by Penny Jordan
‘Are you sure you really want to know?’
‘I’m sure,’ Garth told her.
* * *
‘Well, there’s one thing I can tell quite categorically,’ Garth announced half an hour later when Deborah had finished speaking. They were seated at the kitchen table, Deborah still grasping the now cold mug of coffee he had made for her.
She was still wearing the clothes he had put her to bed in the previous night. Her face was pale and drawn as she relived the unhappiness of losing Mark.
‘It isn’t you Mark’s stopped loving, Dee, it’s himself.’
‘Himself…?’ She shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Yes,’ Garth insisted. ‘Look, take it from me—I’m a man, I know, and even now there’s still a tiny, ineradicable, deeply programmed part of us that says, Me man… me hunter… me winner…’
Deborah stared at him and then shook her head.
‘No,’ she insisted. ‘Mark isn’t like that——’
‘Balls,’ Garth interrupted her forcefully. ‘All men are like that. Look, I’m not saying that Mark is deliberately trying to offload his own sense of failure on you, to blame you for it, to punish you for being more successful than he is, but you can be damned sure that somewhere deep inside him, even if he doesn’t consciously recognise it, that’s exactly what’s going on.
‘It’s all down to the loss of face, you see, Dee. Boys… men… are geared, genetically programmed if you like, to view other men as their rivals and to compete with them; there’s nothing a man—any man, every man—fears more than the contempt of his male peers, of being seen to fall below the standard they set themselves. It starts from the moment we’re born and we learn that we can take our mother’s attention away from the other man in her life—our father. It takes a hold of us right there where it really hurts and it keeps the pressure up on us every day of our entire Me.’
‘But that’s ridiculous,’ Deborah protested. ‘Mark has always encouraged me.’
‘He loves you,’ Garth told her. ‘And anyway, knowing you’re ambitious is one thing; having to deal with the results of it is another. You’ve beaten him in his own field, Dee, and what’s more you’ve done it in front of other men… That’s a hard thing for any man to take, even one like Mark——’
‘You mean his own ego is more important to him than I am?’ Deborah asked quietly.
‘He can’t live without it, Dee,’ he told her gently. ‘No man can. All human beings need to have pride in themselves and self-respect, and we men, because we’re that much weaker and more mortal than you women—well, we need that little bit extra help as well.’
He grinned at the look Deborah gave him. ‘OK, well, maybe some of us need it more than others…
‘Mark’s no egotist, Dee,’ he added. ‘If you’d worked in different areas, or even different firms…’
‘Or if I’d played the traditional female role and put his ego before my career?’ Deborah suggested grimly.
Garth caught the note of anger in her voice.
‘It’s not as cut and dried as that, Dee, and you know it. Of course Mark wants you to succeed, of course he’s proud of you, but it’s a tough old world out there and when we’re among our own kind we men are still supposed to show that we’ve got what it takes to come out on top. Don’t give up on Mark, Dee…’
‘What else can I do?’ Deborah asked him, her eyes bright with tears. ‘Give up my job…’ She shook her head. ‘Oh, it might work in the short term, but that’s all.
‘I never thought Mark would do something like this, Garth… Not Mark.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
TIREDLY Sally surveyed her sister’s stripped dining-room walls. Her back ached, not just with the effort of removing the wallpaper, but with the tension of suppressed resentment and anger as well.
Joel should have been the one doing this, as her sister had already self-righteously told her—more than once—and since she did agree with her why was it that she was finding she had to grit her teeth and bite back a wave of irritation against her almost as strong as her anger against Joel?
Half an hour ago her sister had come in to see how she was getting on. She had just returned from the hairdressers, her hair a smooth, shiny, elegant bob, reminding Sally of how much she needed to get her own hair cut, her face, immaculately made-up, grimacing as she carefully avoided the damp shreds of wallpaper matting on the floor at Sally’s feet.
‘Will you be much longer?’ she had asked. ‘Only Clifford has just rung to say that he’s bringing a colleague home for drinks…’
‘No, I’ve almost finished,’ Sally had assured her tiredly, correctly interpreting the message hidden in her sister’s speech.
Daphne obviously didn’t want her around when Clifford and his colleague arrived… Sally knew her sister well enough to know how little she would relish having to introduce her as her sister, but she was still prepared to make use of her to get her dining-room wallpapered cheaply, Sally acknowledged.
Once she and Joel would have laughed together over her sister’s meanness and snobbery. Once nothing would have made her want to trade places with Daphne, to exchange her own world with Joel for Daphne’s far more affluent lifestyle. Once it had never occurred to her to envy Daphne a husband who had a secure, well-paid job.
Fiercely she squeezed back the tears of tiredness and selfpity burning in the back of her eyes.
‘Joel’s doing the best he can, working hard at the leisure centre,’ she had automatically defended her husband when Daphne had raised the subject earlier of Joel’s finding a job. ‘In fact the leisure centre manager has suggested that it might be worthwhile considering making coaching and training a full-time career… retraining to…’
Her sister’s exclamation of contempt had silenced her. ‘Joel, retrain? Oh, come on, Sally—you must know as well as I do that to make any kind of success in that field Joel will need proper academic qualifications. The country’s full of graduates who can’t get jobs, so how on earth someone like Joel, who left school without so much as a single qualification to his name, can even begin to think that he——’
She had broken off, shrugging disdainfully.
‘Of course he always could wind you round his little finger. Mark my words: if you’re not careful, ten years from now he’ll still be telling the same old tale, and you’ll still be working full-time to support him while he enjoys himself playing at earning a living.
‘I hear he’s been giving private coaching lessons to Carol Lucas’s little girl. I’d keep an eye on him if I were you, Sally… I’m not suggesting anything, of course,’ she had added hastily as she’d seen the look Sally was giving her, ‘but one hears such things and after all he has always been a very physical sort of man, hasn’t he…?’
‘If you mean he’s always had a strong sex drive then yes, he has,’ Sally had agreed steadily, ‘but Joel is the last man who would ever let a woman pay him for sex, if that’s what you’re implying…’
‘No, of course not… no such thing. You misunderstand me completely,’ Daphne had back-pedalled furiously, her colour high, but Sally knew that she had not misunderstood her at all.
The thought of Joel of all men allowing some rich, bored woman to pay him for sex was indeed totally ridiculous; that pride of his would get in the way for starters…
But supposing he did meet someone else—a woman whom he was attracted to, a woman who was attracted to him…
Her heart skipped a beat and then started to thump painfully. She was uncomfortably aware of how often she had turned away from him recently, rejecting his sexual advances, but marriage, loving someone wasn’t just about sex, and surely she had just as much right to have her needs respected as he did when he had been the one going out to work, supporting them all, worrying about how they would pay the bills. She had often put his needs before her own then, but now that their positions were reversed he was making no attempt to do the same for her.
After she had returned to work on the dining-r
oom she had continued to brood over Joel’s selfishness—the fact that he still seemed to expect her to do whatever he wanted, even though she was now the one who controlled the purse strings.
Abruptly she put down her scraper.
Was that really how she thought of sex… of marriage… ?
She shivered abruptly, feeling oddly sick, and dizzy tears suddenly filling her eyes. Tears not for herself, she recognised, but for the dreams and ideals which somewhere along the road of her life she had lost, and for the disillusionment which had taken their place.
When she had married Joel she had thought that life could hold no greater pleasure than being his wife. In bed at night, held safe in his arms, she would sometimes feel as though her heart might almost burst with happiness, and she had marvelled daily that she should be singled out for such joy.
Then the thought of making love with Joel had filled her not with dread but with incoherent excitement and delight, and if the things he had whispered to her, the way he had touched her had sometimes half shocked her, it had been a pleasurable, expectant kind of shock.
Had she ever disappointed Joel in those early days with her shyness and inhibition? If she had, he had never said so, she acknowledged. Then he had been patient with her, tender, wooing her slowly into a state of ecstatic ardour.
But that kind of sexual intensity didn’t last. One only had to ask any long-married couple.
Now when Joel turned to her in the night she knew it wasn’t the intensity of his love for her that motivated him, but simply his own physical need.
It was Kenneth, with his restraint and his appreciation of her as a human being, and not just a body in his bed, who loved her, not Joel.
So why was she standing here with her heart thumping and her stomach churning with nausea at the thought of Joel touching another woman? If she didn’t want him any more… if she didn’t love him…
She frowned as she saw her brother-in-law’s car turning into the drive. The room was stripped but she still had to clear up and Daphne wouldn’t be at all pleased that she was still here.
Still, with a bit of luck she could finish off and sneak out the back door without Clifford’s ‘colleague’ knowing that she was here—or who she was.
She could hear voices in the hallway outside, her brother-in-law’s, thin and slightly petulant and another man’s—deeper and very familiar.
Her heart thumped into her ribs in shock.
‘My wife must be in the kitchen; I’ll just get her,’ she could hear Clifford saying and then the dining-room opened and Kenneth was standing there apologising,
‘Oh, I’m sorry—wrong door,’ and then as he saw her he exclaimed in surprise, ‘Sally! Good heavens… what on earth are you doing here…?’
‘You know my sister-in-law…?’
Clifford couldn’t quite keep the disbelief out of his voice or the disapproval out of his expression as he looked at her, Sally noticed.
‘Sally is your sister-in-law? You’re a very lucky man.’
Kenneth was talking to Clifford but looking at her, and Sally thought faintly that if Clifford had been anything like as intelligent and observant as he liked to pretend he must surely have noticed the intensity, the possessiveness in Kenneth’s eyes as he watched her. She could certainly see it.
‘Sally was my nurse when I was in hospital. And a very good nurse she was as well. I’ve missed her…’
Sally could feel her face starting to burn. Kenneth, please be careful, she begged silently. If Daphne came in and saw the way he was looking at her…
She ought to have trusted him, she acknowledged mentally ten minutes later as her sister, plainly flattered and overwhelmed by the attention he was paying her, allowed Kenneth to manipulate the situation so that as though by magic the four of them were sitting in her sister’s over-fussy sitting-room, drinking glasses of sherry, while Kenneth pandered to her sister’s ever-hungry ego by relating how impressed he had been by Clifford’s reputation and how he thought that Clifford was wasted as a teacher at a mere comprehensive.
‘Of course that’s what I’ve always told him,’ Daphne gushed.
‘But Clifford believes that he owes it to his pupils to stay where he is, even though from my and Edward’s point of view it would be far better if he applied for his own headmastership.’
Watching from the sidelines, Sally could imagine all too well what Joel would have had to say about her sister’s behaviour.
She had known immediately from the look he gave her that the only reason Kenneth was here in Daphne’s house was because of her, and yet even while a part of her thrilled with pride that he should want her so much, another part retreated from the knowledge that he was deliberately using her family… deliberately and quite callously encouraging Daphne to make a complete fool of herself as he played on her susceptibilities. His charm, his friendliness, his quiet and yet somehow too knowing questions which led to her sister’s arrogantly, blithely revealing the poverty and ugliness of her personality, the arrogance, the vanity, the lack of awareness or concern for the feelings of others… this reduction of her sister to all her most base parts was, Sally discovered, somehow hurtful to her.
It was almost, she recognised uncomfortably, as though Kenneth was enjoying not just manipulating her sister and husband, but humiliating them as well. Hastily she dismissed her thoughts; she was letting her imagination run away with her. Kenneth wasn’t like that, he was kind, thoughtful, caring; it was just an unfortunate coincidence that his questions should bring out the worst in Daphne.
Not, of course, that her sister was at all aware of what she was revealing. On the contrary, Daphne was revelling in Kenneth’s attention, patently semi-awestruck by the fact that he as an academic and a university lecturer should seek out her husband to express to him his admiration of him.
That he should actually know her sister as well was something she dismissed as a mere coincidence.
‘Oh, Sally has just come round to help us out getting our dining-room ready for redecoration,’ she had said hastily when Kenneth had commented not just on Sally’s presence but on her appearance as well.
As she glanced down at her feet Sally saw that a couple of stray pieces of once damp wallpaper had now dried on to her shoes. No wonder Kenneth had grimaced a little in distaste when he had first seen her; she probably did look a sight wearing her old jeans and an even older shirt of Joel’s, her hair caught back in a ponytail and her face free of make-up.
‘We wanted a change of style in our dining-room,’ Daphne confided, ‘and our regular decorator could only manage to fit us in if he only had the repapering to do.’
‘Ah… of course,’ was Kenneth’s response. ‘Of course, I should have guessed; naturally you wouldn’t expect your sister to do your redecorating—not when she already has so much to do.’
‘No, of course not,’ Daphne agreed, shooting Sally a fiercely warning look that dared her to contradict what she was saying.
Kenneth and Clifford were discussing a paper Kenneth had apparently recently submitted on economics and Sally’s thoughts wandered, the wallpaper on her shoe catching her eye a second time. Her fingers itched to bend down and remove it but Daphne would be furious with her if she did and it marked the pristine newness of her sitting-room carpet.
There was an itch beneath her left shoulder-blade—another errant piece of paper, she suspected.
Somehow she was always the one who managed to get herself covered with either wallpaper or paint when they were decorating, she acknowledged ruefully, while Joel never did.
She could remember the first decorating job they had ever tackled together after they were first married, stripping the hideous brown-painted wallpaper off the room which was to be their bedroom.
It had been summer, the small room hot and airless, shreds of damp paper sticking themselves persistently to her clothes and face, her body hot and uncomfortable beneath the protective layers of clothes she was wearing.
‘Take them off
,’ Joel had suggested when she had complained for the umpteenth time about her discomfort.
‘I can’t!’ she had protested, half laughing, half shocked, but in the end she had and Joel had too, and somehow she hadn’t noticed any discomfort at all later when they had made love on the floor among the tangle of discarded paper and clothes.
She dipped her head towards the floor, not to examine the paper clinging to her shoe this time but to conceal the hot colour burning her face.
What on earth had made her think of something like that… and so vividly as well that for a moment she had almost been able to smell the hot, aroused scent of Joel’s body, his skin tanned, gleaming like oiled silk, his hands sliding over her body as he marvelled at its softness? Oh, Joel… A feeling of such intense yearning and loss filled her that it actually brought tears to her eyes, burning the dry sockets, making her blink rapidly to disperse them.
‘Oh, but that’s a wonderful idea, we’d love to, wouldn’t we, Sally…?’
Abruptly she lifted her head and stared at her sister. She had been so absorbed in her own thoughts that she had completely lost track of the conversation going on around her.
‘Er—I——’
‘Your sister has just been telling me about her garden and I’ve just invited you all to come round and see mine…’
‘Oh, I don’t think…’ Sally protested, but Daphne was already overruling her, telling her firmly,
‘Of course you can go…’
‘Good; so that’s settled, then.’ Kenneth smiled as he stood up. ‘Shall we say some time next week… Thursday afternoon…?’
Next week, when she was on earlies and would be at home during the afternoon. Sally gave him a brief look and then looked quickly away again, afraid that she might betray what she was thinking.
‘I want you to see my home,’ Kenneth had told her the last time they had met. ‘It will be a perfect setting for you.’
‘I can’t,’ she had protested. ‘I…’
‘You can and you will,’ he had contradicted her softly. ‘Wait and see.’