To Tame a Proud Heart

by Cathy Williams

  ‘I was a fool,’ she said dully. ‘You’re right. I don’t think before I act. Nobody else—’ Imogen, for instance, she thought, with a twinge of pain ‘—would have rushed out of the room and ended up tripping down eight steps to the beach.’

  ‘Stop whipping yourself. It’s done. We just have to wait and see what happens in the morning.’

  ‘If I lose this baby, it’ll never be done for me.’ She fiddled with her fingers, anxiously clasping and unclasping them, and he reached out and placed his hand over hers, stilling the worried little movements.

  ‘Don’t think the worst,’ he said gruffly, but she could tell from the tone of his voice that he had already thought of that outcome himself.

  ‘I have to. We both do.’ She raised her eyes and looked at him evenly. ‘We got married for the sake of the baby, and if there’s no baby…’ She paused because she knew that if she carried on her voice would break. ‘If there’s no baby,’ she continued, taking a deep breath, ‘then what’s the point of the marriage?’

  He didn’t say a word. He stood up and prowled through the room, his hands thrust into his pockets—a tall, commanding, half-naked figure who looked as though he belonged to myth and not reality.

  ‘I don’t deal in hypotheses,’ he said finally, stopping at the foot of the bed and staring at her intently.

  ‘We can’t pretend that it’s not a possibility. You always tell me that I don’t like facing unpleasantness, and I suppose you’re right. I haven’t got your strength.’

  ‘You underestimate yourself.’

  ‘Do I?’ She smiled sadly. ‘I don’t think so. I feel as though I’m growing up at long last. As though I’ve spent my life inside a cocoon, and now I’m slowly having to break out of it.’

  ‘You make that sound like a tragic inevitability,’ he said, returning to sit on the bed next to her once again. ‘There’s nothing wrong with living in a cocoon.’

  ‘Don’t humour me, Oliver.’

  ‘When I was young,’ he said, ‘I sometimes used to wonder what it would be like not to have to struggle for everything. I used to wonder about you sometimes.’

  ‘About me?’

  ‘You. I knew about you from my mother. I knew when you were born. I wondered what sort of life you led on the other side of the tracks.’

  ‘A very different one from yours,’ she said quietly. She wished that she had known him then. She wished that she could have been a fly on the wall and watched him as he grew from boy to man. Had he always had that supreme self-confidence, or had necessity given birth to it as he’d got older? A bit of both, she suspected. He had been born to succeed, with or without a moneyed background.

  ‘We came from different worlds, Oliver, and that’s where we must return. If the baby is lost there’s nothing at all to keep us together.’ She had to turn away when she said that because if she hadn’t she would have burst into tears.

  ‘You can have your freedom whatever happens,’ he said abruptly, standing up again and walking restlessly across the floor, as though the energy in him couldn’t be confined.

  ‘I can?’ There was no hope there in her voice, no exultation at this, what she had wanted all along, just despair at the thought that her freedom meant nothing to her without him near. He misread her question, though, because when he spoke his voice was cool but with an underlying savagery.

  ‘Will you have a better rest now?’ he asked, raking his fingers through his hair. ‘Go to sleep, Francesca,’ he said. ‘We have to be at the hospital for nine, and that’s less than four hours away. I’m going out for a swim.’

  ‘A swim?’

  ‘That’s right.’ His mouth twisted. ‘You’ll fall asleep quicker if I’m not in the bed next to you.’

  ‘But you must be tired as well,’ she protested, and he gave her a crooked, mirthless smile.

  ‘You’d be surprised how easy it is to get used to having next to no sleep. I’ve spent my life working so hard that sleep is a pastime that I can usually take or leave.’ He stood at the door and said as an afterthought, ‘What were you doing while I was working my way up and doing without sleep?’

  ‘Sleeping, I should think.’

  He laughed and looked at her, and she thought for a split second that he was going to add something more, but he just said, ‘I’ll be back shortly. Get some rest.’

  Then he was gone, and all semblance of laughter died from her face. She lay back against the pillows with her hands on her stomach and stared upwards at the ceiling.

  There was the hurdle of the scan to get over, but all in all she decided that she should be feeling relieved. All that agonising over whether she had done the right thing in accepting his proposal of marriage, all that worry at the prospect of living with a man who didn’t and couldn’t return her love—it was gone now. She was free. She could return to England without the thought of that dark presence filling her life until she could stand it no longer.

  But she wasn’t relieved. She lay there, trying to imagine a life without Oliver Kemp in it, and she couldn’t. It was as though he had embedded himself deep inside her—too deep for her to prise him out.

  She finally drifted into a sleep of sorts, and was awakened by Oliver shaking her by her shoulder and telling her that it was time to get up. She hadn’t heard him enter the room, but he must have been there for a while because he had showered and changed into a pair of trousers and a striped short-sleeved shirt.

  ‘I must have a shower,’ she told him.

  ‘Be quick, then. The taxi arrives in fifteen minutes.’

  So she hurriedly showered, noticing that she was still bleeding and already preparing herself mentally for what that meant. She wished that the hotel doctor, who had seemed so kind and efficient, was going to be there.

  ‘Come on,’ Oliver called through the door, and she hastily plaited her hair back and put on a light denim dress.

  ‘Feeling better?’ he asked as she joined him in the bedroom and grabbed her bag from the chair, and she shook her head.

  ‘I’m dreading this,’ she replied honestly. ‘I’m not strong enough for this.’

  ‘I’m strong enough for the both of us,’ he murmured almost inaudibly, taking her hand and ushering her out of the room and out towards the taxi which was waiting downstairs.

  When they arrived they found that the hospital was small, but they were efficiently shown through to the waiting room, by which time Francesca’s nervousness was almost palpable.

  There was a stack of outdated magazines on the table next to her, and she idly picked one up and began flicking through it, hardly seeing the print at all, very much aware of Oliver sitting next to her, and wondering what he was thinking.

  The room was only half-full. Two heavily pregnant women sat opposite her, talking in their low, lilting accents, and next to them was a young girl who couldn’t have been more than fifteen and who looked as though she should have been in school instead of in the maternity wing of a hospital.

  When the doctor called her name Francesca automatically took Oliver’s hand, which seemed to be waiting for her, and they went into the darkened cubicle.

  ‘Relax,’ the doctor told her. ‘Legs flat on the bed, please. No need to be scared; this isn’t going to hurt.’

  He swivelled the machine round so that she and Oliver could both see it, and there it was. Fuzzy, tiny, but moving vigorously, and every single word the doctor said from then on was lost, because her whole mind seemed to have been taken over by the image on the screen in front of her. Her baby. Their baby.

  ‘Looks fine,’ the doctor said, not feeling the miracle that was unfolding underneath his blunt-headed instrument; it was just another scan in a morning full of them.

  ‘I won’t lose it?’ she asked timidly, and he smiled at her for the first time.

  ‘Shouldn’t think so. But I’d try and stop throwing myself down steps, if I were you.’

  Outside, fifteen minutes later, the sun was beating down. The taxi-driver had been ins
tructed to wait, however long it took, and he was fanning himself with a newspaper, his windows rolled down.

  Francesca looked around her. The world, she thought, was suddenly a wonderful place.

  ‘Francesca,’ Oliver said, once they were inside the taxi, ‘we have to talk.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  BUT they didn’t talk. Not inside the taxi. They travelled the distance in silence. Francesca stared out the window and saw the bright green trees, the bright blue sky, the picture-postcard prettiness of the scenery, but her thoughts were travelling round slowly in her head.

  She knew what Oliver wanted to talk about—arrangements. They would have to discuss how the marriage was going to be annulled. She had no idea how one went about dissolving a marriage which had not even survived the honeymoon, but she didn’t think that it would be difficult. A few forms to sign, perhaps, and then it would all be over barely before it had started.

  Except, she thought, it had started long ago. It had started at the very moment that she had walked into that office—the very moment that she had set eyes on Oliver Kemp and something deep inside her had been ignited. And it would carry on too—long, long after a piece of paper told her that it no longer existed.

  The taxi travelled slowly back to the hotel, and in the back seat of the car the distance between them seemed like a yawning chasm. Oliver was as preoccupied with his thoughts as she was with hers.

  When the taxi-driver finally stopped outside the hotel and they got out she hovered indecisively by the car, waiting for Oliver, not knowing what she should do now.

  ‘There’s a bar overlooking the pool,’ he said, not looking directly at her but taking her elbow, as though he thought that she might fall down without the support, although in fact she felt fine physically. The reassurance of the scan had given her a stamina that had not been there earlier on.

  They walked to the bar, sat down at a small round table, and when their drinks had been brought to them she said in a rush, because she wanted to get it off her chest, ‘I know what you want to discuss—arrangements for ending this and for visiting the baby once it’s been born. Can’t we leave it until we get back to England, though?’

  It seemed horribly incongruous to be discussing things like that with the sun beating down, with lazy couples lounging by the pool, with the sound of the sea a distant, lapping noise, with birds flitting from flower to flower. The worst thing about beauty was that it made ugly things seem so much uglier.

  Oliver didn’t answer. He stood up, as though his restless energy needed some kind of release, and leaned against the veranda railing, staring down at the pool below. Then he turned to her, with his back against the railing, and said harshly, ‘I’m not waiting until we get back to England. I can’t.’ His voice was flat and aggressive.

  He had ordered a glass of fruit juice and he took a long sip, then carefully placed it on the table in front of him. She had ordered some variety of fruit cocktail, which had arrived complete with pieces of fruit, a miniature umbrella—the sort that children adored—and a cocktail stirrer, so she now stirred, staring down into the glass. She wished that he would sit down. When he loomed over her like that he made her nervous.

  ‘Look,’ he said abruptly, ‘I can’t talk here.’ He picked up the glass again and drained the contents, and when she raised her eyes to his it was with more curiosity than nervousness.

  There was something about his manner—something edgy and slightly defensive which she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  ‘But—’ she began.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk on the beach.’

  ‘In these shoes?’

  She stuck one sandal-clad foot out and he snarled roughly, ‘Leave the damn shoes by one of the tables on the beach.’

  ‘There’s no need to shout,’ she snapped, standing up.

  He muttered darkly, under his breath, ‘Sometimes I think it’s the only way to get through to you.’

  ‘Thanks a lot! Any more compliments before we go?’

  ‘I blame you,’ he said almost inaudibly, moving off while she hurried to keep pace with his long strides. ‘You always manage to turn me into someone I can hardly recognise.’

  ‘So it’s all my fault now, is it?’ she threw at him. ‘Will you stop running?’ A couple who had been passing them from the beach to the hotel looked round at her tone of voice, and out of the corner of her eyes she saw the man smile—a sympathetic, amused smile that seemed to say, Women—aren’t they always the same? Take them on an expensive holiday and they still manage to find something to shout about.

  She lowered her voice and said, catching up with him, ‘I’m not racing behind you on the beach. I don’t see why we couldn’t just stay at the bar and thrash this out, since you insist that it can’t possibly wait until we get back to England.’

  He didn’t answer. He walked across to one of the umbrella-shaded beach tables and kicked off his shoes, then he rolled up his jeans a few times, stripped off his shirt and looked at her.

  That, she thought, was another thing she wished he wouldn’t do—look at her. She could never get her thoughts straight when he focused those amazing light eyes on her. She removed her shoes, then walked alongside him with her hands clasped behind her back.

  It was a very long beach. Just around the area of the bar, and by the sun-loungers, there were clumps of people lying on loungers or on towels on the sand, and a few in the water, but further along the beach was empty—an endless strip of unexplored white sand.

  She wondered vaguely why people seemed to group themselves together on a beach when there was enough of it to spread themselves out, to lose themselves almost. Did they feel more secure if there were other people close by?

  Oliver clearly did not believe in the group mentality. He was walking towards the far end of the beach, and she fell into step with him, unwilling to break the silence—not because she had nothing to say but because there was an absorbed tension in his body, in the tautness of his muscles.

  ‘I told you that everything would be all right with the baby, didn’t I?’ he said, in an accusing, argumentative voice, and she looked at him from under her lashes.

  ‘Why do you want to fight with me?’ she asked. ‘Do we have to? Can’t we sort this all out in a civilised manner?’

  ‘No, we cannot!’

  They were far away now from the sun lizards, whose prostrate brown bodies were dots in the distance. He went across to a log and sat down, then he began doodling on the white sand with a thin twig.

  It brought back a rush of memories for her—memories of a holiday in the sun with her father, when she had spent hours doing exactly the same thing—drawing on the sand, fascinated at the thought that everything she drew would be obliterated by the wash of the water.

  Oliver, she suddenly thought, would make a wonderful father. She closed her mind to that anguished realisation and sat next to him on the log, prodding her toes into the warm sand and making a little mound like a molehill, which she promptly flattened only to start again.

  ‘My father will be able to recommend a good lawyer…’ she began, faltering.

  ‘There will be no lawyer,’ he bit out harshly, with his face averted from her.

  ‘You mean that we’ll do it all ourselves?’ She frowned and looked across to him, and he met her eyes unwaveringly.

  ‘I don’t mean anything of the sort, Francesca,’ he said grimly, and when she continued to stare at him uncomprehendingly he went on, ‘Are you completely stupid? Do I have to spell it out for you? There will be no lawyer because there will be no divorce. Do you understand me now or do you want me to put it in writing?’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘I know what I said! I’m not senile! But I’ve changed my mind. No divorce, Francesca.’

  ‘Why? Because the baby is all right?’ Tears stung the back of her eyes and she glared at him.

  ‘Because,’ he said, and a deep colour rose to his face, ‘you belong to me and I have no intention o
f letting you go. Ever. Do you get my meaning? If you want a divorce, I’ll fight you and you’ll lose.’

  ‘Why?’ she whispered. ‘Is it because Rupert took Imogen away from you? Is that it?’

  He laughed—a harsh, grating sound. ‘My God, woman. What Rupert and Imogen do is irrelevant.’

  ‘Is it?’ Francesca asked quietly. ‘How can it be when you still love her?’

  He shot her an incredulous look. ‘Love her? Imogen? What I felt for Imogen might have been a hundred things, but it was never love.’

  She felt as though someone had lifted her up and was swirling her around. ‘Why were you planning to marry her, then?’ she asked, dragging herself back down, reminding herself that the situation between them had hardly altered. ‘Because you detested her?’

  ‘Because,’ he muttered, ‘I was a fool—a blind, stupid fool who thought that fondness and superficial similarities provided sufficient grounds on which to base a lifelong commitment.’ The challenge was there in his voice, as if he wanted her to dispute what he was saying so that he could argue with her.

  How could she when she was too busy struggling to stifle the little seed of elation which was growing steadily inside her?

  ‘And you think a baby provides those grounds?’ she asked, and his voice, when he replied, was sober.

  ‘No.’

  The seed was rapidly growing into a plant. What was he trying to say to her now? It was as though wild hope was dragging her along to the answer, but before she could get there she kept bumping into an invisible wall which wouldn’t allow her entry. ‘What do you want me to say, Francesca?’ he said tersely. He flung the twig away from him and she watched it scud across the sand to rest next to a coconut which had fallen from a tree. She felt a bit like that twig—whirling through space for a while before the inevitable bump back to earth. Reality was always just round the corner, she reminded herself sternly, waiting to trip you up.

  For a while, once, when she had made love to him, when she had let her emotions dictate her responses, she had known what it was like to fly high above the clouds, but that hadn’t lasted, had it?