by Penny Jordan
Her parents left home early in the morning but Philippa waited almost until lunchtime to do the same, still half afraid that for some reason they might come back.
The journey would only take her a couple of hours, or so she had estimated… What she had not allowed for, though, was taking the wrong exit off the motorway and getting well and truly lost afterwards, so that it was early evening before she finally turned into the road where Blake lived.
It was a chilly, wet evening, sullen grey rainclouds darkening the sky. She parked the car outside the flat, running through the rain to the door and ringing the bell.
A huge drop of rain fell on her face, smudging her mascara, and she was just trying frantically to rub it away when the door opened.
‘Blake…’ Tired and emotional, she would have hurled herself into his arms if he had not fended her off.
‘What is it… what’s happened?’ he demanded. ‘Is it Mike—has something happened to him… ?’
‘Michael?’ Philippa stared at him. This wasn’t what she had planned… what she had imagined… Blake holding her at arm’s length, looking at her so coldly, more concerned, it seemed, with her brother than with her.
Fiercely she tried to banish the small feather of disquiet starting to curl uncomfortably inside her stomach.
‘Blake, I had to see you. I need to talk to you…’
He didn’t seem to be listening to her.
‘How did you get here?’ he demanded.
‘In my car…’ Wearily she gestured to the car parked by the kerb.
‘Your car…?’
‘Yes… they… Daddy gave it to me for my birthday.’
‘Oh, yes, I suppose I should have guessed.’ The sardonic tone of his voice made Philippa flinch a little. She shivered, suddenly feeling cold and very unsure of herself. He didn’t seem the same Blake somehow.
‘Look, you’d better come in and tell me what all this is about,’ he told her, frowning as he turned away from her and opened a door off the hall.
The sitting-room that lay beyond it was sparsely furnished and pin-neat; a book lay open on the desk, an anglepoise lamp illuminating it.
‘Oh, I’m sorry—were you working?’ Philippa apologised awkwardly.
Blake’s mouth twisted. ‘Typical Philippa,’ he commented. ‘Showing us all how well she’s been brought up, how nice her manners are… how good she is. My God, you aren’t real!’ he exploded suddenly with such violent intensity that Philippa tensed against it. ‘You can’t be,’ he added as he turned round and stared angrily at her. ‘You arrive on my doorstep talking some nonsense about needing my help and then you——’
‘I do need your help,’ Philippa told him. ‘Daddy won’t let me go to university…’
‘Surprise, surprise,’ Blake responded cynically. His mouth curled downwards when he saw her face.
‘Oh, come on—you must have known it would happen… The car, I take it, is your reward for toeing the line, for doing what he wants…
‘What are you really doing here, Philippa—what is it you really want from me? Or can I guess?’
He was beginning to frighten her now; he wasn’t like the Blake she knew at all.
‘I—I’ve already told you,’ she stammered. ‘I… I wanted to talk to you… to ask for your advice.’
‘My advice?’ The harshness of his laughter hurt her ears. ‘So you want my advice, do you? Very well, I’ll give it to you. My advice is that you stop trying to deceive yourself and face up to reality, but then you don’t like reality, do you, Philippa? You’d much rather be Daddy’s little girl, shielded from all the unpleasant things in life like having to make decisions and having to do without a new dress every week, pearls round your neck and everything else he provides you with. That’s what you really want, isn’t it, Philippa…?’
‘No, of course it isn’t,’ Philippa denied. His attack shocked and hurt her. She’d had no idea he could be like this, speak to her so brutally… as though… as though he didn’t even like her, never mind…
Tears started to fill her eyes but she tried to blink them away.
‘I do want to go to university, but…’
‘But what?’
‘But I can’t,’ she told him shakily. ‘Not without my parents’ support.’
‘Why not?’ Blake demanded curtly. ‘Other people do… other people work to finance their education, but of course you could never do anything like that, could you, Philippa…?’
He took hold of her hand and examined her pretty french-polished nails, stroking the softness of her skin, but there was nothing loving and tender in his touch, nothing remotely approaching desire.
‘No,’ he said under his breath, more to himself than to her, or so it seemed to Philippa. ‘No, you couldn’t——’
‘Yes, I could,’ Philippa cut in painfully, hating the way he was looking at her, the contempt she could see, hear and almost feel in his attitude towards her. ‘I could work… I could…’ Her voice died away as she saw the way he was looking at her, saw her dreams being destroyed in front of her, consumed in the ice-cold fire of his anger, crumbling beneath the crushing weight of his rejection of her.
‘Blake…’
There was no mistaking the appeal in her voice, even she herself could hear it, and she flinched from it, mortified by what she was revealing but helpless to stop it.
‘No…’ Blake told her thickly, shaking his head. ‘Oh, no… no. No, you don’t, Philippa…’ And then, with a harsh frown, he took hold of her, crushing her against his body so hard that the impact of his muscles against her body actually hurt, the sensation of the soft dark hair on his bare arms touching her own skin, the maleness of him overwhelming her to such an extent that she immediately panicked, fighting to break free of him, subdued only by the fierce pressure of his mouth as it took hers in a bruising, punishing kiss that was nothing like the tender, almost reverential embrace she had imagined.
The kiss was hot and hard and angry, bruising her lips, forcing their compliance, the thrust of his tongue parting them for his to take marauding possession of her mouth. Her breasts hurt from the pressure of his muscles against them, her legs were shaking, her whole body in a state of semi-shock.
The tears she would not allow herself to cry ran down inside her throat instead, clogging it with their salt taste.
‘What is it… what’s wrong?’ Blake demanded, his lips against her ear. ‘This is what you came here for, isn’t it…? This is what you wanted… ?’
‘No,’ Philippa denied desperately, trying to break free of him, but he refused to let her go.
‘Don’t lie to me,’ he taunted her. ‘I’ve seen the way you look at me… the way you watch me… the hunger in your eyes. But then of course you would lie, wouldn’t you, just as you’re lying about your reason for being here… just as you’re lying about not being able to go to university… ?’
‘I’m not lying,’ Philippa protested.
‘Yes, you are,’ Blake insisted. ‘There’s only one person stopping you from going to university,’ he told her harshly, ‘and it isn’t your father. It’s you. You want it all, Philippa, don’t you? You aren’t prepared to make any effort, any sacrifice… no, others can do that for you while you sit there prettily and accept it as your due.
‘Well, shall I tell you something about that prettiness, Philippa—shall I? In reality it isn’t prettiness at all, it’s ugliness… ugliness, because without intelligence, without character, all it is is just a vapid, empty mask. That’s all you are, Philippa… just an empty, pretty mask, not a real woman at all. Yes, you’re pretty, Philippa, as pretty and prettily packaged as a little doll and just as insipid and lifeless.’ And Blake poured out more painful words in the same vein.
He released her then, pushing her away from him with such force that she almost fell.
The hall door was still open and, reacting instinctively, driven by her desire to escape both from him and from his humiliation of her, she took to her heels and fl
ed.
He ran after her, following her right out to the car, and she thought he might actually open the door and drag her out of it, but to her relief there was a policeman walking down the road towards them and, taking advantage of his presence, she turned the key in the ignition and drove off.
The pain of Blake’s rejection of her, of knowing how he felt about her, was so intense that there were times in the following weeks, many, many of them, when she didn’t know how she was going to bear it. Only her pride kept her going. Her pride was, after all, all she had left.
She couldn’t believe how she had ever been stupid enough to imagine that Blake had wanted her, that he might share her feelings, and whenever she thought of what she had done she writhed inwardly in such self-inflicted torment that she felt as though she was being burned in the fire of her own self-loathing and contempt.
She hated herself so much that she had no energy left for anything else, and certainly not enough to fight with her parents.
Six weeks later, when she met Andrew, she told herself that he was the balm she needed to soothe and heal her wounds, that in view of everything Blake had said about her she was, as her parents were saying, lucky that Andrew so obviously wanted her.
It was easy then to deceive herself that she was doing the right thing; after all, she had deceived herself before, hadn’t she? Easier simply to give in to the pressure her parents were putting on her… easier simply to pretend to herself that she had never really loved Blake at all. But the fear he had instilled in her remained, the fear and the self-doubt…
What if he was right… what if in reality there was nothing there behind her prettiness?
He wasn’t right, she told herself fiercely now, and she was going to prove it. Wasn’t she?
Joel hadn’t seemed to find her too vacuous to confide in. He hadn’t been contemptuous of her looks.
He was a married man, she reminded herself, someone she barely knew, someone with problems enough of his own; but despite those problems there had been concern for her in his eyes, warmth in the way he’d talked to her… touched her.
They were poles apart in almost every way and yet, listening to him, talking to him, she had felt somehow closer to him than any other man she knew.
Closer to him and drawn to him. As a fellow victim of Andrew’s actions, or as a man?
The phone rang, releasing her from the necessity of finding an answer.
It was the boys’ headmaster, and she still hadn’t spoken to her parents. Coward, she derided herself as she acknowledged that she would have to apologise to him and ask him for a little more time, but before she could say anything she heard him telling her, ‘I think I’ve solved the problem of the boys’ trip. The school has a special fund for cases like theirs. I’ve checked with the administrator and he confirms that they are eligible, so unless you particularly want them home for Easter, which I wouldn’t recommend at the moment, they can go on the trip to Italy as originally planned. By summer, when they’ve had more time to adjust to their father’s death, things should be different.’
‘At least something seems to be going my way,’ she told Susie later when her friend rang.
‘Mmm, looks as if you’ve hit bottom and are on the way up,’ Susie suggested optimistically.
‘Right now I’d quite happily settle for on the bottom,’ Philippa told her.
But, even though she discussed quite openly with her friend the trauma of her visit to the social services office, she did not mention meeting Joel.
Why should she? she asked herself quickly as she replaced the telephone receiver. After all, it was not as though he had any real relevance to her life, or she to his, was it… ?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
JOEL tensed as he heard Sally open the kitchen door; his ears and his mind, now attuned to her routine, caught the sound of her exasperated indrawn breath.
‘Joel, where are you?’
She came into the living-room and demanded, ‘Haven’t you got anything better to do than watch television all day?’
‘Like what?’ he asked bitterly.
‘Like finding a job.’
The minute the words were out Sally regretted them, but it was too late, they were said. She watched Joel’s face close up and his mouth grow bitter.
‘What job?’ he demanded. ‘There are no jobs, Sally.’
She knew that; after all, she had had to listen to him saying it often enough over the last few weeks.
Guiltily she tried to smother her frustration. It wasn’t Joel’s fault that he was out of work, after all, even if Daphne seemed to think differently.
Thinking about her sister reminded her of something else she had said.
‘No jobs, maybe,’ she retorted now. ‘But there is work. Daphne was saying only the other day that she knows dozens of people looking for someone to do a bit of gardening or decorating and she’s right, Joel. Sister was saying only last week that she’s been trying to find someone to paint the outside of her house. Surely you could…’
Joel couldn’t listen to any more.
‘I could what?’ he exploded. ‘Go cap in hand to the likes of your sister and her posh friends begging for work?’ Angry colour flared across his cheekbones. ‘She’d love that, wouldn’t she? She’d…’
Sally pushed her hand wearily into her hair. She had just come from a ward where a patient whose life they had been fighting for for over a week had just died; she was mentally and physically exhausted with the strain of working full-time and trying to run things at home as well. ‘Well, at least it would be work, and there’d be some extra money coming in,’ she told him bitterly.
Did he have any idea what a struggle it was for her to manage? She knew how upset and worried he was about losing his job and she’d done her best to cope and not to add to his worries by admitting that her money just wasn’t going as far as she’d hoped, but he knew how much she earned compared with what they’d been bringing home; surely he could see for himself how much she was struggling?
She frowned as her attention was caught by the magazines on the floor beside his chair: two angling ones and one of them was an expensive one, she recognised as the tension and anxiety inside her suddenly exploded in a ball of tight, frightened anger.
‘Joel, how could you?’ she demanded as she picked them up. ‘How could you waste money on these when you know…?’ Her voice shook as she threw them down on the floor. ‘If you think I’m going out to work, half killing myself, so that you can waste money on stuff like this…’
Joel’s face went white. ‘They cost three pounds eighty, less than you give the kids for spending money,’ he told her with quiet venom.
His words struck at her conscience like physical blows, but Sally was too angry to back down.
‘They earn that money,’ she told him sharply.
When Joel came towards her, for one awful heartbeat of time she actually thought he was going to hit her—Joel, who was the least violent human being she knew. Instinctively she shrank back from him, her eyes widening with fear and shock.
Joel looked shocked too. Shocked and something else, something she couldn’t put a name to but which brought a lump of painful aching emotion to her throat as her senses suddenly relayed to her what her eyes had refused to see: the way his shoulders were hunched, the brooding, bitter, defeated look in his eyes.
She wanted to run up to him and fling her arms round him, to tell him that she was sorry… to explain that she was tired and confused and very, very frightened; that she hadn’t realised just what it would mean to have the full financial responsibility of their lives resting on her shoulders; that she ached sometimes for him to take hold of her and tell her that she wasn’t to worry, that he would sort everything out, even though she knew that wasn’t possible.
She felt so alone, so afraid, but Joel just didn’t seem to notice or care.
Other people did, though. Daphne had commented the last time she had seen her on how tired she looked.
&n
bsp; ‘You’d think Joel would find some way of earning something,’ Daphne had told her. ‘After all, it’s not as though he couldn’t… not with his upbringing.’
Sally had had to avoid looking at her. It would be a betrayal of Joel to tell her sister how he felt about the life he had led as a child, about the fact that his father had never had a regular job and had had to scrape a living where he could.
Joel had once told her that without the allotment he’d worked on with his father they would often have gone without proper food.
‘Jack of all trades, master of none, that was him,’ Joel had told her bitterly. ‘People used to treat him like dirt: he should never have married my mother… He ruined her life as well as his own… and ours…’
Sally had winced as she’d listened to him. As a girl she had thought his background, his gypsy blood romantic, but Joel had shown her a different side of that inheritance when he’d revealed to her the taunts he had suffered as a child, the determination he had developed never, ever to be like his father.
And yet Sally had liked the older man. He had been very like Joel. He had been kind and gentle, patient, and Sally knew how much it had hurt him that Joel had rejected him.
‘There aren’t the jobs,’ she had said quietly, deliberately misunderstanding her sister as she’d added, ‘Not for someone with Joel’s training…’
Daphne had given an exasperated sigh. ‘You’re too soft on him,’ she had told her. ‘And you’re letting him take advantage of you. You should be careful, Sally… after all, what’s in the blood…’
‘What do you mean?’ Sally had demanded unwisely.
‘Well, it’s a well-known fact that gypsy men live off what their women earn,’ Daphne had responded self-righteously.
