by Penny Jordan
She put down her cup of tea. Was it really Joel she wanted, or just someone to cling to, someone to transfer her troubles to, someone to make her feel that her life had a viable purpose to it? Was she really so weak, so afraid?
Even if Joel were free to form a relationship with her, she was not free to have one with him, she acknowledged honestly; there was too much other unfinished business in her life.
And besides, she mocked herself wryly as she stood by the window and watched the first pale lemon warming of the spring sun lightening the grey sky, didn’t she need to learn to love herself before she could start trying to convince herself that she loved someone else?
* * *
Five hours later, when Susie called round to invite her to go out to lunch with her, she found her halfway up a ladder cleaning windows.
‘Spring-cleaning,’ she commented ruefully. ‘You’re making me feel very guilty; I haven’t touched mine yet.’
‘Mmm. Well, this is more a form of therapy than good housewifeliness,’ Philippa admitted as climbed down the rungs and pushed her hair off her face. She looked tired and thin, Susie noticed, but at the same time there was a new determination about her, a new energy.
‘Therapy?’ Susie quizzed her and then added teasingly, ‘What you need is a new man in your life, not——’
She broke off, appalled by her own lack of tact when she saw the look of pain that crossed Philippa’s eyes.
‘Oh, Pip, I’m sorry,’ she apologised. ‘I didn’t mean to be so tactless—I know Andrew was…’
‘It isn’t Andrew,’ Philippa stopped her. She made a faint grimace. ‘Even I can’t be that much of a hypocrite. You know how Andrew and I lived, Susie, what our relationship was.’ She got up and walked over to the sink, keeping her back to her friend as she told her, ‘It never really bothered me that Andrew and I didn’t have much of a sex life; to be blunt about it, I was almost glad.
‘It’s odd, isn’t it, how things change? Ten years ago the worst thing you could possibly admit to was having a low sex drive. Any woman who couldn’t manage to have an orgasm to order, never mind admitting that she didn’t even want to, would have been classed by her peers as an oddity—a complete failure.
‘I was almost grateful to Andrew for not wanting to discuss the lack of sexual desire between us; it made it easier for me to pretend that I was just like everyone else.
‘Fashions change, though, don’t they, and now it’s almost acceptable for a woman to lay claim to a certain amount of loss of libido, provided she can back it up with the combined demands of a high-profile career, motherhood and if possible half a dozen other balls to juggle in the air as well?’
She turned round and gave Susie a smile that was half rueful and half sad. ‘The trouble with me is that I never seem to quite make it in step with fashion…’
Susie digested and unravelled her small speech and then said carefully, ‘If you’re trying to tell me that you’ve met someone else and that you want to have sex with him——’
‘Wanted to and have done,’ Philippa interrupted her, and then added gravely, ‘But that’s as far as it goes. He’s married and if I’m honest with myself I know that at least half the reason the sex between us was so… so explosive was because of our joint need…
‘That’s the trouble with our sex, isn’t it, Susie? We have sex with a man and suddenly we have to invest what is really only a physical act with a full battery of emotional baggage.’
‘You mean he took you to bed and then dropped you?’ Susie demanded angrily. ‘What a rat! He…’
‘No… It wasn’t like that. I… he… I was the one who said that it couldn’t go any further. It shouldn’t have gone as far as it did.’
Her eyes filled with tears as she said softly, ‘He was so tender, Susie, so loving, so giving; he made me feel so… so sexually strong and powerful. He made me realise something that all those years of marriage to Andrew never did. I woke up last night aching for him… wanting him… envying, hating his wife almost, wondering how on earth she could be so indifferent, so unmoved by a man who is such a wonderful lover…’
‘He could be lying to you, Pip,’ Susie warned her gently. ‘Men do, you know, especially when…’
‘When they want to get you into bed. Yes, I know…’
Susie’s expression lightened as Philippa laughed.
‘No… it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t planned or contrived and I already knew, despite his gallant attempts to deny it, that he loves his wife.
‘And even if he didn’t, the last thing I want is to be responsible for the break-up of someone else’s marriage. It’s just… it’s just that it hurts so much knowing how good what we had together was and knowing that it can never happen again. Logically I know that it’s only my body that aches and yearns for him, Susie, but because I’m a woman…’
‘And because right now you’re far too damned vulnerable,’ Susie supplied for her. ‘Oh, Pip, I’m so sorry…’
Philippa shook her head and gave her a brief smile. ‘Don’t be. I’m not. Not really. Even while I was lying in bed crying for him this morning, a part of me was…’ She stopped and shook her head. ‘When I was in my teens I had a mammoth crush on a friend of my brother’s. When he rejected me and I married Andrew I thought my sexuality was something that only my first love could arouse. Discovering that I was wrong is like being set free from an imprisoning cage.
‘It’s hard to explain properly, but I feel as though the control of my sexuality, which subconsciously I believed I had handed over to him, has been returned to me. That I am now the one who can choose and decide to whom I do and don’t respond.’
‘It’s all right,’ she assured her friend when she saw the way she was looking at her. ‘Right now I feel bad, but I know that it’s something that will pass, like a bad bout of flu.
‘Even if Joel were free to have a relationship with me, it’s too soon for me. There are things I need to do, problems I need to resolve first, emotionally as well as practically.
‘Don’t feel sad for me, Susie—I can do that all too well for myself—it isn’t pity I need, it’s love. Yes,’ Philippa laughed now, ‘love.’
* * *
‘There, that should be OK now.’
Joel smiled reassuringly at the small tow-headed boy whose bike he had just been fixing, dusting off the knees of his jeans before getting up to watch him ride off.
He was going to be late home—again, he acknowledged as he walked across the leisure centre car park and unlocked the door of his car.
It had felt good knowing that he could afford to pay for things like petrol for his car himself.
‘Where did you get the money for these?’ Sally had demanded when he had taken her home some flowers. Her voice had been full of suspicion, destroying his pleasure in being able to afford to give her the small gift.
‘I earned it,’ he had told her. ‘Remember I told you last week that one of the parents had asked me to give her little girl some private swimming lessons?’
‘Estelle just doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere with her swimming,’ the woman had confided to him as she’d stood watching him coach her son. ‘We’ve just become members at the new private health club that’s opened at Deighton Hall, and I hear they’ve got a pool there and I was wondering if you gave private swimming lessons.’
He had bought the flowers on impulse on his way home, remembering how Sally’s face used to glow with pleasure when she arranged the flowers she had occasionally bought herself, confessing that they were a treat she hadn’t been able to resist; but instead of being pleased she had almost thrown the flowers down on to the kitchen worktop, threatening their delicate stems, her face flushed with temper and her mouth tight as she’d criticised him for wasting money.
In the town centre the traffic lights were on red and, as he waited for them to change he glanced to his right and the road which led to Philippa’s house.
‘We mustn’t see each other again,’ s
he had said, and although the firm tone of her voice had told him that she meant it he had seen the way her mouth trembled slightly and her eyes grew shadowed. ‘And Sally—your wife—you love her,’ she had told him.
The lights changed and quickly, before he could give in to the temptation, he drove straight on.
It wasn’t just sex that made his thoughts turn to Philippa at odd times during the day and, even more betrayingly, when he lay awake beside Sally at night. He had liked her honesty and her humour, the way she sat watching him so attentively while she listened to him.
No, it wasn’t just the small throaty cries of pleasure she had given when he had touched her, nor the way she had touched him.
‘It doesn’t mean anything’, she had told him. ‘It was just sex’, and he had known that she was lying, that what was there between them could, if they allowed it to do so, become far, far more than physical lust.
He could feel his throat tightening with pain and an aching sense of loss. It didn’t matter how hard he tried to reach out to Sally these days; all she did was reject him.
In the peace of Philippa’s kitchen and in the warmth of her bed he had found a pleasure and sense of relaxation he had long ago forgotten existed, simply holding her and talking to her, knowing that he would be listened to, that his opinions and views were valued, that he was valued; he had felt a sense of companionship with her, of closeness to her, that had brought into painfully sharp focus the emptiness of his relationship with Sally.
‘You’ve got a wife… children’, Philippa had told him softly.
He had known what she was saying.
Six months ago he would have shrugged aside her comment, telling her that his children barely knew he existed, that it was their mother they related to, but now things were different and yet Sally was still just as critical of his relationship with them now as she had been in the days when she used to accuse him of not taking enough interest in them and not spending enough time with them, of being jealous of them; only now she complained that he spoiled them and undermined her authority over them.
In fact, she had changed so much recently that she no longer seemed like his Sally, the girl he had fallen in love with and married.
* * *
Sally tensed as she heard Joel opening the kitchen door.
She was constantly on edge in his presence these days, terrified that she would somehow betray herself and that he would guess what she was doing, and yet, at the same time as she feared his discovery of her relationship with Kenneth, another part of her felt very let down and angry because he was so oblivious to what was happening to her, to the fear and panic that swept over her like lightning, piercing the dull, thick cloud of an oppressive, overcast sky, sharply illuminating changes she would really rather not have seen.
Some days she felt as though the Sally who was so drawn to Kenneth was someone who wasn’t really a part of her, but rather a dangerous stranger who took over the real Sally, and then at other times it was her life with Joel that didn’t seem real.
Sometimes when she looked at Joel she was overwhelmed by a feeling of panic, of her life being out of control, and the small, tight pain inside her became a huge, enveloping feeling of anger and resentment against Joel for being so oblivious to what was happening to her, for being deaf and blind to the fact that another man wanted to take her away from him.
But then Joel wasn’t really interested in her feelings, was he? The leisure centre and the new friends he had made there—that was all he wanted to talk about.
A small knife-sharp pain twisted inside her as she remembered a comment one of the other nurses had made the previous day.
Everyone knew that Donna fancied herself and that she was a bit of a man-eater, always hinting at having men running after her, and normally Sally didn’t pay much attention to anything she said, but yesterday she had made a point of seeking Sally out and saying purringly to her, ‘I saw your Joel down at the leisure centre yesterday… he certainly looks good in a pair of swimming-trunks, doesn’t he? I wouldn’t mind getting a few private lessons from him myself,’ she had added.
Joel had always been an attractive man and Sally had never been blind to the looks he attracted from other women, but this was the first time she had actually felt threatened—and upset by another woman’s interest in him.
And yet why should she be? Surely the very best thing that could happen now was for Joel to find someone else. That way she would be free to go to Kenneth without feeling any guilt.
‘You are going to be mine,’ Kenneth had promised her. ‘I won’t let you go. I need you, Sally,’ he had told her.
Once Joel and the children had needed her, but not any more. These days they scarcely seemed aware of her existence, she recognised bitterly.
Watching their children with Joel, she felt sometimes as though she was an outsider, invisible and unwanted, and her feelings gave her a frightening feeling of disorientation, of not, somehow, actually existing.
It was Kenneth who made her feel real… who made her feel she was important to him.
‘But how will they manage without me?’ she had whispered to Kenneth when he’d told her that he wanted her to leave Joel.
‘How will I?’ he had asked her in return.
‘You’re late,’ she told Joel, interrupting the conversation he had been having with Cathy.
The look in his eyes as he glanced at her over their daughter’s head hurt her somehow.
‘I’m sorry,’ Joel apologised quietly. ‘Neil wanted to discuss a new training programme he wants to try with me and——’
‘And that was far more important than getting back here so that I could leave for work on time,’ Sally interrupted him bitterly. ‘It’s all right for you, Joel—you can do as you please; your time’s your own. I don’t have that choice—I have to go out to work…’
Sally actually loved nursing and she enjoyed the companionship of the other medical staff, but with the family financially dependent on her, and the increasing talk of cuts having to be made and of jobs being lost, didn’t Joel realise how frightened and alone she felt?
She had always loved her home, too, but these days it didn’t somehow feel as though it was hers any more.
It was Joel who had suggested that it might be an idea to put up a dado rail in the living-room and to redecorate it, Joel who had noticed that the bathroom tiles needed regrouting and suggested that it might be an idea to consider replacing their shower with a modern and efficient one.
‘And how are we supposed to pay for that?’ she had demanded.
The phone rang just as she was putting on her coat and she froze as Joel went to answer it. She saw him frown and then replace the receiver with a brief shrug.
‘Who was it?’ she asked him nervously.
Did her voice sound as rough and anxious to him as it did to her?
Apparently not, because there was not a trace of any suspicion or concern in Joel’s voice when he told her carelessly, ‘I don’t know; they hung up. Must have been a wrong number.’
Kenneth; it had to be Kenneth. He had rung several times at home already even though she had begged him not to do so.
As Joel looked across at Sally he was suddenly made aware again of just how tired and pale she looked.
As he watched her she lifted her hand and pushed her hair back off her face. A painful knot of emotion tightened inside him.
‘Sal…’
Warily she looked at him.
‘It’s your day off tomorrow. Why don’t we go out somewhere together… just the two of us?’
‘Go somewhere? How can we?’ She sighed. ‘Have you really forgotten what I’ve got to do tomorrow, Joel?’
He was frowning now, the warmth gone from his voice, leaving it sharp with irritation.
‘You’re not still going on about your sister’s damn wallpaper, are you? I told you. I am not redoing it…’
‘Then I’ll have to, won’t I?’
‘Sally,’ Joel pr
otested wearily, ‘you…’
But it was too late; she was already halfway out of the door and plainly not interested in listening to whatever he had to say.
Didn’t she realise how it would make him look if she went ahead and did it—how it would make that sister of hers crow? Couldn’t she just for once have supported him… taken his side… seen his point of view instead of immediately siding with her sister, without even bothering to listen to him?
* * *
Sally felt as though Joel was a stranger to her these days, a different man from the one she had married—a different man even from the one who had been made redundant from Kilcoyne’s.
He had been so unhappy, unable to talk or think about anything else. Now, though, Joel didn’t seem to care any longer that he was out of work; he sang and whistled in the house, joked with the children, laughed and played with them in a way she had never known him do before.
He actually seemed to be enjoying life, as though… as though… As she struggled with her thoughts, fresh tears filled her eyes.
Once he would never have let her leave the house like that with an argument between them unresolved. Once he would have been the one to go to Daphne’s and redo the wallpapering; once he would have been the first to notice that something was wrong and to demand to know what it was. Once he would have been immediately aware and suspicious of Kenneth’s presence in her life; once he had thrown the warmth of his protection and his love around her as possessively as he had thrown his leg over her body in bed at night, drawing her close to him, securing her to him.
She shivered suddenly. He slept with his back to her now, leaving a cold, empty space in the bed between them.
Once he had told her that he would love and look after her forever.
* * *
Silently Joel watched as Sally carefully assembled everything she would need.
She hadn’t spoken to him once this morning, studiously ignoring him, just as she had ignored the cup of tea he had made her, making herself a fresh one instead.