‘There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a family. You’ve told me that marriage isn’t for you, but don’t you want children?’ Claire asked, and he shrugged.
‘Olivia was pregnant when she died,’ he said in a flat voice, and she looked at him, horrified.
‘I’m sorry. I had no idea. How dreadful for you. How far in the pregnancy was she?’
‘Four and a half months.’
‘How awful. You never said—’
‘Very few people know,’ he conceded, which, she thought, was better than giving her another lecture on how unnecessary he felt it was to share his past with her, or anything else of importance for that matter.
‘I see.’ It was patently clear. His pregnant wife had died and left a legacy of disillusionment in him that could never be dispelled.
‘Do you?’ he asked in a gentle voice. ‘I doubt it.’
‘Will you never marry?’
‘One day, maybe, who knows? To someone who isn’t looking for the whole romantic bit.’
‘Does such a woman exist?’ She didn’t expect him to answer that, but he did.
‘Of course. For some women marriage is as much a social convenience as anything else; for others it’s companionship.’
Gayle. She had no idea why that should have sprung, uninvited, into her head, but it did. He had known Gayle for a long time, hadn’t he? They were good friends, good enough for him to set her up in his cottage in the grounds of the manor. And she was a career woman, someone who was into high tech, into city life, not into lazy walks in summer and nights spent sitting in front of a log fire in winter. Is she your type? Is she the woman you’ll turn to when you want the social convenience of having a partner? She wanted to ask him, but her reluctance to hear his answer silenced her.
‘But that doesn’t mean that I’m not addicted to you,’ he said in a huskier voice. ‘I want you so badly that sometimes I think that it’s driving me crazy. It’s selfish of me, I know, and I give you my word that if you want to walk out on this relationship right now then I won’t try and stop you.’
That should have set her mind at rest but all it suoceeded in doing was to make her want to burst into tears all over again. He was being as direct as he possibly could be and she wondered whether she wouldn’t have preferred a few white lies, because she already knew that she was going to stay with him for as long as he would have her. She didn’t think that she could relive those long, desolate hours spent thinking that she would never see him again, never share anything with him again. One day, she knew, she would have to, but not yet. When that time came, she would cope with it.
‘You tried to stop me before,’ she pointed out, and he reddened.
‘Did I?’ he asked roughly, then swore under his breath. ‘OK, I might have been a bit unfair, but you have my word this time. No pursuit.’
‘Can I think about it?’
‘No.’
‘In that case,’ she whispered, ‘I’ll be a sucker for punishment.’
He relaxed and smiled, kissing her lips lightly but persuasively.
Jackie’ll kill me, she thought, and Karen’s going to be stunned and I know I’ll end up miserable when he does finally call it a day, but he’s the breath in my body, and why do without him when I can have him just a little bit longer?
They said that absence made the heart grow fonder and now there seemed to be an edge to their passion, an intensity that hadn’t been here before. She was sure she wasn’t imagining it. Maybe because everything was out in the open, they were both savouring each other because the limitations of their relationship had been laid on the table and they both knew that sooner or later what they were enjoying so fiercely now would one day be water under the bridge.
At work, he was utterly professional, but all the time she was aware of a silent game being played between them, apparent in the occasional smouldering, sidelong look, in the way he brushed against her, in the way he held her eyes just that bit longer than was necessary. No one else noticed it but she found it thrilling, like an illicit enjoyment.
And in the nights they made love until every thought was driven from her brain.
They returned to England and brilliant weather. The weather men were at it again, churning out statistics about the extraordinary heat and talking about the greenhouse effect.
There was a conspiracy, Claire decided two weeks later, to keep her in this euphoric state of mind. The weather was splendid, her sister was out of the country so there was no outside pressure being put on her to do the sensible thing, and she couldn’t get enough of James. It was like riding the crest of a wave, dangerous, exhilarating, filling her with wild adrenalin.
The one thing she refused to do, however, was move back into the cottage. Apart from anything else, Gayle was still there. Claire had not mentioned her thoughts about her to James, but time hadn’t dimmed them any. He might not be sleeping with the tall blonde at the moment, indeed he might never have slept with her, but that didn’t mean that old friends would not some day become lovers, and more. She knew, as she had always known, that he had slept with women before her, but none of them had ever seemed more threatening than Gayle King.
‘I can find her somewhere else to stay,’ James murmured. It was after eight but bright and warm, and they were sitting in the grounds of the manor, under the shade of a tree which rustled above them in the slight breeze. ‘I want you closer to me.’ He slipped his hand under her blouse and she quivered in response.
But she held her ground. Somehow she didn’t care for the thought of moving back into the cottage. Sharing the house with Karen had given her a degree of independence which common sense told her that she would need one day.
She noticed that he had not volunteered to share his house with her, and she was tempted to point that out, teasingly, but she didn’t. He might think that she was angling for the position of lady of the manor, despite his blunt refusal to entertain the idea, and anyway, ever since they had returned from Paris she had preferred not to dwell on the short-lived nature of their relationship. The subject of Olivia was never reopened and there was no way that she would ever put herself in the position of being accused of trying to engineer marriage.
It was exactly four weeks to the day after they returned from Paris, on another one of those mornings that promised yet more fine, sunny weather, that reality came crashing down around her.
She should have guessed sooner, of course, but she had been so caught up in him that she hadn’t put two and two together until her periods were almost ten days late. Then, in a panic, she rushed out and bought one of those pregnancy testing kits and waited, in a state of nervous tension, for the results. But she knew, deep down, what the result would be even before proof positive was in front of her.
She was pregnant.
CHAPTER TEN
IT WAS one thing knowing, just knowing that she was pregnant. It was quite another to be staring at confirmation of it. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, or both, and after a few minutes of doing neither she quickly disposed of the used kit and went downstairs.
Karen was there, rustling around, getting ready for work. They normally had a cup of coffee and some toast together and then she would get a lift in to the office with Karen. She was so disorientated that she couldn’t think straight, and her hands were trembling as she slipped on her tracksuit and then rushed down to the kitchen to find the coffee made and the toast buttered. A feeling of nausea swept over her and then a deep, burning excitement filled her until she wanted to laugh out loud.
She was having James’s baby! It seemed incredible, and she had to resist the temptation to rush back up the stairs and disentangle the little tube from the bin where it lay carefully concealed under screwed-up tissue paper.
Karen was staring at her as though she had gone mad, and she said, frowning, ‘What’s the matter with you? You can’t be this happy at seven-thirty on a work morning.’
‘I’m not feeling terr
ibly well, actually,’ Claire said, smiling. ‘I won’t be going to work.’
‘You don’t look ill.’
‘Stomach problems—must have eaten something.’ She tried not to grin too broadly at that one.
‘Sure you don’t mean that you need to do some shopping?’ Karen looked at her suspiciously, biting into the toast while Claire poured herself some apple juice from the fridge.
‘Would I do that?’
‘You might.’ Karen stood up, still eating what was left of the toast, and washing it down with some coffee. ‘It’s not unheard of.’
‘Tell Tony I’ll be in tomorrow, won’t you?’ Claire asked, smiling like an idiot.
She was still grinning when she shut the door and tentatively walked towards the telephone.
Funny, she thought, how five minutes could change the course of your life. One minute she was locked into a stalemate relationship with James, the next she was here, pregnant, and life from where she was sitting looked absolutely marvellous.
She dialled James’s number.
Of course, it was all totally unexpected, the result of that one night of passion in Paris when neither of them had used contraception, but it was still wonderful, heavenly. She was carrying his child! She touched her stomach and felt a great deal of wonder.
The telephone rang three times and then James’s secretary answered.
Everything had been going so well between them. He was going to be over the moon about this. She just knew it. How could he possibly be cynical about his baby? He would realise that Olivia was a tragedy that belonged to the past and that this new life beginning now, inside her, was their future.
‘Hang on a sec, Claire, I’ll just connect you.’ Elaine was James’s secretary and over the months she and Claire had built up an easy rapport over the telephone. She chatted away about this and that and Claire half listened, too excited to offer much by way of reply.
Her parents would be overjoyed, of course. Surprised, but once they met James they would see that everything was going to be fine. Her mind took off on another tangent and she began to wonder whether it would be a boy or a girl. Who would it look like?
She heard James’s voice on the other end of the line and her fingers coiled around the telephone wire.
‘James, it’s me.’
‘I know,’ he said drily, ‘Elaine forewarned me.’
‘How are you?’
‘Much the same as I was when I saw you last night. Why? Do you know something that I don’t?’
I do, as a matter of fact, she wanted to say. ‘Are you sitting down?’
Her stomach was going into tight, hard little knots and she could hardly wait to tell him her spectacular news.
‘Yes,’ he said, and there was a hint of wariness in his voice now.
‘Good. Because I’ve got something to tell you.’
There was silence and she took a deep breath, then said in a rush, ‘Guess what! I’m pregnant.’
Even in silence it was possible to discern meaning. Some silences were comfortable, like the silence between old friends, some were fraught with anticipation, like the silence between lovers. This silence stretched between them, taut and thick, and she felt the first sharp ebb of her new-found excitement.
‘Are you still there?’ she asked, trying hard to sound light-hearted.
‘You can’t be.’
‘What do you mean?’ Dismay was beginning to set in and it was like cold, clammy fingers crawling over her.
‘We took precautions,’ he said patiently.
‘Not in Paris. Not on that first night.’
‘I don’t believe this.’
‘And from the sound of it, you don’t much like it either,’ Claire whispered. The clammy fingers had wrapped themselves around her body and had managed to reach deep inside her, so that she felt cold all over.
‘This is impossible. I can’t talk about this over the phone. Where are you?’
‘Whether you talk to me face to face or over the phone doesn’t change the fact that I’m having your baby.’
‘Dammit, Claire!’
‘I should have known what to expect from you.’ She didn’t feel dismayed now. She felt utterly desolate.
‘You spring this thing on me and expect what…?’
‘I wish I’d never told you. I wish I’d walked out of your life.’
‘Well, you have and you didn’t.’
She heard something buzz in his office, another line, and he said to her, ‘Look, I have a meeting at eleven. It’s important. I’ll be down as soon as I can after that. We have to sort this one out.’
‘Sure,’ Claire said stiffly, but her mind was working frantically. Sort this one out? What did he mean? Abortion? She would have to leave, and quickly. She could go to Jackie’s place. She was still out of the country, in Australia for two months because Tom was over there on business and they had decided that two months was too long for them to be apart. She had the key to her sister’s house.
She was feeling sick, sick and disillusioned, with a depth of disillusionment that would never go. It would haunt her until the day she died. He didn’t want this baby, he had as good as said so, and she had been an utter fool to have expected anything other than that from him. He hadn’t been joking when he had told her that he wasn’t into playing happy families. He had been deadly serious. The grave error of judgement had been on her part, in thinking that this baby would represent anything to him other than a huge, unwanted complication.
She telephoned Karen at work and tried not to sound as distressed as she felt as she told her that she wasn’t going to be to work for a few days, that she was going to her sister’s, that James might call round and in no circumstances should she tell him where she, Claire, was. There was panic in her voice as she said that, but Karen accepted it easily enough, only saying that if something was wrong she wanted to be the first to help.
She moved quickly after that phone call. Some clothes in a case, a few books, a photo album, then a taxi up to London. James would never find her, of that she was certain. He knew of her sister’s existence, but he didn’t know where she lived and he didn’t know her married name. Not that that would have helped, since they were ex-directory.
The only link to her was Karen, who had sworn secrecy. Not even Tony had her sister’s address. When she had first started working for him, she had given the house in Reading as her point of contact, and had never bothered to change it, even after she had moved into the cottage. It had never before occurred to her how easy it would be simply to vanish, to disappear off the face of the earth, but to all intents and purposes she had vanished out of James’s life, for good.
It was only later that she thought about the ramifications of her flight.
Nothing would ever take away the deep pleasure it gave her to be pregnant, but realistically she knew that life from here on in was not going to be a bed of roses. Her child would have no father, because there was no way that she was going to contact James. She neither wanted an abortion nor did she want him to feel obligated to her in any way. The euphoria which had overwhelmed her when she had first discovered her pregnancy had been replaced by a corrosive cynicism. He would never be happy about this child, and she was not about to become a noose around his neck.
Then there was the question of her family and friends. So far she hadn’t breathed a word of her condition to anyone. She had spoken to Tony, to tell him that she had left, vaguely attributing her sudden departure to unforeseen family problems, which was near enough the truth for her not to feel too horribly guilty. She had said the same to Karen, who had, by now, probably put two and two together and figured out the whole sorry mess anyway. And as for her parents—well, she hadn’t even called them at all. They still thought that she was happily ensconced in Reading, doing all the fun things normal young girls did. Sooner or later she would have to say something, and she knew that it would have to be sooner rather than later. They deserved that, even if they would be disappoint
ed in her. Their sheltered, uncomplicated little girl who had never given them any trouble with boys, pregnant by a man they had never even heard of, far less met.
At least, she thought fiercely and protectively, the baby will be a product of love; and that, over the next two days, afforded her some degree of satisfaction.
She also knew that pretty soon she would have to tackle the problem of finding another job and she wondered whether she shouldn’t simply return to her parents’ home and find work down there. It smacked a little of taking the easy way out, but she had left her girlish dreams behind forever. Now was no time to build castles in the air. The knight in shining armour had turned out to be a tarnished mockery of the real thing. At least, with her parents next to her, lending her their support, she wouldn’t have to cope with loneliness on top of everything else.
She was sitting on the sofa in the lounge, with a book on her lap but really staring vacantly past it, thinking over and over what she should do, when the doorbell rang.
At ten-thirty at night, in London, there was no chance that she was going to throw open the door to whoever might be lurking on the doorstep. She slipped the chain through the catch and slowly opened it, just enough to get a glimpse of whoever was outside.
‘You!’ she said. Her body felt as though it had been plugged into a socket and suddenly switched into furious life.
‘Open this door.’
It wasn’t a polite request, it was a command, and that galvanised her into anger. She pushed closed the door, frantic to double-lock it, but he had wedged his foot into it, so she fell back and said coldly, ‘What are you doing here? How did you find me?’ He looked dark and dishevelled and furious.
‘Open this door,’ he said by way of response, ‘or I’ll break it down.’
‘Go away.’
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