Time Fuse

by Penny Jordan

  Where before she had grimly refused to allow herself to think about him or his family she had now developed an appetite to know everything about them. Occasionally after a weekend he would mention various visits from his daughters and their families. Emily, the eldest, had three children; two boys and a girl. Both boys were still at school, but the daughter, Camilla, at sixteen was apparently something of a problem. ‘The only person who seems to get any response from her is Piers,’ Sir Gerald confided one Monday morning. He was looking particularly worn and a sharp pang of concern for him shot through her. Oh, how creepingly dangerous was this affection for him she had scarcely expected to feel and yet which at times threatened to overcome common sense and caution; demanding the right to be voiced.

  ‘It is very difficult for her, of course,’ he added with grandfatherly indulgence. ‘She is nowhere near as clever as her brothers, but still bright enough to be aware of it, I’m afraid. Emily and her husband are divorced.’ He grimaced faintly. ‘They parted when Camilla was at a very vulnerable age. The more I see of the effects of divorce the less sure I am about its efficacy. Perhaps our ancestors had the right idea after all when they married for less romantic reasons. Love, which in these supposedly enlightened times, is often nothing more than acute sexual lust is not any lasting basis for a relationship. I expect you find me very cynical,’ he continued wryly, ‘but I’m afraid the older one gets and the more one observes of life the more convinced I am that the human race possesses an instinct for self-destruction that is truly appalling.’

  He caught her expression and smiled faintly. ‘Am I depressing you, Selina? I forget sometimes how young you are; just a few years older than Camilla, and yet you have a maturity that often makes me think we’re of the same generation. The family unit is still a very strong institution… Dulcie and I are closer now perhaps than we ever were as children.’

  ‘I’ve always wished I wasn’t an only one.’ The admission was out before she could silence it; the echo of a passionate childhood desire to have someone to share the trauma of those years with.

  ‘You have no family at all?’ His voice was compassionate and Selina wished passionately that they had never entered these dangerous conversational waters. ‘None,’ she told him crisply, and then more as a warning to herself than anything else, she added. ‘Somewhere I have a father, but doubt that he ever gives any thought to me.’ Bitter pain darkened her eyes as she spoke, unaware that Piers had walked into the room and overheard her last words.

  When she did see him, humiliation that she should have witnessed a betrayal of her feelings sent colour to her pale skin, her desire to escape his presence so great that she was unaware of his frowning concentration on her comment.

  Work kept her mind occupied during the day. Occasionally she spoke to Dulcie Gresham when she telephoned to speak to her brother, but there had been no repeat invitations. No doubt Piers had advised his mother against involving herself socially with the help, she thought bitterly.

  One Monday morning Sir Gerald arrived in chambers looking particularly fatigued. They had had the whole family over for the weekend, he explained to Selina, as it had been his wife’s birthday. ‘Grandchildren are delightful, but exhausting,’ he told Selina wryly, as he settled down to work, ‘but Mary adores them and loves nothing more than a family “do”.’

  Maybe so, but couldn’t she see how tired and strained her husband was looking, Selina wondered, and then berated herself for the thought and for the emotional involvement behind it. What was she doing working here, allowing herself to be drawn into a relationship which could only ever be one-sided? Did she always want to sit on the sidelines of life, watching while others participated?

  Piers came in with a bulky folder under his arm while they were talking. ‘The Hargreaves case comes up next week,’ he told his uncle abruptly. ‘There’s a couple of points I’m concerned about.’

  The case in question was the divorce he was handling for a friend of his mother’s—a woman whose husband was deserting her for a girl twenty years younger, and Selina shivered uncontrollably as she was forced to sit and listen to the two men discussing the case, the relationship between the three main parties too close to that which had existed between Sir Gerald and her own mother for her to listen with equanimity.

  ‘Sophie Hargreaves is distraught,’ Selina heard Piers telling Sir Gerald. ‘The girl in question is the daughter of a friend—her own father has recently been declared bankrupt and no doubt she sees Alan as a handy substitute. He, poor fool, is too besotted to realise the truth.’

  Sir Gerald’s mild, ‘The girl might genuinely care for him, Piers,’ was greeted with a harsh disclaimer. ‘I doubt it very much. Take away his bank balance and you take away the prime cause of her “love”. In five years time, if she’s still with him, he’ll be bitterly regretting it. He’d have been far better keeping his marriage intact and paying for his pleasure on the side—he’d have got a damn sight better value for money that way.’

  ‘Piers, you’re a cynic,’ Sir Gerald told him. He looked at Selina and smiled wryly, ‘Selina, my dear, I’m afraid my sex is always very vulnerable in its vanity and thirst for feminine flattery. And the older we get, I’m afraid the more vulnerable we become.’

  She suspected that it was an oblique reference to his own involvement with her mother, and her heart started to pound. She felt sick and giddy and was overcome by an urgent desire to escape from the office. She couldn’t sit there under Piers’ sharp critical eye and not betray what she was feeling. She had never had any illusions about her mother, but in the last few years she had come to accept her weaknesses without taking the guilt of them on her own shoulders, and now in the space of a mere half an hour all that guilt was back; she felt almost as though she were her mother; the type of woman whom Piers so clearly despised; the woman who had tried to use their sexual relationship to force from her father the security of marriage and the ability to enjoy his wealth.

  The papers had been cruel in their denouncement of her, and she had read every single one. What she had read had left her scarred and hurt and she shuddered now, wondering what Piers’ reaction would be if she stood up and announced her identity. Some wilful part of her almost wanted her to do it; to shout it as loud as she could; to throw off the burden of guilt and say this is what I am, and I’m not ashamed of it.

  But she was; deep down inside she was ashamed. She smiled grimly to herself… The sins of the fathers…or in this case of the mother… The man who wrote that truly knew what he was saying.

  As the summer recess drew nearer the pace of work hotted up. Sir Gerald was often absent from the office at court. Occasionally Selina went with him and found these occasions fascinating and exciting, although occasionally she wondered if she would have had the detachment necessary to make a first-rate barrister.

  Sir Gerald often discussed the technique of his colleagues with her, and one day as they were setting out for court he took her by surprise by saying, ‘Piers is in court today. If our case finishes early, as I think it might, we might go and listen to his. He’s a first rate counsel and he’s lucky in that he possesses a rare additional gift; he has an intuition about people that’s almost faultless. I say almost because Piers is as vulnerable to the old prejudice as the rest of the human race.’

  Selina had a first-hand opportunity to see just what Sir Gerald meant later that day. As he had predicted his own case closed just before lunch and after the recess he directed her to the court where Piers’ was sitting.

  It was the first time she had seen him dressed in his court robes and the sight of him sitting in consultation with his colleagues brought a tension to the pit of her stomach that was instantly betraying.

  Pity the poor defendant who had to face him, she thought shivering slightly. In his black robes, he looked like some dark avenging Lucifer. Telling herself she was being ridiculously fanciful, she tried to concentrate on the case. It was a rape case and a particularly unpleasant one at that. Th
e girl, an eighteen-year-old, was pregnant and was claiming that she had been raped by a friend of the family who had called round when her parents were absent.

  The man in question, dressed formally in a business suit, well-groomed but pale, was Piers’ client. He spoke in a low voice and displayed a surprising firmness when it came to resisting the verbal thrusts of the prosecution.

  The girl, on the other hand, looked frail and heart-rendingly defenceless. Her swollen stomach was almost grotesque against the acute thinness of the rest of her body. She broke down twice during the questioning of her own counsel, and Selina felt her muscles clench in protest when Piers approached her and began his cross examination.

  It was a nightmare that seemed to go on without end, punctuated by the sobs of the girl in the witness box. At one point Selina thought she would be unable to endure any more. She longed to stand up and demand that the torment was stopped. How could these others sit here and listen impassively to what Piers was doing? He questioned her ruthlessly, naming several youths who had claimed to be her lovers. Her innocence, her character, were ruthlessly torn to shreds and in the end Selina was not all surprised when the jury found for the defence.

  Afterwards, when Piers joined them, she could hardly contain her feelings. While Sir Gerald was congratulating him on his win she looked the other way.

  ‘Something wrong, Selina?’

  How smooth and self-assured his tone, like a cat fed on cream, and it sickened her to know that the cream was the total humiliation of a member of her own sex.

  ‘Forgive me if I don’t add my congratulations,’ she said brittlely too wrought up to remember that she was a mere employee. ‘How could you do that?’ she added fiercely when he simply looked at her, watching her. ‘How could you destroy that girl like that?’

  ‘What I said was simply the truth…’

  ‘That because she had had other lovers she could not possibly be raped?’ The bitterness inside her spilled over into her voice.

  She saw his lips tighten. ‘I’m not such a chauvinist, Miss Thorn, no matter what you might think. In this case I assure you the man was innocent.’

  ‘How do you know?’ she demanded scornfully. ‘What makes you so sure you are right? Your instincts?’

  She caught the way he exhaled through gritted teeth as she flung the last comment at him and she knew he hadn’t forgotten, any more than she had, his accusations to her.

  ‘Yes…plus the fact that not ten minutes ago in the Judge’s chamber she broke down and admitted to her parents that the child was a fellow schoolmate’s. Her parents didn’t even realise she was having sex with anyone, and too frightened to admit the truth she made up a cock-and-bull story about my client, when she realised she was not going to be able to hide her pregnancy for much longer.’

  Selina was dumb-founded. She had been completely taken in by the girl’s story and it galled her to know that she had been deceived. ‘Which of us is guilty of chauvinism now?’ Piers asked quietly, before turning on his heel and striding away.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she apologised to Sir Gerald.

  ‘No need to be,’ he assured her easily. ‘Rape cases are notoriously hard to handle. In this case Piers played a hunch and was proved right…that’s what I meant about him being a first-rate barrister.’

  ‘And if he had been defending the girl,’ Selina asked slowly, ‘would he then have attempted to conceal the truth?’

  ‘No, knowing Piers. I suspect he would have gone for a settlement in Judge’s chambers—always supposing he had allowed the case to get that far. A barrister is always at liberty to refuse a brief, and I’ve known Piers refuse a fair few. I know you and he don’t always hit it off,’ he told her with a smile, ‘but under that harsh exterior, he can be surprisingly emotional.’ He gave her a brief look and smiled, ‘Don’t judge him too harshly. Life hasn’t been entirely easy for him. He was very close to his father and his death hit him hard, and then…’ He broke off to return the greeting of an acquaintance and the conversation was never resumed. What had he been going to say, Selina wondered that night as she prepared for bed.

  Piers was thirty-three years old and as far as she knew had no permanent relationship in his life. His mother had spoken of her wish to see him married and he was so devastatingly sexually attractive that she could not imagine his single state was anything other than voluntary, but why? He was a complex invulnerable man who, for reasons of his own, had set up many barriers against her sex, and who had also instigated himself as her enemy, she reminded herself. He didn’t like her and he didn’t trust her. But he did desire her; and she knew now with a sudden flash of intuition that he had told her so in order that he could transfer the burden of controlling that desire from himself to her and that to allow him to express it physically to her now was to accept his parameters for such a relationship. That meant she knew that it would be totally devoid of emotion or commitment; that it would simply be a satisfaction of physical lust.

  A long shudder passed through her body as she forced herself to admit how vulnerable she was to him. There were times when she hated him so acutely that she longed to lash out and hurt him, but that hatred was simply the reverse side of a coin whose other side was love. But how could she love him? She tried to examine her emotions logically. What did she know of him after all, other than what she saw; what was there about him that drew her to him? He was physically attractive yes—indeed to describe him as attractive was a gross understatement—devastatingly male would be a closer description, and yet it was not simply his looks. Then what? His personality? Was she really so masochistic that she could only respond emotionally to the type of man who was bound to hurt her? There was no future in loving him, she knew that. She got up and moved restlessly round her small sitting room.

  Even if by some remote possibility he should come to desire her to the extent that he was prepared to forego his suspicions of her, how could she tell him the truth? The moment he learned her identity, he would reject her, she was convinced of it. She shivered, and clutched her arms around her in a defensive motion. If she was wise she would simply smother what she felt for him; destroy it in its early stages before it took too powerful a hold on her. She had always sworn she would not make herself vulnerable through love and yet here she was abandoning everything she had ever taught herself, and for a man who could never want or love her in return.

  As the summer recess drew nearer Selina could feel her tension increasing, and not purely because of her feelings for Piers. During the summer Sir Gerald worked from home. When she had accepted the job she had known this and discounted it as a problem. Now she was not so sure. She had met one of his daughters and had liked her, but how would she cope with meeting his wife; with continuing her deception in the face of his legal family?

  Slowly she had come to terms with the reality of working for her father, but how would she feel when she saw him against the background of his family, giving to his other children the love he had never given her? Would she be jealous? Bitter? Coming to know him as an adult she had been surprised by her own lack of resentment towards him; he had a quick mind and a compassion for his fellow beings that warmed her; they shared a sense of humour and he often evinced a moral code so much in accordance with her own that she suspected he, too, had not come unscathed through his relationship with her mother. At times the urge to talk to him about the past to find out if indeed he ever thought about her, was almost unbearable, but she always managed to contain herself, reminding herself of Pandora’s box and the havoc that opening it created.

  ‘I shan’t be sorry when recess starts,’ he told her one Wednesday afternoon. ‘I’m beginning to think Mary is right when she tells me I’m not as young as I was.’

  Selina had noticed the lines of strain round his eyes and it worried her that he should admit to being tired; normally he resisted every suggestion that he might be overworking. She also noticed that he was massaging his left arm, and hideous thoughts of heart attack
s flooded her brain.

  ‘You’ve got a free afternoon today,’ she reminded him, ‘why don’t you take a few hours off?’

  ‘Umm…that might not be a bad idea. I could take the papers for the Easton case with me and study them. In fact I think I’ll do that. I’ll be able to concentrate better away from the office.’

  During the week he lived in a service flat in St John’s Wood, and normally his wife lived with him, Selina knew, but the previous weekend she had elected to stay down in Dorset to get the house ready for a summer influx of grandchildren.

  When he had gone she settled down to her own work, trying not to think about Piers, who had been away for several days. He was due back tomorrow and as always at the thought of seeing him, her stomach muscles tensed.

  It was just gone five-thirty and she was about to leave when her phone rang. She picked it up, slightly surprised to hear Sir Gerald’s voice. ‘Selina, my dear, I’ve just discovered that I didn’t bring some of the papers home with me, and I rather need to discuss them with Piers. I’m seeing him tonight, he’s calling round here later, could I ask you to bring them round for me—there’s no immediate rush. Go home and have something to eat first, if you prefer, Piers isn’t due until around ten.’

  After giving her instructions on where to find what he wanted Sir Gerald rang off. Selina found the papers without any undue difficulty and putting them in an envelope, finished clearing her desk.

  Because they were busy she had worked through her lunch hour and the thought of waiting to eat until after she had been to St John’s Wood was unappealing, so she decided she would eat first and then take a taxi to Sir Gerald’s.

  Although it was only May they had been having a brief spell of hot weather and her small flat felt stuffy and overwarm. The hunger that had been gnawing at her since mid-afternoon vanished in the clammy heat, but she forced herself to prepare a small salad and after she had eaten it, went into her bathroom to have a shower. She was very particular about eating well-balanced meals. Living alone was a constant temptation to snack, and although she had no weight problem, she was very conscious of the importance of a good diet. Her shower helped to revive her, leaving her feeling cooler and more relaxed. It was silly to feel so wrought up simply because she was visiting her father’s home, she told herself, but the nervous butterflies would not go away.