Accidental Mistress

by Williams Cathy

  ‘That’s right.’ He folded his arms and she looked at his profile, clean and strong, with worried eyes.

  She began to wonder why she was bothering to fight. Wasn’t it going to be a losing battle? She had laid her cards on the table and so had he. He wanted her for the sake of his child and he was going to get what he wanted because he always did. Whether she liked it or not, he would insinuate himself into her life and erode her until she gave in.

  ‘And what if you fall in love with someone else when we’re married? What if I do?’

  ‘You can’t conduct your life based on some hypothetical speculation. What if this car goes over the edge of a cliff with us in it? What if the Third World War breaks out and the whole world goes up in smoke? When you start thinking like that, you can carry on ad infinitum.’

  ‘Those things aren’t likely to happen. It’s far more likely that—’

  ‘You’ll marry me and then fall in love with another man, only to find yourself unhappily trapped in a situation of my making?’ His voice was hard.

  Lisa didn’t answer. There was no possibility of that, she knew. The Third World War scenario was far more likely.

  They had cleared the traffic of central London, and now they were picking up speed along the motorway. They would be back at her place in no time at all, and for the first time since he had voiced his preposterous suggestion that they get married she just wasn’t sure. She just didn’t know whether it was a preposterous suggestion. Hadn’t they strolled through Harrods if not entwined like a loving couple anticipating the birth of their first child, then at least like friends, sharing a single dream?

  And hadn’t it been easier? She imagined what it would have been like trudging wearily through baby shops in Reading, choosing things happily enough but never escaping that edge of sadness, knowing that she should be sharing things like that with the father of her child.

  She thought about all the months and years that lay ahead, the decisions that would have to be taken, the childhood illnesses that she would have to face on her own.

  What, she thought a little desperately, am I to do? Which path do I go down? She could actually see her life in front of her. Her life was a wilderness and the paths forked in opposite directions.

  So, he didn’t love her. Well, he must at least like her. He surely wouldn’t have proposed if he hated her, would he? She might not be his first choice as a partner for life, she might not even be his second or third, but, as he’d said, these were exceptional circumstances.

  And would it be so awful? She had so much love in her heart—enough for the two of them. And maybe one day, when he was least expecting it, he might turn around and realise that he did in fact love her, that time had nourished something which didn’t presently exist into fruition.

  ‘And what if you stray?’ she asked timidly.

  ‘Then you can divorce me and have full custody of our child and I’ll abide by whatever rules you want.’

  ‘I never imagined...that things would turn out like this for me.’

  ‘You imagined that you had learnt lessons from your childhood and that you could arrange your life in such a way that it fitted in with what you wanted?’

  ‘Yes.’ Except now it was difficult to remember what those lessons were. Falling in love with Angus Hamilton had turned those preconceived ideas on their head and whenever she tried to grasp the things that had kept her going all this time she found that they were not quite within her reach.

  ‘I know I’m not your type...’

  ‘You know less than you think,’ he answered ambiguously.

  ‘I’m not a social butterfly. I’m no good at arranging dinners for twenty. I don’t glitter and sparkle.’ She knew that she sounded as though she was apologising, but she couldn’t help it.

  They had reached the outskirts of Reading now. Angus pressed a button so that the glass partition separating them from George in front slid aside, and he gave brief directions to the driver, then leaned back in his seat and looked at her.

  ‘Will you let me think about it?’ she asked, and he nodded. ‘I’ll call you.’

  ‘No. I’ll call you.’

  ‘Don’t you trust me?’ she enquired with a faint smile, which he returned.

  ‘Not when it comes to this. I’ll drop by on Wednesday.’

  The car pulled up outside her flat and now that they had arrived she felt a desperate urge to get inside, where she could be alone with her thoughts and decide for herself what she should do, without Angus’s handsome, clever face swaying her every thought.

  ‘Yes, OK.’

  She pushed open the car door and Angus got out and said wryly, ‘The bags in the boot?’

  ‘Oh, yes, right.’ She had forgotten about those. The big items were due to be delivered on Monday, but they had also bought an assortment of smaller things which had, in the mood of the moment, fallen into the category of cute, unnecessary and utterly irresistible.

  He helped her with them into the flat, deposited them on the sofa, and before he left he turned to her and said, ‘No more wriggling, Lisa.’ He looked at her for a long time, then he did something completely unexpected. He reached out and laid both his hands on her stomach, caressing it, and she felt a spring of desire gush into life.

  ‘No,’ she agreed faintly, her body tensing, against her will, in expectation of his hands sliding upwards to her breasts. They didn’t. He let them fall to his sides then turned around and let himself out of the flat.

  She went across to the window, from where she could see his car, and watched as he slid into the back seat, leaning forward to say something to George, and she continued watching until she could no longer see it. Even after it had disappeared, she remained by the window and imagined the car heading back towards London, towards his place. Where was it? What was it like? There was so much, she realised, that she didn’t know.

  Then she spent the afternoon, and the rest of the weekend, unpacking all the assorted bits and pieces which she had collected over the months.

  On Monday morning, she telephoned Paul as soon as she got up and asked him whether his offer of the loan of the cottage was still on.

  ‘Isn’t it too far for you to travel,’ he asked dubiously, ‘in your condition?’

  ‘I’d really like it, Paul. I need to sort myself out; I need to get away from the house, just for a couple of days.’ She didn’t really know whether it would help being in a different place, but she thought that it might. She might be able to think clearly and lucidly without her familiar walls around her, and the familiar sights of those baby things lurking in the spare room, waiting in readiness as time ticked by and the day that had seemed so far away crawled nearer and nearer.

  ‘It’ll be cold. It’ll take a little while to warm up.’

  ‘No matter. I shall be back by Wednesday afternoon.’

  She could sense him thinking, worrying about her, but he finally said that she could. He said he would make sure that Ellie stayed in so that she could get the key, and that he would also have her prepare some food—no arguments, please, or else no cottage—which made Lisa smile.

  At a little after ten, after she had thrown a few things together in her case, she dropped by his house and collected the key along with enough food to last the duration of her stay and waged a friendly war with Ellie about the sanity of going somewhere so far when the baby was just around the corner and she should, really, be putting her feet up and taking it easy.

  ‘I’ll take it very easy,’ Lisa promised. ‘As soon as I get there. Feet up and all that stuff. And I won’t have to cook. Thank you so much, Ellie.’ But when she looked in the rear-view mirror as she drove off she could still see Ellie’s face as she stood on the pavement outside their house, looking concerned and worried.

  It was going to be a long drive, but at the end of it she would find peace—peace in which to decide what she should do with her life.

  And, she thought, it was a fine day for driving. Cold and clear and blue. A g
ood day to start a trip, as her father used to say every time they left one place and headed towards another. A good day to make the biggest decision of her life.

  Look at me, Mum and Dad, she said to herself, no more that frightened little thing. Wherever you are, I know you’d be proud! She smiled.

  CHAPTER NINE

  IT WAS a good drive up. Lisa stopped at every service station she passed, so that she could stretch her legs, and she switched on her stereo for the entire drive. The various disc jockeys’ voices boomed through the small car and it felt as though she had company.

  Halfway through the journey, she pulled off the motorway, took a side road, parked the car in a lay-by and ate some of the sandwiches which Ellie had prepared. They tasted wonderful. She could already feel her head getting clearer. As she put distance between her and her house, the cobwebs began falling away and quite a bit of that worried agonising which she had done the previous night, alone in bed, began to recede.

  By half past three, she was at the cottage. It was just as she remembered it. Small, clean, with minimum mod cons. A typical holiday home, Paul was always telling her, begging for attention except that no one could be bothered because it was never used enough to warrant a great deal of money being spent on it.

  The ground floor was all open-plan, with the sitting room flowing into the kitchen, separated from it only by the width of a counter.

  In the sitting room, there was a large, open fireplace and a stack of logs next to it, neatly contained in a basket which had seen better days but which comfortably matched the rest of the place.

  Before she even unpacked, Lisa switched on the central heating, which cranked into life. It had been a fairly mild winter so far, so although it was very cold in the cottage there wasn’t that deep-frozen feeling which tended to attack unused places in the depths of winter.

  By the time she had hauled her bag upstairs and unpacked her few possessions, then laid out the food in the kitchen, it had warmed up enough for her to remove her coat, and, an hour later, her thick cardigan.

  Ellie had prepared a generous hamper of milk, eggs, bread, several cans of several things, coffee, juice, butter—everything that Lisa could possibly need—and she made a mental note to buy her a huge bunch of flowers on the way back.

  It was already dark by the time five o’clock rolled round—dark and warm and cosy—and she settled onto the sofa with her feet up and lay there with a cushion behind her head and her hand on her stomach and let herself think.

  Her mind drifted into the past. She remembered bits of her childhood days, happy memories that filled the cottage like warm companions.

  She remembered how she had longed for a life of security, but here, with no sounds around, just the silence of the darkness outside pressing against the windowpanes, she couldn’t recapture the passion with which she had longed for it.

  Fate had thrown her into an impossible situation where that placid, settled contentment which she had envisaged for herself would simply never materialise. Fate had thrown her Angus Hamilton and now, because she already knew what her decision was going to be, she began to enumerate the reasons why marrying him was what she intended to do, why it was the right thing to do, the only thing, in many ways.

  It wasn’t, she argued to herself, as if she could turn her back on him and walk away. It wasn’t as though she could ever find again any sort of happiness in the monotonous tenor of her life. Even if she never laid eyes on him again, which was out of the question because of this child inside her, things would never be the same. He had filled her with the sort of wild, uncontainable passion that made a mockery of everything that was ordered and neat and safe.

  It was as though she had lived her life like a two-dimensional cardboard cut-out, and he had taken her and given her shape and form, made her into a three-dimensional human being, with all the attendant problems.

  And that, she knew, was her greatest problem. Whatever lay before her, she would never again be that cardboard cut-out. He had changed her and she would remain changed until the day she died, whether he stayed as a part of her life or not.

  I can’t be wary any more, she thought to herself. I have to meet this challenge even if it leaves me broken in the end.

  And anyway, maybe it wouldn’t. Hope would give her the impetus to carry on and who knew? Who could see into the future? She might get to like dinner parties for twenty. She might just find that it wasn’t as bad as she’d imagined. She might find that laughter came easily after a while. She might well discover that she could shed the defensive caution that had sat on her shoulders from as far back as she could remember.

  In a strange way, he had made her into the sort of person she had never thought she could be. She had discovered deep within her some spark of impulse, some stirring of recklessness, something of her parents, and nothing had extinguished it and nothing, she now knew, ever would.

  Later, at a little after seven, she made herself some food, opening one of the cans which Ellie had thoughtfully provided and helping herself to some pasta which was already in the cottage. Basic provisions, Ellie had told her, were always kept in the cupboards because they did use the place at least once every five weeks or so and they planned it so that they only had to bring perishables with them when they came to stay.

  Then she settled down to read her book. There was no television. They had been adamant about not having one installed, despite pleas from the children, because they’d decided that there was already too much television at their house without it taking over their lives at the cottage as well.

  Lisa didn’t miss it. In the car, it had been fine listening to the voices talking at her out of the radio, but here it would have been intrusive.

  It was only when she found herself drifting into sleep that she went upstairs, had a bath and then settled into bed.

  There were only three small bedrooms in the cottage, but they were very pretty bedrooms, oddly shaped with sloping roofs. This one had a skylight and from where she lay she could look up and see the black, starry sky. She fell asleep thinking that out there, in another part of the country, the same black, starry sky was looking down on Angus, wherever he was. Working probably. It wasn’t yet eight-thirty. Would he stop working such long hours when she married him? When he had this baby to come home to?

  When she next woke up, it was black and silent outside and she had a brief moment of woolly disorientation which threw her into a panic as she wondered where she was. Then, sleepily, she remembered, and closed her eyes and felt it. The twinge that had awakened her, a cramping feeling. A contraction.

  Oh, no—oh, my God, no! she thought. In real panic, she reached out to switch on the bedside lamp and in the process sent her alarm clock skittering across the darkened room. The noise, intruding into the silence, was piercing and nerve-racking.

  She lumbered out of bed, her movements clumsy, and another contraction made her bend over double, grunting with pain. The blackness and the isolation, which had been comforting earlier on, were now a hostile force that brought home the seriousness of her situation in a way that nothing else could.

  She was in labour, much earlier than her expected date, and contrary to what her doctor had confidently told her at her last antenatal appointment three days previously. At that point the baby had not yet engaged and he’d predicted that it would be late. Very few babies were born on their due date, he had told her. Some arrived early but most arrived late and he had assured her that she fell into the latter category.

  She headed for the stairs, very slowly, and she was trembling by the time she made it to the telephone.

  When she picked up the receiver and heard nothing at the end of it, she began to shake. She felt ill and lost and terrified.

  She hadn’t even bothered to check to make sure that the phone was working when she had arrived. She had just assumed that it would be. She had assumed that Paul and Ellie would have known if it had been disconnected for whatever reason.

  Another contract
ion and now the dreadful pump of adrenaline through her made her act quickly, switching on lights to ward off the frightful darkness, hunting for her bag containing her car keys, which she located just when she had more or less given up in desperation.

  She slung her coat on over her nightdress, made it to the car, and had actually driven it partially down the track, with the trees pressing down on either side, when she realised, with horror, that she wouldn’t be able to go the distance. She wouldn’t even be able to make it to the main road, never mind that she had no idea where the hospital was even if she did. The contractions were coming stronger and harder, making her grit her teeth together in pain, turning her stomach into a hard rock that made her cry out.

  She couldn’t even begin to think of what she could do next. The pain made thinking too difficult. She switched off the engine, made her way to the back seat, and she had no idea how long she had lain there, with the pain getting more and more unbearable, when she heard the roar of a car and the screech of brakes as it scudded to a halt behind her.

  She didn’t care who the hell it was. It was help. She didn’t care whether it was a car-load of robbers on their way to ransack the cottage. By God, she would collar them and make them take her to the hospital, or at least to the nearest house where she could use a phone and call for help.

  Her eyes were squeezed shut and in between her cries of agony she was panting. She heard the door being yanked open and then a muttered exclamation before someone reached inside the car and she felt herself being lifted out.

  She opened her eyes and saw, in a haze, that it was Angus. Carrying her to the house, opening the door with her key and then kicking it wide open.

  ‘How long?’ he demanded, putting her down on the sofa, and she tried to answer but only a long groan emerged. ‘Have you telephoned the ambulance?’

  ‘Not working,’ Lisa panted. The sweat had cooled on her. She felt slippery and incoherent.

  ‘Dammit! Don’t move. I’ll be back.’

  ‘Don’t move’? Where did he imagine that she was going to move to? Did he think that she might go for a quick jog through the woods? Or lumber towards the kitchen to politely fix him a cup of coffee?