A Reason for Being

by Penny Jordan

  ‘I came here because of Susie’s letter,’ she told him unsteadily when she had herself under control. ‘That’s all…not out of malice or spite…not for any reason other than because I felt she and Sara needed me.’

  Another minute and she would be in floods of tears, and that was the last thing she wanted. She bit down hard on her lip…too hard, she realised as she tasted the rust-salt taste of her own blood and realised what she had done. She touched the small wound with her tongue.

  ‘They do need you.’

  The quiet admission stunned her. She stood where she was, her mouth half open, her eyes registering her amazement.

  ‘It won’t be for long,’ she assured him when she had got over her astonishment. ‘By the time you and Isobel get married…’

  An odd look crossed his face. A spasm of something that could almost have been pain. Was it because he knew how much the two girls disliked his fiancée?

  ‘That won’t do,’ he told her quietly. ‘Susie is sixteen, Sara fourteen. If you’re serious about making a commitment to them, it’s going to have to be for something more like four years than four months…’

  ‘Four years?’

  He smiled grimly.

  ‘Yes. Think about it, Maggie, and then after dinner we’ll have a talk.’

  When he probably expected her to back down, to say that she wasn’t prepared to give up four years of her life, Maggie realised sickly as he left the room. Oh, he was clever, she had to give him that. He thought he’d found the ideal way of getting rid of her without arousing the girls’ antagonism. He was going to make her do the leaving, just as he had done before. She swallowed down the sobs of pure rage building in her throat. This wasn’t the time to give way to the feelings burning inside her. She needed to stay calm and controlled…she needed to think.

  Four years! But what did it matter…four or forty? There was nothing for her in London. This was her home. She already knew she would never marry. But living here meant that she would be constantly tormented by the sight of Marcus himself…by her memories…by her feelings.

  She checked herself abruptly. What feelings? She had no feelings left…for Marcus or any other man. She was immune to the emotional and physical impact of any man, incapable of responding to them in any way at all.

  So why had she been in this constant turmoil ever since she arrived?

  Because of her own guilt, she told herself angrily. That was why. Nothing more.

  * * *

  BECAUSE she wasn’t sure where they normally ate and didn’t want to disturb either the girls’ concentration on their homework or invade Marcus’s privacy in his study, Maggie laid the table for supper in the kitchen, using the dinner service on the old-fashioned dresser.

  In Marcus’s mother’s day, supper, or more properly dinner, had always been served and eaten with proper formality in the dining-room, but since tonight’s meal was rather a sparse affair Maggie didn’t feel it warranted the faded splendour of the Edwardian dining-room with its crimson paper and heavy mahogany furniture.

  She had managed to find time to ring Lara and tell her that she was staying on. Lara had been somewhat disturbingly unsurprised.

  ‘Some day I’m going to make you tell me more about this stepcousin of yours,’ she had warned her. ‘And don’t bother saying there’s nothing to tell. When you mentioned his name, you looked just as you used to look when you told Dad you didn’t have any family.’

  Maggie had blushed a little as she denied her friend’s allegation. It was true that, when she first lived with Lara and her father, she had told them she had no family, but later, when she had learned to trust them, she had admitted the truth…or at least some of it. She had kept back the exact reason why she had left, and once he’d realised that no force on earth was going to get her to either confide in them or go back, John Philips had stopped pressing her. She had been lucky to find such a refuge, she acknowledged now as she went to call the others to supper; even now it made her skin crawl to think of the fates that could have befallen her. Had Marcus ever wondered, ever worried…? She stopped herself from following such unprofitable lines of thought. Marcus owed her nothing. He had trusted her and she had abused and betrayed that trust. She had…

  Noisy footsteps in the passage reminded her that the past was dead, and Susie and Sara hurried into the kitchen together.

  ‘Smells good,’ Sara exclaimed with a smile as she went to sit down. Neither of them made any reference to the fact that they were eating in the kitchen. Maggie had prepared a tray for Marcus, thinking he might prefer the privacy of his study, well away from her, but as she was getting it ready he came into the kitchen and frowned down at it.

  ‘Not eating with us?’ he asked her caustically.

  She flushed. ‘The tray was for you…I thought…’

  ‘Well, don’t,’ he told her abruptly, and then added under his breath so that the girls couldn’t hear, ‘Much as you might want to pretend I don’t exist, Maggie, I’m afraid I do. If I want to have my meals on my own, you may rest assured that I shall tell you.’

  His sarcastic rebuke made her angry. An anger she had no right to feel, she reminded herself as she watched the girls enjoying their food, and pushed her own miserably around her plate.

  ‘Not eating?’ Marcus queried, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘I…I’m not hungry. I was wondering if the kitchen garden still exists,’ she added hurriedly, uncomfortably aware of the narrow-eyed scrutiny he was giving her slender frame. Did he think she was too thin? Was he comparing her slender frame with Isobel’s far more lush curves? Where once she would have been delighted to have his attention on her, to have his gaze on her, now she was made awkward and miserable by his scrutiny, bleakly aware of how dangerously vulnerable he could still make her feel. Now, though, there was no sexual frisson of pleasure in the knowledge, only a cold and nauseous burden of guilt and misery.

  ‘In a way. It’s very overgrown. Why?’

  ‘I had to use frozen vegetables tonight, and I couldn’t help remembering how your mother always had fresh things.’

  ‘Well, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be resuscitated, if that’s what you want,’ he told her, surprising her. ‘When John comes tomorrow, I’ll have a word with him. Get him to make a start on clearing out the weeds. We might not get much from it this summer, but next year…’

  ‘Oh, yes…and we could help you,’ Sara interrupted, her eyes shining. ‘We could make jam like you said Mum used to.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maggie agreed softly, touched by the enthusiasm in the younger girl’s voice. ‘We’ll do that. In fact, we could make some this autumn. We’ll go blackberrying,’ she promised them, ‘and see what we can find.’

  From the way they all cleaned their plates, even Marcus, it seemed that her cooking was a success, Maggie reflected, as she offered to make some coffee and apologised for the lack of any dessert.

  ‘Girls, you can both help Maggie with the washing-up,’ Marcus announced firmly. Once or twice during the meal, watching him listening to something one or other of the girls had been telling him about their day, Maggie could almost have imagined herself back in the past, and then, as though conscious of her concentration, he would turn and look at her and all her guilt and misery would come rushing back.

  Now, as he pushed back his chair and stood up, she could see that he looked tired and strained. And no wonder; those plaster casts couldn’t exactly be comfortable.

  ‘Perhaps you’d prefer to have your coffee in the study,’ she offered formally.

  He looked at her, dark eyebrows lifting.

  ‘Trying to get rid of me again?’ he asked sotto voce as the girls carried the dirty plates over to the sink.

  To her own disgust, she flushed. It was ridiculous, this pale skin of hers that so easily gave her away, betraying every single emotion she felt.

  ‘No,’ she told him shortly. ‘I just thought you might prefer the comfort of the chairs in there. It can’t be easy for you—�
�� she looked at the casts ‘—heaving all that extra weight around.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ he agreed shortly, ‘and they itch damnably. Actually I have got some work to do, if you’re sure you don’t mind.’

  ‘Isobel won’t like that,’ Susie commented cheerfully, catching his last comment as she came back for the rest of the dirty dishes. ‘She was furious when she found out that Marcus was going to be off his feet for so long. She likes to go out dancing and to parties,’ she told Maggie, adding thoughtfully, ‘I suppose that’s why she didn’t want us around, ’cos she’d have to find babysitters and things for us.’

  ‘Susie…’ Marcus warned her tetchily, but Susie ignored the warning growl in his voice and tossed her head.

  ‘It isn’t my fault if she doesn’t like us. Mrs Nesbitt said she only got engaged to you anyway because she’d had a row with her last boyfriend.’

  ‘Susie, I don’t think you should repeat gossip,’ Maggie intervened hurriedly, not daring to look at Marcus to see how he was reacting to these disclosures. Behind her, she heard Marcus making to get up, and as he did so he staggered a little, suddenly clumsy. She reacted instinctively, reaching out to steady him, surprised to feel the fine tremor racing over his skin as she held on to him to balance him. It was hardly cold enough to merit such a shiver, and then she realised that the muscles beneath her fingers were bunched in tense agony, and as she looked into the too-dark depths of his eyes, she realised that she was the cause of that shudder of revulsion.

  She let go of him immediately, her skin burning with acute misery. Of course he would loathe the very touch of her, but she hadn’t thought. She had simply wanted to help him. Idiotic tears blurred her eyes and she turned her back on him, hating herself for her stupidity.

  When she had made the coffee, she got Susie to take it into him. The girls still had homework to do, and while they did it she busied herself checking on the meagre contents of the cupboards.

  Tomorrow whe would have to do some shopping. She could do it after she had dropped the girls off at school…which reminded her…

  She went upstairs and knocked briefly on the school-room door before walking in.

  ‘Washing,’ she announced briefly. ‘I need to wash some of my own things tomorrow. Lara, my flatmate, is going to send on the rest of my clothes, but until they arrive I’m stuck with what I’ve brought with me. And while we’re on the subject…what kind of routine did Mrs Nesbitt have?’

  ‘Routine?’ Susie queried, nibbling the end of her pen. Her hair needed trimming, Maggie noticed absently, and perhaps even reshaping in a different style. Her school skirt was also far too short, almost indecently so.

  ‘Yes, you know…when did she do the shopping and the washing? Which days?’

  Susie’s forehead cleared.

  ‘Oh…oh, she didn’t have one. She just did things when she felt like doing them, didn’t she, Sara?’

  Maggie was astounded that Marcus had put up with such a ramshackle state of affairs, especially when she remembered the way in which his mother had run the house.

  It seemed that she had taken on a bigger task than she had imagined. She would be needed for four years, Marcus had warned her, and suddenly her mouth quirked in unexpected amusement. Four years to teach them all the feminine skills it had taken her half a lifetime to learn? Well, why not? It would give her a purpose in life…a cause…a reason for being. It would answer a need in her which had remained hungry and unappeased for far too long. She would enjoy being a surrogate mother to these cousins of hers, she recognised on a sudden shaft of self-knowledge. They would fill the space in her heart left empty by the children of her own she would never have. She was needed here and she needed to be here, and she wasn’t going to let anyone or anything drive her away.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WAS almost ten o’clock before she was free to make her way to the study in response to Marcus’s earlier command. The reason for the delay had nothing to do with any reluctance on her part to face Marcus alone, she reassured herself as she went downstairs.

  During term-time the girls were apparently expected to start preparing for bed at about ten o’clock unless some special occasion necessitated them staying up later, and she had, of course, needed to find out from them as much about their everyday routine as she could, which had kept her upstairs in the school-room with them until almost ten.

  Their rooms were not on the same floor as hers, but one floor above, the nursery floor, where they had apparently been quite happy to remain. They had separate rooms, but shared a bathroom and a room which had originally been their playroom, but which they now referred to as the ‘den’. It was comfortably furnished, with an ancient, sagging settee and two equally old chairs, and although Maggie’s housewifely eye noticed that the same film of dust so much in evidence downstairs covered this room as well, she remembered enough of her own teenage years not to make any comment.

  Pop records and tapes jostled quite happily for space alongside more classical music; a pair of tennis racquets in their presses were leaning up against one of the walls; what looked like at least half a dozen assorted pairs of tennis shoes were discarded next to them.

  Both girls rode and played tennis, but it was Sara, the younger sister, who had the musical ear, Susie explained to her as she talked to them, drawing them out about their hobbies and how they spent their spare time.

  It was obvious from their conversation that they both thoroughly enjoyed attending their local convent school. Although they were in different classes, they both seemed to have a large circle of friends, certainly far more than she could ever remember having, and in fact they were both extremely well-rounded and mature young people. Far more so than she remembered being at the same age.

  It appalled her now to recollect that at sixteen, Susie’s age, she had been so firmly convinced of her love for Marcus that her whole world had narrowed down so that she had virtually excluded everyone else from it.

  The death of her parents when she was just entering her teens, the fact that she had been too shy to make many new friends at her new school, the shocking deaths of her aunt and uncle, her grandfather’s poor health…all these things had exacerbated the situation, but the original fault had lain with her, a massive fault in her personality, which had enabled her to blinker herself to reality.

  She recalled abruptly one hot summer’s day some time after the death of her aunt and uncle. Marcus was working in the garden, shirt off, the sunlight playing on the hard muscles of his back and arms. She had been sitting watching him, totally absorbed in greedily filling her senses with the sight and scent of him…so much so that she hadn’t realised they had a visitor until Mrs Hayes, the then vicar’s wife, had touched her on her shoulder.

  She remembered how she had spun round in shock and anger, not wanting anyone to interrupt her precious moments with Marcus. She had given the vicar’s wife a fierce look of resentment as she stood up, and it was only now, with the maturity and wisdom of her much older self, that she was able to realise that the look she had surprised on Mrs Hayes’s face had been one of intense concern. A kind-hearted woman, she had called quite frequently in those early days of her aunt and uncle’s death, Maggie remembered. She had even suggested that Maggie might like to stay at the vicarage for a while. The older woman had perhaps seen the danger which Maggie herself had been totally oblivious to, in her intense devotion to Marcus.

  She remembered how she had burst into tears the moment Marcus had suggested the visit, demanding to know why he wanted to send her away. He had always hated to see her crying, and she had known it and played on that knowledge, she admitted wryly, and of course the visit had never materialised. Perhaps her whole life would have been different if it had. She might have found a good friend in the vicar’s wife, and that friendship might have distracted her from her emotional dependence on Marcus.

  Thank goodness neither Susie nor Sara showed any signs of sharing her own teenage intensity. They were much better adjust
ed than she had ever been…everything that parents always hoped their teenage daughters might be, although she suspected they were quite capable of the odd tantrum and sulk now and again.

  At the moment she and they were very much in the honeymoon period of their relationship. It remained to be seen how they would get along when they had had more opportunity to get to know one another. She had fortunately had some experience of teenage girls, having worked for a brief space of time some years earlier at a private school in London, taking the art classes during the illness of the regular art teacher. That experience had helped her to see how very abnormal in many ways her own teenage life had been, centred exclusively as it had been on Marcus and Deveril.

  That had been her fault and not his. There had been opportunities for her to make friends, but she had shunned them all, so very protective and possessive of her relationship with Marcus, so determined that one day he was going to look at her and return her love, that she had deliberately excluded everyone else from her life. That was why it had been so easy for her to slip from reality into fantasy…into a world where Marcus did, in fact, already love her…and not as a child, but as a woman. And once she had found the door to that fantasy world, she had opened it more and more often, so that there had eventually come a time when in her subconscious mind the fantasy became fact.

  She now saw that time, that experience as a dark pit from which she had only just managed to drag herself free. She shuddered a little as she closed the girls’ sitting-room door behind her and headed for the stairs. What would have happened to her if it hadn’t been for the catalyst of Marcus announcing his engagement? Would she have gone on deluding herself until eventually… Her mouth went dry as she contemplated the consequences of such folly.