by Penny Jordan
Her eyes were over-bright with foolish tears. What had she expected? she asked herself as she heard the door close behind him. That he would pick her up and carry her to the bed, that he would undress her and then slowly and thoroughly make love to her? Things weren’t like that these days. She was a modern young woman, she told herself firmly. Of course Gregory wanted a drink. It had been a hot, tiring journey, and while he was gone she might as well unpack their things. She could have a shower and then be all pretty and cool for him when he came back. It never even occurred to her that Gregory might have asked her if she wanted a cool drink in the company of her new husband! Determinedly she pushed aside her sense of somehow having been abandoned, and unlocked their cases.
Gregory came back just in time to change for dinner, and Davina, who, after her shower, had dithered over whether or not to change into the ultra-feminine and frilly broderie anglaise trousseau shortie robe she had bought for herself, was glad that she had put on a dress instead when Gregory disappeared into the bathroom, firmly locking the door behind him.
When he came out fifteen minutes later his skin gleamed; he smelled of soap, and, even slicked back off his head, his hair still made her want to reach out and stroke her fingers through it.
The sight of him, the smell of him, the reality of him banished her earlier panic, and she ached to throw herself into his arms, to have the confidence, the experience to tease him with kisses and caresses until he growled that what he wanted was not dinner but her, but she knew awkwardly that she just wasn’t that kind of girl, that she did not have that kind of self-confidence, and so instead she sat miserably through the dinner she had not wanted, her throat closing up with a misery she could not explain as the blonde courier hovered over their table, chatting animatedly with Gregory while ignoring her.
It was late, almost midnight, when they finally went up to their room. Gregory had been drinking steadily all evening. He swayed slightly as he unlocked their bedroom door.
The atmosphere inside the bedroom hit them like a muggy hot wall. The room had no air-conditioning, and the windows were screwed down so that they could not be opened.
Davina showered quickly, trying to ignore the headache tensing her scalp.
When she came out of the bathroom wearing her new robe and its matching shortie nightdress, the broderie anglaise threaded with pale blue satin ribbon, Gregory was lying on one of the twin beds.
He looked up at her and pronounced, ‘Very virginal. What are you going to do? Take it home complete with appropriate bloodstain to show Daddy?’
Davina stared at him in disbelief. She started to tremble a little, aware that something was wrong, but not knowing what.
After all her dreams, the reality of Gregory’s lovemaking shocked her into a silence that prevented everything other than one brief, sharp sound of pain leaving her lips as he possessed her.
She didn’t even cry. Not then, not until she was alone in her own single bed and Gregory was safely asleep, snoring in the other bed.
Was this what she had waited for … wanted … ached for … dreamed about? Was this, then, sex? Where was the exquisite build-up of sensation, the aching, consuming urgency of need, the quick, fierce pangs of sensation that exploded into that rhythmic starburst of pleasure she had known in her dreams and in waking from them? If this was sex, then what had they been?
When Davina returned from her honeymoon she felt immeasurably older—and wiser; the scales had not so much fallen from her eyes as been ripped from them.
After the fourth night of enduring Gregory’s increasingly uncomfortable penetration of her now painful body, on the fifth night she turned quietly and sadly away from him.
Gregory made no attempt to coax or persuade her, simply returning to his own bed with a small shrug.
Feeling shocked, distressed, and most of all guilty because she was not able to enjoy his lovemaking, not able to respond to him since at times she almost wished she were here on her own rather than here with him, she was relieved to return home and to escape into the familiar routine of her life there.
She had no close friends to whom she could confide her doubts and feelings of guilt and despair. Her family doctor was old, and a friend of her father’s, and even if she had been able to pluck up the courage to consult anyone about her growing dislike of sex she could never have explained to him the way she felt, the tension she felt whenever Gregory touched her, the dread almost.
It was her fault, of course. It had to be, and she knew that Gregory must be as disappointed as she was herself, even though he made no complaints.
She was glad when she had her period and was relieved of the necessity of having to lie tensely in bed praying that Gregory would not touch her, and yet even in her relief she was conscious of other feelings, of a heavy, leaden sense of somehow having lost something; of having been cheated of something.
She refused to allow herself to remember those tormenting pre-marriage dreams, the feeling she had experienced. She had just imagined them; they hadn’t been real. If they had been, she would have experienced them with Gregory, she told herself firmly.
* * *
It was on the night of their first wedding anniversary that Gregory told her that during their honeymoon he had made love to the courier.
The moment he told her she knew that it was the truth. He had come home late, too late for the special dinner she had prepared. Her father was out playing bridge. They had had a row. She had promised herself that tonight she would try, really try to overcome her dislike of sex, but then Gregory had come home late, and she had smelled the perfume on him immediately.
When she asked him whose it was he had told her about the girl he had been seeing. A girl who, unlike her, was good in bed and who knew how to please a man.
Shocked, distraught with despair, Davina had demanded to know why, then, he had married her.
Gregory had told her.
‘For your father’s money,’ he said brutally. ‘What the hell other reason could there be? Why the hell would a man … any man want you? And don’t bother going running to your father over this, Davina. He thinks you’re as useless as I do. Why do you think he was so keen to see us married? A divorce is the last thing he’d want.’
A divorce! The brutality of the ugly words hit her like a blow. Divorce was something that happened to other people. In Davina’s world it was still seen as a stigma, as a sign of failure on the part of a wife, as a wife and as a woman.
The very sound of the word terrified Davina. It would be a public acknowledgement of her failure.
It was only later, curled up into a tight ball of misery on her own side of their bed, that she confronted the true enormity of what Gregory had told her.
He did not love her. He had never loved her. She felt sick inside … not at his lack of love, but at her own folly in believing that he might have loved her. From this point onwards Davina had had to acknowledge that their marriage was a sham.
Outwardly their lives went on as normal. Occasionally Gregory made love to her, and when he did Davina gritted her teeth and prayed that she might get pregnant. They both wanted children, but for very different reasons.
Davina’s father had started dropping hints about grandchildren, but both Davina and Gregory knew that what he wanted was grandsons.
Gregory told Davina that it was her fault. She underwent a whole series of tests before a young and sympathetic female doctor suggested to her that the reason she had not conceived might lie with Gregory and not with her, since they could find no reason why she should not conceive.
Davina contemplated putting the doctor’s theory to Gregory with a certain amount of grim mental despair. She had changed from the girl who had married Gregory in such blissful ignorance, even though barely twenty-four months separated the woman she now was from that girl.
No, she would not tell Gregory what the doctor had said, she acknowledged wearily as she drove home.
Slowly she started to forge a life for
herself. A life apart from Gregory’s. She was a married woman now, not a girl.
She ran the house smoothly and efficiently, and, since both her father and Gregory rejected any suggestions she tried to make that she could fill in some of her spare time by working for the company, she looked for another avenue to occupy her.
Davina needed to keep busy. That was the only way she had of keeping at bay her despair over her marriage. If she just kept herself busy enough she did not need to think about her marriage at all. She did not need to think about the fact that Gregory was unfaithful to her. She knew that because he made no attempt to hide it now.
In front of her father he used the pretext of work as an excuse for his absences. To her in private he didn’t bother to conceal what he was really doing.
It shamed Davina more than she could bear to admit that she was actually sometimes glad, grateful that she was not the recipient of his sexual favours. Now she dreaded those times when he did touch her. Just occasionally, when her concentration lapsed, she sometimes remembered how she had felt before she married him, but she fought hard to keep that kind of weakness at bay. She was married to him, and at least he had the discretion to conduct his affairs outside their own small social circle. Davina had seen the way the other wives looked at Gregory, and she dreaded the day he returned any of their interest.
Sometimes she was sickened by her own weakness in staying with him, but she was too afraid, too conventional to break out of their marriage—and to what purpose, anyway? There was none. She was empty of all hope, all pleasure, all desire; a woman unwanted, unloved and undesired by the man to whom she was married.
But she was married and she must make the best of it. Behave like an adult and not a child.
* * *
Wryly Davina shook her head, dismissing her thoughts of the past. What was the point in dwelling on the past? She had chosen to marry Gregory, no one had forced her, and it was pointless wondering what her life might have been had she married someone like Giles. Gregory was dead now, and his death had brought her far more important things to worry about than the emotional barrenness of her own life.
It had been cowardice, and a too strongly rooted dread of offending against her father’s idea of convention, that had kept her in her marriage; it was that which had trapped her just as much as Gregory’s manipulation of her. She couldn’t blame everything on him.
Not even the failure of the company?
She closed her eyes tiredly. That was a different matter. What on earth had prompted him to get involved in something as volatile and dangerous as the currency market, and with money that should have been used to secure the future of the company and of its employees?
How much real chance did she have of finding a backer … an investor? Virtually none, the bank manager had told her grimly. These were difficult times for industry; money was tight, especially the kind of risk-money involved in supporting something like Carey’s.
Davina turned into the drive. She was home. Home; she smiled mirthlessly to herself as she stopped the car and got out.
She had lived in this house all her life and she felt very little affinity towards it. It had never truly been hers. During her father’s lifetime it had been his, and after his death … Well, he might have willed it to her, but she had never truly felt it belonged to her.
It had been Gregory, during one of his many affairs, who had produced the interior designer responsible for its present décor; she and Gregory had been having a passionate affair at the time, and even though she knew it was quite ridiculous, since she knew Gregory could never have had sex with her here at home, Davina felt somehow as though the very fabrics the woman had chosen were impregnated with the musky odour of sex.
She loathed the brilliant harsh colours the woman had chosen, the dramatic blacks and reds, the—to her—ugly rawness of so much colour and emotion. They made the rooms seem claustrophobic, reminding Davina of that awful honeymoon hotel with its cramped room and lack of air.
As she unlocked the front door and walked into the hall she wondered with a certain wry amusement if she was always to associate sex with a lack of breathable air. She also wondered even more wryly if, had it not been for Matt, she would ever have felt this faint stirring of curiosity about Giles. If all she had ever known was Gregory’s lovemaking, somehow she doubted it.
It had been a long time now since she had finally recognised that Gregory might not have been the skilled lover he had always claimed. Five years, to be precise.
But now wasn’t the time to think of Matt.
* * *
‘Lucy, I’m home.’
Giles tensed as he heard the sound of pans being slammed in the kitchen. Increasingly these days he dreaded coming home, dreaded the inevitable row that followed his arrival.
Ducking his head to avoid the house’s low beams, he walked slowly towards the kitchen. Outside the closed door, he paused, mentally willing away his involuntary mental image of opening the door and finding not Lucy, his wife, waiting there for him, her face sharp with temper, but Davina.
Davina, who always looked so cool and calm; Davina, whom he had never once heard raise her voice; Davina, who was always so relaxed, so easy to be with, her manner directly the opposite of that of his emotional, highly volatile wife.
He must stop thinking like this, he told himself fiercely as he took a deep breath and then pushed open the kitchen door.
Lucy was standing by the sink.
She was tall and slim, her thick, dark red curls a fiery glow of colour round her small pale face. Her eyes, green and almond-shaped, glittered with temper. Giles could almost see it vibrating through her tense body as she glared at him.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ she demanded. ‘You were supposed to be back at half-past five.’
‘I had to talk to Davina.’
‘Oh, you did, did you? And did you tell her that you were leaving? That she wasn’t going to have your broad manly shoulder to cry on for much longer?’
Giles winced at the bitterness, the acidity in her voice.
She had gone too far. She could see it from Giles’s face, and for a moment she was afraid. She had thought she had learned to control these rages, these outbursts of temper fuelled by fear and insecurity.
‘Well, I hope you’ve had something to eat,’ she told Giles, ‘because there certainly isn’t anything here for you. Half-past five, you said. It’s almost seven.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ Giles told her wearily. ‘I’ll make myself a sandwich later.’
‘Why bother?’ Lucy goaded him, driven relentlessly towards self-destruction by her fear and anguish. ‘Why not ring Davina and have dinner with her? She’s a wonderful cook … although rumour has it that she wasn’t much good in bed. Still, that won’t bother you, will it, darling? You haven’t had much interest in that department yourself recently, have you? Or is it just me you don’t want?’
‘Lucy, please,’ Giles begged her wearily. ‘Not now. I—’
‘You what? You don’t want to discuss it. All right, let’s discuss something else, then, shall we? Like your telling Davina that you weren’t going to stay. You did tell her that, didn’t you, Giles?’
Giles sighed. ‘I … I tried. Look,’ he said desperately when he saw Lucy’s face, ‘it won’t be for much longer. Only another few weeks. She needs me, Lucy.’
He knew the moment he said it that he had said the wrong thing, but as he watched the way Lucy’s face closed up, her eyes as hard and flat as dull river pebbles, he also knew it was too late to call back his words.
As Lucy slammed down the pan she had been holding and walked past him he said desperately, ‘Lucy, please try to understand …’
As she opened the door she turned on him, feral as a maimed cat. ‘I do understand,’ she told him. ‘I understand that Davina James is more important to you than I am.’ As she slammed the door the whole house seemed to shake.
It was an old house, parts of it dating back to the
fourteenth century, a long low-timbered building. They had bought it eight years ago when they first moved here shortly after their marriage.
They had been so happy then. So much, so passionately in love. When had it all changed? Why?
He had thought himself so blessed when he met Lucy, bemused by the way she had flirted with him, teased him and coaxed him, dazzled by her fire, by the life, the energy that filled and drove her. She had been a passionate lover, overwhelming all his hesitation, overwhelming him.
He had been thrilled, disbelieving almost when she had told him she wanted to marry him, shy, hesitant, unsure of him for the first time in their relationship. He had loved her so much then. And he still loved her now. At least, a part of him did; another part of him …
He tensed as he heard the front door slam and then the sound of her car engine starting up.
It had been unjust of her to accuse him of not wanting her any more. She had been the one to reject him, to turn away when he reached for her, to let him know without words that his body, his touch no longer aroused her.
Helplessly Giles sat down, his head in his hands. Maybe for the sake of his marriage he should have stood firm and told Davina that he could not stay on. Maybe he should have done, but the truth of it was that he hadn’t wanted to. The truth was that he had looked at Davina and had ached to take her in his arms, to hold her, to protect her. Davina was that kind of woman. She did not, as Lucy had always done, challenge his masculinity, she complemented it. Where Lucy was all fire and passion, Davina was all loving, comforting serenity, and something within him ached to have that serenity wrapped around him.
He was so tired. Tired of Lucy’s wild outbursts of temper, her volatility, of all the things about her that had once held him in such thrall. Including her passion? Her love for him?
Sick at heart, he groaned helplessly to himself.
CHAPTER FIVE