that grief allowed.

Only grief?

Was that all it was?

His gaze went to her. Her face, so tear-stained, seemed gaunt and strained, and yet there was something about it—a haunted quality that accentuated her cheekbones, sculpted her mouth, deepened those eyes brimming with more as yet unshed tears, like diamonds on her eyelashes.

For a moment he felt something within him that had never been there before...a sense of closeness he’d never experienced.

Because I am remembering my grandfather just as she is remembering her grandmother? Is that why?

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