Act Of Possession. Anne Mather
him her hospitality? she asked herself impatiently. Did she want him carrying tales upstairs of the straightened circumstances in which she lived? ‘I mean,’ she added awkwardly, ‘I don’t suppose you—drink tea.’
‘Well, I don’t survive on honeydew and nectar,’ he responded, his grey eyes gently teasing. ‘Thank you, Miss Sheldon. I’d love a cup of tea.’
She had to step aside then, and treading silently on suede-booted feet, Reed entered the flat. Unlike the apartment occupied by Celia and her friend, there was no entrance hall. One stepped directly into Antonia’s living room, and her colour deepened embarrassingly as Reed looked about him with evident interest.
With the door closed behind him, Antonia did not linger to correct his assumption of her status. Shedding her coat on to a chair as she passed, she walked through the living room into the kitchen, leaving him to make what he liked of the flat. She simply wasn’t interested, she told herself, filling the kettle at the tap and pushing in the electric plug. The sooner he had his tea and departed, the better. And after all, Celia might not approve of his making a detour, when he was evidently on his way to visit her.
She was examining the contents of the biscuit tin when his shadow fell across her. ‘A watched pot never boils, isn’t that what they say?’ he remarked drily, surveying the pristine neatness of the kitchen. ‘Come and sit down. You must be tired.’
‘Do I look tired?’
After what Mr Fenwick had said earlier, Antonia’s tone was unnecessarily tense, and Reed regarded her with rueful tolerance. ‘I guess I always seem to say the wrong thing, don’t I?’ he averred, running a lazy hand around the back of his neck. ‘Now, how can I redeem myself? By telling you I was only being polite, or by assuring you that you look pretty good to me?’
Antonia bent her head. ‘Neither. It doesn’t matter I—you go and sit down. I’ll join you presently.’
‘Okay.’
With a careless shrug he left her, and Antonia took cups out of the cupboard above the drainer, and set them on their saucers. By the time she had put milk into a jug and set it, along with the sugar bowl, on a tray, the kettle had boiled. Filling the teapot, she put it on the tray, too, and then after checking she had everything, she carried it through to the living room.
Reed was lounging on the sofa, flicking through the pages of a self-help magazine she had bought to learn how to do minor repairs. In her absence, he had loosened the top two buttons of his shirt and pulled his tie a couple of inches below his collar, and the slightly dishevelled appearance suited him. But then, anything would, thought Antonia woodenly, refusing to respond to his lazy smile. He was vibrant; magnetic; the kind of man one could not help but be aware of, his unconscious sexuality a challenge in itself.
Conscious of this, she seated herself on the armchair opposite him, and made a play of pouring the tea. ‘Milk and sugar?’ she enquired, the jug poised just above the cup, but he shook his head, and responded lightly: ‘As it is.’
Belatedly, she guessed he was used to taking it with lemon, but in any case, she didn’t have any. And besides, her tea was not Lapsang or Orange Pekoe. It was just common-or-garden quick-brew that she bought at the supermarket.
Still, he seemed to enjoy it, resting his ankle across his knee, emptying his cup and accepting a second. She should have known he would feel at ease anywhere, she thought, going to cross her legs and then thinking better of it. Like a chameleon, he adapted to his surroundings, totally indifferent to anyone’s feelings but his own. He was making her feel a stranger in her own apartment, and she resented his easy manner almost as much as his sex appeal.
‘Why don’t you like me, Miss Sheldon?’ he asked suddenly, setting his cup back on the tray while Antonia’s clattered noisily in its saucer. ‘Do I frighten you? Is that it? Are you afraid of men, perhaps? I’d be interested to know what I’ve done to provoke such a reaction.’
Antonia replaced her cup on the table with rather more care than she had picked it up. ‘I think you’re imagining things, Mr Gallagher.’
‘Am I?’ His eyes were shrewdly assessing. ‘We may not know one another very well—which I’m sure is your next line of defence—but I can sense hostility when I feel it, Miss Sheldon.’
‘It’s not—Miss Sheldon,’ she corrected him abruptly. ‘It’s Mrs I am—I was—married.’
‘Ah!’
His long-drawn sigh infuriated her, and abandoning any further attempt at politeness, she sprang to her feet. ‘It’s not what you’re thinking, Mr Gallagher,’ she declared hotly, her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides. ‘I’m not afraid of the opposite sex. I don’t hate all men, or anything like that. I simply—I simply don’t care for … for men of your type, that’s all!’
‘My type?’ he prompted softly, and she felt the instinctive thrill of knowing she was getting into deep water without any means of saving herself. ‘Men like your ex-husband perhaps?’
Like Simon! Antonia knew an hysterical desire to laugh. No one less like Simon could she imagine. Oh, Simon himself might have seen himself as being attractive to women, as knowing all the answers, but compared to Reed Gallagher, he had only been an amateur. And she had probably been at least partly responsible for the high opinion Simon had had of himself. Although it had meant giving up her degree at university, she had been flattered that the local heart-throb should have chosen her as his girlfriend, and she had fallen for his good looks without ever questioning what might lie beneath the surface. Until it was too late.
‘You’re nothing like my husband!’ she retorted now, suddenly losing enthusiasm for the argument. The reason she resented Reed Gallagher had nothing to do with Simon’s defection, and she felt ridiculously gauche for having lost her temper. ‘I—I shouldn’t have implied that you were.’
Aware of her discomfort, Reed got resignedly to his feet and tightened the knot of his tie once again. ‘I think I’d better go,’ he remarked, stepping sideways round the low table on which she had set the tray. ‘Thanks for the tea. It was—delicious.’
Antonia was sure it had been nothing of the kind, and her own behaviour had been unforgivable, but there was nothing she could say. Short of offering an apology, which she had no intention of doing, she could only spare him a tight smile as he walked towards the door, and with a knowing inclination of his head, he let himself out of the flat.
Conversely, as soon as he had gone, Antonia wanted to call him back. Sinking down on to the edge of her chair, she cupped her chin in her hands and stared humiliatedly at the spot on the sofa where he had been sitting. What a fiasco! she thought bitterly. What an absolute fool she had made of herself. She hadn’t wanted him to leave with that impression of her, particularly not when she thought how amusing it would seem when he related the incident to Celia—and Liz.
The disturbing dampness of a tear sliding down to touch her fingertips brought Antonia a measure of relief. It wasn’t that important, she told herself, dashing the tear away and making a concerted effort to pull herself together. Putting the teapot and her cup on to the tray, she picked it up and carried it into the kitchen. It wasn’t as if she and Celia were close friends or anything. It would teach her to be more wary of them in future. They were not like her, and she should remember that.
IT was over a week before Antonia encountered either of her upstairs neighbours again.
It had been an unsettled week for her, not helped by the discovery, when she came home from work on Tuesday evening, of the delicate bouquet of creamy narcissus, hazy blue irises and nodding yellow daffodils residing in her kitchen sink.
‘I didn’t know where else to put them,’ declared Mrs Francis confidentially, knocking at her door only minutes after Antonia had arrived home to explain that she had taken delivery