by Penny Jordan
‘No? That isn’t what my body says,’ she told him steadily. ‘But there’s no need for you to worry about it, Sam. In fact I’d rather you didn’t. From now on I’d rather you stayed right out of my life, as I intend to do yours. From now on, as far as I’m concerned, you simply don’t exist. Rather appropriate, don’t you think? When our child—my child—asks about his or her father I shall simply tell it that you don’t exist.’
‘Abbie…’
She could hear the note of pleading desperation beneath the anger in his voice, but she closed her ears to it.
It was over…finished… How could it be any other way?
She placed her hand on her stomach as she walked away from him and whispered softly, ‘Don’t worry, my precious one. I love you…I’ll always love you.’
She wanted nothing more to do with Sam, she told her family and friends. Nothing more to do with her marriage. Her baby and its safety, its future were all that concerned her now, she had told everyone, with a calm detachment which she knew had surprised and slightly disconcerted those who thought they knew her. Her previous easygoing, eager-to-please personality seemed to have changed overnight into one of cool, icy strength. The warmth and passion, the intensity which had been so much part of her emotional, loving nature was firmly banished as she took on the new role that nature—and Sam—had imposed on her.
When Sam tried to get in touch with her to ‘talk things through’ she refused to have anything to do with him.
She wanted nothing from him, she informed her parents. The house, the furniture, the wedding presents—she wanted none of them.
But how would she manage? they asked her in concern. On her own with a baby… She would, of course, have their help, their support, but…
‘I’ll find a way,’ she told them determinedly.
Sam wanted to give her an allowance, but she refused that as well.
‘I don’t want his charity,’ she told her solicitor. ‘I don’t want anything of his.’
‘But you’re carrying his child,’ her solicitor had pointed out gently.
‘No,’ Abbie denied woodenly. ‘This child is mine. Only mine.’
Nothing and no one could persuade her to change her mind. Her parents were shocked by the implacable streak of stubborn determination revealed in their hitherto gently malleable daughter.
Not to them, not to anyone could she confess that during that dreadful fight with Sam, when he had accused her of carrying another man’s child, of being unfaithful to him and breaking not just her marriage vows but the vows of love she had made to him that first night she had spent in his arms, something inside her had been destroyed, had quite simply ceased functioning…had been broken. And it could never be repaired.
She never wanted it to be repaired because she never again wanted to go through the kind of pain that Sam had put her through. Ever…
It was hard at first, and her parents were horrified when she grimly insisted on carrying on working in a local pub right up until the last month of her pregnancy.
She was living at home with them then, having nowhere else to go. Sam had been threatened with an injunction if he ever tried to see her, and she had heard in a roundabout way that he intended to leave the country to take up a post he had applied for at an Australian university. She had been surprised by her own lack of reaction to that news. She had quite simply felt nothing.
Towards the end of her pregnancy a sense of great calm descended on her, a sense of purpose, a need to gear her whole life towards the arrival of her baby.
Although as yet she had said nothing to her parents, she intended just as soon as she could to find herself a small flat somewhere, which she could rent for her and the baby. She didn’t want to be dependent on her parents for ever, loving and protective though they were. She had already talked to the landlady of the pub about returning to her job as soon as she could, and of working longer hours. She knew it wasn’t going to be easy but she also knew that somehow she would find a way… She had to for her baby’s sake.
She had to and she would.
* * *
‘Mum, Mum, where are you?’
Abbie gave a small start as she realised just how long she must have been sitting on the dusty loft floor, lost in her memories of the past. Her body felt cold and cramped, her head filled with old memories. Quickly she stuffed her wedding dress back out of sight, wincing as her cramped muscles protested at the movement, calling out to Cathy, ‘I’m on my way down, Cathy. Put the kettle on, would you, darling?’
CHAPTER FOUR
‘WHERE on earth have you been? I rang twice and there was no reply so I decided to come round,’ Abbie heard her daughter saying as she hurried into the kitchen.
‘I was upstairs in the loft,’ Abbie explained. ‘That’s why I didn’t hear the phone.’
‘The loft? What on earth…? Mum, are you all right?’ Cathy asked anxiously, concern darkening her eyes as she turned round to look at her mother.
‘Of course I’m all right,’ Abbie told her. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘No reason. It’s just… Look, you’re not upset because of what I said earlier, are you?’ Cathy demanded in a rush. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. I…I know you don’t like talking about Dad…’
‘Oh, Cathy, of course I’m not upset,’ Abbie denied remorsefully, going over to put her arms around her daughter and hug her lovingly.
‘I do know how hard it must be for you, darling, especially now, when you and Stuart are planning your wedding. I know it can’t have been easy for you growing up without a father, knowing that yours…that he… If I was snappy because you mentioned him, I suppose it was just because you might have thought you saw someone who looked like him, but it can’t possibly have been Sam. He would never come back here. He knows that there’s no way I’d ever forgive him for what he did and he knows that he has no place in our lives. He gave up any rights he had to that when he denied that you were his child.’
‘I know how much he hurt you, Mum,’ she heard Cathy saying in a muffled voice. ‘But it must have been a shock for him too, to learn that you were pregnant when he believed that that wasn’t possible. Stuart says that any man would be shocked, and—’
‘“Stuart says“?’ Abbie queried, releasing her daughter and stepping back slightly to look up into her face. Her heart sank as she saw the way Cathy’s gaze slid away from her own, her face slightly flushed, her expression unfamiliarly defensive.
‘Mum, I don’t want to hurt you, but—’
‘Then let’s forget the whole subject,’ Abbie interrupted her gently. ‘The fact that your father has no place in our lives is by his own choice, remember. Anyway, what exactly are you doing here?’ she queried lightly. ‘I thought you and Stuart were house-hunting this evening.’
Cathy had moved into Stuart’s small bachelor flat several months ago, but both of them had agreed that they wanted to start their married lives in a home which they had chosen together. Stuart was in the fortunate position of having secured a good job with a local firm of accountants, and his parents had already announced that their wedding present to the young couple would be a lump sum towards their new home.
Abbie, although she had said nothing to her daughter, suspected that Stuart’s family were slightly surprised by her own initial reaction to the engagement, which had been to counsel the young couple not to rush into anything. In their eyes, and in the eyes of most other people, Abbie acknowledged, Stuart was excellent husband material, with his steady family background and his secure financial future.
‘Yes. Yes, we are,’ Cathy agreed quietly. ‘But I just wanted to see you first. ‘Mum—’ Cathy started to say, but Abbie interrupted her, warning her.
‘That sounds like Stuart’s car now, Cathy, and I’ve really got to rush myself. I hadn’t realised how long I’d been up in the loft and I’ve got a meeting with Dennis Parker in an hour…’
‘What, at the hotel?’ Cathy asked her anxiously.
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��Mmm… Cathy, what is it?’ Abbie asked, but her telephone had begun to ring and Stuart was already knocking on the back door.
‘Give me a ring and tell me how the house-hunting went,’ Abbie told her, kissing her lovingly before giving her a small push in the direction of the back door and then rushing into the hall to answer her telephone.
She was still smiling slightly ruefully to herself half an hour later as she stepped out of the shower and started to towel her body dry.
Cathy was such a loving, caring girl—everyone said so. It was typical of her that she should worry that she had upset her mother by bringing up the subject of her father.
She hoped that Stuart and his family appreciated what a lucky man he was, and that he took good care never to hurt Cathy the way Sam had hurt her.
Her smile turned to a frown as she remembered what Cathy had said when she’d repeated Stuart’s comment about Sam. It was, Abbie reflected, perhaps only natural that Stuart should view what had happened from a male perspective…from Sam’s point of view. But…
But what? But she hadn’t liked hearing Cathy voice Stuart’s comments? Her daughter had to grow up and away from her some time, she reminded herself. She couldn’t stay a little girl for ever. She and Stuart were very deeply in love, and, like any girl in love, it was only natural that she should attach the preface ‘Stuart says’ to so many of her comments, for a little while at least. She, as Cathy’s mother, must just learn to grit her teeth and try to hold onto her sense of humour—and to her memories of how she had felt when Cathy had first started school and begun every other sentence with the words ‘Mrs Johnson says’.
This was the pitfall that lay in wait for every mother, Abbie told herself. Perhaps all the more so in cases like hers when, as a single parent with only one child, she knew the relationship between Cathy and herself had been so very close.
Had been?
Abbie sighed as she padded into her bedroom and opened a drawer to remove clean underwear.
Cathy had often teased her warningly about her habit of walking around naked before she’d left home for university; that was one of the benefits of living either alone or in a single-sex household, Abbie acknowledged as she pulled on clean white briefs, tugging them up over her still enviably slender hips. Her body wasn’t something Abbie was used to spending much time thinking about; so long as it and she were both healthy and functioned properly she was content.
The thought of finding it necessary to be sexually alluring was one which had filled her with angry repugnance in the early years after Sam’s desertion and betrayal, and she’d been filled with a bitter distrust of virtually all men. But, more recently, this had become something she viewed with detached amusement when she listened to those of her friends of the same age who were beginning to mourn the passing of their youth.
That was just one of the benefits that came from living a manless existence; the fact that she was now over forty wasn’t something that Abbie felt in the least uncomfortable about.
When other people commented admiringly, as they frequently did, that she looked nowhere near her age, she generally told them gently that, on the contrary, she looked exactly her age, and that if they bothered to look around and use their eyes they would see that most women of forty looked exactly what they were; adult, fully grown human beings at the full height of their maturity and often with a hell of a lot more going for them than they had ever had as callow young things in their late teens and early twenties. And if the male sex failed to appreciate the fact then that was their problem.
Although, to be fair, she admitted judiciously as she wriggled into a stretch calf-length slim-fitting black skirt and then pulled a cream knitted top over her head, men were beginning to catch on to the fact that a woman in her forties was still very much a sexually alluring and active human being—rather too much, as far as she was concerned.
She had had more men approach her in the years since she had reached her fortieth birthday than in the previous decade, including several who she suspected were a good half-dozen years or more younger than she was herself.
Not that she had been interested in any of them.
She glanced at her wristwatch as she fastened it. She didn’t want to be late for her meeting with Dennis. They had established a good working rapport in the time that he had been in charge of the town’s most prestigious hotel, and both of them in their different ways were perfectionists when it came to their work. Abbie saw him strictly as a business associate, but, as Fran had pointed out teasingly to her on more than one occasion, Dennis would leap at any chance she gave him to put their relationship on a more personal footing.
‘No way,’ Abbie had told her firmly.
‘You can’t go on being afraid for ever, Abbie,’ Fran had told her gently.
‘I’m not afraid,’ Abbie had denied. ‘I just don’t see the point in getting involved in a relationship I know I don’t really want.’
‘But surely there must be times when—’ Fran had begun gently.
‘When what?’ Abbie had interrupted her. ‘When I need a shoulder to cry on…? A man to lean on…? Sex…?’ She had shaken her head vigorously. ‘No. Never. Don’t feel sorry for me, Fran,’ she had warned her friend, correctly reading her expression. ‘I certainly don’t feel sorry for myself. The last thing I want is any kind of emotional complications in my life.’
‘He must have hurt you so very badly—Cathy’s father,’ Fran had said sympathetically.
‘No,’ Abbie had told her curtly. ‘I hurt myself by believing him when he said he loved me.’
As she inspected her face in her mirror, checking her make-up, Abbie decided wryly that, whilst other people might think she looked young, when she compared herself to Cathy she could certainly see the difference between them.
Her eyes grew slightly shadowed for a second. Cathy had mentioned Sam quite a lot over the last few months, asking her questions about him, bringing his name into their conversations… Stuart’s influence, Abbie suspected.
Abbie had never made any secret of the facts of her marriage and its break-up, answering Cathy’s questions as she’d asked them, tailoring her answers to meet the emotional awareness of her age at the time the questions had been asked.
Cathy knew what had happened, how Sam had turned his back on them both.
It disturbed her that Cathy should have imagined that she had seen him. That was impossible, of course, but what upset her was that the tone of Cathy’s voice had implied that she might actually want to have seen him.
She had thought that she had succeeded in being both mother and father to Cathy until now, until she had seen that look in Cathy’s eyes when she’d talked about her father—her father. Sam had never been a father to Cathy.
* * *
‘Abbie…’
Abbie smiled, stepping back from Dennis slightly as he came forward to greet her, gently fending him off with her outstretched hand as she avoided the kiss he had obviously intended to give her.
‘You said you wanted to see me about the extra staffing requirements over the Christmas and New Year period,’ she reminded him gently.
‘What…? Oh, yes… You know, Abbie,’ he told her eagerly, ‘you really are the most stunningly attractive woman I—’
‘Not the most, surely,’ Abbie teased him lightly, but her eyes held a warning message, reminding him that she wasn’t here to be flirted with.
‘Very well.’ Dennis gave in. ‘Let’s get down to business, then. I thought we could talk over dinner, if that’s all right with you. We’ve taken on a new chef and—’
‘I know,’ Abbie interrupted him. ‘Trained by the best, according to my informants. Quite a coup…’
‘An expensive one,’ Dennis agreed. ‘But the area isn’t short of good restaurants, and the last thing we want is hotel guests eating elsewhere because we can’t provide them with a first-class meal.’
‘People often find that hotel restaurants lack the intimacy of somewhere smaller.�
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‘Mmm. I know,’ Dennis agreed as he ushered her out of the foyer and into the restaurant. ‘But I’m hoping that by offering a special price for our Saturday evening dinner-dances we’ll bring more people in, and that once they’ve tasted David’s food they’ll want to come back. You’ll have to tell me what you think of it.’
‘Don’t worry, I shall,’ Abbie laughed.
The restaurant was comfortably busy for a midweek evening, but then the hotel was busier during the week than at weekends, mainly with businessmen and women.
‘How’s the leisure centre doing?’ Abbie asked as they sat down and the waiter brought them both a menu.
‘Not too badly,’ Dennis responded.
‘You’ve got quite a lot of competition, and your prices are on the high side,’ Abbie pointed out.
‘Yes, but we also have a more up-market setting, plenty of free parking and a certain degree of exclusivity…’
‘Mmm, there’s such a thing as pricing yourself out of the market,’ Abbie warned him as she gave the waiter her order.
‘How many extra staff do you think you’re going to need?’ she asked him whilst they waited for their food. ‘And remember,’ she reminded him, ‘since they’ll be working over Christmas and New Year, and especially since most of them will be young and female, I can only supply them with your assurance that they’ll be provided with guaranteed transport to and from work.’
‘They’ll have access to our normal free staff bus service,’ Dennis told her.
Abbie shook her head.
‘That’s not good enough, Dennis. I don’t want any of my girls having to walk to and from pickup points which might mean them having to walk alone and in the dark, late at night. You’ll have to do better than that. You know my feelings on that subject…’
‘I certainly do,’ Dennis groaned. ‘Have you any idea of what it costs to run a door-to-door pick-up service for every single member of staff?’
‘Have you any idea what it costs a young girl when she’s sexually harassed or worse?’ Abbie returned crisply, shaking her head as she told him firmly, ‘No, Dennis, I’m insistent on this. There’s no way I’d allow any of my staff to work late shifts without guaranteed transport home.’