can dance the night away as well as anyone, and just because I have a grown-up daughter, doesn’t make me decrepit.’
Relieved, she slipped her arm through his, smiling up at him. ‘Let’s go, then.’
Dinner was over and the dancing had begun when he made his way over to Barbara’s table and stood before her. He was a few years older than she was, a very tall man with broad shoulders. He had dark-brown hair cut short and parted in the middle, matching dark eyes and a serious expression. Everything about him seemed serious, almost sombre, even down to his tailcoat, black cummerbund and his shining patent shoes, though they were really no different from what all the men were wearing. But there was something about him that made him different and she didn’t think it was only his size.
‘Miss Bosgrove, would you care to dance?’
She glanced at her father, sitting beside her. ‘Go on, my dear, don’t mind me.’
She rose to face him. A hand, a very big hand, went about her waist and the other took hers in a firm, dry grip. She laid her other hand on his shoulder and they whirled away in a Viennese waltz.
‘How did you know my name?’ She tilted her head to look up at him, wondering where she had seen him before.
‘It wasn’t difficult to find out. Your father is well known in Melsham, isn’t he?’
‘I suppose he is. The family has been farming in the area for generations. Do you always find out the names of people before you ask them to dance?’
‘Only if I intend to ask them out.’
She laughed. ‘That’s a new angle, I must say.’
‘It’s the truth.’ The sombre look had disappeared and he was smiling, making her realise he was handsome in a rugged kind of way. ‘I would like to see you again.’
‘But I don’t know you from Adam!’
‘It’s not Adam, but George. George Kennett.’
‘I’m Barbara.’
‘I know.’
‘What else do you know?’
‘That you live with your father at Beechcroft Farm, that you are studying at Cambridge and you have friends called Penny and Simon.’
Cambridge! The man with the bicycle, the man in the checked shirt and the paint-stained trousers, who had stared so long and so hard. ‘What were you doing in Cambridge?’
‘You noticed me?’ He had certainly noticed her. The redhead was the more glamorous of the two girls, but it was Barbara who had caught his eye. Somewhere, sometime, he had known he had seen her before and that had been borne out when she mentioned Melsham, his own home town.
‘That’s what you intended, wasn’t it?’
‘Not at all. I was hardly dressed to impress, was I?’
‘Everyone has to work,’ she said, though her mind went back to Simon. He seemed to get along quite happily without it but, according to Penny, their father was putting pressure on him to join the family stockbroking firm. ‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a builder. I was in Cambridge converting an old house into student accommodation. It was easier and cheaper to live in lodgings and cycle back and forth than travel forty miles home every day.’ An influx of undergraduates coming back to complete their studies after serving in the armed forces needed accommodation. George had won the contract for the painting because he had put in a bid that was ridiculously low. He was single, lived at home with his mother and had no overheads. Until he had bought a van he had pushed his paint, brushes, tools and dustsheets from job to job in a handcart. He could not afford to stable and feed a horse, and besides, he was convinced the horse had had its day.
But painting and decorating were only the beginning: he had plans. One day, he would have a thriving business, a grand house and a motor car, and not a second-hand van which had cost him thirty hard-earned pounds only the month before. Half the time he could not afford to put petrol in the tank, which was why he carried his bicycle in the back of it.
‘The work in Cambridge is finished now and I’ve just won a contract to convert a couple of old houses in Melsham town centre into flats,’ he told her. He would need help for those but he could take on casual labour and there was plenty of that about: soldiers who had survived the bloodshed had come home to find jobs hard to come by and were grateful for whatever work came their way. Lloyd