The Winter Folly by Lulu Taylor

told her about his life in the country and that he was divorced. They sat there all afternoon, Delilah ringing in to say she
wouldn’t be back in the office, and then she ditched the cocktail party too and they went to a bar near Regent Street and talked on all evening. By the end of the night, they both knew that
something had started.
    It had been dizzying and delightful as she began to fall in love. He drove up to see her twice a week until one Friday night they kissed under a street lamp by Embankment tube station, oblivious
to the people all around them. He came back to her tiny west London flat and they had frantic, clothes-tearing-off sex in the sitting room, before moving to the bedroom for long, tender hours of
delicious lovemaking. She loved his smell, the feel of his skin, the muscled hardness of his back and thighs, and the way their bodies fitted together so perfectly. She was exhilarated at the
rightness of it all, and he couldn’t take his hands off her or keep his mouth from hers for any length of time. They wanted nothing more than one another, talking and laughing and confiding,
and always ending up in bed again. He stayed the entire weekend and the flat, usually her haven, was empty and soulless when he’d gone. When he returned, he had a bag with him.
    ‘I don’t need to go back for a while,’ he said. ‘They’re filming something at the house. I’ve left my cousin Ben in charge. He works for me. He can handle it
all.’
    ‘That’s wonderful,’ Delilah said with a smile, an effervescent excitement bubbling inside her. ‘I’m glad you can stay.’
    He gazed at her hungrily. ‘I can’t keep away from you. You’re lighting up my life, Delilah. You’ve changed everything, you don’t know how much.’
    She felt reborn into happiness, Harry forgotten in her passion for John. He was funny, charming and witty, with a soulful side that intrigued her. He didn’t speak much about himself or his
family, and gave her only sketchy details of his history when she pressed for them, telling her that his father was ill with encroaching dementia, and that his mother had died years before, though
he didn’t elaborate. He had no brothers and sisters and he felt the weight of his great inheritance: the house and all that came with it. It was no wonder, she thought, that he had a tendency
to spells of silence, when a dark mood descended on him and he seemed to vanish inside himself. When she asked him what was wrong, he would always snap out of it, smile again and tell her that it
was nothing. But every few nights he was rocked by bad dreams that made him convulse, twist and cry out in his sleep, and he would wake panting and wild-eyed, in a panic that he could not describe.
Then she would hold him and soothe him until it had passed and he fell asleep again.
    The return to Fort Stirling made Delilah feel as though she was in a fairy tale. John drove her back on a frosty autumn day so that they could spend a weekend there, just the
two of them, and the house looked impossibly beautiful against the sparkling icy parkland. When the gloomy afternoon fell, it was cosy inside with the lamps lit and the fire burning. The
housekeeper had left a stew bubbling and potatoes baking. They drank wine in the small sitting room at the back of the house and made love in front of the fire.
    Lying in his arms afterwards on a pile of cushions and watching the dancing flames, she said with a studied idleness, ‘That portrait hanging in the hall – is it her?’
    He stiffened slightly. ‘Who?’
    ‘Your first wife.’ Earlier in the day, when John had gone to fetch something, she’d been looking at the pictures and had noticed the pastel and watercolour painting of a woman.
It had a chocolate-box quality: the hair too blonde and smooth, the eyes too big and the mouth too cupid-bowed to be entirely plausible as a true likeness, but there was nevertheless a defiant air
about the face. Underneath a small gold