Hot Breath Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  www.panmacmillan.co.uk/bello

  Contents

  Sarah Harrison

  For Sue and Tim

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Hot Breath

  Sarah Harrison is the bestselling author of more than twenty-five books. She is best known for her adult fiction, which has included commercial blockbusters such as The Flowers of the Field and A Flower That’s Free (both now re-released, along with the third part of the trilogy, The Wildflower Path). She has also written children’s books and the successful writer’s guide How to Write a Blockbuster, as well as numerous short stories and articles.

  Sarah is an experienced speaker and broadcaster, who has taught creative writing both in the UK and on residential courses in Italy. She has been a judge for literary and public-speaking competitions, and is also an entertainer – her three-woman cabaret group, Pulsatillas!, has an enthusiastic and ever-growing following.

  For Sue and Tim

  Chapter One

  It has always been my contention that it’s a crime to waste good, fresh morning brainpower on domestic chores. I have therefore trained myself, with almost complete success, to resist the silent siren call of unmade beds, and bowls on the inside of which the Brekki-Nuts are forming a pimply collage, and to spend five minutes getting my mind into another, higher gear, suitable for what is known as ‘creative writing’. The morning in question was no exception. In fact, with a new book to start I actually allowed the period of mental preparation to extend from five to twenty minutes, and employed all the recognised aids for release of the imaginative powers. That is to say a nice cup of coffee, a perusal of the popular press and the amiable background prattle of a well-known Irish disc-jockey.

  It worked a treat. With the children at school and the sun streaming benignly through my kitchen windows, everything seemed possible. And it continued to seem so, for a minute or two after I left the table and began to trudge up the stairs. My mood of quite unfounded optimism even saw me through my study door and over to my desk.

  I addressed my typewriter and stuck a piece of A4 into its grinning maw. But the sight of that pristine acreage as white, empty and inhospitable as the Russian steppe, did for me.

  I picked up a biro and my notebook and wrote, feverishly: ‘Mince Spag Whiskas Post Veg’. And then, as an afterthought: ‘Bread’. This last sparked off a rapid association of ideas and, for reasons more mercenery than literary, I began to type.

  Maria Trevelyan, I wrote, gazed out of the window in the great library of Kersey House. She was utterly alone—Were there degrees of aloneness? I allowed this knotty problem to occupy me for a full three minutes, and had still not resolved it when I continued. —in this new and strange place. Beyond the window the gardens of Kersey stretched away in awesome grandeur. A formal terrace ran the length of the house above smooth emerald lawn, which was in turn bordered on the far side by a sweeping gravel walk. Beyond this, as far as the eye could see, there extended rolling parkland where herds of fallow deer grazed between the mighty trees.

  I paused, drained, and looked out of the window at my own garden. Here, cracked concrete lapped weed-strewn turf, and in the herbaceous border my cat, Fluffy, was sedulously covering the still-steaming evidence. It was the day for Declan, my gardener, to do his weekly stint, and animal-lover though I was I almost wished he would sweep down on the slant-eyed bastard with a bottle of rat bane and a dustbin liner. I watched Fluffy saunter off, stretching each leg fastidiously behind him with a teeny shake of the paw, and thought that next time my publisher’s PR department asked for a list of my hobbies I could not in all conscience include gardening.

  I looked back at the tripewriter. Seeing that I had actually made a few black marks on the virgin white I experienced a small surge of inspiration and wrote: Maria caught sight—

  At precisely this moment I myself caught sight of my neighbour, Brenda Tunnel, returning I presumed from seeing her youngest child on to the school bus. She stopped on the corner by my front gate to conduct her usual shouted exchange of scurrilous small talk with Baba Moorcroft over the road. Brenda spoke, laughed, listened with eyebrows raised, and laughed again, this time almost uncontrollably.

  I returned to the page:—of her reflection in the glass. She saw a pale, heart-shaped face framed by— I glanced again at Brenda Tunnel—abundant brown hair, caught back in a velvet snood. Her figure was trim and neat; she was not displeased with it. Maybe not, but how much of her figure would have been reflected in the glass? Not a lot, presumably, unless she was standing on the window seat. But then which mattered more, stringent realism, or the speedy establishment of Maria Trevelyan as a raver? I continued: Her breasts were high and firm, waist narrow, legs straight and strong as a boy’s.

  Brenda flapped her hands at Baba in an agony of mirth. In the breast and waist department my neighbour afforded little inspiration, being built like an Aga. But on the other hand if I was cracking Maria up to be a feisty sort of lass, I could have worse models. Kersey House and its aristocratic inhabitants could scarcely offer more opportunities for licentious behaviour than the public bar at the Wagon and Horses where Brenda pulled pints of an evening.

  I turned my mind to matters of seventeenth-century dress, so promisingly begun with the velvet snood, but images of Brenda in a farthingale kept rising to stick in my creative craw.

  Fortunately the phone rang and I went downstairs with my usual sense of relief to answer it.

  ‘Hallo! Harriet?’

  ‘Hallo, Vanessa.’ It was my editor from Era Books.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you when I know you’re bound to be writing—’

  ‘That’s okay.’ All this time and she hadn’t learnt that writers only write in the hope of being disturbed.

  ‘—but I wanted to know how you were. And of course to find out how The Remembrance Tree is coming along …?’ She named the historical romance the first few lines of which protruded from the tripewriter upstairs.

  ‘It’s beginning to take shape,’ I said weightily. Brenda Tunnel passed the window, had a damn good look in, caught my eye, and having the decency to look embarrassed, waved her carrier bag in a salute to which I did not respond.

  ‘—so much interest already,’ Vanessa was saying, ‘it’s quite fantastic, I can’t wait to read some of it.’

  This was an unhealthy development. ‘I feel a bit secretive about it at present,’ I confessed with engaging diffidence. ‘It’s a big project and I’m feeling my way rather, I’m sure you understand …’

  ‘Of course, Harriet, say no more! It will be all the more thrilling when it arrives,’ trilled Vanessa. I could picture her in her elegant office off Southampton Road, surrounded by huge plants amongst which her plain, docile, but efficient teenage secretary lurked like a ruminating tapir.

  ‘But you will ring if th
ere’s the least thing I can do?’ she asked. ‘I mean I’m always here, even if you just feel like a good talk …’

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. ‘ Yes,’ I said. At lunchtime Vanessa would, no doubt, be off to some recherché watering-hole to promote more interest in my book, tripping through Covent Garden in her hand-tooled cowboy boots. What a load of Chelsea Cobblers.

  ‘The great thing is,’ she enquired earnestly, ‘ are you enjoying it?’ I could not imagine where Vanessa, with six years in publishing under her belt (and I use the phrase advisedly), picked up the idea that authors enjoy writing.

  ‘It’s coming,’ I said cryptically. ‘It’s coming. You know how it is.’

  ‘Absolutely. That’s the main thing,’ effused Vanessa, hearing what she wanted to hear. ‘I’ll keep in touch, anyway. All the best with the writing.’

  As I left the sitting room I could hear my daughter’s guinea pigs making noises like tugboats greeting the QE2 out in the yard. I opened the back door and glanced out. There was the cat, not content with defecating on the bedding plants, sitting on the roof of the hutch as if trying to hatch it out.

  ‘Gertcha!’ I cried amid a chorus of agitated tootings from the caveys. Fluffy poured himself down the side of the hutch like furry custard, and prowled away.

  I returned to nubile Maria in her mullioned window. Time, I considered, for the first, premonitory flicker of lust in her hitherto latently sensual loins.

  As Maria gazed out, a figure entered the empty landscape. It was—I paused—one of the—I paused again—young under-gardeners (this title had a peculiar aptness for what I had in mind). As she looked he stopped, and seemed to return her stare. He was no more than twenty yards away. Were yards anachronistic? I pencilled a question mark and went on: Maria was unsettled by those burning dark eyes, the tangled gypsy-black hair, the body full of animal strength and grace. Broad shoulders, long, thick-thewed legs—I called another halt. What exactly were these ‘thews’ to which I so carelessly referred? I scanned the shelf for my dictionary, but it wasn’t there. It would be in Gareth’s room, appropriated for homework.

  Temporarily stumped, I looked out of the window. There was my own gardener, Declan O’Connell, clipping the hedge with an electric strimmer. He wielded this tool slung round his barrel-shaped body in a leather harness where it reared and shuddered like a gigantic motorised prick. Declan was a gardener of the rip-strip-and-clip variety, never so happy as when he was bludgeoning vegetation into submission with one of his arsenal of electrical gadgets.

  Idly I wondered if Declan had thews, and if so, where they were. If he did, they were certainly all he had in common with the sultry horticulturalist of The Remembrance Tree. Declan was fiftyish, plug-ugly, and of a disposition so choleric that a girl would have had to be a full-blown masochist to court his attentions.

  But like Maria’s under-gardener he too seemed to sense my appraising eye on him through the window and returned my stare. Not knowing what else to do I waved, and immediately wished I hadn’t, for Declan switched off the strimmer, lowered it to the ground and mouthed something at me with ferocious emphasis.

  I turned off the tripewriter and opened the window: ‘Is anything the matter?’

  ‘It’s this focking strimmer,’ explained Declan. His speech struggled, hissing and sputtering, from a glutinous bog of an Irish accent. ‘It keeps going off.’

  ‘Why, do you think?’ I asked politely.

  ‘If I knew why, I’d have fixed it, so I would!’ He nudged the offending implement with his foot. ‘ It could be the box in the yard. Where does he keep the fuse wire?’

  The name of my absentee husband was never uttered by Declan. George was either just ‘he’, or ‘that bloddy fule’ as in ‘what bloddy fule put the garage so close to this hedge?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘ you could look for it, Declan. I am trying to work.’ I knew this would cut no ice, since only manual labour of the most taxing nature constituted work in Declan’s book. Nonetheless, I closed the window and switched the tripewriter back on, so that its hypnotic hum drowned his mumbled imprecations. Via my peripheral vision I saw him go round the back of the house to the yard. The strimmer lay on the grass like a beached marine monster, trailing tentacles of wire and leather strap.

  I got back to Maria’s libidinous musings. Those thews sprang off the page at me again, but I decided not to let them detain me any longer at this juncture.

  … thick-thewed legs, added to her first impression of a zestful animal nature kept but scantly in check. From ‘ but scantly’ my reader would at once infer that Maria inhabited an historical context.

  As those dark eyes found, and then held, her own, she felt a flush spreading on her cheek. Cheek? Why cheek in the singular? I considered this and concluded that it was because ‘cheeks’ made it sound as though her bottom were blushing. As indeed it very probably was if she were the sort of girl who pulled under-gardeners at twenty paces. That was it, paces, not yards.

  She experienced a strange and frightening quickening of the pulse, a pounding of the heart and racing of the blood which caused her in a moment to rise from the window seat and—

  At this point I experienced some quickening, pounding and racing of my own as the back door opened and my dog, who had till now been lying like an overstuffed pyjama case on the stairs, burst into life with a volley of maniacal barking, fit to wake the dead.

  ‘Bad dog, Spot!’ I screamed cheerily as I trotted down the stairs in his wake.

  I found Declan standing just inside the kitchen door like the Stag at Bay while Spot slavered and bristled most gratifyingly at a distance of some four feet. At this moment I remarked a striking similarity between the two of them. The dog with his upraised hackles, glaring eyes and bared fangs; Declan with his pateful of vertical wire wool, gleaming hornrims and ranks of yellow dentures exposed in a horrible grimace.

  ‘What is it now, Declan?’

  ‘I can’t find the fuse wire, so I can’t,’ he snarled. ‘You could do yourselves a favour by tidying up that bloddy yard.’

  I ignored this gratuitous sally and swept past him, cutting through the aura of bone meal, Ambre Solaire and sweaty chilprufe which hung round Declan through the long hot summer.

  As I led the way to the yard he followed, grumbling and grunting like some pungent and refractory farm animal.

  The yard was certainly a mess, but my instinct as to the fuse wire’s whereabouts proved correct. I handed it to him without a word and he did not thank me, while the guinea pigs poop-pooped winsomely in the background.

  Back upstairs with Maria I wondered gloomily why it had fallen to my lot to have Declan’s malodorous, recalcitrant bulk heaving about my back garden when I might have been thrilling to thick-thewed legs and burning black eyes.

  I recapped and continued:—and move back into the dim seclusion of the library. It seemed odd that she should now feel safe in that great, forbidding, book-lined chamber where only this morning—I was about to introduce, smoothly, an action replay of the indignities visited upon Maria to date in the library. But my attention was caught by the study door, which moved slightly ajar. Declan’s face, or part of it, became visible in the aperture, suffused and accusatory. He was one of those creatures who seem comparatively normal out of doors, but who appear less and less so as they approach the civilised confines of the house. Now, on my carpeted landing with its Laura Ashley wallpaper, Declan’s presence was rebarbative to a degree. It was like discovering a plucked turkey in one’s underwear drawer.

  ‘Well, Declan?’ I asked, with what I hoped was the hauteur of the authoritarian employer.

  ‘Where’s the fuse box?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re in all sorts of trouble, so you are.’ There was a fleeting flash of the NHS choppers, a predatory glitter behind the hornrims.

  I progressed to Olympian detachment. ‘Well, Declan, I look to you to get me out of it. The fuse box is in the main bedroom.’

  ‘What?’ He pushed the
door wide and stood arms akimbo. ‘ It can’t be.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Mother of God, what kind of pantomime is that, to go putting the bloddy fuse box in a bedroom?’

  With murderous rage held, like my hero’s animalism, but scantly in check, I rose, went past Declan, crossed the landing and entered the bedroom. My satisfaction over being right about the fuse box was tempered with chagrin over the state of the room, which embodied just the kind of middle-class squalor most abhorred by Declan. How bitterly I now regretted the rigorous self-discipline which had prompted me to free my mind with caffeine, horoscopes and Radio Two when I might have indulged myself (and saved face) by making the beds.

  I pointed. ‘Declan, fuse box. Fuse box, Declan.’

  My literary allusion was wasted on him I could tell. He approached the fuse box like an animal negotiating treacherous ground—nostrils flaring, eyes rolling, respiration sterterous.

  Reaching it, he crouched down, glared at it, then at me.

  ‘Are you for telling me the chap has to come up here every time just to read the meter?’ he growled rhetorically. It was obvious that his astonished disbelief was not for the original fault in planning, but for the fortitude of the official from the electricity board.

  ‘We manage,’ I assured him. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me I must get back to work.’

  I shut the door of the study firmly behind me, and sat down at the desk. Turning on the tripewriter I began to expound on the formative experiences of Maria in the library. But after only a few minutes the hum of the tripewriter ceased. The keys froze beneath my fingers. Indeed the silence was so complete that for a moment I wondered if I had achieved complete suspension of disbelief, and had been transported back three centuries to join my heroine in her tribulations. But there, by the hedge, lay the strimmer. And here, before me, my sophisticated and presently useless tripewriter.

  I strained my ears. No fridge humming, no trundle and whirr of the washing machine. Nothing.