Wife On Demand

by Alexandra Sellers

  Chapter 10

  “That’s blackmail!”

  “Is it?”

  “You’re as good as saying it’s one or the other!” she choked.

  He shook his head, unimpressed by her panic. “You offered to help. If you don’t want to help, you are capable of seeing the alternatives without me outlining them for you.”

  “You’re saying if I don’t marry you you’ll—” She broke off, aware that her anxious voice might alert the guards, who had microphone access to each table.

  “And what’s that to you, Hope?” Jude asked coldly.

  What it was to her was that he had made it her business now, by telling her. Nothing more. “If I know about it beforehand—”

  “Call the police,” he advised. “Tell them what I’m planning. Then your ass is covered.”

  “How dare you! You know damned well I won’t do that!”

  “Won’t you?” Jude shrugged as if he didn’t believe her, but didn’t care. “Then don’t. If you don’t tell them I told you, believe me, I won’t.”

  “And if I refuse to help you, what will you do?”

  His eyes narrowed. “I’ll get by without you,” he promised flatly. “I don’t need you, Hope, now or ever.”

  “I hate you!” The words involuntarily erupted from her.

  He laughed. “Why? Because I’m not still panting with need for you? Is that what you wanted to see?”

  “No, it is not!”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, but the scales fell from my eyes when you looked at me from the witness stand and it was there in your face for anybody to read that you thought I’d set you up.”

  Her eyes widened. “I didn’t!” she protested.

  “No, and they didn’t say guilty, either,” Jude said with angry irony. “The whole of this past year has been a hallucination! We’re still in bed drinking each other’s sweat and trying to pound ourselves into oblivion as the only escape from obsession with our own pleasure!”

  Sensation rippled through her at the unexpected assault of his words. She grunted.

  “Shut up!” he whispered fiercely. “This is the reality.” His finger hammered the table. “The hallucination was then, me inside you and thinking I’d reached bloody nirvana. Thinking you had, too. Wasn’t it!”

  He was beating her with words. She shivered, half with fear, half with need. But she had the strength to say, “No.”

  “No? It wasn’t a hallucination? I push into you and you moan as if my sex is a torch and your body is gasoline, and that’s real? You felt it? You can remember it?”

  “Jude,” she begged. Sensation leapt up and down her body now with no path or order: here, there and everywhere she puffed into agonizing need and life. “Don’t! Not here!”

  “I want to know whether you remember it,” he said, his voice rough and hard. “On the floor, the table, up against the door, Hope. You were there?”

  “What are you trying to do?” she croaked.

  “I’m trying to find out who was there with me. I want to know where you were then, when I couldn’t get inside you far enough...you were painting once, remember that day?”

  “Yes,” she said, knowing which of the many days on which she had painted he was referring to. “Please. Don’t.”

  “You put your brush down and came over to me, and you took me in your mouth as if I were water in a desert. You remember that?” he rasped. She said nothing. “That look in your eyes, I thought I’d never forget it. I’ve never been so moved in my life.” He cursed, as if trying to destroy the grip of the memory he had unleashed. “All it was was my sex in your mouth, but it was as if you had my heart in your hand, squeezing...I wept. Remember that? I cried as if you’d torn my chest open and ripped out my heart. Have you forgotten that?”

  “No.” The memory beat upon her. Her eyes burned.

  “No. But you forgot it that day on the stand, didn’t you? That day when you wondered if Corinne was telling the truth and everything I’d done had been a trick to fool you into perjuring yourself for me.”

  His eyes were black, his gaze so cold it seared her.

  “Jude, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She could no longer hold back the tears. They spilled over onto her cheeks, burning her like acid. “Please!” she begged. She reached out a hand and stretched it across the table to where his own hands were linked between his knees.

  “I told you once before, don’t touch me, Hope,” he said between his teeth. But it wasn’t once, it was twice. She lifted her head, looking into his eyes, remembering the first time when he had said those words, so long ago, so far away and then she remembered the second time.

  She withdrew her hand. The terrible rejection in him gave her strength somehow. She sat straight and looked into his eyes. “All right, Jude, what do you want from me?” she said, ignoring the tears on her face. “What do you want me to do?”

  She felt she hated him more than ever now, not only for what he demanded of her, but for the yearning he had released in her with the shock of his words. She had been stone, but now a core of lava erupted in her. She could no longer hide from, or control, the burning physical longing for him.

  It was because he had admitted it had meant something to him. For the first time he had told her, in words, what those days and nights had meant to him. Hope only half believed him, but even that half was enough to undermine her. She had learned to cope during the past months through convincing herself it had been a lie, and if she gave that up, what defence did she have against his repudiation of her?

  She began to remember, without any control, the minute details of their weeks of passion. Her body came to life, and she could not prevent it. The yearning suffocated her, more terrible now because of the possibility that he also felt it.

  With wooden determination she filled out the marriage licence application and went to interviews with Jude’s “prison counsellor,” and talked to parole board members to convince them of his community support, smiling determinedly, playing the part of the good woman who would make sure her man kept to the straight and narrow after this, without, of course, actually admitting that he had ever gone off it.

  She knew, somewhere in her, that she was setting up torment. for herself. To agree to this madness when she hated Jude and felt nothing for him was bad enough. To do it when the old torrent of desire had been uncovered in her, not dead, merely bricked over, must be an act of madness.

  Yet she was driven to go through with it. She told herself she was getting Jude out of one prison by putting herself into another, and yet she went blindly on with it.

  Her painting was no longer sterile. It was bleak, tormented, angry and yearning, but at least it was alive. Abruptly, one day, she tired of the half-world of ignorance. She had not shown anyone any of her work since Cannes, fearing as much to be told that she did not have talent as to be told that she did.

  Suddenly, she had the strength to know. She thought, If I’m going to marry Jude like this, I have to know who I am first.

  The man from whom her father had bought most of his collection was an art dealer who owned two galleries. It was Daniel who had sold the Picasso for her when they had needed the money, and it was natural to turn to him now.

  Girding her loins to face the truth, because she trusted Daniel’s opinion and because he would be honest with her, Hope asked him to look at some of her work and tell her whether it was worth going on.

  “Well, Hope,” he said, when he had gazed mostly in silence for so long she had convinced herself that he was looking for gentle ways to tell her she was a gifted amateur. “I can’t say I’m surprised, because your father used to show me work you had done in high school.” He nodded. “I’m grateful that you came to me. It’ll give me personal as well as professional pleasure to launch you.”

  Hope stood blinking at him as he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a little diary. Silence fell as he pondered its pages. “I think—how many finished canvases have you got now? I think
about twenty-five, yes? I’m sorry I haven’t got a more immediate date, because you’re virtually ready now, but gallery calendars don’t allow for spontaneous combustion. I’d like to put you in the Village Gallery, but the first date I have is a year from next January. Just under eighteen months. How does that suit you?”

  She stared at him. The Village Gallery was every new artist’s dream. “What, a show of my own?” she gasped.

  “I might be able to slip an introductory few paintings into a joint show earlier than that, but I’ll want to think about that. It might be better to introduce you with your own show. Now, if you can give me another half dozen canvases...”

  She swallowed, and said, “I can’t show all of these. Not the...ones of Jude. They’re—can we leave those out?”

  “More than half of what you’ve got are of Jude.”

  “Yes. They’re—private.”

  He stared at her, as if hearing a language he had once studied and was trying to remember. After a minute he seemed to have deciphered it. “Right. Well, in that case, I’ll need more than another half dozen. I’ll need at least thirty I can choose freely from, Hope, so—” he smiled “—so you’d better get down to work. Eighteen months always seems longer looking forward than looking back, and do I understand that you have a demanding day job?”

  “Yes. I need it.”

  “Get down to work when you can, then. I’ll check back with you in a few months to see how you’re progressing. If there’s not enough time for you we’ll push the date back then.”

  One summer morning Hope Thompson passed through a series of clanging prison gates and for the first and last time entered the prison yard, where a little chapel stood in the centre of a plot of grass. Jude stood waiting with a prison officer. He moved towards her when he saw her, meeting her halfway.

  “Darling,” he said, loud enough for the official to hear. One hand came up to grip her upper arm and simultaneously drew her closer and kept her at that distance, and his mouth pressed against hers. Hope had not been expecting it, not yet. Her guard was down, and his nearness ignited her. She opened her mouth under his in raw hunger, and her hand clutched his shoulder. Jude drew away from her, lifted his head, and stared at her.

  “Don’t mistake what I do,” he advised her softly, and the ice in his eyes froze the heat in her blood. She knew he meant Don’t imagine that this is passion, or even lust.

  “Just making it look good,” she hissed at him. “Or would you prefer it if they thought I was frigid?”

  “You are frigid,” he breathed. “Where it counts—in the heart.”

  “Just so long as you understand that,” she returned coldly. She would not give him the satisfaction of knowing he hurt her. That was all she had left now.

  Jude turned and led her back to the prison officer. Hope had met him before. “Hi, Grant,” she said smilingly, trying to look like a happy bride instead of a woman taking part in a bitter travesty.

  “Hi, Hope. All ready for the big day?” He was trying to be jovial, trying to pretend for them that this was an ordinary marriage, not something taking place in a prison yard with a groom who was a convict. His words fell flat, but she pretended to believe him.

  “Too late now if I’m not,” she smiled.

  “That’s right,” said Jude. He was smiling, too, but between them the words had meaning that Grant did not see. “Too late now.”

  Hope shivered, though the sunlight was bright.

  She was wearing a cream-coloured trouser suit with a plain cream silk bodice underneath that left her neck and upper chest bare, plain beige low-heeled shoes. Her red hair was drawn back and held in a floppy cream silk ribbon that flowered behind her head.

  And that was enough fakery. She carried no flowers, wore no hat or veil. Which was just as well, because compared to Jude she was already overdressed. He wore a black short-sleeved shirt, open at the neck, and black suit trousers. The jacket of his old suit no longer fitted him.

  He was dark, and darkly tanned. She was as pale as the cream silk she wore, her hair and eyes the only splash of colour about her.

  “Beauty and the Beast, eh?” Grant said with another attempt at joviality, standing back to look at them. “Ah, here’s the Rev.” He left them to go and meet the prison chaplain, who now stood waiting for a guard to push the control that would open the massive metal gate giving access to the yard.

  Jude cast a glance sideways at Hope. “Beauty,” was all he said, but his voice was so full of ironic contempt that she felt sick.

  “Beast!” she returned, in a half-whisper.

  His eyebrows went up. “Believe it,” he warned her, and for long seconds the air between them was filled with the deafening silence of unspoken accusations, unvoiced fury.

  “Right!” enthused Grant, rubbing his hands as he approached them again with the minister. “Well, I think we’re ready now!”

  It was not a nightmare, just one of those dreams that leaves you feeling slightly sick and apprehensive for no reason that you can remember. Hope smiled and was introduced to the minister and listened without taking in more than one word in five to the brief discussion that followed.

  “Now, I have the civil...but it’s...and if there’s no reason... so if you’ve both been baptized I’ll be quite happy...”

  “I was born in Soviet Czechoslovakia. I was not baptized,” she heard Jude say.

  “Ah, I see. But if you...”

  “Oh, yes,” said Jude. His voice intruded on her blankness. She could not shut him out. “You’d prefer that, wouldn’t you, darling?” he was saying, and only she knew, and he knew, that he had devised some additional torture for her this day. She did not know what, but she would find out soon enough.

  “Is that what you’d like, Hope?” The minister was smiling approvingly at her, and she smiled brightly back.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” she said.

  “Now, if we can just have the other witness...”

  A guard was summoned from somewhere, and his illfitting beige uniform and the deliberately emphasized jangle of keys and handcuffs at his waist put the finishing touches to the ugly unreality of the scene as they all stepped inside the little chapel.

  The minister arranged them in front of the altar, Hope at Jude’s left, Grant beside her, the guard on Jude’s right. The guard was snapping his fingers impatiently, whistling soundlessly, rocking on his leg so that the faint jangling of those handcuffs continued. One of the breed of guards who hated all inmates, she saw, determined to rob the romantic scene of its meaning as far as it lay in his power.

  It was not a romantic scene, it was already as coldly cynical as a marriage service could get, but nevertheless the sheer villainy of the man got to Hope. Jude was in his power, he was telling her silently. Your fiancé isn’t even a man. He’s my prisoner, he can’t protect you from anything I do without suffering for it later.

  Instinct told her that she, also, was powerless to confront him. Even if she only asked him to be quiet, Jude might have to pay for that. As the minister found his place in his book, Hope bent slightly forward around Jude and smiled at the guard.

  “Did you come by bus, or did you bring your own lunch?” she asked.

  “What?” Everything seized in him, his body ceasing to move as his brain involuntarily began to grapple with the irrational. “What?” he repeated, staring at her.

  Still smiling, she opened her eyes at him, then turned back to the minister.

  “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God and the presence of these witnesses to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony,” she heard. Her mouth opened and her eyes closed and she only barely managed to hold back the instinctive protest that formed in her throat. He had chosen the religious ceremony. That was what he had done.

  She looked up at Jude. He was looking at her, his mouth half smiling, a glint of pure enmity in his eyes; this was his deliberately chosen added torment for her. A dark mockery to underline the utter travesty of
this marriage. And his eyes told her that he did not care if she cracked and halted the ceremony. He might even welcome it.

  She faced the minister again, but now she could not keep the comparison from the forefront of her mind. The might-have-been. If the Rose Library had not exploded, she could not prevent herself thinking, she might well have stood in another church somewhere with Jude beside her...it might have happened. Even on this exact day. This ceremony now was the negative image of that other that had once been possible. Then the church would have been filled to overflowing, her father would have been beside her...and there would have been love in her heart and in Jude’s.

  “Jude Miloš Daniels, do you take this woman...”

  She did not look at him. She could only fix her gaze on the minister and pray that she could get through this without screaming at him to stop.

  “...in sickness and in health...”

  “I do,” said Jude, and the vibration of his deep voice trembled down her spine. Oh, if only they could go back to that other life, if it could be real...

  “I, Jude Miloš Daniels, take thee, Hope Antonia Russell Thompson...”

  She looked up into that rock-hard face and with a thrill of fear the thought came to her...He really means it. He takes me, to have and to hold. But not to love and to cherish. He wants me close so that he can punish me.

  They had timed the ceremony to give them an hour in the visiting room afterwards, not because either of them wanted it, but because Jude’s counsellor had taken it for granted that they did. But instead of leading them back towards the prison block, he began shepherding them down the length of the prison yard.

  After a few moments, their destination became obvious, to Jude if not to Hope. He was leading them to a small trailer that sat in isolation near the high prison wall.

  Jude’s step faltered, and he glanced at the man beside him. “What’s this?” he asked softly.

  “A little surprise from me,” said Grant. “Consider it the prison’s wedding gift to you.”