Sara Craven - Summer of the Raven Read online

  SUMMER OF THE RAVEN

  SARA CRAVEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  ROWAN transferred the weight of the shopping bag wearily to her other hand and paused to catch her breath before mounting the remaining stairs to the flat. Just for a moment, she thought nostalgically of the lift which had operated so smoothly between floors in the previous luxury block they had lived in, but it was the only thing she did regret. She had never liked that flat, and never regarded it as home. Now, as she looked around her at the chipped paint and peeling wallpaper, then down at the worn lino covering the stairs, her lips twitched in spite of herself.

  'So this is home?' she asked herself with a kind of desper­ate gaiety.

  And the answer to that was - yes. It was the only home she had now. The cottage in Surrey which contained all her happiest memories had been sold to buy the Knights­bridge flat, and now that had gone too.

  She sighed and hoped very much that Antonia would have a cup of coffee at least waiting for her, but it was doubtful in the extreme. Antonia had spent most of her life in an environment where cups of coffee and meals ap­peared as long as there was a service bell within convenient reach. Antonia had been born to be a rich man's wife, and Rowan's father, Victor Winslow, had filled the bill admir­ably as a doting and indulgent husband.

  Rowan had always taken the background of money very much for granted too, until two years ago when the plane that was carrying her father to New York had crashed without survivors, and a series of long and ultimately em­barrassing interviews with solicitors and accountants had revealed how very little money there was after all.

  There was some money left in trust for Rowan when she was twenty-one from her late mother's estate, and there was a small income for Antonia and herself, dependent on certain conditions. And the main one was that she and Antonia should live under the same roof until she, Rowan, was twenty-one or until she married, or Antonia married again, whichever came first.

  It wasn't a condition which had held much appeal for either of them and Rowan had been quite willing to re­nounce her allowance and seek her independence, but when she had suggested this, Antonia had become almost hysterical.

  Before she had married Victor Winslow, Antonia had enjoyed a marginally successful career as an actress. She'd done some television work and a few minor stage roles - it was at an after-the-show party that she had met Rowan's father - and Rowan had assumed that Antonia would resume her career. But this, she soon discovered, was the last thing her stepmother had in mind. At thirty-seven, Antonia Winslow was an outstandingly beautiful woman with auburn hair and enormous violet eyes. She could have knocked half a dozen years or more off her age without causing anyone to raise a sceptical eyebrow. But the life of a pampered wife of a tycoon suited her far better than the rat-race of acting. Antonia had no wish to have to sell herself in the market place all over again. She was quite content to accept the allowance, and Rowan was made to see that any attempt to carve out a life for herself and thus deprive both of them of this income would be arrant selfishness.

  'Your father obviously wanted you to stay in my care,' she had declared tearfully. 'They were his last wishes, Rowan, and you, can't ignore them. Even you wouldn't be so heartless.'

  Rowan accepted the implication that she was a cold fish without comment. There was, she supposed, a certain amount of truth in what Antonia had said, but what she could not understand was why her father had imposed such a condition, knowing as he must have done that all too often a state of armed neutrality existed between his second wife and his daughter.

  When he had married Antonia, Rowan had been twelve, a slender gawky girl with her light brown hair, pale skin and wide hazel eyes. She had a brace on her front teeth and she bit her nails, and no one could have described her as a pretty child.

  Antonia could possibly have enjoyed a pretty child, someone to dress up and take around with her, and reflect her own charms, although there would probably have been friction of a different kind in the years ahead. There was no friction with Rowan of this nature. If Antonia had ever asked 'Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?' the mirror would have given her the answer she wanted.

  But from the first, she simply hadn't been interested in Rowan, and had made it perfectly plain, and Rowan had looked back at her with clear" scornful eyes that seemed to see that beneath the expensive clothes and flawless complexion there was a mean, rather spoiled little mind.

  Now, at nineteen, Rowan was a little more tolerant. She had few illusions about her stepmother. She recognised that Antonia was lazy and selfish, and lived consistently beyond both their means, but at the same time there could be a curiously helpless and childlike quality about her.

  Antonia, Rowan thought cynically, always has to have someone to look after her. First it was Daddy, and now it's me, and I have to do it for Daddy's sake. It wasn't, she realised, that Victor Winslow wanted her to remain in Antonia's care for a few more years. It was the other way round, and it came to her rather sadly; that in his own way Victor Winslow had also been rather selfish.

  She had managed a little independence for herself. She had been forced to abandon her 'A' level course at board­ing school, because the money that was available wouldn't cover the remaining fees, but she had enrolled at a local college of further education and was in the throes of a two ­year course there. If she was successful, it had occurred to her that she might try for a degree on die Social Sciences side at one of the Polytechnics.

  Life was by no means perfect, but there seemed to be a certain order and pattern emerging from the frank chaos that her father's sudden death had left. Money was always in short supply, largely thanks to Antonia's ideas of bud­geting. This was why Rowan did the shopping herself now, on the way home from her classes. She did a lot of the cleaning too, and most of the cooking, and tried to fit her studies in as best she could.

  Every so often, Antonia would bestir herself and an­nounce that she was going to get a job. She had done a little demonstrating at various exhibitions, and some clothes modelling in the restaurant of a West End department store, relying heavily for these breaks on contacts she had known in her acting days, but she was not reliable and the offers of work were rarely repeated.

  She had even managed at one stage to become a partner in a boutique which was about to open. Rowan had been frankly appalled. Where, she had wanted to know heat­edly, had Antonia got the money to invest in this chancy venture? Boutiques came and went like April showers, and often their erstwhile owners found themselves facing the Official Receiver.

  But Antonia had waved her objections irritably aside.

  They had backers, she said, people who were not afraid to risk their money on possible success. She was so evasive on the subject that Rowan guessed this unknown backer had to be a man, but she was neither shocked nor disturbed by the knowledge. Her father had been dead for two years now, and Antonia was a man's woman in every sense of the word.

  Rowan herself was still thin rather than fashionably slender, and her brown hair remained as straight as rain­water, and about as interesting, she thought detachedly.­ Her teeth were straight now, but she still bit her nails on occasion. The chances, she decided objectively, of her get­ting married before she was twenty-one were remote in the extreme. Her only hope was that Antonia would beat her to it, preferably with someone who could keep her in the style to which she had been accustomed.

  This mysterious backer, whoever he was, seemed hope­ful. And he must have money to burn if he was prepared to risk it on the prospect of Antonia undergoing some kind of sea-change into a successful businesswoman.

  She had waited resignedly for the inevi
table crash. Neither Antonia nor her partner, another ex-actress called Alix Clayton, had any real working knowledge of the ex­igencies of the rag trade. They assumed blandly that they would get by because of their eye for style and colour, and that their friends would flock to support them. As it was, they lasted a bare three months before the sad 'Closing Down Sale' notices went up in the window, alongside the announcement that the lease was available again.

  Rowan had wondered uneasily how much liability Anto­nia would have to bear for the failure of the business, but nothing had ever been mentioned on this score. The boy­friend, she decided drily, must be besotted as well as rich if he was prepared to write off that kind of loss. Or maybe he was doing it for tax reasons.

  Anyway, Rowan thought as she pushed her key into the door, she'd heard nothil1:g more on the subject, and at least Antonia had been fairly subdued since, with no more wild­cat schemes for making her fortune in the offing.

  The air in the small living room was thick with cigarette smoke when she entered, and Antonia was lying on the sofa in the act of lighting another from the previous butt. 'Chain smoking, yet?' Rowan dumped the heavy shop­ping bag down on the table.

  Antonia surveyed it sourly. 'What have you got there?' 'Nothing very exciting,' Rowan said lightly. She ticked the items off on her fingers. 'Mince, stewing steak, carrots, onions, potatoes, spring greens . . .'

  'God!' Antonia shuddered. 'You should get a job cater­ing for some kind of works canteen. Well, have fun with your nice mince, sweetie, because I shan't be here for dinner tonight, thank heaven. I'm going out.'

  Rowan sighed. 'You could have told me,' she observed with resignation.

  'I couldn't tell you because I didn't know myself until an hour ago,' Antonia returned. 'And I shall probably be late, so don't bother to wait up for me,' she added with evident satisfaction.

  Rowan went into the tiny cramped kitchenette and began stowing the meat away in the ancient refrigerator, and piling the vegetables into the rack that stood beside the sink unit. She would make do with a poached egg later, she decided. She did the odd bits of washing up that had been left for her, then made herself a cup of instant coffee and carried it back into the living room. She set the cup down on the table and took her college file out of the bag, together with the reference books she had brought from the library that day.

  'More work?' Antonia queried without interest. 'You know what they say - all work and no play . . .'

  'Makes Jill a dull girl,' Rowan concluded for her rather bleakly. She'd heard it all before. And she also knew that if she never lifted another finger as long as she lived, it would make her no less dull to Antonia.

  'You ought to get out more - enjoy yourself a little,' Antonia declared. 'You could look quite reasonable if you just took a little trouble with your appearance. As it is, no one would dream that you were nineteen.'

  Rowan opened one of her books and studied the index with minute interest.

  'I'm not really concerned about appearing in other people's dreams at any age,' she remarked rather shortly. She was used to Antonia's sniping by now, and didn't let it disturb her particularly. Besides, she knew quite well that Antonia was quite satisfied that she appeared to be much younger than she actually was. It wouldn't have suited her book at all to, have a grown-up stepdaughter; she would have considered it ageing. When they had first moved to this particular flat, Rowan was quite aware that Antonia had informed some of the neighbours that she was her youn­ger sister, and she had never bothered to correct this im­pression. If that was what Antonia wished people to think, then it was all right with her.

  Antonia got up from the sofa and wandered across to look in the long mirror what was fixed to the wall.

  'I'm putting on weight,' she complained, turning sideways to study herself. 'It's all this starchy food we eat. I shall have to go on a salad diet for a while.'

  'Do you realise what salads cost at this time· of year?' Rowan frowned as she tried to concentrate on her reading. It would be more sensible, she thought, to forget about trying to write an essay until Antonia had gone out, but on the other hand, Antonia was clearly in one of her difficult moods and Rowan wanted to avoid an· overt row if poss­ible. She shrank from scenes and raised voices, and always had done. Usually if she buried herself deeply enough in a book at times like this, Antonia contented herself with a few shrewish observations on her intellectual abilities and then relapsed into sulky silence. '

  'That's all you seem to think about - the cost of things!' 'Well, someone has to,' Rowan said temperately. 'If we're careful, we can manage, but . . .'

  'I'm sick of being careful- sick of managing!' Antonia's face was flushed with temper and her eyes were stormy. 'Cooped up in this damned hole, day in, day out! At least you have that college of yours to go to.'

  Rowan had to smile. 'Well, you could always enrol for a course yourself if you wanted. And you do get out. You go anywhere you want, and you know it. You play bridge each week with Celia Maxwell and that gang and . . .'

  'I haven't played with them for weeks.' Antonia passed her hands over her hips, smoothing away the non-existent surplus.

  'I didn't know that.' Rowan gave her a surprised look.

  Bridge had always been one of Antonia's passions.

  Her stepmother's lips tightened sullenly. 'There's a lot you don't know. It's all very well for Celia. When she loses at bridge, all she has to do is stretch her hand out to good old Tom and he'll pay up without a murmur. She doesn't realise it isn't that simple for all of us.'

  Rowan laid her pen down and regarded Antonia with startled eyes and parted lips.

  'Toni, do you owe Celia Maxwell money?'

  'Yes, I do as a matter of fact. Quite a hell of a lot, if you must know. I went on playing because I thought my luck was bound to change, only it didn't. It just got worse.' Antonia's tone was bitter. 'And if you don't pay your debts in that circle, you're soon persona non grata.' Her voice sharpened. 'And don't look like that, for heaven's sake. You must have known I played for money.'

  'I suppose so.' Rowan pressed a hand to her head. 'It just never occurred to me before. What are you going to do ­ask Mr Tomlinson to advance you some of next quarter's allowance?'

  'I asked him already,' Antonia snapped, 'and the answer was no. Instead I got a sermon on extravagance. My God, he'd never have dared when your father was alive!' 'Maybe it would have been better for both of us if he had don,' Rowan said soberly. 'Will- will Mrs Maxwell insist on your paying?'

  'I don't know what she's planning. We're not exactly on close terms at the moment.' Antonia sounded petulant. 'But I'll find the money somehow. I'll have to. Celia could make things damned uncomfortable for me if she wanted to.'

  'I wish you'd told me before,' Rowan said unhappily. Antonia's brows rose. 'Why? What good would it have done? What good has it done now?' she asked. 'Now I have you looking down your nose at me as well as old Tomlin­son. Well, just don't imagine I'll stand a lecture from you. I'll manage without any help from you.'

  'Is it this man?’ Rowan bit her lip as she met Antonia's inimical stare. 'The one you're going out with tonight, I mean. Is he the one who advanced the money for the boutique?'

  'Yes, it is - if it's any affair of yours.' Antonia flounced back to the sofa and sat down, lighting another cigarette.

  Rowan hesitated. 'Do you think it's wise - to put yourself so much in his power, I mean?'

  'My God!' Antonia gave her a look full of derision. 'You sound like the heroine of some Victorian novelette! Miss Puritan herself. This is the 1980s, sweetie, and the permis­sive society has been here for quite some time, although I can see it may have escaped your notice,' she added with a curl of her lip. 'You should give up writing essays and start on moral tracts. Everything in this world has to be paid for, my dear, even marriage with your estimable father.'

  'That's a vulgar, hateful thing to say!' Rowan said pas­sionately.

  Antonia was not offended, she appeared instead almost amused. 'But
the truth, sweetie, often is vulgar and hate­ful, as you'll probably find out before you're much older. I was younger than you when I realised what life was all about.'

  'I hope I never do, if that's the case.'

  'That's rather a forlorn hope.' Antonia's voice was bored. 'You not only look like a child, Rowan, you are a child. But even you will have to grow up some time. And now I'd better do something about my nails. I wish to God I could afford a decent manicure.' She got up, flicking ash casually on to the carpet, and wandered off towards her bedroom.

  Rowan sat staring down at the table feeling utterly wret­ched. She supposed that ultimately it was none of her bus­iness what Antonia did. Her stepmother had her own life to lead, and her own values to lead it by, and she had not the least right to interfere. But at the same time, she felt that if she had kept silent -she would in some strange way be letting her father down.

  By the time she was ready to go out Antonia had re­covered her good humour. She looked striking in swirling chiffon patterned in jade, peacock, lilac and gold, and she wore long gold earrings, and a collection of bracelets on one wrist.

  'Goodbye, sweetie.' She tapped Rowan carelessly on the shoulder as she went towards the door. 'Don't read too much or you'll get wrinkles and damage your eyesight. See you later.'

  Rowan watched her go, and then on an impulse got up and went over to the window. The April sky was fading into twilight, but she could see quite clearly that there was a car parked just outside the front door of the flats. It was long and low and sleek, in some dark colour, but she could not catch a glimpse of the driver. No doubt he would be dark and sleek too, she thought with a grimace of distaste. She moved back as Antonia came into sight, and returned to the table and her studies. Pride forbade that her step­mother should glance up at the window and catch her peering out at them like a gossipy neighbour. But at the same time her ears were pricked for the sound of the car drawing away, even though common sense told her that those kind of engines rarely made any sound.