by Penny Jordan
Formal clothes suited him, she acknowledged, as she studied the effect of his well-cut fair hair, and the healthy tan he had acquired since visiting the leisure centre, against the expensive fabric of his dinner suit and the crisp whiteness of his dress shirt.
Nick liked his dress shirts to be hand-laundered by her, and starched. It was a laborious job and one which she felt the local laundry could have performed far more efficiently, but she also knew that if she tried to point this out to Nick he would demand to know if she thought he was made of money, and what she did with her time. After all, she did not work.
Because Nick would not let her. Because every time she raised the subject of getting herself some sort of part-time paid work he told her furiously that he was not going to be humiliated in their local community by having his wife pretending that he kept her so short of money that she needed to earn the pathetically few pounds she would earn.
‘And besides, what would you do?’ he had taunted her. ‘You’ve never held down a proper job.’
‘I could train,’ she had retorted. ‘Some of the local shops…’
Nick had gone from contempt to fury, accusing her of deliberately trying to undermine him, his position.
Didn’t she at least owe it to him to at least try to behave as a loyal wife? he had demanded bitterly.
A loyal wife… Her eyes bleak with despair, she turned to look at him, watching the irritation and contempt hardening his face as he studied her.
‘Why the hell don’t you find something decent to wear?’ he demanded.
She could have retorted that she could not afford the luxury of anything other than the most basic of chain-store clothes, but to do so would reignite his grievance against her late parents, for using their modest wealth to purchase annuities which had died with them rather than investing their capital elsewhere so that it could have been passed on to her.
They must present a bizarre contrast, she admitted tiredly, Nick in his obviously expensive dinner suit, she in her shabby, well-worn, dull dress.
‘My God, you love playing the martyr, don’t you?’ Nick accused her as he glared at her. ‘Hurry up or we’re going to be late. I don’t know what the hell you’re doing up here anyway.’ He gave her another disparaging glance.
Comparing her with Venice, Fern wondered unhappily, or was she simply imagining things… looking for them, because…?
As she followed him downstairs, she wondered what Nick would say if she told him that she would rather stay at home.
Get even more angry with her than he already was, she imagined.
There had been a time when she had actually enjoyed going to dinner parties, had looked forward to the stimulation of conversation with other people, but that had been before Nick had pointed out to her on their way home one evening that she was boring people with her silly mundane conversation.
He had apologised to her later, but when she had refused to respond he had accused her of sulking and she had tried to tell him that she wasn’t; that she just felt so weighed down by the burden of realising what people had privately been thinking of her that she simply couldn’t raise the energy to respond to him.
‘Don’t he to me, Fern,’ he had told her bitterly. ‘You’re trying to punish me for telling you the truth. Just as you tried to punish me for having an affair by…’
She had run out of the room then, unable to bear to listen to him any more, knowing that she was behaving childishly and yet unable to trust herself to stay and hear him out.
It had been shortly after that that her father had died, and then her mother, who had suffered ill health for several years, had gradually started to grow worse, and she had had no energy left to do anything other than cope with her mother’s decline.
‘Fern, for heaven’s sake come on,’ Nick demanded irritably. Quietly she picked her bag up off the bed and walked towards the bedroom door.
Well, at least there was one thing she could be sure of about this evening’s dinner party, Fern reflected, trying to resurrect her sense of humour, and that was that Venice would not be dressed in an out-of-date, dowdy black dress.
* * *
She was wrong, on one point at least. Venice was wearing black, but that was the only thing her own dress had in common with the outfit Venice had on, Fern remarked wryly as Venice opened her front door to them.
At closer to thirty-five than thirty Venice was older than Fern; older than Nick too, a tiny, vivacious, fragile-boned creature with a small oval face and enormous eyes. Where another woman might have self-consciously tried to conceal her lack of height, seeing it as a fault rather than an asset, Venice seemed to take pleasure in deliberately underlining the fact that she couldn’t be much more than five feet tall, and Fern, who had in the past suffered several slighting comments from Nick about her own small frame and the fact that short women invariably lacked the elegant grace of their taller sisters, stifled a small pang of envy at Venice’s abundant self-confidence.
The black dress she was wearing might almost have been painted on to her body. For someone so small-boned she had disconcertingly voluptuous breasts. Fern had overheard a couple of other women discussing Venice and her figure, one of them wondering out loud if her breasts might possibly owe more to man than nature.
Whatever the case, they were certainly catching Nick’s eye, Fern recognised.
Had Venice deliberately chosen that trimming of black feathers for her dress, knowing that they not only provided an eye-catching contrast to her skin, but also that the sheen on the feathers reflected the pearly translucence of her bare skin?
The single pear-shaped diamond that nestled between her breasts was so large that it only just escaped being vulgar. When she moved, it blazed cold fire like the matching diamonds in her ears.
Tonight the almost white-blonde hair, which she normally wore in a perfectly shaped shoulder-length bob, was drawn up and back in a contemporary version of a Bardot-type beehive hairstyle, all careless, artful fronds of ‘escaping’ hair and tousled curls, half as though she had just come from her bed and the arms of her lover, piling her hair up carelessly on top of her head, more concerned with the pleasure of their lovemaking than her public appearance.
Only of course that particular type of artless sensuality could only be achieved with the aid of a very expensive hairdresser.
But even without the embellishments provided by her late husband’s wealth Venice would have been a very beautiful woman, Fern admitted.
That she was also a very sensual and provocative one as well and that she enjoyed being so Fern also had little doubt.
Venice was obviously very much a man’s woman and made no attempt to hide it, something that was reinforced by the cursory way she welcomed Fern, turning immediately and far more enthusiastically towards Nick, moving between Fern and her husband, her back almost but not quite turned towards Fern, almost deliberately excluding her from her welcome to Nick.
A welcome which was surely far more effusive than was warranted by the business relationship Nick claimed to have with her. Or was she being unfairly suspicious? Fern wondered, as she stood quietly to one side, politely waiting for Venice to finish her conversation with Nick.
‘That’s a beautiful diamond,’ Fern heard Nick saying softly to her.
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Venice agreed.
As she smiled up at him, her index finger stroked over the hollow between her breasts just above where the diamond lay, almost deliberately drawing Nick’s attention to her body.
Not that she needed to do so, Fern acknowledged. He had hardly taken his eyes off her since she opened the door to them.
The last time Nick had become involved with another woman, he had claimed that she, Fern, had driven him to it with her sexual coldness. If she, his wife, had been more responsive to him, if she had not forced him to find sexual solace in the arms of another woman, he would never have dreamed of being unfaithful to her.
It was her fault that he had had an affair.
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br /> And deep down inside herself Fern had believed him. After all, hadn’t her parents brought her up to be aware that it was her female role in life to please and appease, to be gently and femininely aware of the needs of others, and to minister to them before her own?
She had married Nick without giving much thought to whether or not they might be sexually compatible, naïvely assuming that her inability to find much pleasure in their initial lovemaking had been because of her lack of experience.
And besides, she had not been marrying Nick for sex. She had been marrying him because he loved her… because he needed and wanted her.
It hadn’t taken her very long to realise that the understanding with which Nick had appeared to treat her lack of sexuality before their marriage was an indulgence he might have been prepared to allow a fiancée but was most definitely not prepared to allow a wife.
She should never have stayed with him, she recognised now. Not once she realised she no longer loved him; but it had seemed more important then to put her parents’ feelings before her own, and Nick had been so persuasive, so contrite, so sure that this time they would be able to make a go of it, that she simply hadn’t had the heart to tell him that she no longer wanted to.
And then of course there had been the complication of Adam, and so she had given way.
Not just because she had wanted to protect her parents, not even because she was still torn between what she felt or rather did not feel for Nick, and what she firmly still believed—as she had been brought up to believe—that the sanctity of the state of marriage, of the commitment she had made, far, far outweighed the self-indulgence of giving way to her own feelings; but also, shamefully, she had given way because she could not face the thought of Adam knowing she had walked out on her marriage and suspecting why… feeling sorry for her that what had happened between them had in the end been at her instigation, and did not mean… could not mean that she could ever have any future with him…
No, she could not endure the humiliation of listening to Adam explaining in that careful, neutral voice of his that he did not really want her. As though she needed telling…
‘Stay with me,’ Nick had pleaded. ‘We can make it work. I know we can…’
And she had allowed herself to believe him… because she had so desperately needed to believe him.
And now?
She could feel the panic starting to flood through her, the aching, cold, terrifying sensation of somehow having been asleep, only to wake up and find herself trapped in a world, a life that was totally alien to her.
She was still suffering from the effects of her parents’ deaths, she told herself. That was why she was experiencing this sense of panic and loss… this sense of dislocation … of being not just a stranger to herself, but in some sense an outsider to her own life… someone who was dispossessed… alone… alien…
It was a relief when Venice finally turned to her, giving her a coolly appraising look as she commented with a feline smile, ‘Fern… do come into the drawing-room. You look cold… and so thin.’
So plain, so dowdy, so patently undesirable, Fern added mentally to herself as Venice ushered them into the drawing-room, having handed their coats to the uniformed maid who had been standing silently just behind her.
Fern tried to think of anyone other than Venice who would give a small weekday dinner party for less than a dozen people and employ uniformed temporary staff.
Not even Lord Stanton up at the Hall did that. But then Lord Stanton probably couldn’t afford to, and besides, he had the invaluable Phillips to take care of all his domestic arrangements. She had a feeling that Phillips would have been highly disdainful of Venice’s maid, uniformed or not.
Venice’s drawing-room, like the rest of Venice’s house, had been decorated and furnished with one object in mind, and that was to provide the perfect backdrop for Venice herself.
If, in the recessionary environment-conscious Nineties some people might have balked at such an obvious display of wealth and consumerism, such an unabashed love of luxury, Venice was plainly made of sterner stuff.
The drawing-room had, Fern recognised, been redecorated since she had last seen it, and she blinked a little at the effect of so many subtly different shades of peach, layer upon layer of them, so that the room almost seemed to pulsate with the soft colour.
If chiffon curtains were not exactly what one might have expected to find in a drawing-room, they certainly created a very sensual effect, and it certainly took very little imagination to picture Venice lying naked on the thick fleecy peach-hued rug, smiling that slant-eyed provocative smile of hers at her lover.
And her husband? Fern wondered dully.
‘I must show you my bathroom… It’s wonderful,’ she heard Venice saying. ‘I’ve had a mural done of the Grand Canal with the bath framed so that it looks as though I’m looking out through one of the windows of one of those enormous old palazzos. So clever… and so naughty. Sometimes I almost feel as though the gondoliers are real and can actually see me.’
She laughed, batting her eyelashes at Nick, and ignoring her, Fern recognised.
Some of their fellow dinner guests had arrived ahead of them: the local doctor and his wife, both of whom Fern knew reasonably well. She had no really close friends in the town.
She had looked forward to making new friends when they had first moved into their house after their marriage, but Nick had proved to be unexpectedly jealous and possessive; so much so, in fact, that she had found it easier simply to give in to the emotional pressure he put on her rather than endure the unpleasant confrontations her attempts to establish an independent life for herself provoked.
Although she knew a lot of people, some through Nick’s business and others through the work she did for a variety of local charities—Nick approved of this unpaid help she gave to others, not because it helped the charities she worked for, but because it increased his esteem within the area—she had no really close confidantes… no one to whom she could talk about the crisis she felt she was facing.
Was it her parents’ deaths—a final severing of the physical links with her childhood—which had prompted this agonising and soul-searching, this belief that her life had become an empty wasteland with nothing to look forward to; these traumatic feelings of panic which threatened to engulf her whenever she was forced to confront the reality of her marriage? Or was it because she was afraid of facing up to that reality; afraid of stripping back the fiction and the deceit and seeing her marriage for what it really was? Afraid of admitting that she did not love her husband?
And if he was having an affair with Venice… She could feel her heart starting to beat faster, her throat starting to close up.
Don’t think about it, she warned herself. Don’t think about it.
Why not? Because she was terrified that, if she did, she would have to do something about it… that, without the necessity of protecting her parents to hide behind, she would be forced to confront the truth and ask herself, not just why, but also how she could bear to stay in a marriage that was so plainly a mockery of everything that such a commitment could be.
A commitment… That was the crux of all her agonising. When she’d married Nick she had made a commitment… a commitment she had truly believed to be given for life; she had made promises, vows, which were meant to last for life, not to be pushed to one side the moment things went wrong. And surely, just so long as Nick continued to claim that he needed and wanted her, she had no right to walk away from that commitment?
‘Fern… how are you?’
Dizzily she broke free of her painful thoughts, smiling automatically, her tension tightening her face into an almost masklike rigidity as she turned towards the doctor’s wife.
‘I’m fine, Roberta… and you?’
‘Relieved that the winter flu season is almost over,’ Roberta Parkinson told her ruefully. ‘It’s been particularly bad this year, as well. John lost several of his older patients as an indirect re
sult of it. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?’ she added with motherly concern. ‘You’re looking a bit pale.’
‘It’s just the heat in here,’ Fern fibbed. In actual fact she was enjoying the warmth of the room. It was such a contrast to the cold chilliness of their own sitting-room at home.
Because he himself was often working in the evenings, Nick refused to allow her to have the central heating or the gas fires on, claiming that she was extravagantly wasteful with heat.
If it weren’t for the Aga in the kitchen—not one of the brightly coloured modern ones, but the original old-fashioned dull cream type which had been in the house when they first moved in, and which Nick had claimed he was unable to afford to replace—Fern reflected that most evenings she would have been forced to go to bed at a ridiculously early hour just to keep warm.
Roberta excused herself, moving away to talk to the two other couples who had also arrived; Fern knew them both and smiled an acknowledgement of their greeting but remained where she was. One of the couples was a local entrepreneur and his wife, who had moved into the area in the last few years, and the other was their local MP and her husband.
Fern liked all four of them, but tonight she was feeling so on edge and tense that she wanted a few seconds to herself before going over to join them. Because she was afraid of what her expression might betray?
She could feel the panic welling up inside her again, and with it her increasing dread that she was losing all control, not just of her life, but of herself as well. Only yesterday, when Nick had ignored her request that they sit down and talk about their relationship, she had felt almost hysterically close to screaming her frustration out loud. Something… anything to make him listen to her instead of swamping her with his anger, his irritation, his indifference to what she was feeling.
‘Only one more couple to arrive now,’ she heard Venice saying from behind her. As she turned around, she noticed distantly that Nick was with her.
‘Oh, Fern, you don’t have a drink,’ Venice commented, all mock hostessly concern.
