by Penny Jordan
The coincidence of both of them choosing to visit London at the same time; the fact that Nick had claimed that he was unable to tell her where or how she could get in touch with him; the hyped-up mood he had been in before he left… they were all signs that were familiar enough to her by now.
She didn’t want to have to tackle him about it, she admitted cravenly as he glowered sullenly at her, but she couldn’t just close her eyes and pretend it wasn’t happening.
Listening to Lord Stanton talking about his wife, hearing the love, the loss, the respect in his voice had brought home to her how barren and sterile her own marriage was.
‘She was my best friend,’ Lord Stanton had said of his wife, and Fern had ached with a sense of loss and grief as she listened to him.
Friendship was something she and Nick had never shared, nor ever would share. She tried to imagine the kind of relationship they might have had if they had not married and acknowledged with a sickening sense of despair that friendship could never have existed between them. They had nothing really in common, no shared interests or hobbies, no past memories of shared happiness to treasure.
No matter how much he might claim that he needed her and refuse to discuss the state of their marriage, Nick surely could not be happy… could not love her.
She took a step towards him and then stopped as he pre-empted her and spoke first, his voice harsh and critical as he looked at her and demanded, ‘For God’s sake, Fern, can’t you do something with yourself?’ His mouth twisted contemptuously. ‘You look closer to forty than thirty. Why don’t you get your hair restyled… wear some make-up…?’
‘Like Venice?’ Fern suggested, her voice taut with humiliation, the words escaping from her before she could call them back, even though she knew from experience how much they would infuriate Nick.
‘Like Venice! You couldn’t look like her in a million years,’ he told her scathingly.
‘Good. I wouldn’t want to,’ Fern retorted. ‘Did you see her while you were in London?’ she asked him, attacking before she could lose her courage.
‘See who?’ Nick asked, turning away from her.
Fern gritted her teeth. He knew quite well who. ‘Venice,’ she told him, keeping her head up high as she added challengingly, ‘Apparently she was in London these last few days as well.’
Nick turned round, his mouth cynical and hard, his eyes glittering slightly, but he was avoiding looking directly at her, Fern recognised as he turned to go upstairs.
‘My dear Fern, it may have escaped your notice, but London is a very large place. No… I did not see Venice. Who told you she was in London, anyway? Adam?’
Fern could feel her skin starting to burn.
‘No,’ she told him woodenly. ‘Laura Welch happened to mention it.’
‘Interfering busybody. Still, a single woman of her age… I suppose she’s so desperate for it that—’
Fern turned away, reopening the kitchen door. She loathed it when Nick behaved like this, reverting to the kind of crudity which made her cringe. In the early days of their marriage he had laughed at her for it, calling her a prude, telling her that it was simply the way that real men behaved, but that, since her experience of his sex was limited to her father and Adam, she was unlikely to be aware of it.
She had felt too humiliated then to counter that she did not believe a ‘real’ man as he termed it would ever find it necessary to reinforce his masculinity by the parading of that kind of verbal vulgarity and she still couldn’t say so now, although her expression gave her away…
‘What’s wrong, Fern?’ Nick called contemptuously after her. ‘Don’t you like hearing the truth?’
‘I’m your wife, Nick,’ she told him quietly. ‘And after all it wouldn’t be the first time you’d been unfaithful to me, would it?’
‘And just who the hell is to blame for that?’ Nick demanded aggressively, coming downstairs and following her into the kitchen. ‘If you hadn’t fucked my brother…’
Fern went white and then red, nausea erupting violently inside her stomach, her body tensing as Nick gripped hold of her arm and swung her back to face him.
‘You’re such a prissy little bitch, Fern. My God, you haven’t a clue about what it means to be a real woman… and Adam wouldn’t know what to do with one anyway.’
A real woman… They were back to where they had started, Fern recognised miserably. Back to Venice, who no doubt Nick considered to be the epitome of what a ‘real’ woman should be.
‘I’m not Venice, if that’s what you mean,’ she agreed dully, wishing now that she had had the sense to keep silent and say nothing instead of provoking all his aggression and malice… instead of reminding Nick of her guilt, instead of giving him that guilt as a weapon to use against her.
‘What did you do when you were with Adam, Fern?’ Nick challenged her thickly, ignoring her comment about Venice. His eyes were glittering too sharply, like pieces of broken glass, a hectic dangerous flush surging up under his skin. ‘Were you as cold and boring in his bed as you’ve always been in mine? Did you lie there un-moving and unexciting the way you do with me, or did he make you scream with ecstasy when he touched you? Did you beg him to lick you; to suck you; to fuck you… did you, Fern… did you?’
She had gone so cold that her teeth were literally chattering, her body gripped by such a storm of anguished pain that her throat muscles locked against the protest, the denial she wanted to scream out loud…
How could Nick talk to her like that… accuse her… suggest…? But it was her fault that he was doing so, she reminded herself as she shook her head, fiercely trying to blink back the tears filling her eyes. Her fault that he was drawing those ugly destructive images of her. Her fault that he was deliberately defiling something which…
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she heard him mutter as he released her and then stormed out of the kitchen.
She heard him going upstairs and into their bedroom. She couldn’t move. She could only remain where she was, clinging to the back of the chair she was holding on to for support.
Now she made no attempt to stem the weak tears of shock and shame slowly running down her face.
Why on earth hadn’t she simply kept quiet, said nothing, done nothing to provoke him?
Perhaps after all she had been wrong… perhaps he hadn’t been with Venice.
From somewhere inside her a small, caustic, cynical presence she hadn’t known existed raised its voice and demanded tauntingly, ‘That’s it, give in… take the easy way out. Of course he’s been with her. He still smelled of her perfume.’
She stayed in the kitchen until she heard Nick come downstairs and go out again. She had known that this was what he would do. It was a familiar pattern he followed every time they had a quarrel…
When he came back he would be contrite and apologetic. He would remind her of how much she had hurt him… of how much she owed him, of how difficult it was for him to live with the knowledge that she, his wife, the woman he had married… revered… put up on a pedestal above other women, had betrayed him… and with his own stepbrother.
Was it any wonder, he would ask her, that he sometimes felt the need to prove his manhood, to lay claim to his own sense of masculinity and self-respect by occasionally flirting with a pretty woman? Flirting, that was all… She was his wife, wasn’t she? He would never leave her, she knew that.
Oh, yes, she knew that, Fern acknowledged heavily.
Now, in the aftermath of her shock, she felt weak and shaky, oddly light-headed in a way that seemed to give her thoughts a relentless, unignorable clarity and intensity.
She should never have married Nick. She didn’t love him and, for all his avowals to the contrary, she suspected that he did not love her. Their marriage was a sham, a deceit, a dishonesty that was slowly infecting not just their relationship with one another, but her whole attitude to life, Fern acknowledged.
She had been not just a fool, but a coward as well. During her parents’ lifeti
me she had told herself that she could not upset and hurt them by revealing the truth about what she felt, but had she simply used them as an excuse because she had been too weak to tackle Nick and make him see that their marriage had to end?
Was the simplest, the easiest, the best thing to walk away from him?
She hugged her arms around her body, shivering still with shock and distress.
She had tried that once before and look what had happened. The discovery that their marriage was simply not working, the knowledge that Nick was involved with someone else—these had sent her running from him, a headlong, unplanned, unthinking flight with no direction to it, motivated solely by her need to escape a situation she could no longer contain or control.
If Adam had not seen her, stopped her, insisted on taking her home with him because he had seen how obviously upset she was…
He had thought it was the discovery of Nick’s infidelity which was upsetting her; the shock of the visit from Nick’s lover shaking her faith in her husband to the roots, never guessing that Fern had actually been on the verge of leaving Nick.
Afterwards she had known that she had to stay; that to leave then after what had happened would have been to make Adam feel responsible for her… to make him feel that he had to…
Men were not like women; men, even the nicest, the kindest, the most compassionate of them, took a very different view of sex from women.
It was not Adam’s fault that he had succumbed to the physical desire she had obviously aroused in him. How could it be? Hadn’t she after all been the one to instigate everything… to urge, encourage, incite and almost beg to complete what they had inadvertently started, when he would have stopped it?
She had been the one to push them both over the edge and into the abyss of guilt and shame from which she could never escape. No blame, no guilt, no responsibility could attach to Adam.
She could feel the slow, hot crawl of colour stinging her skin as she remembered the things she had said, the things she had done… things she had never, could never anticipate doing with Nick.
Nick was right to accuse her of that. She had been a cold, sexually unresponsive wife, unable to understand why Nick’s caresses should leave her so unmoved, so inclined to tense her muscles and pray silently that it would soon be all over. She loved him, didn’t she?
Some women were just not highly sexually motivated, she had comforted herself, and in some way she had felt that Nick was almost pleased by her lack of sexuality. She had tried to discuss it with him in the early days of their marriage, to apologise and ask him to help her understand why, when she knew from all he had told her that he was a very sexually experienced and gifted lover whose previous lovers had more than appreciated his prowess in bed, her body remained so cold and awkwardly unresponsive to his touch.
She had wanted to respond to him; had wanted to experience the pleasure, the knowledge she had heard other women talking about. She had even taken to furtively reading books, nervously purchased from a bookshop on a specially planned trip to London, hoping to discover within their covers something that would explain away the reasons for her lack of arousal.
All they had done had been to reinforce her sense of guilt and despair, even further diminishing her self-confidence and security.
Nick had turned away from her in bored irritation when she had talked to him about it. It was just his bad luck that he had married a woman who was frigid, he had told her. She had been grateful then when he had added that, despite her frigidity, he fully intended to stay married to her. Grateful because in overlooking her inadequacy he was saving her from having to face the humiliation and scorn of the outside world… in having to admit that her marriage was a failure and see the disappointment and pain reflected in her parents’ eyes.
She hadn’t noticed at first how Nick’s tolerance was beginning to change to contempt and criticism… how the way he touched her in bed had started to change from a pattern of orchestrated and obviously knowledgeable caresses to an almost rough immediate penetration followed not only by his physical withdrawal from her and the sight of his hunched back and the back of his head as he turned away from her, but by his emotional and mental withdrawal from her as well.
She knew that it was her fault, of course, but she ached to be able to talk to Nick about what was happening to them, to ask him to be more patient with her… more… more tender, more loving… to give her time.
What was the point? he asked her brutally when she did. Nothing—no one could arouse her. Did she think he actually enjoyed it? he demanded cruelly. Because if so she was wrong. It was simply that as a man he had a need… and that she as his wife had an obligation to allow him to satisfy it.
She had cried herself to sleep the night he had told her that, and for several nights afterwards.
It had been less than a month later when she had begun to suspect that he was having an affair.
How much longer could she go on like this? Fern wondered wretchedly now. No matter how hard she tried to push it to the back of her mind with increasing intensity, the problems within her marriage would push past the mental barriers she had tried to erect against them, forcing themselves to the forefront of her mind, refusing to be ignored.
Nick might have needed her once, as he had claimed, but he didn’t need her now. Living with him, knowing that their marriage was an empty sham, was eating away at her self-respect, adding self-dislike to her already heavy burden of guilt.
She had even begun to find she was avoiding looking at herself in the mirror, almost as though she could no longer face the accusation and misery in her own eyes.
The days were gone when a woman in her position had to remain locked into an unhappy marriage simply because she had no alternative. She was a healthy, intelligent woman of twenty-seven who was surely capable of living on her own and supporting herself financially.
All right, so maybe she had left it a little late to step into a high-powered career, but she could still earn her own living.
She had always disliked being financially dependent on Nick, she admitted when enough strength had returned to her body to enable her to complete the task she had been engaged in before Nick’s return.
As she climbed back up the ladders and reapplied herself to cleaning the kitchen windows, she reflected on Nick’s insistence right from the start of their marriage that he did not want her to work; that he wanted her at home.
Her parents had approved of this. Her mother had never worked and both she and Fern’s father had seen in Nick’s attitude confirmation of their old-fashioned belief in the traditional roles both sexes played within a marriage.
Faced with their united agreement with one another, it had seemed easier to simply accept what Nick had said.
‘It isn’t that I want to prevent you from having your own career,’ Nick had told her winningly. ‘It’s just that my own job is so demanding and I have to work such odd hours that, selfishly, I don’t want to come home and find you not there. Of course, if you’re worried that I won’t be able to support you properly, or if you think I’m going to turn into the kind of mean bastard who keeps his wife short of money and queries every penny she spends…’
Of course she didn’t think that, Fern had quickly assured him.
He had kissed her then. In those days they had of course still been on kissing terms.
However, while Nick had never precisely kept her short of money, he had not exactly been generous with it either, neither in practicality nor, more importantly, in spirit.
How and when had it happened? Fern wondered, stopping work for a second to stare unseeingly out of the window, staring not out into the garden, but back into the past and the early days of their marriage. When had she started to feel apprehensive about spending Nick’s money… about buying small luxuries? Not for herself… no, the kind of luxuries she meant were things like good quality food, fruit out of season, small delicacies and treats which, although he ate them with every appearance of rel
ish, Nick always seemed to make small critical reference to, some small but sharp allusion to her inefficient financial housekeeping. It was never anything too abrasive, at least not in those early days… sometimes little more than a smiling, almost teasing reference to her love of luxuries, and the spoiling her parents had indulged in; but his words had hurt none the less.
As for her buying herself the sort of luxuries Venice enjoyed… the expensive clothes, the expertly painted nails, the make-up, the chic salon-styled hair, the real silk tights—or more probably stockings, Fern acknowledged—the exclusive health-club membership that provided her with a year-round tan and the slim, svelte shape to show off on the tennis courts, plus the opportunity to parade around in the most minute of bikinis…
It was laughable, a joke to imagine that she could ever indulge in those kind of self-centred enjoyments, even on the simplest of scales.
In the early days of their marriage, Nick had made a big virtue out of giving her her own allowance.
That allowance, so much discussed and paraded for the approval of her parents and their acquaintances, had barely covered the cost of her underwear and tights in the days when he had first allocated it to her, Fern acknowledged tiredly.
She had once tried to broach the subject of it with him, assuming that he was perhaps unaware of just how much things actually cost, but he had been so angry with her, accusing her of being spoilt and unrealistic; of expecting him to support her as generously as her parents had done, making her feel so greedy and thoughtless that she wished she had never raised the subject in the first place.
When all the legal formalities had been attended to, she would inherit a small sum from her mother’s estate, but her parents had purchased an annuity with the bulk of their capital which had died with them.
But it wasn’t any lack of money that was keeping her within the marriage, Fern knew. If necessary she was quite prepared to take on the most menial kind of work there was in order to support herself. After all, she had no children to worry about… no one dependent upon her.