Free Only in the Night by Roberta Latow Page A

Fanshaw?’
    ‘Oh, he’s gone off to the hospital. Mr Hope-Quintin asked me to tell you that he’s sending the car back for you to take you wherever you want to go.’
    Eliza tried to cover her disappointment, but there had been so few in her life that she did not actually know how to do that. Mrs Fanshaw could not help but feel sorry for her. John Hope-Quintin was a marvellous man and she enjoyed working for him, but he was a devil with women. He seduced them to his bed and his heart, he was kind and generous to them, but for only for as long as it amused him and did not interfere with the life of work and intense pleasure he had designed for himself. Even when, as Mrs Fanshaw suspected now, he was in love, he was what she termed a natural philanderer who never could resist a pretty young face whom he would seduce behind the back of the number one girl of the moment.
    There had been so many Elizas and older, moresophisticated beauties who believed they would be the one to grab the title ‘
wife of Mr John Hope-Quintin
’. How many times had she, without being disloyal to her employer, tried to warn the women off, most especially the young girls whom he tended to ruin for life with his seductive charm? They never listened or wanted to believe that here was a man they could not change, for he was quite straight with them about one thing: he was not looking for marriage. Mrs Fanshaw asked Eliza if she could sit down and have coffee with her?
    ‘Oh, please do. In our houses the kitchen is the heart of the house for everyone. Not so much in Little Barrington where I live now, but at our summer house in Tuscany there is always a pot of coffee and lovely things to eat.’
    Eliza suddenly thought of Vittorio and felt a pang of love for him. She still missed him. Their love felt strange because it was drifting away from her so swiftly. It felt so different from the love she was feeling for John, this strange new world he was introducing her to.
    She abandoned all thoughts of the past and Vittorio when Mrs Fanshaw asked, ‘Do you have something nice planned for the next few hours? It’s only until half-past one, you know, because the car will pick Mr Hope-Quintin up at the hospital.’
    A light came into Eliza’s eyes at the mere suggestion that in a matter of hours they would be together once more. It was not missed by Mrs Fanshaw. As concerned as she was for the girl, the housekeeper did know that the doctor would give her a grand time for as long as he was smitten. All she said to Eliza, as she rose from the table with her empty cup in her hand,was, ‘You go out there and have the best time you can because good times don’t last for ever.’
    Immediately after she’d said it, the housekeeper sensed that Eliza hadn’t heard, because she was struck deaf by love. More’s the pity because she is the best of them I’ve seen for a long time: no gold digger, no social aspirations, too young to think of marriage, ruminated Mrs Fanshaw.
    Eliza never left the house that morning. Life outside the flat held no interest for her. All she wanted was to be enveloped by the flat and
his
things, that spoke so strongly of
him.
She discovered his enchanting garden with its sculptures and trailing ivy, its late-autumn flowers and the long flight of iron stairs that led up from the basement garden to the much larger communal Ennismore Gardens, enclosed by an iron railing. The deserted garden was open only to the few of the residents living in the several blocks of flats surrounding it who had a key to the gate. Everything Eliza looked at she could only relate to as John’s. John’s flat, John’s garden, John’s neighbours.
    A pattern emerged on that first day they had together in London but Eliza was too dazzled by love to recognise it, let alone do anything about it. The car, with Eliza waiting impatiently in the back seat, picked John up at precisely half-past one. He issued instructions to Banberry to take them to Wilton’s where