by Penny Jordan
His irritation clashed with the guilt he was feeling.
He wished now he had never given in to that crazy impulse to ignore his suspicion that he was hanging the wallpaper the wrong way, but he was dammed if he was going to back down and give Daphne the triumph of belittling him a second time. Couldn’t Sally see that her sister was just using him… them; couldn’t she see just how she was playing into her hands by giving in to her?
He looked across at her. She had her back to him, and she looked tired and vulnerable, her shoulders slightly hunched. A feeling of pain and guilt swept over him. He put down his mug and walked over to her.
‘All right, Sal,’ he told her quietly. ‘I’ll do it. You…’
Angrily Sally whirled round. ‘Oh, no, you won’t,’ she told him. ‘Do you think I’d risk letting you touch that wallpaper after what you did the first time?’
She was over-reacting, Sally knew, but she couldn’t help it. She was so tired and so confused that all she wanted to do was to spend the day in bed, safe from the rest of the world and all her problems. She knew that a part of her had been deliberately trying to goad and force Joel to do the wallpapering for her, and yet now that he had said that he would she felt irrationally angry with him, as though somehow by giving in to her he was in some way letting her down. As though he cared so little for her that it was easier to give in to her than to ask her what was wrong.
Joel did not care… it was like receiving an electric shock direct to her heart; it jerked violently against her breastbone and then started to thud frantically at high speed.
‘I don’t want you going anywhere near my sister’s wallpapering,’ she heard herself saying shakily to him. ‘And I don’t want you coming anywhere near me either,’ she added, checking him as he took a step towards her.
She waited for Joel to say something, to explode and demand an explanation, but instead he simply looked at her. At her and then through her, she recognised numbly, as though she were a stranger—no, she corrected herself, as though she simply did not exist.
And then he turned away from her and walked over to the table, picking up his jacket and his car keys.
‘Joel, where are you going?’ Panic sharpened her voice but Joel didn’t even turn round to look at her as he responded flatly,
‘What the hell do you care?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
JOEL drove around for two hours before finally giving in and doing what he had wanted to do, ached to do from the moment he had closed the back door behind him and driven away.
He saw the shock on her face as Philippa opened the door to him—and he saw something else as well.
She made no attempt to resist him as he took her in his arms, gathering her up against himself with gentle care. She felt slender and fragile, warm and softly woman-scented.
His body trembled with the fight to control his emotions as he kissed her with tender restraint and then kissed her again with no restraint at all when he felt her response to him.
‘I had to see you,’ he told her as he held her, kissing the top of her head, wrapping her tightly in his arms as though he never intended to let her go. But ultimately he would have to let her go, Philippa recognised; ultimately they would have to let one another go.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she told him. ‘We agreed——’
‘That we couldn’t be lovers,’ Joel interrupted her. His hands cupped her face, tilting it upwards so that he could look down at her. ‘But we can still talk, can’t we? Still be… friends…?’
‘Oh, Joel. This… this thing between us isn’t really real, you know,’ she told him sadly. ‘It’s… it’s just a… a fantasy… a… a mirage we’ve both conjured up because…’
‘Oh, it’s real to me,’ Joel said fiercely. ‘As real as the way I feel when I hold you in my arms… as real as the ache in my body when I lie awake wanting you at night…’
‘You mustn’t say that to me… You’re married… No matter how strong my feelings for you were, I couldn’t live with the knowledge that I’d broken up your marriage…’
‘What marriage?’ Joel asked her bitterly. ‘Sally and I don’t have a marriage any more. You can’t break up something that no longer exists.’
Philippa could feel herself weakening. The feel of his body next to hers, the now dangerously familiar male scent of him, the warmth of him, his need and emotion were like a drug to her senses, senses which she was only just beginning to recognise that she had deliberately denied and starved into virtual non-existence for years in an attempt to conform to others’ demands of her; a betrayal of herself as a woman.
She knew how much she wanted Joel, but she knew as well how vulnerable she was; habit had made her cautious, wary of expecting too much for herself.
Instinct told her that, no matter how much Joel might believe now that he wanted her, no matter how strongly he might believe that his marriage was dead, he still loved his wife. He had released her face and was holding one of her hands, lifting it to his mouth, gently caressing her palm and then her wrist with his lips.
‘Don’t send me away,’ he begged her.
‘Come into the kitchen,’ Philippa told him, weakening, hoping that the more mundane workaday atmosphere there might ease the intensity of the sexual tension she could feel building between them. Here in the hallway with the stairs behind her and her mind and body already flooded with awareness of him, as well as the potency of her memories of their previous lovemaking, it would be all too tempting to turn round and take him by the hand, to give in to the need she knew they were both feeling.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Joel told her drily as she offered him a cup of tea. ‘But I didn’t come here looking for sex. No matter what Sally seems to think, that’s not… Every time I try to touch her or hold her she accuses me of wanting sex, as though it’s some kind of punishment
I’m inflicting on her… some kind of payment she has to make…
‘She lies there next to me, her body tense and unmoving, willing me to get it over with. That’s sex; that’s what our relationship has been reduced to. What you and I shared…
‘I’d forgotten how good it feels to hold a woman who’s warm and responsive, who wants you as much as you want her, who doesn’t turn her head away when you kiss her, or tense her body when you touch her.’
Philippa could feel her throat starting to ache as she listened to him. Did he realise how much he was betraying with every word he said? She could hear the anger in his voice when he spoke of his wife’s lack of response to him, and she could hear the yearning and the pain as well.
Stupid, stupid and totally irrational of her to feel jealous of this unknown woman, and yet totally predictable that she should, as well.
Joel eventually shook his head. ‘I’m sorry; you can’t want to hear all this.’
She ought not to want to hear it, Philippa acknowledged, if only from a sense of self-preservation, but there was a morbid, self-destructive fascination in hearing about Joel’s marriage, his relationship with his wife.
‘All relationships suffer… change when there’s a switch in their power base.’ Philippa smiled as she saw the way Joel was watching her. ‘I’m trying to be detached now,’ she admitted wryly. ‘To… to listen to you as a friend and not as…’
‘A lover,’ Joel supplied for her. ‘I didn’t plan what happened between us, Philippa, but it wasn’t just a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that you were there and I wanted sex. If it were just sex I wanted, there are plenty…’ He caught himself up. The last thing he wanted was for Philippa to think he was the kind of man who needed to brag about his sexuality, but there had been enough subtle and sometimes not so subtle come-ons from other women over the years for him to know that he could have quite easily found elsewhere the sexual satisfaction his marriage no longer gave him, if he had really wanted to.
That was what hurt, he acknowledged: the fact that Sally relentlessly accused him of being sexually obsessed when the reality
was that for him sexual desire had to be accompanied by something deeper; and he had thought that Sally knew that.
‘I suppose you think the same as Sally—that I’m a selfish, thoughtless bastard who——’
‘No,’ Philippa interrupted him, shaking her head. ‘It’s just that as a woman…’ She paused. Her marriage was not his, and to tell him that she too knew what it was like to lie intimately sexually entwined with a man with her body while her mind and emotions remained totally unengaged would be to open doors she preferred to keep closed. ‘As a woman,’ she continued, ‘I know that it isn’t always easy trying to combine so many different roles, especially when one of those roles involves being a mother…’
‘I sometimes used to feel that our kids—especially Paul—meant far more to Sally than I did,’ Joel admitted.
‘Fathers often do feel a little bit jealous of their sons,’ Philippa commented.
‘Did your husband?’
She paused and then answered honestly, ‘I don’t know… Andrew and I never discussed our feelings. I was the one who wanted children; he… he never seemed to have any strong feelings for them one way or the other…’ Or for me, she could have added, but she stopped herself, not wanting to sound self-pitying, and besides, wasn’t at least half the truth that she and Andrew had never talked about their feelings because there hadn’t been any real feelings between them to discuss—something she had always known and yet been afraid of confronting, preferring inertia to action, passive acceptance to passionate aggression?
‘Sally and I used to talk a lot once… In bed at night after we’d… she used to lie there in my arms and tell me about her day… That all stopped once Paul was born. He was a difficult baby, restless at night, never wanting to go down, and she used to complain that if we made any noise we’d wake him up.
‘Even when we made love all she seemed to want to do was to get it over with as quickly and quietly as possible.
‘But at least then she still needed me… I could still support her… all of them… Now…’
‘Can’t you see, Joel?’ Philippa told him gently. ‘Her anger is because she’s afraid… because she feels insecure… because she’s worried about the way you’re taking over her role…’
The baffled look he gave her made Philippa smile slightly.
‘I’m just doing what she wants me to do…’
‘Yes, but you’re also usurping her role within the family, just as with her going out to work to support you all you feel she’s usurping yours. It’s like… it’s like when someone does something for us that we’re supposed to be grateful for… Logically we know we should be grateful, but inside a tiny part of us resents them for it, and knowing we feel that resentment makes us feel mean and uncomfortable with ourselves… None of us likes admitting to the darker side of our nature, even though we’ve all got one.
‘I used to feel that my husband never gave our children enough time and attention, and yet I know that deep down inside me a part of me was secretly pleased that it was me they turned to and me they wanted, even though I knew that they needed love and attention from both of us.
‘It’s the same for all of us, whether we want to admit it or not; I suppose we’re all programmed to feel protective and possessive about certain aspects of our most personal lives, about the things we do that give us status, if you like, in our own eyes. While we’re quite happy to compete in a broader circle, when it comes to our most intimate relationships we each want and need to feel confident of supremacy in our own particular sphere.
‘That’s why it’s so difficult for any of us to adapt to the kind of role reversal you and Sally are having to go through. Think about it, Joel. Deep down inside, aren’t you perhaps just a little bit resentful of the fact that Sally is able to work and support you all, even though logically you know you should feel grateful for the fact that she can…?’
He was quiet for so long that Philippa thought she had gone too far, pressed on him too hard, but when he lifted his head and looked at her she expressed her pent-up breath in a small, leaky sigh of relief.
‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘Yes, I suppose I am…’
‘And it’s the same for Sally. She knows she needs your support at home and that she can’t do everything but at the same time she feels hurt because she feels that you and the children no longer seem to need her.’
‘She might be hurt because of the kids, but not because of me,’ Joel denied.
‘When a woman withdraws sexually from a man it doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s stopped loving him,’ Philippa told him, but she saw from his expression that she hadn’t sounded as positive as she would have liked and that he had picked up on her real feelings.
‘Talk to her, Joel,’ she urged him. ‘Talk to her the way you’ve just talked to me… ask her why… what’s wrong… Surely your marriage is worth that much of an effort…’
‘And trying to work things out with Sally will stop me coming round here and pestering you… is that it?’
‘No… no…’ She could see the pain in his eyes. He deserved her honesty, Philippa recognised, both of them deserved it.
‘It would be the easiest thing in the world to let what’s started between us develop into… Until I met you I’d never thought of myself as a sexually hungry woman; far from it.
‘I don’t know whether to be ashamed of how much I want you or proud of it, but on balance feeling proud wins out. And I know myself well enough to guess that if a sexual relationship developed between us I’d become emotionally committed to you as well, emotionally dependent on you, and that wouldn’t be healthy for either of us. Can’t you see, Joel, that both of us, for different reasons, would be using what we have between us to cover up other problems, to avoid dealing with them…? We’d be using each other as a means of escape, and to me that would be the worst kind of betrayal—of ourselves and each other.
‘It isn’t that I don’t care, but that I’m afraid of caring too much and for all the wrong reasons. What was it that first attracted you to your Sally, Joel…?’
He paused and then told her quietly, ‘Her gentleness; the fact that she needed me… looked up to me, I suppose… it made me feel good… it made me feel…’
‘Valued and wanted,’ Philippa supplied for him. ‘And now it’s my need that your senses and emotions are responding to, but it’s still Sally you love.’
‘No,’ Joel denied, but his voice lacked the conviction it had held earlier when he had told her that his marriage was over.
‘It’s time for you to go,’ Philippa told him gently.
She walked with him to the front door and paused while he turned to her and took her in his arms.
‘We would have been good together, you and I,’ he told her huskily.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. Her throat ached and her mouth trembled as he lowered his own to touch it, but she didn’t try to turn away.
Tears burned behind her closed eyelids, her ears buzzing with the agonised cry of her silenced emotions. She neither moved nor touched him, making no attempt to hold on to him or keep him, but her lips clung betrayingly to his for a handful of seconds after their kiss ended, and she knew that if he pushed her now, if he begged her or pleaded, she wouldn’t have the strength to resist him. She suspected he knew it too.
But he didn’t say or do anything other than simply touch her mouth with his fingertips in a silent gesture of farewell before opening the door and walking away from her.
The phone started to ring as she walked back to the kitchen. She picked up the receiver, automatically forcing herself to sound bright and optimistic, using the lessons learned over the weeks of her widowhood. ‘Never mind love thy neighbour,’ Susie had once told her grimly. ‘It’s love thyself that really matters.’ Love herself, value herself, depend on herself, know herself—because her own self was all that stood between her and the rest of the world now, Philippa admitted.
She recognised Elizabeth Humphries’ voice before the other woman
gave her name, her stomach tensing with familiar apprehension. Like her mind, her body had learned to dread the arrival of unheralded visitors and telephone calls, of letters and bills.
‘The reason I’m ringing,’ Elizabeth told her, ‘is that the other evening at a dinner party I was talking with a colleague of my husband’s who has just moved into the area and he was telling me about the problems he’s having finding someone suitable to employ to take charge of both his orphaned god-daughter and his home.
‘He stressed that he didn’t want either a nanny or a traditional housekeeper but someone who could be to his goddaughter a sort of surrogate-mother figure, without usurping the role of the child’s dead mother… He wants someone who can act on her own initiative and who is used to dealing with children; someone the child can relate to and whom he can trust not just to look after her physically, but to help her emotionally as well.
‘It immediately occurred to me that you would be perfect for such a role.’
‘Me? But I don’t have any qualifications for that kind of thing,’ Philippa protested. ‘I’m not…’
‘You’re a mother,’ Elizabeth reminded her, and added drily, ‘And reading between the lines, as well as going on my own judgement, I’d say you are more than adequately qualified for the role he’s got in mind. He stressed to me that he considers it far more important that whoever he employs is more concerned about his god-daughter’s emotional welfare than running a spotlessly clean house; that he wants someone young enough to be a mother figure to the girl and old enough to be left completely in charge of her.’
‘You said she was orphaned…’ ‘Yes,’ Elizabeth agreed.
Philippa hesitated. She could all too easily imagine the trauma such a child must be experiencing and the anxiety of the man apparently responsible for her.
‘ I… I don’t know… A child like that would need someone who could make a long-term commitment to her. Has he—her godfather—has he no wife, no female relatives?’
‘Apparently not. I’m not trying to push you into something you don’t wish to do, and of course it will be the child’s needs that come first; her godfather was quite adamant about that. He did say, however, that if you proved suitable he would be quite willing for you to have both your boys with you during the school holidays; in fact he seemed to think that would be a plus point—company for his goddaughter. He’s got a large house with plenty of room to spare. The salary he mentioned is a good one; the girl is eleven and of course in full-time schooling so you would have some free time on your hands to study for that Open University course you discussed with me.’
