Phantom Marriage

by Penny Jordan

  Both the twins could swim, but Tara made sure that they never entered the water without her. Watching them playing together like baby seals, their newly tanned bodies gleaming with the seawater, she experienced an overwhelming need to share the moment with James; to exchange with him a look of doting parenthood over their oblivious heads. Pain swept her, her eyes drawn involuntarily to the other families on the beach; complete units, mothers and fathers with their children. She was being foolish, she warned herself; she was an adult and knew better than to fall into the trap of the ‘perfection’ of family life, and yet the pain inside her wouldn’t go away. She closed her eyes on betraying tears, shocked by the images shimmering against her eyelids of herself and James, lying together beneath the hot sun, his hands on her body. Forcing the images away, she tried to concentrate on the present, to blot out all memories of the past, on her love for James, and her yearning need to have him with her.

  Margaret had been marvellous about not asking questions, and although Tara had been a little perturbed when she first discovered the cottage was not on its own, she admitted now that she was glad of a little adult company, especially when it was as unobtrusive as Margaret and Sam’s.

  The twins too, had made fast friends with the Burtons’ two younger children, Philip and Robert, aged ten and twelve respectively, while Gill made no secret of the fact that she adored the twins.

  ‘You wait,’ Margaret had predicted gloomily, watching her with them. ‘This year it’s kids, next it will be boys!’

  Later in the afternoon Tara drove into Dartmouth to do some shopping. She bought postcards to send to Chas and Janice, and was amused when Mandy announced importantly that she too had postcards to write and asked for stamps to stick on them.

  Her school friends, no doubt, Tara decided, passing over the requisite stamps. Poor little girl, this was the first opportunity she had had to send rather than receive, and she was obviously determined to make the most of it, even though the stamps were not the exotic variety she received from her friends.

  That evening they had supper with the Burtons, and when Margaret suggested that they stroll down to the village pub for a drink, Tara felt relaxed enough to agree.

  There was a moment, when she urged the twins to behave themselves for Gill, when she remembered coming home to the shattered teapot and the appalling silence that accompanied it, but she banished it firmly, reminding herself how she had always striven to allow the twins some measure of independence. Simon had disconcerted her by clinging a little to Sam Burton, and watching him blossom and gain confidence as he copied the Burton boys she had experienced a twinge of fear that she was depriving him of the male influence he seemed to need.

  It was a pleasant walk to the pub—crowded with holidaymakers and locals, and Tara thoroughly enjoyed the hour or so they spent there before walking back, although she couldn’t help noticing on the return journey how Margaret slipped her hand companionably into Sam’s, and the teasing smile they exchanged. A great sense of desolation overwhelmed her. She had to stop feeling like this, she warned herself. She simply could not succumb to morbid envy every time she witnessed intimacy between another couple.

  The days passed pleasantly, the good weather holding. They toured the moors one day and ate a picnic lunch in the shade of a tumbledown cottage, Simon entranced by the sturdy ponies who watched them inquisitive and greedy. All three of them were tanned, scarcely recognisable from the city dwellers who had arrived such a short time ago. They must try and do this every year, Tara decided as she set the car in motion. It had done them all good.

  The following day Margaret announced that they were visiting a nearby safari park and invited the twins to go with them.

  ‘I won’t suggest that you come,’ she told Tara. ‘Have a day on your own. Read a book, laze about. Something tells me you don’t get many opportunities to be alone.’

  Silently blessing Margaret for her kindness, Tara passed on the invitation to the twins. As she had suspected, they were thrilled, and although she felt a tiny pang when she saw how blithely unconcerned they were that she was not to accompany them, she told herself that it was only right and natural. Simon in particular had been too clinging.

  They left after breakfast, waving enthusiastically to her from the Burtons’ Range Rover.

  When they had gone Tara washed up and made the beds before unearthing a book she had brought with her. If anything the weather had improved, today the sun shone from a cloudless sky with only the merest suggestion of a breeze. Donning her bikini, Tara wandered into the attractive cottage-style garden at the back of the cottage. After a while her book failed to hold her attention. She could hear a bee humming drowsily nearby, and a pleasant lethargy crept over her. She closed her eyes.

  Footsteps crunching on the gravel woke her. She sat up, swivelling round to see the intruder, then all the breath left her lungs on a painful gasp as her eyes travelled incredulously upwards over lean, jean-clad thighs to James’s dark inscrutable face.

  For a moment she thought she must be hallucinating and that her dreams had conjured him up out of nowhere. She blinked, dazzled by the sunlight bouncing off his sunglasses, wishing he would remove them so that she could at least see his eyes. He moved, and the thin body-hugging shirt exposed the fluid muscles of his torso.

  ‘James!’ Her voice ached over his name. ‘What… what are you doing here?—How did you know where to find us?’

  ‘Mandy sent me a postcard.’ The grimness round his mouth seemed to relax a little. ‘She put your address on it, but I would have found you anyway, if it had meant searching every inch of the country.’ He removed his glasses and Tara shrank from the anger she saw blazing in his eyes.

  ‘How could you?’ he breathed, walking towards her, his stance almost menacing as he towered over her. She longed to scramble to her feet, but something kept her where she was, her heart pounding in longing and fear.

  With a swiftness that startled her he dropped down beside her, so close that she could see the faint shadow along his jaw where he had shaved. A need to reach out and touch him overwhelmed her, but she refused to succumb to it.

  ‘Did you honestly hate me that much?’ he demanded, his voice curiously uneven. ‘So much that you kept the existence of my own children from me?’

  Tara was too stunned to speak, but any hopes she had nourished of denying his allegation were quenched as he grasped her shoulders, almost shaking her in his anger, his harsh, ‘And for God’s sake don’t compound your crime by denying it; the truth is written all over you, even if I hadn’t seen the birth certificates with my own eyes!’

  With a crawling sickness Tara’s mind swept back to those first despairing days after the twins’ birth. She had been too drained and weary to rationalise, too hurt by James’s betrayal, and when they had brought her the forms to fill in in the space designated ‘father’ she had written James’s name almost before she realised it.

  James’s bitter ‘Why, damn you?’ and the shake that accompanied it dragged her from the past, and her own bitterness welled up to meet his.

  ‘What was I supposed to do?’ she cried. ‘I was seventeen—what choice did I have? An abortion? I couldn’t, and that I was only an amusing interlude to you was made more than clear to me, as I’m sure you’ll remember.’

  She turned her face away, hating herself for the telltale tears rolling down her face, gasping when James grasped her chin, forcing her eyes to meet him.

  ‘Will I?’ he asked smoothly. ‘You’ll have to make allowances for my advancing years, I’m afraid and remind me afresh, starting from the moment you discovered you were pregnant.’

  For a moment she was tempted to refuse, hating his cynical attitude. Of course he didn’t remember—why should he? To him she was merely one more fool among many. Anger stirred, whipping soft colour into her cheeks.

  In a voice that trembled she reminded him of how he had disappeared after they had made love without a word to her, and how she had foolishly believe
d that he loved her. How terrified she had been when she discovered she was pregnant, how she had plucked up her courage to visit the house, hoping to ask his advice and how she had been met with scorn and mockery when Hilary told her the truth.

  ‘And you told her you were pregnant?’

  Tara shook her head proudly. ‘There was no point. I knew then that you wouldn’t help me, that you’d never meant any of the things… that you didn’t care about me the way I cared about you,’ she managed to enunciate clearly.

  When she lifted her eyes he was looking away from her, his face set and hard as though it had been carved in granite. He turned his head and the pain and desolation in his eyes took her breath, leaving a tight agony in her chest when she tried to breathe.

  ‘I had no idea,’ he said simply. ‘And it wasn’t like that at all, Tara. God, if you hadn’t been so young, so innocent… but I didn’t want to burden you, to spoil what there was between us. I went away simply to give you a breathing space—to allow you to grow up and discover if what you professed to feel for me was real or imaginary. Can you imagine how I felt? I’d taken your sweet innocence when I had no right. My marriage might have been a farcical sham, but I was still married—although I’d asked Hilary for a divorce long before you and I met. However, my marriage is something we can discuss later. I loved you,’ he told her simply. ‘Perhaps I had no right, but I did. When you offered me yourself so sweetly I couldn’t stop myself although I suffered a hell of bitter regret later. I went away vowing to give you the opportunity to make up your own mind, telling myself that it was only right that you should meet and fall in love with boys your own age, but when I came back and discovered you’d married, I was forced to admit to myself how much I’d been counting on your love, how much I wanted your sweetness, your body against mine.’

  Tara swallowed, unable to believe her ears.

  ‘You mean what Hilary told me wasn’t true?’ she managed to croak at last. ‘I wasn’t merely one of a long string of brief affairs?’

  James shook his head. ‘You were the only one—and you weren’t a brief affair,’ he told her roughly. ‘Let me tell you about my marriage. My father owned a small engineering company which he had built up over many years. My mother adored him and when he died I thought I would lose her too. Up until then I’d never met Hilary, although I knew she owned some shares in the company. She arrived several weeks after my father’s death—she spent the weekend with us. I found her glossy and hard. She was the antithesis of everything I looked for in a woman, but she made it plain that she was attracted to me. I was twenty-four and made the mistake of laughing at her.’

  ‘She left, and then a week later I received in the post some photo-copies of letters my father had written to her and which made it plain that they were lovers. If I didn’t agree to what she wanted she was going to show them to my mother. I was caught in a trap. I knew it would totally destroy my mother to learn the truth—I couldn’t really believe that my father had actually loved Hilary, but he had obviously desired her and made love to her, and my gentle mother would never be able to understand.

  ‘I got in touch with Hilary, suspecting that what she had in mind was that I should fill my father’s shoes, so to speak. We were having problems with the company at the time. My father had generously given a longstanding employee a block of shares, which meant that he no longer had overall control, and I was desperately trying to buy the shares back. What Hilary had to suggest appalled and infuriated me. An affair wouldn’t restore the damage I had caused to her pride, apparently. I had laughed at her and for that she demanded marriage. Oh, I refused—at first, but she’s a shrewd and determined woman. She held on to the threat of those letters, and she had almost managed to buy a controlling interest in the company. In the end I capitulated. We were never lovers,’ he told Tara bluntly, ‘but the mere fact that I’d married her salved her wounded ego. My mother died twelve months after we were married. That was the summer before I met you. I asked Hilary for a divorce and went on asking her, but she refused. It didn’t really matter, I knew sooner or later she would take a lover and grow bored with tormenting me, and there was no one else I wanted in my life, until I met you. I tried to hold back, not to sully you with the total mess my life had become, but you were like cool, pure spring water after a surfeit of sour wine, and the more time I spent with you the more I longed for you. I left England determined to give you a chance to grow up unfettered by my desire, and also to insist again that Hilary gave me a divorce. I’d already asked her when she met you.’

  Tara had been silent while he spoke, but now tears choked her of breath and she longed to reach out and convey her anguish for him.

  ‘I thought I was going to go mad when I discovered you were married,’ James said quietly, ‘and for a while perhaps I did. I concentrated on freeing myself from Hilary—I blamed losing you on her. I also managed to buy enough shares to gain control of the business. As I had suspected, Hilary had taken a lover and our divorce eventually went through, and I was a free man again—only I wasn’t free, Tara,’ he said huskily. ‘You haunted me. When Sue told me that she’d met you again I told myself I wasn’t going to get involved, that the past was dead and that the sensible thing was to avoid you. She told me that you were a widow with two children. I told myself I didn’t want to know, but somehow I found, myself urging her to allow me to drive you down to her home. I wanted to feel indifference towards you. I wanted to dislike the twins. I couldn’t bear the thought of you giving birth to another man’s child, but somehow they destroyed my defences and the hatred I’d expected to feel towards them became channelled towards your dead husband. I was jealous of Chas Saunders, but he was a known rival, something I could contend with, especially when I realised the twins didn’t like him. But their father… And when you kept insisting that you still loved him…’ He broke off suddenly, an arrested expression crossing his face. ‘Him, or me, Tara?’ he demanded huskily. ‘Did you love the man you married to protect the twins, or when you told me you loved their father, did you mean me?’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he muttered savagely when she refused to speak, ‘stop torturing me like this. Have you any idea what I’ve been through? Forced into dragging what titbits of information I could out of the twins, trying desperately to build up a mental picture of the man who’d supplanted me, and all the time you resisting me. That’s why I went to Somerset House. I thought if I had a name I might be able to discover something about him, instead of which I discovered that I was a father… Tell me about him, Tara,’ he urged. ‘What was he like? What…’

  Tara moistened her lips with her tongue, fear a coiled knot inside her. She was about to release her last defence, to expose herself to possible ridicule and pain and yet something drove her on, pushing aside caution.

  ‘He didn’t exist,’ she answered nervously. ‘There was no man, no husband.’ She glanced down at the cheap gold wedding ring she wore. ‘I made it all up… At first I wasn’t going to, but men… people…’

  ‘Were crass enough to believe because you’d been to bed with one man without the benefit of clergy you were willing to do so with more?’ James suggested softly. ‘Oh, my poor love!’ His hands were framing her face, the long fingers trembling slightly against her skin. Like tiny shoots from a vulnerable plant, emotions started to grow inside her, hope flowering in her eyes as she looked up at him.

  ‘About the twins,’ he continued. ‘Now that I’ve discovered that I am their father.’ He paused expectantly and the light died out of her eyes. Of course he didn’t still care about her—she had been a fool to think he might.

  ‘I’m not giving them up,’ she said stiffly, tensing her body in preparation for the confrontation to come.

  ‘I’m not asking you to. We can share them.’

  ‘On alternate weekends?’ she demanded bitterly.

  ‘I had something a little better than that in mind.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as marriage,’ James t
old her softly.

  For a moment Tara was silent, and then the pain began.

  ‘You’re prepared to go to those lengths to get two children you didn’t even know you’d fathered until a matter of days ago?’ She injected as much scorn as she could into the words, but James ignored it.

  ‘Them,’ he agreed, ‘and their mother. Tara, have you any idea what I endured when I returned from the States and discovered you’d gone?’ he demanded urgently. ‘Oh, I told myself it was all for the best, that I was too old for you, but none of it helped. I tortured myself night after night, imagining you confessing our lovemaking to your husband, dismissing it as just one of those things, when for me the memory of how it had felt to hold you in my arms and taste your first sweet cries of desire was something I could never forget. I loved you then and I love you now,’ he said slowly.

  ‘You love me?’ Still she couldn’t believe it, although hope trembled and grew again, her own love reflected in her eyes as she lifted them to his face. And then as though suddenly words could no longer convey how he felt, James reached for her murmuring against her mouth, ‘Perhaps this will convince you,’ as he possessed it with all the raw hunger she had dreamed of and which he had kept concealed from her on the other occasions when he had kissed her.

  They were completely alone in the garden and she had neither the desire nor the will to resist when he lowered her on to the grass, removing the brief scraps of her bikini, the sun stroking moltenly over her body, before he covered it with his.

  Their lovemaking was a white-hot need consuming them both, her body electrically responsive to his touch, his possession a shattering climax to their need for one another.