Ruthless Passion

by Penny Jordan

  ‘Of course, they’ve always resented me because I’m not one of them … because of my background.’ She was pacing the room again, bitterness corrosive in her voice, her eyes darkening with resentment.

  Saul tried to comfort her, to tell her that there would be other jobs, other successes, but she refused to listen to him, deriding him as being naïve, asking him how he would have felt in her shoes. When he tried to take hold of her she pushed him off.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Saul, don’t touch me,’ she told him. ‘Can’t you see that sex is the last thing I want right now? Men.’ Her mouth curled with disdain. ‘You really can’t think of anything else, can you?’

  The charge was so unjustified, the criticism and the contempt in her voice so acidic that Saul immediately stepped back from her. Sex had been the last thing on his mind. He had simply wanted to touch her, to hold her, memories of how, as a child, he had been comforted by his mother’s arms somehow motivating him.

  But Karen was making it plain that she didn’t want his comfort … that she didn’t want him.

  That night she slept in the spare room.

  He had work to do over the weekend. He offered to stay home with her, but she laughed bitterly and told him there was no point. For a month she stayed in the apartment, refusing to go anywhere or see anyone.

  Saul’s immediate boss commented to him that his wife was concerned because she had been trying to reach Karen by phone about a committee they were both on but had not been able to get in touch with her. He said nothing about her sacking from the agency, although everyone knew about it. The agency’s loss of the McCall account had made news in the financial Press.

  That night when Saul got home Karen was waiting for him. Bob Lucas’s wife had called round to see her, she announced. Bob Lucas was Saul’s boss, and he felt his body tense as he searched her face, looking for clues to see how she had reacted to this visit.

  ‘I think it’s time we moved out of New York, Saul,’ she told him. ‘There are some very nice properties available in Westchester and—’

  ‘Westchester?’ Saul stared at her. She had always claimed that she could never live anywhere but in the heart of the city, deriding those who chose to move outside it.

  ‘After all,’ she continued without looking at him, ‘once we start a family we’ll need more space.’

  ‘A family? But I thought you were going to look for another job …’

  ‘No,’ Karen told him evenly. ‘No, I’m not going to look for another job … How can I?’ she demanded savagely. ‘How can I after the way I’ve been humiliated and made to look a fool? What agency in their right minds would want me?’

  ‘Karen, you’re taking all this too personally,’ he told her gently. ‘I know what happened hurt, but … but everyone knows the agency was just using you … that they’d lost McCall’s account long before you—’

  ‘Before I what … before I really messed up for them? Oh, yeah, everyone knows that … and everyone’s laughing at me for being such a fool as to fall into their trap. I can’t go back, Saul … I can’t and I won’t.’

  Nothing he could say would change her mind. They could afford to move out to Westchester, she told him. It was the right kind of career move for him to make. She was twenty-five … the right age to start thinking about a family.

  All of what she said was quite true, but it still made Saul feel on edge and uneasy. Karen had always claimed that she wanted a career, she had always told him how important that was to her. It was not that he didn’t want children, he did, but he was afraid that in starting their family now they would be doing so for the wrong reasons, and he was also afraid of telling Karen so. There was something dangerously brittle about her these days … something that made him feel that he had to hold back … to move cautiously so as not to upset her.

  And so he gave in. They bought a house in Westchester, a move that was firmly applauded by the senior partners and rewarded with another increase in salary plus a slightly freer hand with his work and more responsibility.

  His peers, those other graduates from Harvard, who had the WASP advantages that Saul had not, and who had at first been inclined to rather look down on him, now watched him enviously and sometimes even a little resentfully. He was gaining the reputation not just of having an astute brain, but also of being prepared to use it and to devote himself exclusively to any given task. Dedicated, hard-working, ambitious—those were the words used to describe him. And more and more often Saul found that he was being approached by friends and acquaintances outside the firm for his advice, discreet, off-the-record advice that they could use to further their own careers. Saul was also gaining the reputation of being a good person to know.

  The house in Westchester was only small, but in one of the best residential districts, and it had a good-sized garden, or ‘yard’, as the Americans called it.

  Karen was soon pregnant and apparently content. She was kept busy with her charity work and assured Saul that she was happy.

  Saul could not be with her for Josephine’s birth. He was away on business. He hadn’t thought too much about how it would feel to become a father until he saw his small daughter for the first time.

  She was three days old, and as he looked at her he fell in love for the second time in his life, but this was a very different emotion from the one he had felt for Angelica. This was for his child … his daughter, a new life that was so much a part of him that when he reached out to touch her his eyes filled with tears and his body with protective pain.

  Karen was a perfect mother. Everyone said so. She wanted the best … the very best for her child. And so, of course, did Saul. He remembered his father telling him that one day he too would have a family to support … He remembered everything his father had warned him about the importance of doing well and achieving success. He earned a good salary but they had heavy expenses. He started to work longer and longer hours.

  Karen complained that he was never at home, and yet in the same breath she told him she had put Josephine’s name down for an exclusive and expensive nursery school.

  When Josephine was two years old one of the graduates who had been taken on at the same time as Saul got his partnership. Karen was bitterly resentful on Saul’s behalf. That partnership should have been his, she complained, but of course Saul did not have John Feltham Ill’s family connections.

  Something about her comment rubbed Saul raw inside. Was Karen blaming him because he had not been offered a partnership? Had he failed in some way … failed to meet the standards, the targets he had set himself? It was not good enough simply to do reasonably well; his father had told him that much. He had to succeed, to excel.

  Saul started looking around for another job. He found it in a thrusting, go-ahead new firm that had recently set up in business.

  On the strength of his increased salary they moved house, and when Josephine was two and a half years old Thomas was born.

  ‘Of course, it should have been the other way round,’ Karen complained petulantly after the birth. ‘Thomas should have been born first.’ And somehow, as he listened to her, Saul felt as though she was actually blaming him; that he had somehow failed her in giving her first a daughter and then a son instead of the other way round.

  Karen was once again the perfect mother. Saul, who had tried his best to involve himself with Josephine after her birth, but who had been firmly excluded from the nursery by his wife, found that with Thomas he was hanging back, allowing Karen to take charge, and, besides, he was away such a lot. The firm had so much business out on the West Coast that they had jokingly said that they might as well send Saul out there full-time.

  When he had time to think about it, which wasn’t very often, Saul was aware that he and Karen were drifting further and further apart; that they now virtually lived separate lives; that Karen seemed impatient and irritated by him when he was at home; that the children, especially Thomas, seemed not to respond to him at all.

  When he could
spare the time for a holiday, a vacation, it always seemed as though some all-important business would come up and that he would be forced to turn what should have been a complete break into a working holiday. But then, what option did he have if he was to succeed? And success was even more important to him now that he had a family to support.

  It was when Thomas was still a baby that, on a fleeting visit to Britain, a business visit into which he had managed to squeeze some time out to see his family, he discovered that his younger sister was pregnant … pregnant by a married man who, it seemed, had no intention of leaving his wife.

  She was so close to the end of her medical training, and he couldn’t stop himself from asking her, ‘Why … why, Christie? You could have had an abortion. You—’

  ‘I didn’t want one,’ she told him fiercely. ‘This is my child, Saul,’ she went on, holding her stomach. ‘My child.’

  ‘But your career …’

  She gave him a painful smile. ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Mum and Dad … do they know?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, not yet. I’m dreading telling them. They were so proud of me, especially Mum. I don’t think Dad ever really felt that it was quite the thing for a woman … to want to be a doctor.’

  It all seemed such a waste … such a crime. To have to give up all that she had worked for. Saul contemplated the future that lay ahead of his sister and her child, the child she was determined to have, and knew there was only one thing he could do.

  When Christie went home to tell her parents about her pregnancy, Saul went with her. Christie must not give up her training, he told them, and before he left to return to New York it was arranged that Christie would return home to live; that their mother would look after the baby once he or she arrived and that Christie would continue with her studies and take her final exams.

  ‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ she whispered weepily to him as she saw him off at Heathrow.

  ‘Thank me by succeeding,’ he told her quietly. ‘Thank me by working hard and qualifying.’ He hugged her and kissed her, but went back to New York with a hard lump of undissolved pain burning inside him.

  Karen was not pleased when she heard what he had done. With two children of their own to bring up and educate, they could hardly afford to take on the responsibility for a third—a fourth if you counted the cost of supporting his sister through what remained of her medical schooling.

  Her voice became shrill and sour as she yelled at him. She had lost weight, and, where she had once looked elegant, she now looked thin, her face and voice marred with dissatisfaction.

  As he looked at her and recognised that dissatisfaction Saul knew that it was his fault, that he had somehow failed as a provider … a husband … a man. That he had not been successful enough.

  He started to look around for a better job. After all, they needed the extra money. What he wanted now was to find a business where ultimately he would be the one in control. When he was head-hunted by Sir Alex, he thought that he had found it.

  Sir Alex owned the Davidson Corporation. He had no son to succeed him, he told Saul openly, and he was looking for someone he could groom to one day take over for him. In Saul he thought that he might have found that someone.

  Saul thought so too. He brought all his formidable intelligence and skills to bear on attacking the problems of turning Davidson’s from a company that was reasonably successful to one that was the most successful in its field.

  The financial Press showered him with plaudits and praise. Sir Alex rewarded him with a generous profit-sharing scheme, a large office, a new car and a very generous salary, but he did not relinquish control.

  What he did do, though, was to agree to one of Saul’s suggestions that it might be an advantageous time to reorganise the London office. Sir Alex had two power-bases: the office he ran from New York, and the London end, which was not performing as well as could have been hoped. What Saul had not bargained for was that he would be put in charge of that office.

  By now he was well versed enough in office politics to listen, narrow-eyed, to Sir Alex’s suggestion and to wonder cynically if this was Sir Alex’s way of demoting him. As he had quickly discovered once he joined the company, he was not the first ambitious young man in whom Sir Alex thought he might have found his ‘natural successor’. Not the first. But he intended that he should be the last.

  Karen was furious when he gave her the news. She and the children were established in the American way of life. She had neither the intention nor the desire to move to London, she told him flatly.

  Saul was stunned. He tried to reason with her, to point out the advantages of the move, but Karen refused to listen. Saul was baffled and infuriated by her attitude. He was doing this for her, he told her furiously, for her and for their children. Karen remained adamant. She was not going to London. Saul would have to go without her. After all, there was no real guarantee that the venture was going to be a success.

  Saul interpreted her comments as a lack of belief in his ability to succeed; a questioning of his ability to protect the financial future of herself and his children. It resurrected all his old feelings of anxiety and tension. He had to prove himself; to prove that he was successful and that he could be even more successful.

  Perhaps Karen was right to refuse to go with him. Perhaps she was right to demand that he prove to her and to the world that he could achieve the targets he had set himself.

  Saul went to London without Karen. Six months later she filed for divorce. Their marriage had been failing for a long time, she told him calmly when she made her announcement at Christmas. Saul had flown home on Christmas Eve. The Westchester house, the new one Karen and the children had moved into when Saul got his first year’s profits from the company, had a long shrub-bordered drive, and was well set back from the road, a 1920s Tudor Gothic edifice made respectable with its coating of ivy. Discreet outdoor lighting sprang to life as he drove towards the house. When the front door opened he could see the Christmas tree in the large square hallway. It was illuminated with a myriad tiny plain white lights, the tree itself decorated in traditional reds and golds, satin ribbons tied to the branches, no trace of inelegant glitter anywhere in sight. The rich red carpet in the hallway gave the room a warm glow, subtly patterned heavy curtains hung at the windows either side of the doorway, and in the ornate wooden-frame fireplace a log fire glowed.

  The room was full of the rich, warm scent of spices … of Christmas itself, and yet as he stepped inside the house Saul felt cold; felt a deep inner iciness, a chill of foreboding that took him instantly back to his childhood, back to his memories of those confusing, painful things he had felt when his father talked to him about the importance of success.

  Over dinner Josey was subdued, turning to her mother before answering his questions. Even baby Tom refused to hold out his chubby arms to be held by his father.

  When Saul pushed away his meal, barely touched, Karen raised an eyebrow, her mouth compressing with irritation. He shook his head. He had suddenly lost his appetite; he felt alien, out of place, an intruder. The doll he had bought for Josephine in London was, he realised, far too impersonal a gift for the withdrawn girl sitting watching him with such cool, wary eyes, and as for the train set he had bought for Tom … Obviously the boy was still too young to appreciate that present, and there was every likelihood that Saul wouldn’t be around to see him eventually start to play with it. Saul wasn’t happy with his thoughts.

  ‘Uncle Richard said he would come by to take me to the park on Tuesday,’ Josephine announced to her mother. ‘He said to tell you that he’d drop by on Boxing Day and that you weren’t to forget that he was taking you to the Feldmans’ for drinks.’

  A faint glow of colour seemed to illuminate Karen’s pale face as she removed Saul’s plate. She was still thin; she had never regained the weight she had lost before the children’s births, and the sport she played had given her a taut suppleness that somehow Saul found depressing.
As he watched her he contrasted her almost boyish figure with the round softness of the girl she had been when he first knew her.

  She was wearing her hair in a different style and she had changed her make-up. She looked, he realised with a small start of shock, far more American than British; she had lost that difference, that individuality which had once so clearly marked her out. She was wearing a silk shirt and a plain wool skirt, and her skin had the cool year-round tan of someone who spent time and money on maintaining her appearance. She looked … she looked groomed, he decided as he hunted for the right word … Too groomed. Impossible to think of taking this elegant, disdainful woman to bed and making love to her. If he did, it would no doubt be an antiseptic, unappealing process, a dutiful coupling after which she would retire to her bathroom to fastidiously and thoroughly remove the physical evidence of his intimacy with her.

  There was a raw, uncomfortable sensation in his chest, a sense of being weighed down … a depression … an awareness of pain … of failure.

  Karen was saying something about taking the children to Aspen during the Christmas vacation. Saul frowned and started to tell her that he doubted that he would be able to go with them; that he would have to return to London virtually before the New Year.

  ‘Uncle Richard’s coming with us.’

  He focused on Josey’s face as the girl delivered the aggressive statement, suddenly sharply aware of the hostility emanating from everyone else in the room.

  ‘Josephine … I want to speak to your father on my own. Why don’t you take Tom and go down to the den and watch television for a while?’

  Quietly, without looking at him, Josephine slid out of her seat, gathered up Tom and headed for the door.

  Almost as soon as it was closed Karen told him coolly, ‘I want a divorce.’