by Helen Brooks
He glanced at her then, one swift glance, as he said, ‘Not that it was their fault. They were just nice middle-class people who didn’t have a clue what had hit them. They should have had a sweet little Shirley Temple type girl, not a ferocious little boy with a chip on his shoulder as big as him.’
‘And the second time?’ she asked carefully.
‘That was a year later. I was placed in another foster home after the first adoption attempt failed, and I think I was happier there than I’d ever been or ever was again. They were good folk, kind, and they understood kids. They’d got two boys of their own with learning difficulties but they still took on a couple of foster children and gave them as much time and attention as their own kids. Anyway, I was taken away from them and placed with a couple of virtual strangers who I’d visited a few times on “little tea-parties”, and I went ape.’
Marianne nodded. She could imagine, and she was filled with burning anger that someone in charge hadn’t understood how things really were.
‘I think I thought if I played up enough they’d send me back to Marlene and Jim, but of course it didn’t work out like that. I was sent to a children’s home and told Marlene and Jim had another child living with them and didn’t have room for me. I don’t think the matron who told me meant to be unkind,’ he said flatly, his face hard, ‘but it did something to me. Something died, Marianne. Call it the ability to reach out, to be normal. I don’t know. But from that point on I stopped needing anyone. I became ungovernable and totally opportunistic; if it wasn’t for the fact that I found I enjoyed school and proving I was better than everyone else I’d have probably ended up in Borstal.’
She had been so wrapped up in what he was saying that she hadn’t noticed where they were going, but now, as the car pulled up in a small side street, she saw they were close to Rochelle’s. ‘I don’t want to eat at Rochelle’s,’ she said hastily, without considering her words.
‘What?’ As he cut the engine he turned to her, the grey eyes narrowed and very dark. ‘Why not?’
Because in Rochelle’s everyone knows who you are and how much you are worth, she thought with absolute clarity. They’ll fawn over us and you’ll be Zeke Buchanan, multimillionaire and tycoon. I won’t get another word out of you that means anything. She shrugged carefully. ‘Myriad reasons,’ she said lightly. ‘There’s a couple of pubs and various eating places all round here; let’s leave the car and walk.’
The narrowed gaze moved to the window, where the odd desultory snowflake was beginning to whirl in the wind.
‘Not far,’ she said quickly. ‘Just a little way.’
They found a small bistro on the first corner, and once they had ordered the food and a bottle of wine Marianne leant across the table and said softly, ‘Were you telling me in the car that you don’t need me, Zeke? Is that what you were saying?’ He would never know how much it hurt.
He stared at her, his black hair ruffled from the biting wind outside the warm confines of the restaurant and his grey eyes reflecting the light just above their heads, which turned them almost silver. He had never looked more handsome, or more unapproachable.
She waited, not daring to breathe, for his answer, wondering how everything could appear so normal and mundane when she was crying, screaming inside. She had opened a can of worms that day she had run from the apartment and she didn’t know if she was strong enough to bear what he might say. She loved him, she would die loving him, and yet he was a stranger to her. She had lived with him, eaten with him, laughed with him and slept with him, they had shared physical intimacies she had never imagined in her wildest dreams, and yet all the time there had been a huge great chunk of him he had kept all to himself.
Suddenly she was angry, too. He should have told her some of this before; it had been her right as his wife to at least know what she was battling against. He had cheated her.
And then, almost as though he had read her mind, he said the exact same thing himself. But suddenly Zeke—her Zeke—was back, and the relief was overwhelming for a moment. ‘I’m saying I cheated you, Marianne,’ he said heavily, ‘but as for needing you…’ He looked at her with agonised eyes. ‘You’ll never know. Not in a million years.’
He shook his head, and then as her hand reached out and gripped one of his he looked down at it for a moment, before raising his head and saying wearily, ‘I’ll destroy you if you stay with me and I’ve no right to inflict any of this on you. Don’t you understand? I am what I am; I can’t change. I knew what I was doing, deep down, when I kept you from finding a job. I wanted to keep you locked away. But then you know that, don’t you?’
‘Why? Why, Zeke?’ she pressed urgently.
‘Because I needed to know you were mine, totally, that you weren’t seeing or talking to other men,’ he said with shocking matter-of-factness. And then his gaze gripped hers as he said grimly, ‘And how does that add up with the rest of what I’ve been saying, eh? If I could have locked you away, I would have. That’s how I felt.’
And until he had met her he had never been plagued by that emotion before, she thought intuitively. He had liked his other women to be independent and self-sufficient, living their own lives and making no claims on him, and then with her a whole new set of feelings had come into play, and it had made him feel weak, confused, vulnerable.
Because of his upbringing he hadn’t gone through the normal family ups and downs to knock off the edges and round him off as a person. All the punches life had thrown at him had been knock-out blows aimed straight for the jugular—annihilation and being crushed, or retaliation and militant aggression; that was how he had seen it. Get the other fellow before he gets you. Life on his own terms and damn the rest. And then she had happened.
‘Don’t you trust me, Zeke?’ she asked shakily.
He made a sound deep in his throat and removed his hand from under hers, leaning back in his chair and surveying her broodingly. And then he smiled bitterly. ‘My honest little wife,’ he said mordantly. ‘Nothing swept under the carpet.’ He straightened slightly, and then, as the waiter brought their bottle of wine, took it from him with a nod of thanks as he said, ‘I’ll see to it.’
She waited until he had poured two glasses of the deep red wine, and then she said again, ‘Do you, Zeke? Do you trust me?’
‘No.’
She had been expecting it, but it still hit her like a blow in the solar plexus. ‘Thanks.’ She couldn’t quite keep the bitterness from showing through.
He looked at her as he caught the note, a long look, and then he took a hard pull of air as he said, ‘I don’t trust that one day you won’t see me as I see myself.’
‘And how’s that?’
‘Unlovable.’
Oh, Zeke. Oh, my darling… She didn’t say a word, and she tried, really hard, to keep her face from revealing what she felt, but she obviously failed because he said, his voice harsh, ‘And don’t feel sorry for me, Marianne, because that will be the last straw. I’ve made a life for myself and a damn good one; the Buchanan name is both feared and respected.’
His remark about his name triggered a thought, and she forced herself to sit back in her chair and take a sip of wine before she said calmly, ‘Is Buchanan your mother’s name or your father’s?’
‘My mother’s, before she married.’ He took a long swallow of wine himself before he added, with no expression at all, ‘I told you; she led a pretty wild lifestyle. I gather my father could have been any one of a number of bozos who got lucky. Certainly no one was willing to claim paternity, and who can blame them?’
You, for a start. ‘Has your mother contacted you since you were older?’ she asked quietly.
‘When I became wealthy, you mean?’ His lips tightened and then he breathed out slowly from his nose. ‘I’m sure she would have done; she was a mercenary little—’ He stropped abruptly, finishing the glass of wine in one gulp. ‘She died,’ he said blankly. ‘Fell off a friend’s yacht when she was drunk at a party and drowned.’
Her eyes widened slightly with shock. He had never spoken about his mother except once, when he had told her, on their second or third date, that his mother had given him away as a baby. But she was dead; his mother was dead. That meant there was no chance of any reconciliation or possibility of a reunion.
It was a silly question in the circumstances, but she’d said it before she’d thought. ‘Are you sure?’
His features were as flint-hard as his eyes when he said coolly, ‘Quite sure, Marianne. I spoke to her husband some years ago and he filled me in on all the gory details of her life. He didn’t spare my feelings,’ he added drily. ‘I was left with the impression they’d deserved each other.’
‘I’m so sorry, Zeke.’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t be.’ And then, as he glanced over her shoulder, ‘Ah, here comes the food.’
He regretted telling her everything; she could tell. She stared at him as the waiter placed their meals in front of them. But she wasn’t going to stop battering at that wall he had built between them.
‘What if we’d had a baby, Zeke? What then?’ she asked quietly once they were alone again.
‘A baby?’ There was just the tiniest inflexion in his studiously flat voice that made her look at him more intently. He wanted a child, she realised suddenly. He had always wanted a child, perhaps even more than she did. And she could understand why now. A tiny little being that was no threat, that wouldn’t turn away from him or fall out of love with him, that would be linked to him through the blood as well as the heart.
And he would be a devoted father. He would lavish love and tenderness on the flesh of his flesh, knowing he could do so without appearing weak or vulnerable. He didn’t have to trust a baby not to leave him, and whatever happened he would still be its father.
‘It didn’t happen, did it?’ he said with smooth control. ‘Which is probably just as well in the circumstances.’
‘I agree.’
As his eyes shot to meet hers she saw it was not what he had expected her to say.
‘We weren’t ready to have a child, Zeke,’ she said softly but clearly. ‘We still had too much growing up to do ourselves.’
‘Is that a dig at me?’ he bit tightly, his skin stretching over the rugged lines of his face.
‘No, I said both of us and I meant both of us,’ she said firmly. ‘You called me honest a while back, so you can’t have it all ways. I believe that every child should have the right to be conceived through love and born into a loving and trusting relationship. There might be some people who would disagree with that, but I can’t see it any other way. Trust, love, tenderness, commitment—they should see all that mirrored in their home, Zeke. I’ve grown up a great deal in the last two years and I’ve had to sort out what I want and what I believe, not what my parents or society or anyone else tells me.’
‘And all this growing up told you to leave me.’
‘It told me we couldn’t go on as we were,’ she said sharply. His voice had been dry and cynical. ‘I’m a person in my own right, Zeke, with dreams and aspirations, but that doesn’t lessen my love for you an iota. I don’t have to be just a wife, or a wife and mother and nothing else, don’t you see? You can only benefit if I’m happy and fulfilled.’
‘And being my wife wasn’t fulfilment enough,’ he said tightly.
‘No, it wasn’t.’ Her hands were trembling with the enormity of their differences, and she linked her fingers together to stop their shaking. ‘Like being my husband isn’t enough for you. You have your work, which consumes you at times. Admit it.’
‘That’s different,’ he said harshly.
‘Why? Because you’re a man?’ she challenged swiftly. ‘What rubbish, Zeke. You know as well as I do that a woman can be just as dedicated as a man to her work.’
‘We’d agreed you were going to have children and I’d be the breadwinner,’ he shot back roughly, changing his tack in view of her scathing voice.
‘And the children didn’t happen.’ She eyed him firmly. ‘And you know as well as I do that you don’t have to do another day’s work in your life and you’ll still be a multimillionaire for the rest of your days.’
‘This is a ridiculous conversation,’ he said crisply, dark colour flaring across his countenance.
‘Why? Because you are hearing a few home truths?’
‘That’s enough, Marianne.’
‘And now you’re shutting down again because you aren’t winning.’ She was looking at Zeke and he was looking back, his eyes narrowed and hot and his mouth a thin line in the tautness of his jaw.
She had gone as far as she could for one day. Marianne followed her instinct and, despite the churning of her stomach and the trembling in her limbs, smiled brightly. ‘Think about what I’ve said, Zeke,’ she advised calmly, willing her voice not to shake. ‘You are telling yourself you can’t change because you are too scared to try, and out of that has come a whole cart-load of hang-ups. Whatever you might think, I love you, and I shall continue to love you as long as I live. I could be the next Prime Minister and I’d still love you—a top model, whatever.
‘You exasperate me at times, annoy me, drive me mad, if you want to know. And you’re right—you have cheated me. You’ve cheated us both, actually. But I still love you, more than ever. Because love, real love, doesn’t choose where it wants to go; it just happens. There’s no rhyme or reason to it very often, and certainly it defies logic. But it happens and that’s that. Fait accompli.’
She had expected some dry, cynical barb at the end of her little oration, one of the razor-sharp cuts that he did so well, and her stomach muscles had clenched in readiness. But he just sat there, his expression frozen and revealing nothing of what was going on in his mind.
And then, as one of the young waiters bustled over, enquiring if their food was to their satisfaction, Zeke made some polite comment on their as yet untouched meals and they both began eating.
But Marianne had seen his hand shake slightly as he transferred a forkful of food to his mouth, and that, more than anything else that had occurred, gave her the slightest ray of hope.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MARIANNE had expected—perhaps foolishly, she acknowledged to herself as she sat at the bedsit window watching a frosty Christmas Eve dawn—that Zeke would be in touch after their frank and somewhat caustic meeting that snowy December lunch-time.
Admittedly she had received an outrageously generous cheque through the post from his solicitors two days later, along with an official note stating the same amount would be repeated on the fifth of every month, and asking could Mrs Buchanan please inform Jarvis & Smith of her new address in due course? She had returned the cheque the same day, with a short note stating that she did not intend to change her address, neither did she want the money.
After that, sixteen days ago, she had heard nothing from the solicitors and nothing from Zeke.
Her father had been to see her twice and taken her out to dinner, and on the first occasion—once the initial awkwardness was over—they had talked as they hadn’t done for a long time. By the time he had left she had known he understood how things were, and on his second visit they had simply enjoyed each other’s company, which had been great.
Pat had come to stay for a couple of days the week before—complete with army sleeping bag which she’d insisted on spreading out on the floor at the side of the sofa bed, refusing Marianne’s offer to use the sleeping bag herself—and the two of them had had a girly weekend which had done Marianne the power of good. You simply couldn’t wallow in self-pity or any other negative feelings with Pat around.
And Mrs Polinkski—bless her—seemed to have made it her mission in life to make sure Marianne was well-fed and befriended, inviting her to their spacious flat above the supermarket for a home-cooked meal several times a week, and always insisting the son of the family—Wilmer—saw her home to the door of the bedsit, despite Marianne’s protests.
Marianne frowned as her thoughts u
nfocused her gaze on the winter sky of silver and pale peach. She might have something of a problem brewing with Wilmer, actually, she told herself darkly. The Polinkskis were fully aware of her situation, but in spite of that Wilmer had asked her out for a drink twice in the last few days, and despite her refusals seemed more keen, if anything. He had taken to looking at her with great sad puppy-dog eyes and making unnecessary visits into the front of the shop every two minutes. It was beginning to drive her mad.
He was a nice enough boy—he was probably her age, but seemed heaps younger to Marianne—and quite good-looking, with his shock of dark blond hair and brown eyes, but, apart from the fact that she was a married woman, she could never have liked him in a romantic sense in a hundred years.
All in all, life had been full and busy—she had barely had time to look through the university and college prospectuses she had sent away for—so the gnawing feeling of aloneness which hadn’t left her since she had first walked out of the apartment was silly, ridiculous, crazy. But it was still there, she admitted with a deep sigh as her eyes focused on the river of mother-of-pearl and varying shades of luminescent peach again. And it was worse, if anything, when she was with people. All she wanted, all she seemed able to think about whatever she was doing or saying outwardly, was one particular person.
‘Oh, Zeke.’ She spoke his name out loud, her breath misting the cold glass before she rubbed at it with the sleeve of her dressing gown. He had admitted to a profound emotion for her that was all at odds with the rigid control he liked to keep on his feelings, and in the voicing of it had made it impossible for them ever to go back to the old way of things. Not that she would have contemplated that herself, of course.
Nevertheless, the portent of all they had said that lunch-time had the power to blow their marriage to smithereens or ultimately make it stronger than it had ever been, but it all depended on Zeke. And she didn’t, she really didn’t, she reiterated miserably, know which way he would jump.