by Penny Jordan
‘Have you no one… no family or friend… who could come in and help you out for a few days?’ Sally asked him, concerned. He was making a good recovery from his injuries, much better in fact than anyone had believed when he had first been brought in, but it would still be several months before he was able to move about easily on his repaired leg, despite what the surgeon might have to say about his handiwork.
‘Not really…’ He shrugged his shoulders, powerfully muscled from the exercises the physio had been giving him. ‘My colleagues at the university have done more than enough already. I can hardly expect them to do any more. I suppose I’m lucky that I’m in a profession where this——’ he touched his injured leg ‘—hasn’t meant that I’ve lost my job. Lucky in fact still to have the leg,’ he added, his face suddenly grave.
‘Yes,’ Sally agreed simply.
When he had first been brought in there had been a danger that his left leg might have to be amputated, his injuries had been so severe.
‘You know, lying here these last few weeks has proved something of a double-edged sword. Once the immediate danger is over and you know you’re going to live, you find that you have time on your hands to think about all those things you’ve pushed into the deepest cupboards of your mind, all hidden safely out of sight and then avoided on the grounds that there simply isn’t time to deal with them,’ he told her sombrely. ‘Having a busy life is a wonderful excuse for not dealing with one’s deeper emotional problems, as I’ve discovered.
‘When my wife used to accuse me of being selfish, of living in my own world, I always felt she was being unfair. After all, I had stood by her, hadn’t I? I married her, provided a home for her and the family. It’s only while I’ve been lying here that I’ve come to realise what she meant… I was selfish.’ He paused, watching the effect his words were having on Sally, but her expression reassured him, the sympathy in her eyes encouraging him to go on.
‘I’m a very orderly man,’ he told her. ‘I like neatness and tidiness. It comes, I suspect, of being an only child. She was just the opposite, and when I complained about coming home to the disorder of a household containing a small child she would point out, quite rightly, that she simply didn’t have the time to do everything.
‘I suspect that part of my irritation stemmed from resentment of the fact that she put the baby’s needs before mine. I’ve always believed that she was the one who abandoned our marriage, who broke faith with it by having an affair with another man.’ He paused and gave Sally a painful look. ‘Oh, yes, she managed to find time for that. No doubt the appeal of spending time in bed with her lover was far greater than that of doing the housework…
‘I shouldn’t be criticising her though,’ he added, shaking his head. ‘I realise now that in many ways I had never properly committed myself to our marriage. The family was a duty, a responsibility I shouldered because it was the right thing to do and then, having been seen to do the right thing in the eyes of the world and publicly, I privately turned my back on them by giving to my work, and consequently to myself, my self-esteem, my ego, the time and attention I should have given them.
‘Will you think very badly of me if I tell you that there were many many nights when I deliberately made extra work for myself rather than go home; that I preferred the quiet calm of my work to the noisy, untidy chaos of our home?’
‘No,’ Sally told him honestly, shaking her head. How could she say anything else, when she too knew what it was like to dread returning home, even if it was for different reasons?
‘We should never have married, of course. We weren’t suited; we didn’t even really like one another. I was never the kind of man she wanted, as she proved when she left me. Her lover was all the things I wasn’t and am not…’
Sally made a soft, sympathetic sound that made him stop and smile ruefully at her.
‘Oh, I don’t envy him… in any way. His type of competitive macho sexuality has never been something I’ve wanted to emulate. There, now I really have revealed my inner self to you,’ he told her.
Sally flushed a little as she looked away from him. He was so very different from Joel—in every way. Joel would never talk to her as openly as Kenneth was doing, never discuss his innermost feelings with anyone, never reveal any aspect of himself which might show him in a bad light. Like the man Kenneth’s wife had left him for, Joel too possessed a competitive male sexuality.
Kenneth’s nature was kinder… warmer. A small shadow touched her face, and, seeing it, Kenneth told her gently, ‘You are all the things a woman should be, Sally. All the things any man could possibly want in a woman…’
Sally made a small protesting sound beneath her breath, but he heard it and shook his head.
‘No, it’s true. And so is something else.’ He turned his head and looked at her. ‘I’m going to miss you and our conversations very, very much indeed…’
‘All patients miss their nurses when they first go home,’ Sally told him huskily.
‘Ah… I suppose that’s a tactful way of telling me that all male patients fall a little in love with their nurses,’ he retaliated. ‘Very true. Although in my case I suspect it’s rather more than a little. You must be very glad that you’re happily married, and that you’ve got a wisely protective husband to stand between you and the endless stream of smitten male patients who would probably make your life a misery with their protests of undying love.’
He was smiling at her with his mouth, but his eyes were unsmiling. His eyes… She caught her breath.
It was just as well he was going home, she told herself severely half an hour later when she went for her break.
* * *
Sally grimaced disgustedly as she walked into the kitchen and caught sight of the empty, unwashed milk bottle. Joel had left three used teabags in the sink and they had made a dirty brown stain on the surface she had left clean and shining when she went to work. His mug was on the worktop, unwashed. She scooped up the teabags with one hand and turned on the hot tap with the other, her mouth compressing. She could hear Joel coming downstairs, but she didn’t turn round.
‘Do you have to leave the place in such a mess, Joel?’ she demanded as he came into the kitchen.
She could tell from the sound of his feet that he was wearing his slippers, which meant that he wasn’t dressed… which meant … She could feel her stomach muscles tightening protestingly, resentfully, her whole body tensing when he came up behind her and slid his arms round her, trying to nuzzle his face into her neck as he told her, ‘It’s Saturday morning. Leave all that and come to bed. You must be worn out.’
‘Too worn out for what you’ve got in mind,’ she told him shortly, edging away from him, relieved when he abruptly let go of her.
‘For goodness’ sake, aren’t I allowed even to touch you now? What’s the matter with you?’
‘Nothing’s the matter with me,’ she denied, turning round. ‘And as for touching me… all you ever want these days is sex, sex, sex. Why don’t you think about what I might want for a change? Like not coming home to find the place looking like a tip…’
‘It’s an empty milk bottle, Sal, that’s all,’ Joel told her wearily. ‘OK, so I should have rinsed it out, but to be honest with you I had other things on my mind——’
‘Just as you had other things on your mind when you were supposed to come home early and take Paul fishing, I suppose,’ she interrupted him angrily. ‘You’re always accusing me of spending too much time with the kids, Joel, but whose fault is that? If you spent a bit more time with them yourself…’
‘They don’t want me… they…’
He stopped when he saw the stubborn look on her face.
‘I tried to ring, but the phone was engaged. Probably that sister of yours boasting about her new extension…’
Sally stared at him. ‘How do you know about that?’
‘Cathy told me. It seems this house isn’t good enough for her any more. She wants to live somewhere with a garden all t
he way round it. When you’re complaining to her, perhaps you ought to try explaining to her that if you’d got yourself a husband like your sister’s she might have been in with a chance,’ he added bitterly.
‘Oh for goodness’ sake, Joel, stop feeling so sorry for yourself,’ Sally protested. ‘If you could see some of the patients from the wards…’ She stopped abruptly, tensing inwardly as she recognised what she was doing. It was unfair of her to compare Joel to Kenneth Drummond. Unfair and unwise? ‘Look, it’s been a long night and I’m tired. If you go up and get dressed now you could do the supermarket shopping while it’s still quiet and then——’
‘Yeah… and pushing the trolley will give me something else to think about instead of sex, sex, sex—is that it?’
Sally flinched as she saw the bitterness in his eyes, but she was not going to give way and be bullied into making love with him. If he wanted to sulk like a spoiled child, well, then, let him.
‘Sally…’
Gritting her teeth, she ignored him, keeping her back turned until she heard him leave the kitchen. Upstairs in the bathroom, Joel showered angrily, turning the water to its fullest force, welcoming the savage pounding on his skin as a release of his tension. He hadn’t wanted to have sex with Sally, he had simply wanted to touch her… to hold her, to make her focus her attention on him and listen to him while he tried to explain. To explain what? That he was afraid… Oh, she would love that. The last thing she had time to do these days was to listen to his problems.
* * *
She ought not to have been so uptight with Joel, Sally admitted tiredly as she pulled the duvet over herself. She’d make it up to him later… cook him a special supper, bribe the kids to stay out of the way, try to get him to listen while she tried to explain what she wanted from him, needed from him now that she was working.
Yes, they could talk later.
CHAPTER TWO
‘GOODNESS, I’d forgotten how bad London traffic is, hadn’t you?’ Deborah exclaimed. ‘Emma said it was eight for dinner at eight-thirty. Will we make it in time, do you think?’
Without waiting for Mark to reply, she added, ‘I can’t believe it’s over eighteen months since we last saw them. Their moving down to London has made the distance too great between us for frequent visits.’
She gave Mark a quick, amused look as he stamped hard on the brakes and cursed as someone cut in front of him.
‘I told you you should have let me drive the London stretch of the journey,’ she reminded him cheerfully. ‘You know I’m a much better driver than you.’
‘You mean a much more aggressive one,’ he retorted.
‘My driving is not aggressive, it’s simply self-assured,’ Deborah corrected him. ‘I think we have to take a left here, Mark… Oh, no, you missed it. Now we’ll have to go all the way round again. You really should…’ She saw the muscle starting to twitch in his jaw and bit back the comment she had been about to make, saying instead, ‘Ryan told us on Friday that we’re going to be appointed as liquidators for Kilcoyne’s. No official announcement has been made as yet. They’re going to wait until after the funeral for that. Apart from the bank there are quite a lot of trade creditors outstanding. Not that they’re likely to recover very much. The bank seems to have all the security pretty well tied up——’
‘Where did you say we had to turn?’ he interrupted her tersely. Mark had never enjoyed city driving or heavy traffic. Unlike her. She positively revelled in the cut and thrust of it, the tussle of wills with other drivers, the challenge of outwitting them.
‘Wow… do you think we’ve got the right place?’ Deborah asked when they finally reached the address Emma had given her. It was a quiet, elegant square, and, while it might not compare in size or grandeur with some of London’s more famous squares, it was nevertheless very obviously an exclusive and expensive address.
‘Toby must be doing well if they can afford somewhere like this,’ she added as they left the car. ‘Emma said he’d recently bought into an accountancy practice. Quite an upmarket one too, apparently.’
‘Well, that should please her,’ Mark commented sourly. ‘She always was a bit of a social climber.’
Deborah eyed him in surprise. ‘She’s ambitious, that’s all—she wants Toby to succeed.’
‘Of course she does, she wants him to succeed so that she can boast about how well he’s done to her friends. What happened to her career, by the way? As I remember it, she’d got it all planned that she was going to make a big name for herself in the media.’
‘Well, she was doing very well until the TV station she was with lost its franchise. It was a case of last in first out. Since then she’s been doing some part-time PR work for a friend.’
‘Part-time PR work—well, they certainly haven’t bought this place with what she’s earning from that,’ Mark announced as he eyed the elegant façade of the building in front of them.
Deborah watched him thoughtfully as she pressed the intercom buzzer. He had been so scratchy and grouchy lately, so unlike his normal placid, calm self.
Emma came down herself to let them in. Small and vivacious, her tiny frame and delicate features hid a personality that was extremely strong-willed and tenacious. She was not a woman’s woman, and unlike Deborah she had made few friends at university. Deborah had found her competitiveness more amusing than threatening and had often teased her about the streak of conventionality which had made her insist almost as soon as they had left university that she and Toby marry instead of opting to live together as Deborah and Mark had chosen to do.
She and Mark had been invited to the wedding. A lavish affair held at a small, carefully chosen village where Emma just happened to have an ancient relative living. It had been a fairy-tale occasion, and a tribute to Emma’s talents as a master tactician and planner.
‘Mmm… this is really something,’ Deborah enthused generously as Emma ushered them into the apartment. ‘You could virtually fit the whole of our place into your living-room and have space to spare, couldn’t you, Mark?’ she commented as she admired the expensive silk curtains and the specially woven off-white carpet that covered the floor. ‘You must be doing very well, Toby,’ she added when Emma’s husband brought her her drink.
‘Oh, it’s nothing to do with me,’ he told her without smiling. ‘Emma bought this place herself—with her own money.’
Deborah felt her scalp prickle slightly as she picked up on the highly charged atmosphere which had suddenly developed. She looked helplessly at Mark, who was standing looking out of one of the long Georgian sash windows.
‘Don’t pay any attention to Toby,’ Emma advised brittly as she flashed her husband a quelling look. ‘I’ve already told him, if he wants to make a fool of himself by behaving like a spoilt child then that’s his choice.’
Despite the elegant comfort of the antique-furnished traditional dining-room and the excellence of the meal Emma served, Deborah was relieved when it was finally over. Emma and Toby had barely talked to one another all evening other than to make sniping remarks at one another. Toby made constant references to Emma’s money, in between sneeringly putting her down and being irritatingly sorry for himself.
After dinner, while Toby took Mark off to his study to show him his new state-of-the-art computerised set-up, Deborah helped Emma to clear the table and wash the expensive antique dinner service she had used for the meal.
‘This is lovely,’ she commented appreciatively as she carefully dried one of the plates.
‘It’s Sèvres,’ Emma told her. ‘I only bought it a month ago and Toby’s already broken one of the plates—deliberately, of course. I never imagined he would ever behave like this, Deborah—he’s so childish, so resentful; but, after all, why shouldn’t I enjoy the money and spend it on what I want? My grandmother left it to me, not to me and Toby. He seems to think that just because we’re a couple… just because he’s the man, he should be the one to make the financial decisions within our relationship and to have th
e financial power. That’s what it’s all about, of course. He was quite happy when he was the one earning more than me, making me feel I should be grateful to him when he insisted on buying me something, paying when we went out—not that that happened very often,’ she added darkly. ‘That’s another thing I’ve discovered about him recently: he can be unbearably mean. Take this dinner service, for instance… he wouldn’t speak to me for three days after I’d bought it and I don’t know what he’s complaining about really; after all, I did give him the money to buy into the partnership, and, all right, so I haven’t had this place put in joint names, but after all that’s only common sense, isn’t it, with the divorce rate as high as it is?
‘He seems to think I’m deliberately trying to humiliate him by letting people know that I’m the one with the money. You wouldn’t believe how unpleasant he’s being… mind you, you could see for yourself the way he is tonight, couldn’t you, embarrassing us all with his childishness? I’ve told him he must either accept things the way they are and live with them or——’ She gave a small shrug.
‘You mean you’d leave him, end your marriage?’ Deborah asked her, shocked.
‘Why shouldn’t I? No woman needs to stay in a relationship that isn’t working for her any more, does she, especially not one with the financial assets that I’ve got? I’ve warned him, if he doesn’t like what’s on offer there are plenty more men who would.’
‘You’re not wearing your engagement ring,’ Deborah commented as she dried the last plate.
‘No…’ Emma gave a small shrug. ‘I was never very keen on it in the first place. My grandmother left me a lovely antique ring which I’m having cleaned and re-sized. I’ll probably wear that instead.’