by Penny Jordan
'Oh yes, so you have,' he agreed cynically. 'But were you telling me the truth? You've told me so many lies, haven't you?' he asked bitterly. 'There were so many evasions… so much deceit. I was so wrong about you, wasn't I? I thought you were just guilty about making love with me—about wanting me—so soon after your husband's death. I bent over backwards making allowances for you, Diana, telling myself that you needed time, that I mustn't rush you; but all the time you were simply playing a game—that's all it ever was to you, wasn't it?'
She could see the fury glittering in his eyes; sense it building up inside him, but she simply bowed her head, knowing she had no valid means of defence.
'God, how you must have laughed at me behind my back! How amusing you must have found my "understanding" of your grief.' His mouth twisted bitterly.
'No!' The cry was torn from deep within her. 'No… you don't understand, it wasn't like that!'
'Then just what the hell was it like?' he demanded savagely, reaching for her, and practically shaking her. 'Because I sure as hell am driving myself insane trying to understand what it is that makes you tick, lady.
'Oh, God!' He released her abruptly with a grimace of distaste. 'What the hell are you doing to me? You incite me to violence, do you know that? If I don't leave now, I won't be responsible for what I might do to you. When I think of how you deliberately let me think… let me sympathise… Oh, God!'
The tortured curse was drawn from deep in his throat, leaving her own raw and aching. Much as she longed to comfort him, to restore his faith in her, Diana knew that there was nothing she could say.
She stood like a statue watching him go, unaware of the river of tears that slid silently down her face.
That was it then; there wasn't going to be any marriage; any happy-ever-afters where they would share their lives and their child. Thank God she had managed to stop herself from telling him that she loved him. That would have been the final humiliation.
She walked slowly back to the house, her surge of energy depleted, leaving her weak and shaky. Upstairs in her bedroom, she shivered even though she wasn't really cold. Only Marcus's arms could warm her and disperse this cold lump of misery inside her, only Marcus could bring warmth and light back into her life.
CHAPTER TEN
She told herself that she had a child to live for; that she owed it to Leslie, and her baby, to pull herself together. She was, after all, no worse off than she had been when she first came here, and then she had been so happy, so full of plans.
Now all those plans seemed unimportant. She had excused herself from any more work for the fete on the grounds that she wasn't feeling very well. She had barely noticed the concerned look Ann gave her. She was withdrawing into herself like a tortoise into its shell, and she wasn't going to let anything draw her out again.
She spent long hours simply sitting and staring into space. Her energy had gone, and in its place was a lassitude that took the colour from her cheeks, and left her without any appetite, tired-looking and visibly drawn.
Both Mary and Susie commented on it. Susie, beneath the outlandish clothes and peacock hair colour, was a motherly soul, and at any other time Diana would have been amused by her attempts to get her to eat. In the small kitchenette behind the stock-room, Susie cooked scrambled eggs, and brought her a plateful, or offered her pizza, or home-made cake she had brought from home.
At the back of her mind a tiny voice told her that she was being childish; that she was deliberately trying to punish herself for the lies she had told, and that in doing so she was risking both her own health and that of her child. At last, unable to bear her pain any longer, she told Susie that she was going up to London for the day. She was aware of the younger girl's concerned look, but she refused to acknowledge it.
The train journey seemed to take for ever. London overwhelmed her with its noise and dirt. She walked aimlessly along once familiar streets, before taking a taxi to her ultimate destination.
Now in the last flush of summer, the cemetery blossomed with flowers and trees. She wasn't the only visitor, and she paused once, to watch a gnarled old man unsteadily putting some flowers into a vase. He was crying, and Diana felt her own tears start up in sympathy.
She walked slowly towards Leslie's grave. The tombstone was new-looking and stark, but her rosemary had started to grow. She would bring her child here one day, and tell her the story of how he or she came to be conceived.
Now, when her child asked if she had loved its father she would be able to reply honestly that she had—loved him and lost him.
She put her head down against the cool stone and felt the slow remorseless slide of tears down her cheeks. No matter how much she cried it did nothing to ease the pain inside her. She heard someone walking along the path, but she didn't move. Scenes of grief were so familiar here that no one felt any need to comment on them or interfere.
The footsteps stopped, a shadow blotting out the warmth of the sun. She moved her head and turned round, suddenly conscious of how remote the cemetery was, how vulnerable her own position. Fear chilled down her spine, and she struggled to stand up.
Instantly, a male hand came out to help her. The sun was dazzling her; she shaded her eyes, and felt as though the earth was dropping away from her, as she saw Marcus standing there.
'It's all right, Diana. It's all right now.'
Unbelievably, he was holding her, cradling her as though she was a child, and she was letting him, letting the grief and the guilt pour out with her wrenching sobs.
How long they stood like that she didn't know. All she knew was that, unbelievably, Marcus was with her, holding her as she had longed for him to do, stroking her hair and whispering soft words of comfort. She raised her tear-wet face to him.
'How… how did you know where I was?'
A grave smile touched his mouth, softening its hard outline. 'I remembered you saying once that you'd been here. I contacted your solicitor and asked him for the address. Ann called to see you at the shop, and Susie told her how concerned about you she was. Between them, my mother and my sister have reduced me to the state of the lowest of the low, believe me,' he told her with a grimace, adding so quietly that at first she thought she had misheard, 'My mother says you love me, is that true?'
He must have seen the shock and indecision in her eyes, because he took both her hands in his and held her firmly.
'No evasion… no prevarication. Trust me just this once, Diana, and tell me the truth.'
'Yes… Yes I do.'
With her admission she felt the weight of her guilt slide from her heart. No matter what happened now, he would at least know that she had cared about him, that their child did matter to her.
She swallowed hard and looked at him, unable at first to bear to do so until he cupped her face with one hand and tilted it up to meet his eyes.
The look of love and passion blazing out of them burned through her. 'I never thought I'd hear you say that to me.' His voice shook with emotion. 'I love you so much… right from that first moment… right from the very first time I touched you.'
'But the last time we met… you were so angry—'
She shivered, and he touched her comfortingly.
'We'll talk about that later, right now I want you to know that I'm sorry for what I said to you, but I was out of my mind with pain. I wanted to marry you because I couldn't bear to live without you, and there you were telling me that you were willing to marry me because of a vow made in a moment of intense fear. Have you any idea of how that made me feel? I was so obviously unimportant to you… I…' He shook his head, his voice suspended by the intensity of his feelings. 'Marry me, Diana. Come and live with me and…'
'Be your love?' she finished for him. 'Gladly—gladly my darling, dearest Marcus.' She flung herself into his arms, and kissed him with all the pent-up passion of her feelings.
Beneath her mouth she felt the shock and then the response of his, and then he was the one kissing her, his hands hot and urgen
t on her body, his small cry of frustration as he pushed her away a soothing balm to her own aroused desire.
'I can't make love to you here,' he told her thickly. 'In fact, I suspect I'm not going to be able to make love to you anywhere until we're respectably married. I can get a special licence. How about it, my love? Are you brave enough to commit yourself to me so quickly, say, in three days' time?'
What was there to be brave about? And as for commitment… hadn't she given him that the first time she gave him her body?
'Three days!' she teased. 'Will it really take as long as that?'
'It won't all be plain sailing,' Marcus told her as he drove her home. 'There's bound to be some gossip.'
'And we'll have to tell your mother and Ann the truth,' Diana put in. 'I know she'd love my baby anyway, but I do want your mother to know that he or she is your child as well.'
'Everything you say makes me love you more, do you know that?' Marcus told her thickly, narrowly avoiding an affronted pedestrian as he leaned across to kiss her.
They were married three days later, very quietly, in London, without telling anyone. Marcus had booked them into the hotel where it had all started. Diana laughed when she saw their room number. 'I asked for it specially,' Marcus told her.
From their hotel room, Marcus rang his mother, Diana curled possessively against his side, his hand supporting and gently caressing the swollen weight of her breast.
'You're what? Married? Oh, my dears…' He held the phone away from his ear so that Diana could hear his mother's pleased response.
'We're having the shortest honeymoon on record and should be back late tomorrow evening,' he went on.
'She wants to have a word with you.' He handed Diana the receiver.
'Diana, my dear, I'm so pleased. I told you that he loved you, didn't I? You and your child are both very welcome in our family.'
Diana took a deep breath. There was no easy way of doing this.
'Our child,' she corrected shakily. 'Marcus is the father of my baby… it's a long story, and one I promise I'll tell you, but I just wanted you to know.'
For a moment there was silence, and she wished passionately that she had kept the truth to herself until she could tell Jane face to face, but her opening had seemed so opportune that she hadn't been able to stop herself from using it.
'My dear…' There was a wealth of compassion and understanding in Jane Simons' husky words. 'I can't tell you how pleased that makes me.'
Diana handed the receiver back to her new husband. 'I've told her,' she said, unnecessarily.
'I do hope you realise the significance of this room,' Marcus commented half an hour later, after the waiter had arrived with their supper, and left an ice-bucket with champagne.
Diana gave him an impish grin, and said cheekily, patting her stomach. 'Well, if I don't, there's something here that's sure to remind me.'
'We haven't talked about Leslie properly yet, have we?' Marcus said softly. 'I haven't told you yet that I do understand what made you act the way you did. I suppose it was just the shock of discovering that you'd been using a fictitious husband to keep me at bay that made me so furious and unreasonable. You see, I'd been so jealous of him, so bitterly resentful of the fact that you were carrying his child and not mine, that you weren't the woman of my fantasies, created only for me and me alone, but another man's wife.'
'I didn't lie because of you… at least not in the sense you meant,' Diana told him, swallowing the lump of emotion his words brought to her throat. 'Once I knew I was pregnant, I decided it was an omen, a sign that I should make a completely new life for myself. I never dreamed we'd meet again, so I made up a fictitious husband for our baby… I didn't want him or her growing up under any slur of illegitimacy, and it made things so much easier for me as well. By the time we met, I'd already established myself as a widow and it was too late to go back. I was terrified you would discover the truth, and that it was your child. I don't know why… Leslie's long illness and her death made me view any kind of emotional or physical commitment in a very distorted way. I suppose what happened to her gave me a terrible dread of something similar happening to someone else that I loved.'
'Yes, I can imagine how terrible it must be to see a young life destroyed so cruelly,' Marcus agreed sombrely. 'It was bad enough for us with Ma… seeing her freedom curtailed, seeing her always confined to her wheelchair. It's odd, isn't it, how we suffer more for others in that way than we do for ourselves.'
'Leslie was dreadfully depressed at times. She used to beg me to help her to end… things.'
'Ma had her depressions too,' Marcus told her heavily. 'When she had her fall.'
Diana covered his hand with hers and felt it tremble.
'I'll always be grateful to her for telling me that you loved me,' he said, 'otherwise God knows how much more time we might have wasted. I couldn't believe it… but I wanted to believe it so much.'
'All I could think about was how much you must despise me for all the lies I'd told. Everything you said seemed to confirm it.'
'That was just sheer frustrated rage. I suppose it hurt my pride that you'd deceived me so completely. But what hurt most of all was the knowledge that you had been prepared to keep from me the fact that you were carrying my child.'
'Because I thought it was the right thing to do. Can you forgive me?'
He took her hand and pressed a kiss into its soft palm. 'There's nothing to forgive.
Later that night, wrapped in each other's arms in the lazy aftermath of love, Marcus said dreamily, 'I thought at the time that the woman I made love to in this hotel bedroom was someone very special. Now I know exactly how special, special is,' he added appreciatively, laughing as he felt her embarrassed wriggle.
'For a pregnant lady, Mrs Simons, you're amazingly provocative and sexy, do you know that?'
'I don't think the blame for that lies entirely with me, Mr Simons,' she taunted him back.
'Ah, well, you know what they say about abstinence,' Marcus responded, running his hands appreciatively over her body, and pulling her close to him.
'I thought that was absence,' Diana commented muzzily, but it was really too much of an effort to talk, and far to much of a waste of time when her lips would far rather be doing other things than forming senseless words. Things like adoring the unique flavour and texture of Marcus's skin. Things like tasting and tantalising the male body so close to her own, as she was being teased and tantalised in turn.
Marcus's hands and then his lips moved in tender exploration over her throat and then her breasts. She gasped his name and drew him closer, eager again for the awesome sensation of having him within her. They made love gently but fulfillingly, falling asleep to make love again in the pale grey light of the false dawn.
'That was some honeymoon, Mrs Simons,' Marcus teased her later as they drove out of London on their homeward journey.
It was good to hear him joke; good to share that light -heartedness. Her fears and doubts had gone, dispersing like mist in the heat of the sun. Now she could see them in context for what they were; the perfectly natural reaction of any human being to the loss, through a long, despairing illness, of someone they loved. It was like emerging from a long dark tunnel into the light.
Four weeks later, standing in the kitchen of Whitegates, she and Marcus were on the verge of having their first marital quarrel.
'No,' Marcus said positively. 'Look, I do understand your feelings, Di, but this is our first baby. For both your sakes I want you to be safely installed in hospital when the time comes.'
'But Marcus, both your mother and her mother before her had their children—all their children, here at the farm, and I want to do the same,' Diana protested stubbornly.
They had been arguing about this since last night when she had announced that she had been giving serious consideration to the idea of a home birth.
She had already gone into it at some length with the local maternity unit, and after some enthusiastic persua
sion, both from the midwife and from Diana herself, Dr Thomas had agreed that he could see no reason—if her pregnancy continued as trouble-free as it was at present—why she should not give birth at home.
'Look, Diana, this isn't something I'm prepared to argue with you about,' Marcus told her grimly. 'I happen to think that the best place for both you and our child is a hospital, with all the modern technology at hand if… if it should be needed.'
Diana couldn't budge him, as she commented to her mother-in-law later that afternoon. 'It's been like arguing with a combine harvester—I feel as though I've been shredded, threshed, and turned out in a nicely tied-up package,' she grumbled. 'He doesn't seem to appreciate that there's more to having a baby than modern technology.'
'Well, I can see his point,' Jane Simons demurred, 'but I can also see yours, Diana. My husband was just the same, you know. He was determined Marcus would be born in Hereford.'
'But he wasn't, was he?' Diana commented with a grin. 'How did you manage it?'
'Nature managed it for me… that's how.'
'Well, perhaps she'll be very generous and manage it for me as well,' Diana commented wryly.
Apart from Marcus's stubbornness over her desire to have her baby at home, Diana had never been happier. They made love every night, not as passionately perhaps as they both would have liked, but there was something unique and very special about the tenderness of the way Marcus held her; about his care of her and their child.
She was into her eighth month now and beginning to feel uncomfortable. Picking things up from the floor was almost an impossibility, and she needed Marcus's help to get into and out of the bath.
Initially, after their marriage, Jane Simons had told them both that they need not worry that she would intrude into their privacy, but Diana had told her immediately, that the boot was very much on the other foot.
'With Marcus so busy on the farm, I'd be lonely here without you,' she told the other woman firmly and warmly, and so they had got into the habit of sharing their afternoons and having dinner together when Marcus came in.