Force of Feeling

by Penny Jordan

  As she had been… How impossible that seemed now! Now, she could no more imagine the deep frozen heart of hers being melted than she could imagine flying to the moon. Both were impossible.

  Once, a long time ago, things had been different, she had been different.

  Once, she had known what it felt like to have her whole body surge with joy at a man’s touch, almost at the sound of his voice, but that had been before…

  She gave a deep sigh and opened her eyes, but it was no use, for some reason, the past was crowding in on her today.

  For some reason? She knew the reason well enough: it had been the look in Guy’s eyes when he had asked her in that even, calm voice of his if she actually knew what it was like to feel emotion. She had felt as though her very soul had been raked with red-hot irons, but she had kept her expression cool and unrevealing. Let him think what he liked, just as long as he never guessed the truth.

  The truth. Her mouth twisted bitterly. How melodramatic that sounded now! And what was it, really?

  She closed her eyes again and tried to focus her concentration on her book, on Lynsey, but it was virtually impossible. Guy’s dark face surfaced through the barriers of her will, and then another male face, equally dark-haired, equally good-looking, but younger, shallower…weaker, she recognised.

  She had been nineteen when she’d met Craig, and a rather naïve nineteen at that. Her girls’ school had been sheltered; she was an only child, with wealthy parents who spent a good deal of their time out of the country, and consequently she had spent very little time with them until she left school. And in that long, hot summer before she started at Oxford she had felt uncomfortable with them, alien and alone, and had wished that she had given in to Lucy’s plea to accept an invitation from her parents to spend the summer with them in the South of France.

  Instead she had mooned about at home, sensing her parents’ inability to understand her, feeling unacceptable to her local peers, with whom she seemed to have little in common. And then she had met Craig.

  He had come to the house to see her father about something, she couldn’t remember what. Her parents had been out and she had been sunbathing in the garden. She had been flattered by the admiring way he had looked at her bikini-clad body. He had remarked on that and she had offered him a drink.

  One drink had turned into two, and in the end he had spent most of the afternoon in the garden with her.

  Even then she had sensed a restlessness about him, a yearning—a desperation almost, but she had put it down to the same malaise she suffered herself, too naïve to recognise then their basic differences.

  He had asked her out, to a local tennis-club dance. At first her parents had been pleased that she was making friends, and then her father had cautioned her against getting too involved.

  She had known by then about Craig’s background: about the father who drank and the mother who struggled to bring up her five children. She had also learned about Craig’s bitterness at not being able to take up the free scholarship he had won, because of lack of money. Her father had told her bluntly that Craig had a chip on his shoulder, but she had refused to listen to him. By this time, she was in love.

  Or so she thought.

  Her mouth twisted bitterly. She ought to have listened to her father, but she had thought she knew better. She had thought that Craig loved her, when in reality what he had loved was her parents’ wealth and social standing.

  As the summer had deepened, so had her feelings. He had known exactly how to arouse her, how to make her ache and yearn for the final act of possession. Even now, remembering, her flesh remained cold and unmoving, her mind unable to really comprehend how she could have felt that way; but she had.

  They had made love for the first time in an idyllic setting: a small, enclosed glade in a local wood, a privately owned lane, in actual fact, but with an absentee landlord. Ostensibly, they had gone on a picnic. Craig had brought a blanket, plaid and soft, and very new. Where had he got the money from to buy it? she wondered now. Certainly not from the job he had told her he had, working for a local accountant as a trainee.

  He had made love to her with need and passion, or so she had thought, but there had been none of the rapture she had imagined in the ultimate act of possession, and she had rather disliked the heavy sensation of him lying over her afterwards. She had gone home feeling faintly disappointed, until she remembered girls at school saying that the first time was not always very good.

  It had been Craig who had first brought up the subject of marriage. What if she were to be pregnant? he had asked her. It could have happened. And because she was genuinely afraid, and because in her innocence she thought that, since they had been lovers, they must love one another, and because she was lonely and desperately in need of someone of her own, she had listened.

  No, she had done more than listen. She had married him. Quietly and secretly, one month after he had first made love to her. Her parents were away at the time.

  The newly-weds had been waiting for them when they returned.

  Campion struggled to sit up, her throat suddenly tight with tension, her breathing shallow.

  She would never forget the scene that followed, nor Craig’s fury when he realised that her father was not prepared to either settle a large sum of money on her, or to support them.

  To see him change in front of her eyes, from someone she thought loved her to someone who had married her purely and simply for financial gain, had been too much of a shock for her to take in. She had tried to plead with him, to remind him that even without money they still had one another, and he had turned on her then, his face livid with rage.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ he had said. ‘Do you think I would have married you if it hadn’t been for who you are?’

  ‘You—you said you loved me,’ she had stammered, unable to understand his abrupt change of character.

  ‘And you fell for it, didn’t you, you stupid little bitch!’ he had snarled at her. ‘Like taking candy from a baby—only it seems that your daddy isn’t going to play along. Well, I’d better get something out of this, otherwise the whole village is going to hear about how easily I got little Miss Goody-two-shoes here into bed, Mr Roberts,’ he had challenged her father.

  She had cried out then, but he had turned on her, his expression vicious, quite definitely not good-looking anymore.

  ‘I should have made sure that you were pregnant, shouldn’t I?’

  And he had gone on to make such derogatory remarks about her sexuality that she hadn’t been able to take in all the insults he was hurling at her—not then.

  * * *

  The marriage had been annulled—her father had seen to that, but somehow Campion had felt as though she were encased in ice. She had gone on to Oxford, but she had gone there a changed person. Lucy noticed it and asked her what was wrong, and she had broken down and confided in her friend. That had been the last time she cried. The shock of what had happened wore off, but the humiliation remained. Whenever a man approached her, she froze him off, and gradually she got the reputation of being withdrawn and sexually frigid. She hadn’t cared. She was never going to let a man get emotionally or physically close to her ever again. Craig had held up for her such an image of herself that it had destroyed totally her awakening sexuality. Whenever she remembered how innocently and joyously she had abandoned herself to him, her skin crawled with self-loathing; gradually, she withdrew further and further into herself.

  Then her parents were killed in an outbreak of hostilities in Beirut when they were there on business. She had sold the house and bought herself her small flat. The rest of the money she had donated to various charities.

  No man would ever again be tempted to make love to her because he thought she could be his ticket to rich living.

  Over the years, Lucy had tried to coax her to change, to dress more attractively, to meet other men, but she had always refused. What was the point? She didn’t want a man in her life in any capacity, a
nd what man would want her?

  As Craig had already told her, her only attraction lay in her father’s wealth; he had wanted her for that alone. Making love to her had been a necessity, a means to an end, and he had let her know in no uncertain terms just how lacking in pleasure he had found their coming together.

  She actually flinched now as she remembered his insults. Her father had tried to stop him, she remembered tiredly. And, afterwards, her parents had both tried to offer her some comfort. They had never criticised or condemned her; she had done that for herself. They had tried to reach her, but the gap between them was too deep. They had never been a close family, and now she was too hurt and bitter to accept their pity, and so she had buried her pain away deep down inside herself where no one could see it.

  Why couldn’t she use those memories of how Craig had made her feel to flesh out the character of Lynsey?

  She knew why. It was because they had been so false, so dangerously deceptive, and as for the physical pleasure of Craig’s lovemaking… There had been none in his possession, and she cringed from the memory of it, knowing that here again the lack had been hers.

  She flinched again as she recalled Guy French’s last words to her this morning.

  ‘Perhaps you’d have been better off casting your heroine as a nun, Campion,’ he had drawled mockingly. ‘Because it seems that that’s the way you want her to live.’

  She had left the office while she still had some measure of control. She had been tempted to tear up her manuscript in front of his eyes; in fact, when she thought about it now, she was surprised by the violence of her reaction. She shivered slightly and got up. She wasn’t going to sleep, so there was no point in lying here thinking about things that could not be changed.

  It was almost six o’clock, and she still had to go to the supermarket. It was a long drive to Pembroke… She almost decided to delay her departure until the morning but, if she did, Guy French would probably be on the telephone, telling her he had already found her a secretary. He was that kind of man. No, she needed to leave now, while there was still time.

  While there was still time… She frowned a little at her own mental choice of words. It was almost as though she was frightened of the man; almost as though, in some way, she found him threatening. She shrugged the thought aside. Guy French was a bully; she had never liked him and she never would.

  The media considered him to be the glamour boy of publishing, although at thirty-five he hardly qualified for the term ‘boy’, she told herself scathingly. He represented everything male that she detested: good looks, charm, and that appallingly apparent raw sexuality that other women seemed to find so attractive, and which she found physically repellant.

  She had seen his eyes narrow slightly this morning as he came to greet her, and she had instinctively stepped back from him. He hadn’t touched her, letting his hand fall to his side, but she had still flushed darkly, all too conscious of his amusement and contempt.

  No doubt to a man like him she was just a joke: a physically unattractive woman with whom he was forced to deal because it was part of his job. She had seen too many men look at her and then look away to be under any illusions. She wasn’t like Lucy—pretty, confident. Craig had destroyed for her for ever any belief she might once have had that she had any claim to feminine beauty. Ugly, sexless—that was how he had described her in the cruel, taunting voice of his, and that was how she saw herself, and how she believed others saw her as well.

  But there were other things in life that brought pleasure, apart from love. She had found that pleasure in her work. Had found… Until Guy French had started tearing her novel apart, and with it her self-confidence.

  That was what really hurt, she admitted—knowing that he was right when he described her characters as unanimated and without depth. But she had been commissioned to write a historical novel with a factual background, not a love story dressed up in period costume.

  She could, of course, always back down and admit defeat; she could tell Guy French to inform the publishers that she was backing out of the contract. They wouldn’t sue her she felt sure and with withdrawal would stop Guy from hounding her. There were other books she could write… Moodily, she stared out of the window. Her flat was one of several in a small, anonymous, purpose-built block, with nothing to distinguish it from its fellows. Once, as teenagers, she and Lucy had talked of the lives they would lead as adults, of the homes they would have. She remembered quite sharply telling Lucy that she would fill hers with fresh flowers, full of colour and scent.

  Fresh flowers! It had been years since she had last bought any…the wreath for her parents’ funeral.

  Impatient with herself, Campion went to get her coat and her car keys, and then headed for her local supermarket.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SHE must have been mad to have attempted this long journey so late in the evening, Campion admitted bitterly as she stared out into the dark night.

  Somehow, out here in the middle of Wales, the darkness seemed so much more intense than it had in London. Almost it felt as though it was pressing in on her, surrounding her. She shivered despite the warmth inside the car, wondering why it was she should be so much more aware of the fact that it was late November, and the weather wet and cold and very inhospitable, than she had been when she had first left.

  Perhaps because when she’d left her mind had been full of Guy French, and how angry he would be when he found that she had escaped.

  So he thought he could force her to complete the book by taking on a secretary, did he? Scornfully she grimaced to herself. Well, he would soon learn his mistake!

  She came to a crossroads and slowed down to check the signpost, sighing faintly as she realised that it, like so many others she had driven past, had been a victim of the Welsh language lobby.

  Luckily, she had had the foresight to buy a map that gave both the Welsh and the English names for the many tiny villages dotted about the Pembroke.

  At night, the terrain might seem inhospitable but, as she remembered from short summer weekends she had spent here with Helena, the coastline was one of the most beautiful she had ever seen, with mile upon mile of unspoiled countryside, and narrow, winding roads, between deep banks of hedges that were vaguely reminiscent of Cornwall and Dorset at their very best.

  Helena’s cottage was rather remote, several miles away from the nearest village, in fact, down a narrow, unmade-up road. She had been left it by a distant relative, and had some claim to Welsh blood. She had spent childhood holidays in the area, and had been able to supply Campion with many interesting facts about it.

  The Welsh scornfully referred to Pembroke as being more English than England itself, and certainly a succession of English monarchs had been very generous to friends and foes alike when it came to handing out these once rich Welsh lands.

  Sir Philip Sidney, the famous Elizabethan poet and soldier, had been Earl of Pembroke, and there had been others; some sent here as a reward, some as a punishment.

  Her imagination suddenly took fire, and she found herself wondering what it would have been like to have been dismissed to this far part of the country, especially for a young girl, more used to the elegance of court living. A girl like Lynsey, for instance.

  Within seconds, Campion was totally involved in the plot she was weaving inside her head. She reached automatically for the small tape recorder she always carried with her, the words flowing almost too quickly as she fought to keep pace with her thoughts.

  Why was it that she found it so incredibly easy and exciting to imagine the emotions of her young heroine in this context, but, when it came to making her fall in love and having a sexual relationship, her brain just froze?

  Impatient with herself, she pressed harder on the accelerator. Nearly there now, surely. She glanced at the dashboard clock. One in the morning, but she didn’t feel tired; at least, not mentally tired. Her brain had gone into overdrive, and she was itching to sit down at her typewriter and work. It w
ould mean altering several chapters she had already done, but that wouldn’t be any problem, and it would add an extra dimension to her book.

  Angrily, she dismissed the sudden memory she had of Guy telling her that her manuscript lacked a very important dimension. What was she trying to do? Prove to him that she could make the book work without the sexual content he deemed so necessary? And so it would, she told herself mutinously. But, deep down inside herself, she knew it was not just the lack of sexuality to her heroine, but the lack of emotional responsiveness to the men around her that made the book seem so flat. Campion was not a fool, some of the most emotionally and mentally stimulating books ever written—books that caught the imagination and held it fast, books that conveyed a quality of realism and involvement that no one could deny—did so without any reference description of physical lovemaking between the main characters. But what they had, and what her manuscript lacked, was the special, vibrant awareness of the characters’ sexuality. A vibrant awareness which she herself had never experienced, other than that one briefly painful episode with Craig.

  She was so deeply immersed in her private thoughts that she almost missed the turn-off for the cottage. Braking quickly, she turned into the unmade-up lane.

  Surely it had not been as pitted with pot-holes the last time she’d driven down it? Her body lurched against the restraining seat-belt as she tried to avoid the worst of the holes. Muddy water splashed up over her car as she drove straight into one of them, and she cursed mildly.

  Although Helena was in Greece, recuperating from a severe bout of pleurisy, her housekeeper had been quite happy to supply Campion with the keys for the cottage. Campion knew Mabel quite well, and the small, dour Scotswoman had warned her that the cottage was not really equipped for winter living.