by Penny Jordan
It was a long time before she finally dropped off to sleep.
* * *
‘You won’t forget that the publisher is coming to see you this afternoon, will you, Uncle John?’ Emily reminded her relative.
They had just finished breakfast. Matt had gone upstairs to collect some papers. Her uncle was going with him to his college and, knowing how quickly Uncle John lost all track of time once he was with his cronies, Emily had taken the opportunity of reminding him of his afternoon appointment.
‘No, I shan’t forget. While he’s here, I’m hoping that Matt will have time to read through the manuscript. I’d value his opinion. By the way, that young man who telephoned you last night—’
‘It wasn’t anything important, Uncle John,’ Emily responded quickly. ‘Will you be in for dinner tonight?’
‘No. We’ll both be dining at High Table. Now, what time did you say that young man was coming to see me?’
‘Two-thirty,’ Emily replied patiently, one eye on the kitchen door as she waited for Matt to reappear, her stomach twisted in knots of tension.
And yet, for all her anguish and self-criticism, breakfast had not been the ordeal she had anticipated. In fact, if she hadn’t known just how Matt regarded her, she would have been completely deceived by his manner towards her.
This morning, for instance, he had insisted that she sit down and finish her own breakfast, and that he make the fresh pot of tea her uncle had requested. Before she could protest he had been out of his chair, filling the kettle.
And then after breakfast he had thanked her so warmly, so caringly almost, as though it concerned him that the management of the household fell on her shoulders.
Although she was always an early riser, she had been surprised to find him coming in from the garden when she had gone downstairs dressed in her customary uniform of plain brown skirt and an equally dull shirt and jumper.
‘That’s a wonderful garden you’ve got out there,’ he had commented as easily as though they were indeed strangers.
‘It’s rather overgrown, I’m afraid,’ had been her stilted reply. ‘I just don’t get the time.’
‘No. Well, perhaps while I’m here your uncle will allow me to indulge my back-to-nature instincts and do some work on it.’
He had brought into the kitchen with him the cool, sharp scent of the early morning, and without even knowing she was doing it she had been drawn closer towards him, so that abruptly and shockingly she had suddenly realised she was within touching distance of his fingertips. She had taken a step backwards then, saying jerkily that she must take her uncle a cup of tea otherwise he would wonder what had happened to her.
‘I thought you worked here as his researcher-cum-assistant,’ he had challenged her almost angrily. ‘Not as his housekeeper.’
‘I enjoy looking after him,’ she had retaliated defensively, keeping her back to him, her body stiff with the resentment and bitterness of all the years of listening to her parents’ bewilderment at this totally alien urge to nurture she seemed to possess. ‘Some people do, you know. I find nothing demeaning or menial in wanting to provide someone with a comfortable home. Not every human being wants to strive for academic or material success; we don’t all want to climb mountains and conquer the world, and it infuriates me that, just because we don’t want these things, we’re constantly made to feel that we’re some sort of sub-species.’
He said quietly, ‘I quite agree. There’s a very special satisfaction to be found in discovering and recognising one’s talents and in finding the most satisfying way of utilising them. Contentment is a state of mind that far too few people really value as they ought, although of course in this day and age your sex is often forced to take on the triple role of wife, mother and contributor to the family income as well.’
‘You mean, not all women are allowed the luxury of indulging their desire to nurture? Well, I know how lucky I am.’
‘And your fiancé, does he know how fortunate he is, I wonder?’
The soft-voiced question had completely silenced her. She had been so determined to defend herself from what she had seen as his criticism of her way of life—the same kind of criticism she had received so often from her family and friends—that she had completely forgotten everything else. She had stared at him, unaware of the confusion darkening her eyes and the way they were suddenly shadowed with fear.
What was the matter with the man, Matt had wondered bitterly, that he could induce such uncertainty and low self-esteem in the woman he proclaimed he loved? What was their relationship based on, that she had felt the need to lose herself and her innocence in his arms?
He had turned away from her so abruptly that Emily had thought he must have somehow or other divined that tiny betraying twist of sensation inside her; that he must have known of that idiotic, helpless yearning deep inside her, impelling her to move closer to him even while she had remained frozen where she stood, immobilised by the strength of what she had been feeling. And then he had been gone, striding through the kitchen, leaving her to come back to reality and to wish that she had never, ever met him.
Now, as soon as she heard the sound of him coming downstairs, she turned her back towards the kitchen door, busying herself with a small, unnecessary task, so that there was no need for her to do anything other than throw a stiff ‘goodbye’ over her shoulder to them as he and her uncle made their departure.
With him gone, she knew she ought to have felt easier, better—that she ought to have been able to shut herself away in her small office and concentrate on her work. She ought to have been, but she was sitting staring unseeing into space far more than she ought to, she recognised.
CHAPTER SIX
SINCE this wasn’t one of the days when Mrs Beattie came to help in the house, once the men had gone Emily had plenty to do before she could shut herself away in her small office and get to work on Uncle John’s notes.
As she went upstairs to clean the bedrooms and bathrooms, she knew how irritated both her parents would be if they could see what she was doing. At home order was only imposed on the chaos of her parents’ household by Louise. Her parents, so untidy and uncaring at home, though, were strict disciplinarians when it came to preparing for their travels; she knew that her mother especially found it extremely difficult to understand how any daughter of hers could actually enjoy housework, and Emily had always felt as though in doing so she was letting her down in some way.
She remembered how when, as a child she had asked one Christmas for a doll, her mother had gently tried to persuade her to have something else instead.
For a time she had striven to match her parents’ way of life, but she hated travelling, hated not having a home…roots. She loved the mental stimulation of working on her uncle’s book, but she also found pleasure in polishing the house’s old furniture, in cooking meals, in arranging the wind and rain-damaged flowers she rescued from the garden.
Her uncle left his bedroom and bathroom in a state of wild disorder; but, to Emily’s surprise, when she walked cautiously into Matt’s room, having stood outside the closed door for a good ten minutes giving herself a firm talking to, and telling herself that she must look on him as nothing more than another colleague of her uncle’s, she discovered that, not only was the bed neatly made, but also that everything in the room was as pin-neat as it had been before Matt moved in.
Only a jacket lying casually on the back of the armchair testified to the fact that the room was occupied. Automatically she walked towards it and picked it up. It was the same jacket he had worn that fatal night when they had met—she was sure of it.
Its familiar scent of worn, soft leather enveloped her so that, without knowing she was doing so, her fingers curled tightly into the worn fabric, as though it gave her some support. Memories, so sharply clear, so shockingly wanton, so intensely real that she could even feel their echo in the immediate physical reaction of her body, swamped her.
Now, when it was far, far too late for
her to do anything about it, she recognised that the impetuosity, the need, the intensity which had carried her past the barriers of self-restraint and caution had had nothing to do with the fact that Gracie was engaged, nor with the fact that at twenty-six she had never had a lover. Against all the odds, against everything she had believed about herself, she had looked at Matt and subconsciously she had wanted him, not just a man but one particular man: Matt.
She had wanted Matt. She sat down unsteadily on the bed, still clutching the jacket. But she had never wanted a man. Not like that…not so intensely, so sharply, so achingly that that wanting had been stronger than any other feeling she had ever experienced, even with Gerry.
She drew a deep, shuddering breath. Outside, a skittish breeze blew the branches of the stately magnolia against the window. In a few months, those bare branches would be a mass of glorious, deep pink, cup-shaped flowers. In a few months, the overgrown herbaceous borders would be a tangled mass of columbines, trumpet flowers and rose campions. In a few months, Matt would be gone and she would be able to return to her safe, protected world. She would be free from these ridiculous tormenting thoughts, from this dangerous need to investigate every thought and feeling she had.
So what if she had felt desire for Matt—she was human, wasn’t she? She got up, pacing the room tensely, still clutching the jacket. She was allowed to have normal human feelings, wasn’t she—normal human failings? Countless numbers of her sex did exactly what she had done without suffering for it the way she was now suffering.
She could hardly bring herself to look at her own reflection in the mirror without wincing. It had been bad enough before, when she had only had her own knowledge of what she had done to contend with, but now there was Matt—a man who knew more about her than any other human being, a man who had seen her stripped of the comfortable clothing of civilisation, who had seen her defenceless and unprotected.
Was that why she felt so tense and afraid? Because she felt in some way that in giving herself to Matt she had exposed herself to him in a way that would always make her vulnerable?
If only he wasn’t here; if only she had never had to see him again, she would have been able to cope, to put the incident behind her, to bury it decently and completely. Now it was beginning to haunt her… Just as Matt had haunted her dreams ever since that night.
She was standing in front of the window, staring out of it without seeing the view. In her mind’s eye she was back in the Land Rover with Matt, wrapped in his arms, loving the sensation of his bare flesh against her own, aching for the soft drift of his hands against her body…his body against…
With a low tormented cry she dropped the jacket, closing her eyes as she leaned her hot face against the cool glass. What on earth was happening to her? Why was she doing this to herself? She ought to remember what had happened with loathing and disgust, not with this aching yearning, this wanton flowering of sensation, this physical and emotional loneliness that swelled and ached inside her and made her eyes and throat sting with silly, useless tears.
Crying—over Matt… Why, for goodness’ sake? Why was she letting her subconscious weave these idiotic, dangerous daydreams around him, turning him from a man who had simply made the most of the opportunity she had so foolishly given him to indulge his sexual appetite into an imaginary creature of tenderness and compassion, into a fictional sharer with her in a coming together that had held the promise of far more than a merely physical joining of their bodies.
Why was she allowing herself to torment herself like this? Was it because she couldn’t bear to accept that she could desire someone so intensely without feeling any emotion for them? Was she now trying to convince herself that she had felt some emotion for Matt?
If so, she was an even greater fool to herself than she had ever imagined, she told herself as she went back downstairs. There was far more danger in emotionally wanting Matt than there had ever been in simply physically wanting him.
Confused by her own thoughts and needs, she wandered out into the garden. Here, strangely, her orderly mind found something special and pleasurable in looking at the wild havoc that nature, left to her own devices, had created here. She liked the overgrown borders and tangled climbers, the fruit trees which produced vast quantities of blossom but precious little fruit. Only really in the vegetable garden did she yearn to see order restored and production recommenced.
Her pots of herbs stood in the shelter of the kitchen garden wall. The wind tugged at soft strands of her hair, dragging it loose from her neat chignon. She ought to be inside, making her uncle’s favourite fruit-bread for this afternoon, not mooning around out here dreaming impossible and dangerous dreams.
Sighing faintly, she went back to the house, letting its ancient silence wrap itself around her, but for once she didn’t find the silence soothing. Instead, as she prepared the moist tea-bread her uncle loved, she found her mind drifting off at a tangent, peopling the large kitchen with children—dark-haired, blue-eyed, with quick intelligent faces and their father’s curling, heart-stopping smile.
Her whole body went still. Long, long ago, when Gerry had stripped the scales of self-delusion from her eyes and had made her see herself as the rest of his sex saw her, she had put away the daydreams of her growing years: of a husband, children, the kind of domestic happiness she had yearned for so much herself as a child, all those years when she had been growing up and her parents had been exuberant, awe-inspiring strangers who had swooped on her at odd intervals making her feel both excited and nervous at the same time, so that it was almost a relief when they had disappeared again.
She had learned then to keep to herself her unfashionable dreams of domesticity, but still they had persisted, flourishing in the secret places of her heart. It had taken Gerry’s cruelty to finally banish them and to make her focus her life in another direction.
Second-best—a lukewarm marriage bereft of the passion and intensity she had ached for so much—would never be enough to fill the empty yearning she had inside. She had thought she had come to accept reality, to be content with what life had given her, and now, cruelly and surely unnecessarily, fate had decided to taunt her with all that she could never have.
Such thoughts were not only unproductive but dangerous as well, she told herself firmly, the bread made, the kitchen tidy, and the work she had left in the study demanding her attention. Firmly refusing to allow herself to give in to any more self-indulgence, she started work.
The publisher was due at half-past two, and she only hoped that her uncle would return in time to meet him. Brilliant though he was in his chosen field, when it came to more mundane matters her uncle was hopelessly vague.
At two o’clock, she carefully stacked her typewritten sheets of paper and cleared her desk. Then she went upstairs, washed her face and brushed her hair into its neat bob before carefully applying the small amount of make-up Gracie had long ago persuaded her to wear.
‘You’re so fair-skinned,’ Gracie had told her doubtful sister. ‘You really do need some colour. It needn’t look heavy and overdone.’ And Emily had to admit that the soft blusher, the subtle smoky eyeshadow, the mascara and the pretty lipstick did add a certain definition to her face.
Applying them, she told herself stoutly that Matt’s arrival had nothing to do with the fact that she was taking extra special care with her appearance—far from it. The last thing she wanted was to attract the attention of a man who had already made it plain that all he wanted from her was a willing sexual partner. There was nothing wrong in wanting to make a good impression on her great-uncle’s publisher, she told herself quickly as her hand hesitated. Nothing wrong at all. After all, just because she enjoyed the kind of work and lifestyle that so many of her contemporaries scorned, it did not mean that she had to behave and look like some kind of dowdy little mouse.
She wasn’t beautiful, it was true, but Gracie was right—the make-up did add a subtle definition to her face, the eyeshadow did draw attention to the smoky pr
ettiness of her eyes, the mascara did emphasise eyelashes which were surprisingly thick and long.
Perhaps it was this that led her to changing into the unusual green-blue tartan kilt that her parents had bought her for Christmas and the sunshine-yellow sweater that went with it, matching the pretty over-lining of yellow that highlighted the kilt.
The outfit was far more fashionable and colourful than anything she would have chosen for herself, but as she studied her reflection she decided defiantly that she was going to wear it. With a very un-Emily-like toss of her hair, she hurried downstairs to prepare the tray for the substantial afternoon tea she knew that Uncle John would expect her to serve to his guest.
This took longer than she had expected, and she was just carrying the tray through into the study when she heard the sound of a car outside and then Matt and her uncle walking into the hall.
Her stomach muscles knotted as she heard them walking towards the open study door. Perhaps Matt would go straight upstairs and not bother to come in, she told herself, her body unconsciously defensive as she stood facing the door, standing ramrod-straight, her chin lifting defiantly.
‘Ah, good, you’ve made the tea,’ her uncle said as he walked in. ‘That wind is surprisingly cold. I take it our visitor hasn’t arrived as yet?’
‘He’s not due until two-thirty,’ Emily responded automatically. For some reason she was finding it impossible to remove her gaze from Matt. He was standing framed in the doorway, simply watching her in a sober, unfathomable way that made her heart skip and her pulse race.
Her uncle was still talking, but Emily had lost the ability to concentrate on anything other than Matt. Her mouth went dry, and she felt herself trembling inwardly.
‘I’d better go and fill the kettle,’ she heard herself saying mundanely. What was the matter with her? Why did he provoke this powerful and dangerous awareness?
‘Yes—and you might bring another cup, Emily. I’d like Matt to join us. He’s had experience of this kind of thing.’