by Penny Jordan
How dared he come round here, threatening her, accusing her…leaping to the most preposterous assumptions?
Angrily she paced her small study while she waited for Nicholas to appear.
She had been so looking forward to her new life, so happy about it, and now suddenly, like a dark cloud crossing the sun, that happiness had been blighted. Through no fault of her own she seemed to have fallen foul of the town’s most important and influential resident. Well, she didn’t care, she decided mentally, tossing her head. Let him do his worst. He was the one who would suffer the most if it ever came out how he had tried to bribe her, a totally innocent person, to give up a non-existent affair with a man who was nothing more than her legal adviser.
Nicholas arrived ten minutes later. Tania let him in through the front of her shop and then led him upstairs to her study.
They had to walk through her sitting-room to get there, and Lucy turned round, beaming when she saw him.
Nicholas was good with children and they responded well to him. Watching him as he listened to Lucy’s excited account of her day, Tania felt a small shaft of bitterness lodge itself somewhere deep inside her.
Lucy should have had this as her birthright, should have had a father to whom she could turn with her small pleasures and problems.
Tania had never felt the lack of a man in their lives, but she realised Lucy might feel differently. The absence of her father was a subject which was rarely raised between them. At the large inner city school which she had previously attended, single-parent children had been in the majority, not the minority, and, although Tania had told Lucy as calmly and matter-of-factly as she could the brief circumstances of her conception, editing them so that they could be understood and accepted by a small child, it was as though in some way Lucy had realised it was not a subject her mother cared to discuss and had asked no further questions.
Now, abruptly and painfully, Tania realised that in thinking their lives complete and content she had perhaps been looking at the situation only from her own point of view. It had never struck her before that Lucy might actively miss the presence of a male parent, even though that presence was something she had never experienced.
Now, listening to her laughing and giggling as she responded to Nicholas’s gentle teasing, Tania was struck by uncertainty and apprehension.
Was Lucy perhaps secretly nursing a need to have a man in her life? A father?
‘What’s wrong?’ Nicholas asked her with urgent concern once they were alone in her study. ‘You sounded worried over the phone.’
‘Worried doesn’t begin to describe it,’ Tania told him tartly. She took a deep steadying breath as she felt the tension build up inside her and then said levelly, ‘I had a visit from your brother-in-law this afternoon. He seems to be under the misapprehension that you and I are having an affair and he came here to demand that I stop seeing you. He also offered me ten thousand pounds to do so.’
‘Ten thousand!’ Nicholas whistled. ‘Did you take it?’
Tania stared at him. He was smiling but beneath the smile she could see that he was ill at ease, guilty almost.
‘No, I did not. But that isn’t why I asked you to come here. What I want to know is why on earth he should imagine that you and I are having an affair in the first place, much less attempt to bribe and threaten me into giving you up.’
Nicholas had turned his back on her. He picked up the paperweight on her desk, weighing it absently in his hands, his movements jerky and uncoordinated.
‘Nicholas, what is going on?’ Tania pressed, reading these betraying signs. ‘And please don’t tell me you don’t know,’ she added with dry irony as she removed the paperweight from his hand. ‘Because it’s perfectly obvious that you do.’
For a moment he was silent and then he shrugged and admitted sheepishly, ‘I suppose it’s all my fault…although I never intended—that is, I had no idea that Clarissa would fire James up to such an extent—’
‘Just a minute.’ Tania stopped him, curtly frowning at him. ‘You mean that it’s Clarissa who has told her stepbrother that we’re having an affair? But what on earth gave her that idea…? Everyone knows that you’re devoted to her and—’
‘That’s the trouble,’ Nicholas interrupted her bitterly. ‘I’ve allowed her to make a doormat out of me for too long. I’m sick and tired of her carping, her criticisms, of being held up to ridicule…of being made to feel a fool. I’ve already told her that if she doesn’t love me any more then we should separate. Even though, for the children’s sake, I feel… Anyway that isn’t what she wants…or so she says. In fact, she got so wrought up when I suggested it that I began to wonder if I could perhaps make her jealous, make her believe that another woman was interested in me…a woman who didn’t despise me or constantly compare me with another man. She’s always had a very jealous nature…and it’s obviously worked better than I imagined.’
Tania couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
‘You mean you deliberately allowed Clarissa to believe that you and I are having an affair, even though there’s not the slightest truth in such a suggestion?’ she asked, appalled.
Nicholas had the grace to look embarrassed.
‘I’d no idea she’d take things so far. I didn’t say we were having an affair. I just talked to her about you, told her how much I admire you… You know the kind of thing. I had no idea she’d involve James. I suppose I ought to have done, though. She’s forever running to him with her problems. He’s more important to her than I am—’ He broke off, flushing and biting his bottom lip, and Tania recognised that Clarissa wasn’t the only one suffering from jealousy.
Something unpleasant and distasteful stirred deep inside her at what she was hearing.
‘You’ll have to tell her the truth,’ she announced flatly. ‘And you have to tell your brother-in-law as well.’
He had gone pale and was avoiding her eyes.
‘I will do,’ he told her. ‘But not just yet. If I can just get her to realise—’
‘No,’ Tania protested. She was furious with him. How dared he use her like this and without either her knowledge or her consent? ‘I can understand that you want to save your marriage,’ she told him firmly. ‘But I don’t believe this is the right way to go about it. What’s wrong with simply sitting down and discussing the whole thing honestly with Clarissa? Tell her that you love her and that you resent being compared with her brother. Tell her that you want to make a success of your marriage. After all, you’ve every incentive to do so, both of you. You must have loved each other when you married…you have two beautiful children.’
‘One of whom was conceived before we were married,’ Nicholas told her, astounding her. ‘Oh, I wanted to marry her. I was desperately in love with her, but Clarissa… Well, I’ve never been sure whether she married me because she loved me or because she was pregnant. Sometimes I even wonder if Alec is mine. You see, she was involved with another man—a married man—when we first met. She was using me to prevent James from finding out about her affair. He’s very strict about such things, very moralistic.’
Tania felt sickened by what she was hearing. Mingled with that sickness was pity for Nicholas, tinged with a little contempt, and as for Clarissa…
‘You’re going to have to tell her the truth, Nicholas,’ she insisted curtly. ‘Your brother-in-law has given me twenty-four hours in which to make up my mind about his bribe. After that if I refuse to give you up he assured me that he will find some way of making me do so.
‘He’s a very powerful man locally. I can’t afford to have him as my enemy, no matter what my private opinion of a man who accepts the accusations of someone without making the slightest attempt to find out for himself if they’re true. I can’t help you with your marriage, I’m afraid, and, to be honest with you, if you don’t make sure that he knows the truth, then I shall.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Nicholas told her, ‘but it won’t be easy convincing Clarissa.’
‘Really?’ Tania was coldly, icily angry with him now. ‘You do surprise me. You appeared to have no difficulty in convincing her that we were having an affair. Surely informing her of the truth should be even more easy?’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Nicholas reiterated, but, as she saw him out, Tania wished she could have felt more confident of his determination to make sure Clarissa knew and accepted the true situation between them.
As he got in his car to drive away, she called out urgently to him, ‘So you’ll make sure she knows everything, won’t you, Nicholas?’
The smile he gave her was forced and painful, but she dared not allow herself to waste any sympathy on him. He certainly had not spared a thought for her when he had so recklessly and unwisely involved her without her knowledge in his private affairs.
She had gone from feeling sorry for him for the sad state of his marriage to feeling that perhaps he and Clarissa deserved one another after all. She had nothing but contempt for adults who so cruelly played childish games with one another’s emotions.
Surely any good marriage—any worthwhile relationship—demanded total trust, mutual respect, mutual honesty, if that feeling that the human race described as love was going to be allowed a chance to grow to maturity.
If the kind of relationship Nicholas and Clarissa shared was marriage, commitment, then she was glad she had never experienced it.
But then she thought of Lucy, Lucy whom she was perhaps unwittingly denying a very important part of her growing up. Would her daughter as an adult have difficulty in relating to the male sex? Would she have emotional problems and hang-ups because of her lack of a male parent, a male influence in her life?
Uncomfortably she dismissed her thoughts as unproductive, but, later on that evening when Lucy was chatting animatedly about her afternoon at the Fieldings’, describing to her how Tom Fielding was making his daughter her very own personalised stencil for decorating her newly painted bedroom walls, she wondered if she was being over-sensitive in detecting a trace of wistful envy in her daughter’s voice. Lucy’s room in their new flat, while a tenfold improvement on the claustrophobic and damp room she had occupied in their city tower block, was as yet undecorated. Because of the necessity of opening in time for the autumn term trade in new school shoes, there hadn’t been time to do very much as yet with the flat. Once the shop was open and running, then she would be able to turn her attention to making their new home more comfortable.
She had plenty of ideas, plenty of plans, and, determinedly trying to banish James Warren and his threats from her mind, she tried to concentrate instead on discussing with Lucy just how they would decorate her new room.
After Lucy had had her bath and gone contentedly to bed, Tania looked around her sitting-room, mentally giving the plain walls a coat of fresh sunny yellow paint. A pretty stencil frieze around the top of the walls would add a little individuality to the décor; she had taught herself a good many domestic skills over the years, out of necessity more than anything else, and she eyed their comfortable settee she had originally bought second-hand, recognising that it was perhaps time it had a new loose cover, perhaps in a plain damask this time now that Lucy was growing up and the importance of a fabric which would not show every mark was no longer essential. Because her great-aunt had refused to modernise the building in any way, the flat still retained its open fireplaces with their nineteenth-century firebacks.
Worth a fortune now, Ann Fielding had told her enviously, and well worth keeping.
In addition to its two good-sized bedrooms, the sitting-room, the small room she had turned into her study and the bathroom, the flat also had a kitchen-cum-dining-room, but ultimately Tania hoped to extend the rear ground floor of the building to provide Lucy and herself with a downstairs kitchen with french windows they could open out on to a small courtyard for summer eating.
That, however, was for the future. For the present… Grimly she stared out of her sitting-room window, for once oblivious to the view across the open countryside.
She was furious with Nicholas for involving her in what should have been his strictly private affairs, and how on earth Clarissa could be silly enough to believe his lies about her she really had no idea. The woman must surely realise how much her husband doted on her…but then if she was as jealous as Nicholas had implied, almost pathologically so… Tania frowned. The whole situation repelled her, especially those aspects of it which touched upon Clarissa’s relationship with her stepbrother. Clarissa did seem to have an unhealthy dependence on and absorption with her stepbrother.
Surely he, though, as the elder, as the sophisticated and worldly man he was supposed to be, must have long ago recognised the dangers of Clarissa’s dependence on him? Surely it should have been up to him to gently ensure that his stepsister turned to her husband to satisfy her emotional needs and not to him? Surely it should have been up to him to gently and painlessly put a proper distance between them…?
Or was she confronting just another example of the male sex’s vanity and weakness? Did James Warren perhaps actually relish Clarissa’s patent adoration of him, despite Ann’s denial of this?
Restlessly she moved away from the window. Twenty-four hours, he had said… In twenty-four hours he would return for her decision. She wondered cynically whether, once he had discovered the truth and his mistake, he would apologise to her for his totally unfounded accusations against her. Privately she doubted it. He simply wasn’t the type. She doubted if he had ever admitted to a mistake in his entire life.
She went to bed early, worn out by the events of the day, acknowledging how much strain she was under with the opening of her shop so imminent. She daren’t even allow herself to contemplate failure. She had to make a success of this venture. For Lucy’s sake if nothing else. She had seen already how much healthier, how much happier her daughter was in their new surroundings. How much less inclined to cling to her.
In many ways it made her heart ache a little that Lucy should be so willing to spend so much time at the Fieldings’, but then she reminded herself of how isolated she and Lucy had always been and how much this had worried her in the past. How much she had wanted security, self-confidence, and happiness for Lucy.
It was a long time before she managed to sleep, only to discover in the morning that not only had she overslept but she also had all the signs of an impending migraine.
Mentally cursing James Warren and all his family, she hurried into the bathroom to discover that she was out of the only tablets she had managed to find which, if taken fast enough, sometimes managed to keep her migraine at bay. She knew from painful experience that once she let the headache take hold nothing would take it away.
Luckily there was a chemist in the next street, who listened sympathetically to the reason for her early morning call and thankfully was able to supply her with the drug she needed, although her errand took rather longer than she had anticipated, principally because the chemist was a friendly man who liked to chat with his customers. Once Tania had explained who she was he announced warmly, ‘Oh, yes, of course. My wife was saying only the other day that it was a good thing that a decent children’s shoe shop had opened up here. She dreads taking our two into the city to kit them out for school. A proper nightmare, she says it is, so I expect you’ll be seeing her once you’re open.’
As a potential customer Tania felt she could hardly cut him short and risk offending him, with the result that it was almost half an hour before she was able to hurry back to her own shop.
As she went upstairs to the flat, she recognised that it sounded oddly silent. Normally as she opened the door she could hear Lucy humming or talking to herself, but today everywhere was silent.
Her heart started to pound heavily. She had always stressed to Lucy how important it was that she never went anywhere without her; that she never talked to strangers, much less accepted lifts from them, that she never did anything or went with anyone unless she, Tania, had expressly told her beforehand that
she might.
Hurrying into the sitting-room, calling her daughter’s name, Tania came to an abrupt halt as she discovered a tearful Lucy standing in the kitchen doorway.
‘Darling, what is it?’ Tania asked anxiously, dropping down on to her knees and gathering her daughter close in her arms, cradling her there.
Where her own hair was conker-red, Lucy’s was a slightly lighter colour, more the shade of new chestnuts, silky and burnished, and, unlike her own, Lucy’s eyes were grey rather than tawny. Now those grey eyes looked apprehensive and guilty, and as she looked over her daughter’s shoulder, Tania saw the scattered shards of china on the kitchen floor.
‘I’m sorry. I was just trying to help…’
Tania bit her lip as she recognised one piece of china. As a special treat she had recently given in to a reckless whim and bought a pretty set of breakfast crockery, a real luxury to her since in the past all she had ever been able to afford had been cheap seconds, bought on market stalls.
‘I was just trying to make you a cup of tea,’ Lucy told her tearfully, ‘but the teapot just sort of slipped.’
The teapot. It would have to be that, of course, the most expensive item of the set. But at least it hadn’t been full of scalding hot water when Lucy dropped it.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said as comfortingly as she could. ‘Everyone has accidents.’
And yet, even as she comforted Lucy and told herself that it was after all only a piece of china, she couldn’t help grieving for the waste of money its destruction represented. It wasn’t that she was mean or penny-pinching, it was simply that she couldn’t afford… She sighed faintly to herself. Perhaps it was her own fault… Lucy was just at that stage when she adored ‘helping’ and being grownup. She ought to have recognised the danger, ought to have waited a little perhaps before giving in to the impulse towards such extravagance.
* * *
It was a day which seemed destined to be fraught with small difficulties and snags, nothing to do, of course, with her own underlying tension and the knowledge that, before it was over, she would once again by confronted by James Warren.