by Lilian Darcy
‘No, it’s careers, or divorce, or something much bigger. I heard you talking to Sarah on the phone just now. Any news?’
‘She’s having another ultrasound, and her doctor has referred her to Marcus Gaines. That’s all so far. I—I’m worried, Marsh. I wish there was something concrete to go on. Please, don’t make me go home, because all I’ll do there is dwell on it.’
‘I won’t make you go home,’ he promised. ‘In fact, I can think of some great ways to keep you from going home for days, if you’re interested.’
The low, suggestively teasing comment had her laughing at last. ‘What exactly did you have in mind?’ she asked, as they took their soup cups and sandwich packets and left the shop to walk towards the grass and picnic benches that edged the sandy beach.
‘Exactly?’ He raised his eyebrow, and his drawl was full of meaning.
‘Well, roughly, then.’ She laughed again, and felt herself blushing. ‘I suppose my imagination can fill in the gaps.’
‘Mine can. I was going to start with suggesting dinner tonight at my place.’
‘That sounds great.’
Almost like forbidden fruit. Tempting and fabulous, and not something she was certain she should accept. She saw the fire of pleasure flare in his eyes as they sat down at one of the benches.
‘I’ll make my specialty,’ he said.
‘Which is?’
He made a face. ‘Actually, it’s a tuna casserole, which my daughter tells me is hopelessly 1970s.’
‘A tuna casserole sounds delicious,’ she assured him kindly, loving this small display of insecurity in his masculine ego. Did he really think she was going to judge him on the fashion status of his cooking?
He couldn’t be too insecure on the subject, because he now proceeded to detail several other examples of his culinary repertoire which Rebecca found unacceptable, ‘even though she wolfs every one of them down’. His humour was so delicious, particularly the saga of his experience with ‘mock apple pie’, that he had her in fits of laughter as she sipped her cup of soup—dangerous, that—and she almost forgot about all the issues that plagued her.
This had evidently been the intended effect, she realised when he sat back at last, his legs crossed lazily and both arms draped along the back of the wooden bench, to survey her with a twinkle in his blue eyes.
In the background, she heard the surf breaking rhythmically on the beach, each wave curling and swelling until it toppled over itself in a churning tumble of electric white foam. The sea breeze was gentle and fresh and salty, teasing at Marshall’s grey-threaded hair, and the early August sunshine danced on the blue-green water, and in his eyes.
‘That’s better,’ he said softly. ‘Much better.’
‘Oh, it is!’ she agreed. ‘Thank you. My face was aching from worry before, and my jaw was so tight…’
‘Now you’ll be able to chew on that sandwich.’
‘I will!’
He leaned forward again and ran a finger back and forth very lightly across her knuckles as her hand rested on top of the sandwich bag.
‘Don’t ever think I’m not here to help,’ he told her, his voice low and husky.
‘Oh, Marsh, but I have problems at the moment,’ she answered, feeling the relief at letting the words spill out. ‘It’s not fair to you, roping you into my life…’
He had stiffened a little. She felt it as if they’d been pressed length to length, only it was still just that one finger, stroking her hand with an erotic subtlety she’d never imagined before.
Alan, came the disloyal thought, with all his good qualities, had never been a subtle lover.
‘It’s not a question of being roped in, Aimee,’ Marshall said very carefully. ‘If you want me in your life, I want to be there. Is this about Friday night? Are you having regrets?’
The question was too sudden, too unexpected…and, since Peter’s news, too accurate. When she had time to think about it, with so much of importance crowding her mind, yes, she wished that their night together hadn’t happened. It had been utterly fabulous in itself, but as each hour went by the timing seemed more and more of a disaster.
She insisted to him, ‘No, of course I’m not!’ But there had been a hesitation, and he hadn’t missed it.
There was no point in making the protest again. If she had any hope of easing his sudden flare of doubt, it would be through touch, so much more truthful than words.
She turned her hand so that his fingers rested on her palm, then took the weight of his hand in hers and lifted it to her shoulder. At the same time, she ran her other hand up his other arm, and pulled him close to her, in a gesture of open wanting that had him groaning with need before their lips met.
‘Marshall…’ It wasn’t a particularly coherent use of his name, and her voice broke a little on the word.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, in between his passionate onslaughts on her mouth. ‘It’s fine. I understand. Maybe I wouldn’t even have wanted you to have no regrets. Because complicated feelings happen when something’s important, don’t they?’
‘Yes. Oh, yes. Thank you for saying it.’
She let her lips map all the contours of his face, learning it off by heart with a desperation she didn’t try to analyse just yet. The slight roughness of his jaw, the smooth hardness of his nose, the tickle of his eyelashes and the tenderness of the closed lids above. His hard temples, the lines of experience etched on his forehead and around his mouth, his hairline, and most of all his parted lips and the sweetness within.
Their kiss couldn’t last for ever, but their closeness could last a little longer. She loved the way he managed to eat a thickly cut sandwich with one arm still around her shoulders, and he didn’t let go of her until they were almost back at the surgery.
‘Tonight?’ he reminded her, pausing at the bottom of the steps. ‘My place? Sevenish?’
‘I’ll be there,’ she promised, forcing out all other thoughts, not letting herself think for one moment that this might be cowardice.
Aimee brought a chocolate cake to Marshall’s that night.
She’d got to work on it almost obsessively the moment she’d arrived home from the practice, because she couldn’t walk through the front door of her house now without the realisation flooding in. I have to sell my home, the place I’ve lived in for nearly thirty years, and there’s no one I can talk to about it, no one who I can tell the whole story to.
So the chocolate cake was more like a piece of escapism than a piece of cookery but, of course, Marshall didn’t know that.
‘You didn’t have to bring anything,’ he told her, when he saw the clingwrap-covered offering, still faintly warm from the oven and dusted with powdered sugar.
But, as she’d discovered over lunch, words had only a very distant relationship to truth. The boyish flash of hungry appreciation in his eyes told a very different story.
‘Remembering your story of the mock apple pie made out of cracker biscuits, I have to tell you that this is my special recipe with mashed potato in it,’ she said.
‘My goodness!’
‘Makes it wonderfully dense, which all good chocolate cakes should be.’
He took it from her and led the way through the house. Aimee had been here once before, some weeks ago, for drinks with everyone else in the practice, but she found herself taking in the details of the place and its furnishings with much more focus now.
The welcoming and slightly lived-in look was deceptive, she realised after he’d poured her a white wine and turned back to his salad preparations. There were several valuable pieces of antique furniture, and there was an original oil painting on the dining-room wall by a contemporary artist whose work, she’d recently read in the newspaper, now commanded very large prices indeed.
Oh, money! Curse the stuff! It was all she seemed to be able to think about at the moment, as if she had a cash register or a balance sheet in her head, and everything she saw or thought about had a price tag attached. How much wo
uld it cost, for example, to make Rebecca Irwin’s ambivalent attitude go away?
Heavy, noisy things, cash registers. She was getting a headache, and some desperate gulps of her wine only made it worse. She carried on through the salad and the casserole, both delicious, letting Marshall do most of the talking, and foolishly took a piece of the cake as well, accompanied by tea.
But eventually she couldn’t hide from the truth. This was a migraine, with all the embellishments—flickering vision, nausea and black, black pain.
She couldn’t hide it from Marsh any longer either.
‘You’re not feeling well, are you?’ he asked, eyeing her half-eaten piece of cake. They were still at the dining table, watched over by the expensive painting. She’d loved it at first, but now the bold arrangement of colour was like an alarm bell dinning in her brain.
‘Migraine,’ Aimee managed, but couldn’t speak any more because of the nausea.
‘I have some strong painkillers, with a light sedative in them. Will they take the edge off the pain enough for you to sleep it off if you lie down?’
‘Probably.’
‘You don’t want to endure the journey home, do you?’
‘No.’
‘I didn’t think so.’
It was wonderful not to have to explain to him what she needed. He helped her upstairs to the neat, cosy, spare room, which was furnished with an antique washstand, bowl and jug, amongst other things. She sat on the bed, not daring to move in case the pain and nausea overwhelmed her. He was back with the painkillers a minute later, and she downed two of them with a glass of water.
‘Don’t often get these…’ she began to apologise.
‘But when you do, they’re corkers.’ He nodded. ‘I can tell. Don’t say anything more—just lie down in the dark until the pain goes.’
At first, all she could do was lie utterly still, but gradually she felt the pills taking effect so that the pain was more bearable. The firm mattress was extremely comfortable, and the green and pink and yellow quilt on top of which she lay was puffy and soft. Snuggling into it more deeply, she heard Marshall say in the doorway, ‘Here’s another quilt to go on top. Don’t want you to be cold.’
She murmured her thanks, and was going to say that she’d just snooze here for a minute or two and then she’d be able to go home, but the words were too heavy for her tongue to lift. Much too heavy. She’d say them later…
Aimee didn’t wake again until morning. Early morning. There was just a glint of light appearing through the curtains, so it must be before six. Too early to get up, but much too late to go home. Poor Marsh! He might have wanted her to spend the night here, but she doubted whether this was what he’d envisaged!
Still, the headache was gone and she’d had more than nine hours of solid sleep, which had been badly needed. She lay in bed for another hour, with what had quickly become a predictable merry-go-round of concerns spinning in her head. The tension they generated battled with the sense of well-being created in her somehow just by knowing she was here under Marshall’s roof.
As soon as she heard him moving about the house, she got up. Her clothing felt limp and creased, and her face and hair much the same, but that couldn’t be helped. There wouldn’t be time to go home and change with all the traffic surging across her route on its way to the city. But if she could just have a shower…
Marshall made an apologetic face when she suggested it. ‘My shower’s still out of action,’ he said.
‘Oh, your bathroom renovation—I’d forgotten!’ she exclaimed.
‘They can’t start for another two weeks. But there’s the tub in the bathroom downstairs.’
It would have to do. Then some coffee and a quick piece of toast, and hopefully no one in the practice would notice that this was the same outfit of warm-toned skirt and white blouse she’d worn yesterday. At least she had a grey angora cardigan in the car which would camouflage the fact a little.
Marshall’s downstairs bathroom was an old-fashioned one, opening off the back of the big kitchen. It must once have been a scullery, but had been upgraded some years ago. There was a big, deep tub, a toilet and basin, several house plants and a huge stained-glass window, through which the eastern winter sun came pouring, staining the cream-painted walls with red and blue and orange.
There was no modern nonsense about a single tap with a single control for hot and cold either. The separate hot and cold taps each had a generous flow, and the tub filled quickly. Aimee added a sachet of scented bath mousse, and had just stretched out in the tub with the taps turned off, feeling more relaxed than she’d expected to under the circumstances, when she heard a key rattling in a lock, the front door opening and the sound of Rebecca’s voice.
‘Dad?’
‘Upstairs, gypsy,’ he called down, his voice faint from where Aimee’s was. ‘What are you doing here so early?’
‘Forgot I had a pre-natal at the health centre first thing,’ she called back. ‘And you wanted those files back this morning.’
‘That’s right. I’ve got Terry Lyons coming in. Did it help?’
‘Looking at the files? Yes. I discovered I did know this stuff after all. I’m just putting them on the hall table, OK?’
‘OK. See you at the surgery later on. Hope your prenatal goes well.’
‘It should,’ she predicted blithely. ‘Everything seems totally normal, and I’ve started feeling disgustingly good since I hit the thirteen-week mark last week.’
Aimee heard Marshall’s chuckle, still echoing from his bedroom upstairs, and she expected to hear Rebecca’s retreating feet and the sound of the front door again, but instead the footsteps came closer, their pace quickening.
Rebecca muttered. ‘Ouch!’ and something about her bladder, and then before Aimee had time to even realise what was about to happen, let alone react to it in any sensible manner, the bathroom door was wrenched open and she and Rebecca met each other’s horrified faces.
Rebecca gasped, ‘Oh, lordy-loo!’
She shut the door again and the footsteps resumed their urgent rhythm, this time leading up the stairs to the other bathroom.
Aimee felt like a fifty-year-old woman who’d just been caught naked in a bathtub on a Tuesday morning by her lover’s daughter. Funny, that!
The relaxing influence of the scented bath water immediately vanished and she dragged herself quickly and clumsily from the tub, her skin squeaking across the porcelain as the water heaved, as if getting dried and dressed again as quickly as humanly possible might erase the event from time’s annals altogether.
Her bra fastened crookedly, water still beading on her neck, briefs and pantihose dragged on as a single entity, skirt and blouse not meeting straight in the middle. She’d done it in two minutes.
She carried her shoes in her hand and tiptoed through the kitchen and along the hall like a cat-burglar, and only stopped when she reached the hall table and discovered that she hadn’t left her handbag there last night as she’d thought. It must be on the end table in the lounge room instead. Or was it in the kitchen? Last night’s migraine had pulled a curtain over her memory for details like that.
She paused to catch her breath and think, then heard Rebecca’s voice beyond the top of the stairs.
‘Not saying she’d take advantage of you financially, the way Tanya did, Dad, but—sorry, this is none of my business—’
‘No, it isn’t, gypsy,’ Marshall cut his daughter off firmly. ‘I thought we’d been through this twice already?’
Aimee couldn’t bear to hear any more. Their voices were getting closer and they’d now reached the landing. She hurried back to the bathroom, closed the door silently, then began to run the taps in the tub again at full bore.
Turning them off several minutes later, she waited for quite some time before finally concluding from the sounds she heard in the kitchen that Rebecca had gone and Marshall was alone once more. Then she straightened her clothing, patted uselessly at her hair and went out to him with a
big smile etched determinedly on her face, while her heart beat so heavily and painfully that she almost thought he’d be able to see it lurching against her ribs.
‘Toast, cereal or eggs?’ he offered her cheerfully. He had no idea that she’d overheard anything of what had just passed between himself and his daughter.
‘Nothing, thanks,’ she answered, the brightness of her voice too high-pitched. ‘It’s already almost eight o’clock. I’ll go and open up the surgery and grab some coffee and biscuits while I set up.’
He looked at her sharply, alerted by something in her tone. ‘Headache gone?’
‘Quite gone,’ she told him truthfully, and only realised at his next words that she’d missed an opportunity.
‘Then you’re bothered because Rebecca blundered in on you, aren’t you?’
‘It can’t have been a pretty sight,’ she joked feebly.
‘Rebecca’s a big girl,’ he told her. His face had fallen into sober lines. ‘She can handle it, Aimee.’
But she wouldn’t have to.
Aimee knew now what the courageous part of her mind had been trying to tell her since yesterday morning. Perhaps even since Pete’s news on Saturday. She couldn’t just go blithely on with this…with Marsh…with what was happening.
It was too unfair. Unfair to everyone concerned. And there were so many people concerned in this! Sarah, Jason, Thomas and William. Rebecca and Harry and Marshall’s son Simon. Everyone who worked at the practice. Two unborn children. Her brother. And Marsh and herself, perhaps, most of all.
I have to ask that we cool off. Break it off, I suppose is the phrase. Even though there’s nothing to break. Nothing formal. Nothing openly stated between us at all, yet so much that hasn’t been spoken. Oh, it would be so much easier if he hadn’t stayed last Friday night!
Then I have to get the rest of my life under control. Sell the house and work out what I can afford to rent. Make sure I can make ends meet, and that the children make good use of their money from the house. I can’t tell Marsh why. I can’t tell him that I’m broke. That’d be like fishing for an assurance that it didn’t matter, and it does.