‘Jane,’ he said firmly at last, and that note was back in his voice—the one which made a physical entity of sound itself. ‘You don’t know enough about me. You must ask me a few questions about myself.’
‘I can’t,’ she confessed warily. ‘It would feel like giving in. As if I were taking the idea seriously, and I just can’t do that.’
There was another pause and then he smiled wryly, and folded his arms high across his chest. ‘I’m glad you asked that,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Around Sunderland actually—though it’s called Tyne and Wear these days.’
She frowned at him, but he just kept smiling. So he was from Sunderland? There was a Lowry painting which swam into her mind…cranes…shipyards…Victorian terraces straggling under grey skies…
He began to speak again, exactly as if she had asked a question and he was replying. ‘No. I’m an only child, too, as it happens. Actually, my mother died when I was five.’
Jane fixed her eyes furiously on the melon skin. She scraped at it with her fork. No wonder he hadn’t had proper family Christmases.
‘Yes, it was sad—but not as bad as you might think. I scarcely remembered her, you see. And anyway, she’d been sick for over two years, so she’d become almost shadowy to me even when she was still alive. My father was the one who raised me.’
Without thinking she found herself asking, ‘Is he still alive?’ She slammed her hand over her mouth.
His smile reached his eyes, but as it did so it died on his lips. ‘No, Jane. He died a couple of years ago.’ He swallowed hard and she saw his Adam’s apple move in his throat and the pupils in his eyes contracted so that they were suddenly very grey and still. Guy had obviously cared very much for his father.
Jane’s mouth opened and then closed again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as a surge of genuine emotion tugged at her. ‘Trust me to go and ask the one question which…which…’
He reached out his hand and tweaked the end of her nose, as if she were a child. ‘It’s OK. You weren’t to know. I’ll tell you about him, shall I?’
‘OK…’ she acceded in a small voice.
‘Well, he was a machine tool fitter by trade, but his real love was the shed at the bottom of the garden where he made absolutely perfect scale models of steam-engines and rolling-stock. He used to go straight there after work, and would stay there under very late at night.’
She nodded cautiously. So what happened to Guy while his father was in the shed? Was he left all alone?
‘…And he used to have track running all around the house—inside and out. He used to deliver messages to me on the trains. He even made a replica post office sorting van for the purpose. I was woken up every morning by a steam train bursting in through a fake tunnel set in my bedroom door and blowing its whistle. Beats the average alarm-clock, eh?’
So he didn’t even speak to his son? Simply wrote messages and sent trains to wake him in the morning? She found that she was tucking into her salmon without even being aware of its arrival on the table.
By the time the sweet-trolley arrived her mind was buzzing with images of trains. There had been a cablecar overhanging the staircase, the papier mâché mountains concealing the banisters. There had been a London Underground network beneath the floorboards, emerging through the bathroom skirting-board to deliver soap— until someone from the council had come along and put a stop to it, pointing out that they were contravening building regulations.
He talked with such an engaging fluency that she could not help listening. And all the while her mind flashed back and forth between the images he created of his childhood, and the memories of her own. She felt hurt on his behalf. No wonder he was so self-contained…so cool. She’d had all the love in the world. He’d had scarcely enough to get by. She yearned to ask him about all the things he didn’t mention—his friendships, his frustrations, his feelings. But she dared not. It would imply an intimacy…an intimacy which he, despite his proposal of marriage, clearly didn’t want. No wonder he had chosen to do this thing in his own way. Everybody else’s way—the moonlight and roses way—was shuttered and barred to him. He had never been invited into that world.
She tried to visualise him as a boy, eating Sunday lunch alone with his father, but she couldn’t make the mental picture jell. She sighed heavily. The small box still sat on the table between them. It was closed, but she could picture the ring inside very clearly indeed.
At last the meal was finished and the ordeal nearly over. As they went back out to the car she suddenly turned and looked up at him. ‘How old are you?’ she asked.
‘Thirty-four.’
‘And you’ve never been married?’
‘No. But I haven’t been celibate, either.’
She shrugged. ‘I didn’t suppose you had,’ she said softly. That wasn’t what she’d wanted to know. She’d wanted to know whether he’d ever been in love—but she didn’t have the nerve to ask.
The sky above prickled with stars.
‘I shan’t marry you, you know…’ she said, but even as she said it something tired and heavy, almost like a keening, sounded a discordant note in her head. What was the matter with her? She didn’t want to marry him, did she? She opened her hands helplessly. ‘I don’t understand any of this,’ she sighed. ‘Why did you buy the shares, for instance?’
He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, ‘If you marry me, they will be your wedding present.’ And his eyes narrowed, obsidian in the darkness, withdrawn and austere.
Jane frowned. ‘But you started buying ages ago.’
‘After I kissed you, as it happens,’ he said neutrally.
Jane gulped. ‘Do you mean that’s when you decided? When you kissed me?’
‘That’s not when I decided to ask you to marry me. But I could tell from the kiss that we’d be good in bed together,’ he replied levelly. ‘It was very obvious.’
Her skin burned at his directness. ‘Is that why…?’ she stuttered. ‘I mean…just because I’m…well, attractive.’
‘No.’ There was something undeniably honest about his response. ‘If it were simply your body that I wanted, Jane, I’d have had it by now.’
And then, without touching her with his hands, he lowered his mouth and let his dry, parted lips brush across hers, side to side, very gently. She was taken aback by the gesture. She hadn’t expected him to kiss her this evening. He had made his offer in too business-like a way for her to imagine that he would use passion as a tactic. And anyway, only seconds earlier he’d said…? He’d said…? But she couldn’t work it out. Not now while his mouth was moving against hers like that. She could smell the maleness of him. It assaulted the very air she breathed, making it catch in her throat as she dragged it into her lungs. His lips travelled over her face, still feather-light, fragile, haunting. His breath fanned across her hot skin, making desire rush and rattle rhythmically inside her’like a speeding train. She pressed her dry lips together and stood very still.
Would he kiss her properly again? Surely he would…? To remind her…to tempt her…She shook with anticipation and waited, quite unable to steel herself to resist. His mouth reached her neck, nibbling and butting softly at the tender skin behind her ears. With a surprising delicacy she felt the hot tip of his tongue lick the lobe of her ear. He raised one hand then, and she was sure he would take her by the shoulder and pull her to him, but he simply curled his fingers around the silky mass of her hair and lifted it up and away from her nape. When his mouth reached the hard bump of her vertebrae created by the submissive droop of her head, his lips parted wide and the moist fullness of his mouth pressed hard against her skin. His teeth bit into her skin as his tongue found the prominence and caressed it roughly. Jane’s entire body seemed to be weakening and melting at the promise of what was to come. She could hardly breathe.
And then his mouth freed her and his hand let her hair drop. She felt a few strands stick to the damp circle of skin he had left behind. She waited for him to come and face her and
begin to kiss her properly. But it didn’t happen.
Instead he took a few paces away from her towards the car. The back of her neck seemed suddenly very cold.
‘Why did you do that?’ she asked, her quaking voice betraying her arousal.
He made an abrupt, disdainful noise in the back of his throat. ‘To prove my point.’ And he opened the car door and got behind the wheel.
She felt horribly ashamed of herself. She joined him in the car, letting her hair fall forward to shield her face. Was he right? If he’d made a play for her body, would she have given in?
Oh, what was the matter with her? She knocked her clenched knuckles rapidly against each other, as if fighting herself. How could she have been so eager for him to kiss her after everything he’d said? She’d been mesmerised from the moment his mouth touched hers. She made her hands relax and laid them in her lap, watching the patterns of lights shifting and changing beyond the windscreen. The silence in the car shivered between them.
She had to admit to a suspicion that if he’d gone about things differently she might well have let him make love to her—if he’d wined her and dined her and kissed her the requisite number of times, that was. He stirred some great carnal need in her, and she seemed to be powerless in the face of it. Oh, dear. She wasn’t going to find herself agreeing to marry him just for the sake of this…this chemistry, was she?
‘Couldn’t we just have an affair?’ she suddenly blurted out, one hand tightening around the other wrist as she spoke.
‘No,’ he returned expressionlessly.
Her shame swelled and grew until it seemed like a shroud enveloping her. She found herself remembering that silly business over the peanut. He’d thought from the outset that she’d been offering sex. No doubt all her protests had just seemed like a calculated change of tactics—the old game of playing hard to get And then when he’d kissed her and touched her as if to test her out, she—fool—had behaved like a little wanton in his arms…And yet he didn’t want an affair? He claimed to want to marry her. Was he calling her bluff? But none of this felt like a bluff at all. It felt coldly, dispassionately real. That sense of shame seared her with renewed force. She had to understand. ‘Please, just tell me why…’ she said with a husky urgency.
‘Jane, you can work it out. It’s really not that difficult.’
‘Spell it out…’ she insisted.
He sighed for the second time that evening. ‘Well, Jane, there’s your family background for a start…It counts for a lot as far as I’m concerned. And my age, of course…And then, I have more money than I know what to do with. Houses. Yachts.’ He let out another insulting sigh. ‘Godammit, Jane Garston—figure it out for yourself. It really isn’t difficult.’
For the rest of the journey she did just that. His response had brought relief flooding through her. At least it wasn’t all down to the fact that he thought she’d be…good in bed. She hadn’t inadvertently brought all this upon herself because she was attracted to him. He wanted to marry her because she came from a…well, from a very old-established family.
Yes. It made a kind of sense. He’d come from a modest background and had made a lot of money, and now he was ready to marry and she was just the right type of wife for him. She could see exactly what he meant now. He’d moved on in the world socially and he needed a wife who would fit in. The kiss had just been a way of ascertaining that the physical side would be OK too. He’d have needed to satisfy himself on that account, but really the decision was entirely pragmatic.
So he really had meant it when he said he had come to court her that first day? Apart from the outstanding business of the kiss, the decision had been all but taken.
‘Don’t you think that love is important?’ she asked quietly.
He shrugged. ‘Are you so sure that you think that you do? It seems to me that that’s the crucial question.’
‘I think it matters. I think it’s the only thing that does matter.’
‘You’ve got a very conventional idea of love, haven’t you?’
‘So have most people.’
‘But you’re not most people, are you, Jane Garston? You don’t come from a conventional family background, any more than I do. We’ve both done very well without convention so far. So are you really so sure that marriage has to be based on fairy-tales in order to work?’
‘I do come from a conventional family background,’ she contradicted.
He shrugged. ‘Well, yes…up to a point…’
Oh, dear. She could see it all now. Even the fact that she had been adopted from a Brazilian orphanage would count in her favour. It made her less…less ‘establishment’. Less likely to cause problems in the years ahead, because she was, in a sense, an outsider too. She could see now why it had to be her and not someone else.
‘So the fact that I was born into another culture matters?’
‘It’s a fact of life. That’s all. Of course, it doesn’t matter in itself…but perhaps it’s had some effect on you, none the less? You must have considered from time to time how different your life would have been if you hadn’t been adopted.’
‘Naturally.’ But she wasn’t really speaking the truth. Fate had taken control of her life. She had never needed to consider what might have been.
‘Perhaps it’s made you realise on an unconscious level that things can be done differently?’
‘You mean, sort of, arranged marriages? Marriages where love isn’t the overriding motive?’
He was silent. He just kept his eyes on the road ahead.
Of course, he was right. She had been born into another culture. For an orphan in a city like Rio, a proposal from a man like Guy would seem like heaven on earth. So was her rejection just a vanity, as he had suggested?
Then she bit her lip angrily. Oh, this was absurd. It was no good him suggesting that she could do things differently because she came from another culture… because she had only ever known one culture, one family…She wasn’t like her school-friend Mumtaz, who had happily gone into an arranged marriage, knowing that, for her, real love would grow from respect. Mumtaz was lucky. She had roots in two cultures—an extra dimension to her life which had enabled her to make that choice.
Jane sighed. ‘I wish I hadn’t come this evening,’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘I’m expecting you to change your mind about that. Anyway, as I pointed out before, you couldn’t help yourself. You fancy me, Jane, whether you’re prepared to admit it or not. Now why don’t you put your time to good use and ask me some more about myself?’
‘No…’ she wailed insistently. ‘I’m not going to marry you, so why should I do that? Anyway, it’s such a cold way of going about it. If you’d courted me properly it would have seemed natural—but this…well!’
He made an impatient noise with his mouth. ‘Jane— if I’d done things the conventional way it would have been dishonest. It might have got me the result I wanted—but I didn’t want to trick you into believing that sexual attraction was the same thing as love. Can’t you at least see that although this may seem callous, at least it ensures that you know exactly where you stand? If you agree to be my wife now, we can build something really good—without any pretence or disappointment or disillusionment threatening to undermine us. If you married me because you’d fooled yourself into believing that you loved me, things could only go downhill when you finally realised the truth. It would be an appalling waste, and not one I’m prepared to risk.’
‘Ye-es…’ She sighed wearily. ‘I can see that. But I’m afraid it doesn’t make me feel any better about it.’
And then, all of a sudden, in her mind’s eye, she could see him as a small boy, eating Sunday lunch with his father. A cold lunch served by a cold man who wanted to get back to his garden shed and stay there until late at night. A man who never wasted a moment of his precious time on human relationships. He was all Guy had had. And the boy had worshipped him. No wonder Guy was obsessed by his work. No wonder he thought love between ma
n and wife didn’t matter.
She glanced across at his profile and swallowed hard. He still seemed remote; but he no longer seemed ruthless in her eyes.
A funny feeling had come to sit in Jane’s stomach as all this ran through her mind. It was a heavy, sullen feeling. It was as if she were full of tears—but the tears were solid and cold, like gravel. They weren’t capable of being shed. Was this the dull ache of grief which had settled beneath her heart? She laid her cheek against the cold glass of the window beside her and sighed.
If he hadn’t been so sure of himself…if he’d gone the conventional route and bided his time and taken her to a lakeside by moonlight and behaved like a man who had fallen in love, she might have let him put that diamond solitaire on her finger after all. Because she knew that she didn’t just fancy him, now. It seemed she had fallen in love with him. So he was right. She might have fooled herself, and would one day have broken her heart when she realised he didn’t love her in return.
She almost ran away from him when they reached the door. ‘Don’t contact me again,’ she pleaded. ‘I won’t change my mind.’
‘You will,’ he said softly, and his eyes gleamed in the darkness. ‘And I’m sure you’ll find a way to get in touch with me when you have.’
She lay awake all night trying to come to terms with the fact that although she now loved him, and wanted him more than anything in the world, she would never, ever allow herself to marry him.
In the morning her mother said, ‘You’re tired. You have that air about you when you’re tired…’ She laughed affectionately. ‘It was there when you were just a tiny baby, too. All our friends in this country said we were mad—that I should come back home and forget you and adopt a child over here. But I loved you, you see…and I understood you. No one else would have known when you were tired just by the look in your eyes. I couldn’t leave you. For better or worse, it had to be you…’
Fate. It had all been meant to be. Would any other woman ever understand why Guy hid his emotions so carefully? Would any other woman ever love him, knowing that it would take time and tenderness for him to learn to love in return?
Forsaking All Reason Page 7
