She appeared beyond Hewitt’s solid shoulder, pale and bright and formidably angry, her red-gold hair in ruffled feathers on cheek and temple, her forehead smudged with carbon. Her eyes, levelled lances, flashed across the room and pierced Simon to the heart. Faint flags of colour had come to life in his tanned cheeks, warming the grey of sleeplessness out of them. An incorrigible spark of mischief reappeared in his eyes, a shadow of itself and veiled in desperation, but alive. The two roused faces locked glances like the beginning of a battle or an embrace. Difficult to be sure which, thought George, edging unnoticed towards the door. Maybe both.
The first words of love sounded like the clash of arms, if that meant anything.
“You’re a fine one!” said Tamsin hotly. “What the devil have you been up to, to get yourself in this mess?”
“If it’s a mess, at least it’s my mess,” said Simon, all the more loudly and angrily because of the longing he had, and knew he must suppress, to welcome her in and grasp at this unbelievable happiness while it offered. “What do you think you’re doing here? For God’s sake, girl, go home and behave yourself.”
“ ‘Go home and behave yourself,’ he says,” Tamsin rolled bitter blue eyes to heaven in mute appeal. “Listen who’s talking! And he isn’t fit to be let out alone!”
“I doubt if he’s going to be let out at all for the next year or two,” snapped Simon, man-alive again, and surrounded by a live, thorny and rewarding world. “So you can make your mind easy, you won’t be needed for a keeper. Now get out and leave me alone!”
Maybe it was the note of entreaty he hadn’t been able to suppress, or maybe she possessed an intuition that didn’t even need such aids. However it was, Tamsin knew her moment. The blue of her eyes softened to its calmest gentian darkness.
“It’s the forty years or so afterwards I’m worrying about,” she said sternly. She looked at Hewitt, looked him levelly in the eyes, and smiled.
“You’d better let me in. Give me ten minutes with him. I have got a certain right here, you know. That’s my fiancé you’ve got in there.”
She had unfurled her colours, and nobody would ever be able to trick, bully or persuade her into striking them again. Seemingly they all knew it. She breasted Hewitt’s large arm, and it gave before her and let her in. She looked as if she could have marched through walls just as irresistibly. She marched straight at Simon, all pennants flying.
“Ten minutes!” said Hewitt, and shoved George before him out of the office, and closed the door upon them.
—«»—«»—«»—
[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]
[proofed and formatted by MollyKate and released in #bookz for the Prooflist, Sept 17, 2002]
[A 3S Release— v2, html]
[July 17, 2007]