A Pretend Engagement Read Free

immediately made arrangements to go to Australia to spend a month with friends he had there.

    Shortly afterwards, and to put the icing on his particular cake, he had found the job he said he had been looking for all his working life. `It's the job of my dreams, Varnie!' he'd enthused, and she'd thought she would have to tie him to a chair if he got any more excited.

    The job was as peripatetic assistant to one Leon Beaumont. Apparently the great man was often out of the office, either travelling around Britain or abroad. But so keen, not to say desperate, had Johnny been to get the job, he had been ready to cancel his proposed Australian holiday. It had not come to that, because, having been offered the job, he'd found that Leon Beaumont was prepared to honour his holiday arrangements. As it happened those arrangements conveniently fitted in with a break he was thinking of taking himself.

    In actual fact Johnny's Australia-bound flight had taken off earlier that day, Varnie reflected. But, not wanting to think about airports, she recalled how her father-stepfather, to be absolutely accurate-had wanted to give her a lump sum too. But by then she had learned that Grandfather Sutton had left Aldwyn House to her. And, though she knew she would not be able to afford the upkeep of the big old house, and would, reluctantly, have to sell it, she also realised that she would make a considerable amount from the sale, and did not therefore feel able to accept her father's generous offer.

    She had little money of her own, but was heartily glad she had paid her own airfare to Switzerland. Though it would have served Martin Walker right if she had allowed him to pay for it-but in all probability he would have been able to cash her ticket in. Come to think of it, she could not recall him ever offering to pay her fare.

    It had been a very big step for her to have agreed to go with him in the first place. It wasn't as if she had ever done that sort of thing before. But, what with all the upheaval that had happened, the trauma of losing Grandfather, she had been rather looking forward to a break herself. And, she reminded herself, don't forget she had loved Martin.

    Had? That word brought her up short as, the foggy conditions not improving the least bit, she drove carefully on. Had she loved Martin? Grief, she must have done! Hadn't she been thinking of getting herself some kind of a career in London so that she should be nearer to him, so that they might see more of each other?

    Yet what did she feel now? Anger, mainly. Fury that there were such ghastly men about. She felt duped, soiled, and it was none of her making. She felt a sort of numbness too, and wondered if that numbness was perhaps a precursor to the pain she was bound to feel when that numbness wore off.

    She knew then that she had made the right decision not to go home. She did not feel up to facing her parents' concern for her, nor did she want them to be concerned. They'd had enough of an anxious time. Perhaps she could spend the two weeks she was supposed to be in Switzerland in getting herself together at her grandfather's home. His death was so recent she still thought of Aldwyn House as her grandfather's home.

    Varnie wanted her parents to have some quiet time with each other. Oh, how they had earned it. A time together with no hotel to worry them, a time of tranquility, with their children off on their own happy pursuits and without traumas various happening in their worlds.

    Varnie became aware that her eyes were feeling dreadfully gritty from her efforts of concentrating so hard on her driving in such diabolical conditions. At the very next opportunity she pulled off the motorway-to discover, when she went to search out a cup of coffee, that everyone else had the same idea.

    When she was eventually served she found a spare seat at a table and decided to stay where she was for a while. She did not fancy at all driving the tortuous mountain roads if this fog were