by Penny Jordan
The dark, stern, polished wood furniture, the plain white walls, the bare polished floorboards—Rebecca had wanted all of them banished and replaced with hideously jarring modern colours and materials which he had instantly loathed.
The sheer havoc the small screaming bundle of humanity that was his son had brought into the previous calm of his well-ordered life had brought him to the point where he could scarcely bring himself even to look at the child. The noise, the mess, the smell… He gave a small shudder, which Sally totally misinterpreted.
‘That must have been so hard for you,’ she commented sympathetically. ‘Knowing that another man was bringing up your children…’
There was no point in telling her the truth. After all, how could his dislike of small children affect them? That was another plus point about Sally. She was no foolish young girl who would be irrationally tempted to spoil the perfect harmony of their relationship, their closeness, with children.
He made a small non-committal sound while Sally repeated anxiously, ‘I really must go home, Kenneth. Joel…’
‘It’s all right, we’re on our way,’ Kenneth soothed her, turning the car round and then pausing to look into her face and watch as the soft colour crept over her skin at his scrutiny of her.
‘I’m not going to let you go, Sally,’ he told her softly. ‘You’re far too important to me. I respect your loyalty towards your husband but we both know that he just isn’t worthy of you. If he were, you wouldn’t be here with me like this.’
Sally shivered slightly as she listened to him. She wanted to deny what he was saying but she couldn’t. This time she had spent with him was such a solace to her after all she was enduring at home, a bright, warm patch of clear blue in an otherwise dull, heavy grey sky. Kenneth understood her and what she was feeling in a way that Joel didn’t… And didn’t want to?
‘I’ll ring you,’ Kenneth told her as he turned the car into the main road leading to her home.
Sally panicked. ‘No… you mustn’t do that,’ she protested.
Kenneth stopped the car. ‘Then tell me when I can see you again.’
Sally thought frantically; her brain felt like cotton wool, overloaded with confusion and guilt.
She knew she ought to tell Kenneth that it was impossible for her to see him; that she was married; that she loved Joel; but somehow those words wouldn’t come and instead she heard herself saying breathlessly, ‘I… Sister did say I could work an extra shift on Monday and I haven’t said yet whether or not I will.’
Her mouth had gone dry with the enormity of the deception she was… planning. She had never lied to Joel about anything, nor ever dreamed she would want to, and a part of her was already regretting what she had said, urging her to call back the words, but it was too late—Kenneth was already leaning towards her, touching her face softly.
‘Monday it is, then,’ he whispered to her before he kissed her with gentle tenderness.
Hot tears stung her closed lids. How long was it since Joel had treated her so gently, with such caring restraint?
Shakily she disengaged herself from him. The kiss they had just exchanged made her feel as though she had crossed an invisible boundary, stepped into a frightening no-man’s land.
‘Don’t worry,’ Kenneth told her softly, taking hold of her hand and wrapping it inside his own before carefully opening her palm and depositing a kiss there. ‘Everything’s going to be all right…’
Later, hurrying home on trembling legs, her heart aching with the weight of her guilt, she felt desperately afraid. She knew other women who had affairs, broke their marriage vows, but she had always believed that she could never be one of them, and yet here she was…
She stopped, swallowing hard and blinking back the tears threatening her, fighting to control the conflicting emotions. She was in sight of the house, one half of her wanting to run quickly towards its familiarity and security, to hide herself away inside it, from what had just happened, while the other half…
She closed her eyes, her mouth trembling, appalled by her own awareness of how much the other half of her wanted to turn round and run to Kenneth.
She had never known such confusion, such pain, such a racking mixture of guilt, despair and resentment, all mixed up with a helpless longing for all that Kenneth wanted to give her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PHILIPPA sank back wearily on her heels, pushing her hand into her hair. Her fingers, she noticed, were shaking slightly. Susie had obviously noticed too, because she was watching her with sympathetic compassion.
‘It’s all right,’ she assured her friend huskily. ‘I’m OK… It’s just that… doing this…’ she waved towards the neat piles of men’s clothes stacked on the floor and the empty wardrobes beyond them… ‘seems so final somehow… you forget just how much… Andrew was such a hoarder. There are clothes here which——’ She broke off, biting down hard on her bottom lip.
‘I feel as though I shouldn’t really be doing this,’ she confessed, ‘going through his clothes, emptying his pockets. It makes me feel as-though… as though I’m breaking some kind of taboo. It would be different if we’d been closer. As it is…’ She shook her head and summoned a crooked smile.
‘You do realise, don’t you, that if you hadn’t come round here this morning and insisted on our doing this these things would still probably have been here when the house is sold?’
‘Have you heard yet from the bank?’ Susie asked her quietly.
Philippa shook her head. ‘No, not yet.’ She smoothed her hand down over a jumper she had just picked up. Pale yellow with a motif embroidered on the front, the delicate cashmere felt incredibly soft to her touch. She had bought this for Andrew herself, for his birthday last year, saving the money from her family allowance and the housekeeping. He had worn it once; a token gesture, she suspected, because she had never seen him wear it a second time.
‘What is it?’ Susie asked her softly.
‘I was just thinking how little I actually knew Andrew,’ Philippa told her tiredly.
‘Some men are secretive,’ Susie told her. ‘They think that it’s soft… unmasculine… giving in to a weakness to confide in anyone or betray what they’re feeling.’
‘It’s not just that… I don’t just mean… I didn’t even really know the little things about him, Susie… Like the kind of clothes he preferred… I didn’t try to know him,’ she confided, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I just turned away and let him drift away from me. I never cared enough to make an effort to stop him. He must have known that, mustn’t he? He must…’
‘Stop blaming yourself,’ Susie told her firmly. ‘It takes two to break a relationship as well as make one… If Andrew had wanted to be closer to you and the boys he could have told you… shown you…’
‘Maybe, but even these days isn’t the onus always on the woman to nurture the emotional side of a relationship? I’m sorry,’ she apologised to her friend, shaking her head. ‘I am rather wallowing in self-pity this morning, aren’t I? Come on, let’s get these things packed up and then I can clean out the wardrobes. Are you sure you don’t mind taking them down to the refuge for me?’
‘Of course not, but I still think you could probably have sold some of them.’
Philippa gave an involuntary shudder. ‘No… no, I couldn’t do that.’ Selling her own clothes was one thing; selling Andrew’s was another. ‘Besides,’ she added wryly, ‘I’m not sure if I have any right to sell them; for all I know they probably belong to the bank.’
Susie watched her sympathetically. As she had said to Jim, her own husband, the previous night, she didn’t think she would have the courage or strength to cope with such a situation as well as Philippa was doing.
Now, as she and Philippa packed up the clothes into plastic bags and carried them out to her car, she suggested gently, ‘Look, why don’t you come home with me this afternoon? We could…’
Quickly Philippa shook her head. ‘No… no. It’s kind of you, but I
can’t… I… I want to get some more work done on my vegetable bed while the weather’s good. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay on here, but maybe I’ll have some early vegetables to pick before the bank tells us to go.’
Philippa knew that she was flushing and hoped that Susie would put her increased colour down to the effort of carrying the heavy binliners of clothes. It was true that she did want to work in the garden, but it was also equally true that there was another reason why she wanted to stay at home, and it wasn’t one that she wanted to reveal to her friend.
He probably wouldn’t come, of course, probably hadn’t even really meant it when he’d offered to look at her car, and really, after all, there was no reason why she should want to see him again, was there? Except that she had enjoyed talking to him… except that he was the first person she had really felt able to let down her guard with… except that when he had stood next to her on the street, protecting her, she had felt so…
‘Well, that’s the last of them!’ Susie exclaimed cheerfully as she dumped the last of the binliners in the back of her estate car. ‘I’d better get them down to the refuge… Oh, by the way, I nearly forgot… I brought you these. Mother will insist on sending me home with goodness knows what from the local farm. Honestly, you’d think, to listen to her, that decent fresh food isn’t something that’s available once you leave the boundaries of Yorkshire, but I suppose old habits die hard, and having been a farmer’s wife… Heaven knows how long it would take us to get through three dozen free-range eggs and all the rest of the stuff she made me bring back with me.’
She avoided looking at Philippa as she handed over a covered basket.
It felt very heavy, Philippa acknowledged, and it had to contain far more than a dozen or so eggs and a couple of jars of Susie’s mother’s home-made jam and pickles.
Tears pricked her eyes. Her pride made her want to refuse but as she looked at her friend she saw that there were tears in Susie’s eyes as well.
‘Please take it, Pippa,’ Susie begged her quietly. ‘You know if our positions were reversed you would be the first…’ She swallowed and shook her head. ‘I hate the thought of you staying here on your own, especially after what you told me the other day. I wish you’d think again about what I said about coming to us.’
‘Not yet,’ Philippa told her huskily, adding, ‘Don’t make it too easy for me, Susie, otherwise I might be tempted to give in and take the easy way out, and I can’t… I mustn’t… Don’t you see, that’s what I’ve done all my life… taken the easy way out? This time… this time it’s going to be different. You know what they say,’ she added, with a weak grin. ‘No pain, no gain…’
‘Huh… I know it’s what they say,’ Susie agreed. ‘But…’ She stopped and looked at Philippa. ‘OK, OK, I hear you, but just remember…’
‘I will,’ Philippa assured her softly, smiling as she looked at her friend and said drily, ‘Oh, and you will remember to thank your mother for her generosity, won’t you?’
She waited until Susie’s car had disappeared down the drive before picking up the basket and taking it into the kitchen. As she had suspected, it contained far more than what Susie had said; the cheese was farmhouse-fresh and so was the thick slice of pie which Philippa remembered was a delicacy which Jim loved and which Susie always brought back from Yorkshire with her, like the home-cured ham and bacon.
There was probably enough food in the basket to last for two or three weeks, and all of it far more wholesome and appetising than the diet she had grown used to recently.
Tears blurred Philippa’s eyes as she unpacked the food and put it away. This, she suspected, was one of the hardest lessons of all to learn, this acceptance of charity… receiving it rather than giving it.
* * *
Sally tensed as she heard the phone ring. Joel got up to answer it and her stomach muscles locked. It was silly to feel like this, she scolded herself. After all, what really had she done wrong? What if Kenneth did ring her? He was an ex-patient who…
Who had what? Kissed her and made her see all the things that were missing from her life?
‘It’s your sister,’ Joel told her abruptly, coming into the kitchen.
The relief that flooded her was dangerously entangled with disappointment as well.
The postman had arrived as she picked up the receiver and her heart sank as she saw the bills in among the circulars.
‘Have you spoken to Joel about when he can do my decorating yet?’ Daphne wanted to know. ‘Only I’d like him to come and make a start on it as soon as possible, Sally. We’ve got a dinner party next month. It shouldn’t take him long, after all, should it? I mean, it’s not as though he’s got anything else to do…’
Sally sighed under her breath. ‘I’ll have a word with him about it now,’ she promised her sister.
‘What did she want?’ Joel demanded when Sally walked back into the kitchen.
Sally sighed again. Joel and her sister had never really hit it off and she knew that Daphne could be something of a snob at times, but was it really too much to ask of Joel that he didn’t react aggressively to everything Daphne said or did? Couldn’t he see how difficult it made things for her?
Sally looked tired, Joel recognised as he looked at her. She had lost weight as well. He started to frown.
As she walked towards the sink she bumped into the corner of the table, stumbling slightly.
Joel reacted instinctively, reaching out to steady her, putting his hand on the hip she had bumped and rubbing it with his fingers.
She smelled of soap and shampoo, the slightness of her body against his reminding him of how protective towards her he had always felt, of how vulnerable she sometimes seemed. It was one of the most basic and deep-rooted aspects of his character, this need he had to protect and secure those weaker than himself, and now suddenly he had an urge to wrap his arms around her, to hold her and tell her how ashamed he felt. He wanted, he acknowledged, not just to hold her, but to be held in turn; to be told that she understood, that she…
‘Joel, no…’
The sharp protest in her voice as she pulled away from him felt like a knife slicing into the vulnerable flesh of his emotions, the irritation and rejection he could both hear and see freezing back the words he had wanted to say.
‘Can’t you think about anything but that?’ Sally demanded bitterly.
‘Such as?’ Joel challenged her.
‘Such as these.’ Angrily she threw the bills down on the table.
She hadn’t received this month’s salary yet and already it was almost accounted for. Paul had come in last night saying he would need new football boots and now here were those bills. She felt sick at the thought of opening them, knowing already that she might not be able to pay them, and all Joel could do was grab hold of her and…
Silently Joel watched her. The unopened bills lay between them on the table. Sally reached for one of them, ripping it open, scanning it feverishly. Perhaps with the money her sister paid Joel for the decorating they might just be able to cover it.
She reached for the other but Joel stopped her.
‘That’s addressed to me,’ he told her flatly.
Sally stared at him. Joel had never minded who opened their post, and invariably she was the one to do so because he was at work when it arrived.
Suddenly she just couldn’t take any more.
‘You open it, then,’ she told him angrily. ‘And you pay it as well…’
Bitterly Joel watched as she stormed out of the room. He could still vaguely feel the imprint of her hipbone against his fingertips. Once she would never have confused a gesture meant to comfort and solace with one that was sensual and questioning… Once… once a lot of things had been different…
He picked up the unopened bill and opened it.
‘You pay it’, she had challenged him. He could feel the painful burn of his emotions searing his eyelids.
Once she got upstairs Sally discovered that she was
shaking with reaction to their row.
She shouldn’t have spoken to Joel like that, she knew, but couldn’t he see the strain she was under? Other people could… Like her sister… like Kenneth.
She sighed and got up. In less than an hour she had to be at work, and before that she had to persuade Joel to do her sister’s decorating.
* * *
Philippa saw Joel walking up the drive from an upstairs window.
‘The car’s still in the garage… It’s round here,’ she told him awkwardly as she went outside to meet him. The wind was ruffling his hair, thick and dark and silky. She had an odd urge to reach out and touch it. To touch him…
Uncomfortably she distanced herself from him, hurrying ahead of him as she led the way round the side of the house. What was happening to her? She just didn’t feel like this about men… react to them like this.
She looked over her shoulder, suddenly anxious to tell Joel that she had changed her mind. She didn’t want him here. It was too…
He was standing looking at the ground she had been clearing.
‘I’m working on my vegetable garden,’ she heard herself telling him uncertainly. ‘I thought…’
Joel bent down and picked up a handful of soil, letting it trickle through his fingers.
‘Good soil,’ he told her, ‘but you’ll have to watch that hedge; cut it down a bit otherwise it will take too much light…’
‘You obviously know a lot more about it than I do. Are you a keen gardener?’
‘No,’ Joel told her abruptly and then, realising how curt he had sounded, he added, ‘My father had an allotment—it was one of my chores as a boy to work on it…’
There was an expression on his face that told Philippa that his memories of that work weren’t good ones.
‘That must have been hard work?’ she sympathised.
‘Hard and dirty,’ Joel told her. ‘I used to have to scrub my hands with bleach to get them clean, otherwise…’
