Marriage Under Fire

by Daphne Clair

  Marriage Under Fire

  Daphne Clair

  Marriage, home, kids -- was that her life?

  Catherine had married Jason Clyde when she was only eighteen -- scarcely more than a child Jason had been handsome, successful, older, and he had swept her off her feet.

  Now, eight years later, she felt herself becoming restless. She still loved Jason and treasured her two children, but she began to wonder if her life could include more that being someone's wife, someone's mother.

  Then she met Russel Thruston, a handsome sympathetic TV producer, who showed her a world apart from Jason.

  Could her marriage survive the change in her?

  CHAPTER ONE

  Catherine pushed a strand of fair hair from her eyes, but the brisk wind whipped it against her damp lashes again, so that she had to keep her hand on it as she stood watching the plane take off. The viewing platform was exposed and cold, making her shiver as she strained to see if Michael and Jenny were waving to her from behind one of the increasingly distant porthole windows.

  They seemed so young to be flying off alone across the Tasman ... Jenny had looked apprehensive, biting her lip to stop it from trembling, and even Michael, at six a year older than his sister, had surreptitiously wiped a small tear away on the sleeve of his new jacket.

  She couldn't see them at all, but she waved vigorously anyway, fixing a smile on her face although they would be too far away by now to see it. The plane taxied along the runway, turned, and seemed to pause for an age before it began to trundle its impossible weight along with gathering speed until it lifted off gracefully into the cloud-spattered morning and rose swiftly over the sparkling water of the Manukau.

  The stewardesses would look after the children very well, the airline was noted for its special care, providing games and puzzles and plenty of distraction for them. They would be met at Sydney by their grandparents, and have a thoroughly good time for the next two months ...

  'My parents will spoil them rotten,' Jason had assured her. 'We'll have our hands full when they get back. But it will be good for them. Teach them a bit of independence.

  They'll love it!'

  But Catherine had been unable to hide her unease, and later he had said impatiently,

  'Well, if you're so worried, why don't you go with them? The invitation was open to you, too.'

  She had looked at him with sudden curiosity. He was putting on his tie, dressing for work. She could see the back of his dark, sleek head, and his mirrored face, a faint frown between the straight brows echoed in the slight tightness about his firm mouth.

  He looked up and met her eyes in the mirror, his dark grey and enigmatic, and hers jade green flecked with gold, questioning and rather uncertain.

  'Wouldn't you mind?' she asked him.

  She was sitting up in their bed, her hair falling over her shoulders, the strap of a gold satin nightdress he had bought her slipping down one arm. For a moment a spark lit his eyes as they slithered over her, and her heartbeat quickened a little. Then he turned away from her and caught up his jacket to shrug it on. 'I guess I'd survive— somehow,'

  he said indifferently. He came over to her and touched his lips briefly to her cheek, patted the other one and said, 'Come on, lazybones. The kids will be late for school.'

  As he left, Catherine got up, sighing with an unaccountable feeling of depression. She had learned early in their marriage that Jason never ate breakfast. He would get himself a glass of juice from the refrigerator, have a quick look at the headlines in the paper, scan the business pages and go. At first when he said to her, 'Stay there—you might as well,' and pressed her back on to the pillows of the bed, she had ignored him and accompanied him into the kitchen. But she soon found that he was serious about not wanting breakfast, and also that he liked some time alone with the paper. Once she had teased him about how quickly their married life had settled into the conventional rut at breakfast time, and he gave a faint, absent-minded smile and said, 'I told you not to get up.'

  Of course, once the children came she was not able to stay in bed if she had wanted to.

  Frequently she was up before Jason, and as the children reached school age he had got accustomed to sharing the breakfast table with them and dropping them off at school on his way to work. Jenny had turned five and started school in the second term, and Catherine had found herself strangely at a loose end. The house seemed very empty all day, with no children in it until Jenny and Michael returned from school.

  A friend had inveigled her into attending a daytime art class for some weeks, but although she had quite enjoyed the activity, she was no artist, and when they progressed beyond sketching and watercolours to oils, she watched the others in the class turning out presentable landscapes and dashing abstracts, surveyed her own mud-coloured, wooden-looking efforts, and ruefully decided to give it up.

  'I'll never be an artist,' she confessed to Jason, when he queried her decision.

  'You don't need to be. It would have made an interesting hobby for you. I thought you enjoyed it.'

  Catherine shrugged. 'I did, for a while. Jason ... supposing I got a job, now that the children are at school...?'

  'A job? What for?'

  'Well—for something to do.'

  'Not a good idea,' he said dryly.

  'I don't see why not.'

  'For one thing, you could only work part-time— unless you were thinking of palming Michael and Jenny off on someone else after school. Also, there's a shortage of jobs at the moment and a lot of people don't take kindly to the idea of married women whose husbands earn adequate salaries taking jobs to relieve their boredom ---'

  'I don't think that's a valid argument. Women have as much right to work as men, married or not! Why shouldn't a woman pursue a career?'

  'What career were you thinking of?'

  'I—I don't know.' She had been training to be a teacher before she married Jason, but she had not finished the course, and now, apparently, there was a surplus of teachers anyway. New Zealand's birthrate had plummeted and too many teachers were scrambling for too few jobs.

  'Well, you would be just filling in time, wouldn't you? Taking a job you don't need which could be filled by someone who really does need it.'

  'I suppose so,' she admitted.

  'What about those committees that you're on?' he said. 'The hospital whats it and the Plunket Society?'

  'I resigned from the Plunket committee,' she reminded him. 'Now that the children aren't babies any more, I've lost interest.'

  'You seem to lose interest in things rather often.'

  'That isn't fair! I felt I should pull my weight as long as I was using the services of the Plunket nurse, but I don't enjoy committee work. I was glad to give it up.'

  'Are you going to give up the hospital one, too?'

  'No, I don't think so. I don't like the meetings much, there's a lot of time wasted, but they do some useful work, and visiting the wards is something that seems worthwhile to me.'

  'Maybe that's something you should give up,' he suggested abruptly.

  'Why?'

  'Do you think I don't notice that it upsets you? Did you have to volunteer for the children's wards?'

  'I'd be more upset if I thought no one was visiting them. It isn't easy finding volunteers.

  It isn't always upsetting. Sometimes it's fun.'

  'Some fun, when you come home and indulge in a crying bout!'

  'It only happened once,' Catherine said huskily. She had stopped crying by the time Jason got home; she had been cooking the dinner, while Michael and Jenny argued over a game at the table. He had looked at her sharply and asked, 'What's the matter?'

  'Nothing. I was at the hospital this afternoon.'

  'And
. . .?'

  She looked at the children and shook her head. 'Sometimes it's a bit harrowing,' she said. 'Jenny— Michael! Put that away now and set the table for me, please.'

  The children protested and she insisted, and Jason stood aside, then shrugged and made for their room to put away his jacket as Catherine returned her attention to the sauce she was stirring on the stove. Jason had had a meeting to go to that evening, and the next day he appeared to have forgotten about the incident.

  But now, weeks later, he said, 'What was it about?'

  'I got fond of a child,' she said baldly. 'He died.'

  Several seconds ticked by. Catherine was looking down at her hands, and Jason hadn't moved. Then he said, 'I see. Why didn't you tell me?'

  'In front of the children?'

  'Later—the next day!'

  'You didn't ask, the next day.'

  'I didn't realise that it was anything that shattering. Catherine ---'

  They were interrupted then by Michael, demanding his father's help to get his ball down off the roof where he had accidentally thrown it. The subject had not arisen again.

  Catherine had not taken a job, but she had become involved in an ambitious project of the hospital committee to stage a Christmas pantomime at the hospital. She was given one of the leading parts as the Good Fairy, and had also written much of the script, a mixture of fairytale glamour for the children and witty remarks which would also entertain the adults in the audience. She had something of a flair for entertaining writing, remarked on by her friends who received her letters, and her bedtime stories were as often made up from her own imagination as they were read from Michael's and Jenny's books.

  It was the pantomime that prevented her from accompanying the children on their seven weeks' visit to their grandparents in Australia. The rehearsals would continue until Christmas, and the first performance was scheduled for Boxing Day, with a repeat a week later for geriatric patients. Some of the long-term mobile patients were among the performers, including a number of children, but the main parts were carried by the committee members.

  Catherine had not really wanted to go to Australia, but she would miss the children, and couldn't help feeling stupidly anxious in case something happened to the plane, or through some mix-up Jason's parents failed to meet it. They might be travel-sick or homesick, or one of them might have an accident .. .

  It was all nonsense, of course, and she voiced only half of these fears to Jason, knowing she was fussing for no reason. Of course she trusted his parents to care for the children.

  They loved their only two grandchildren devotedly. Usually they flew from Australia for Christmas to be with them, but this year was different. Winston Clyde, who had taken his family from New Zealand to Australia for business reasons when Jason was fifteen, had retired and moved to a new home on the famous Gold Coast. He wanted to give his grandchildren the holiday of their lives. The whole family had been invited, but Catherine knew that Jason had not really been expected to accept the invitation. Her own refusal was probably half expected, too. She and her parents-in-law got on well enough in a superficial way, but she had never been truly at ease with Winston's rather pugnacious drive for success in everything, or Althea's cool graciousness. Both of them unbent considerably with the children, but Catherine had always felt that they had thought her too young, too gauche and altogether lacking in the things needed for the wife of a successful businessman when she had married Jason. And although over the last eight years she had grown a veneer of sophistication and poise, it always seemed to peel away in their presence, leaving her the slightly awkward and tongue-tied young girl she had been at their first meeting.

  'She's just a teenager!' Althea had exclaimed in surprise, and Catherine had seen the quick, scowlingly questioning look that Winston had shot at his son. Because Jason was touching thirty, and already established on the ladder of success in the finance company he worked for. She had seen the tightening of his mouth and the flush staining the taut flesh over his cheekbones as he met his father's gaze with steady, defiant eyes, and with an unaccustomed rush of protectiveness towards him, she had said quickly, 'I'm older than I look.'

  'Not more than twenty, I'll be bound,' Winston had said shrewdly, with a short, hard laugh.

  Jason moved, putting his arm about Catherine's shoulders, saying, 'She's eighteen.' And at the same time, she said, 'I'm nineteen ---'

  Jason slanted a wry grin at her, and she added, '--- nearly.'

  Jason looked resigned. She had made herself look foolish and younger than ever, of course. She wasn't making a good impression.

  She still felt that she never had made a good impression on Jason's parents. She didn't know anything about the business world that Winston inhabited—and that Jason did, too

  —and she didn't share Althea's passion for bridge, or her interest in antiques. Once the children came it was a little easier, though she found Althea's constant smoothly given advice a little hard to take. All the same, she was very glad that while Michael and Jenny were still babies, Jason had taken a new and important executive job in New Zealand and moved them all across the Tasman. Her own father had died some years ago, and her mother had married again and was living in Western Australia. Catherine hardly ever saw her after her own marriage, although they kept faithfully in touch by letter.

  Her mother had been doubtful about her marrying Jason, at first, but she had soon come round after she met him. Jason was obviously good husband material. He had looks and brains and a solid career in finance, and a quietly confident manner that would have reassured any anxious mother. He told her that he realised that Catherine was young to be marrying a man of his age, but that he promised she would be well looked after. And Catherine's mother had seen the way he looked at her daughter, and given her blessing.

  'Provided it's what Catherine wants,' she had added. And Jason had smiled at Catherine, his eyes dark and almost hypnotic.

  'Is it what you want, Catherine?' he asked her softly.

  For just a moment she hesitated, her hand in his, until she felt the tightening of his fingers, sending a signal of warm excitement into her body. He had dazzled her from the start, with his unexpected interest in her, his assurance, and eventually with the restrained passion of his kisses. Now he had only to touch her and she felt herself ready to burst into flame.

  She said, 'Yes. It's what I want.'

  She had got what she wanted—what he had wanted—because sometimes she wondered, now, if she had ever made a decision, herself, that she really wanted to marry Jason.

  She had been so young, and he was the first real man who had crossed her path. She had known boys before that, boys who touched her heart lightly and passed on, who had never even tried very hard to drag her into the depths of real passion. But Jason was different. She had known from the start Jason wasn't interested in playing light love games. Even when they first met, at a party, both of them there with someone else, and he had asked how to contact her, she had hesitated.

  'Are you going steady or something?' he asked her, amused.

  Catherine shook her head.

  'Well, then?' He stood before her, a notebook and pencil in his hand, waiting. They had been talking, laughing together, getting on simply fine until he demanded her telephone number. 'Don't be coy,' he said. 'I can get it from our hostess, anyway. I'll find you.'

  It sounded almost like a threat, and she searched his eyes with hers wide and a little wary. His face softened a little. He said quietly, 'Don't look like that. I don't intend to ravish you, fair maiden.'

  The ridiculous appellation, the thread of humour in his voice, made her giggle and capitulate. He took down the number, said, 'Right, you'll be hearing from me,' and departed to pay some attention to his own partner.

  Catherine had wondered if she would, or if it was a whim which he would forget, and after three weeks had passed, she had decided that he had indeed forgotten all about her. But then he had phoned, asked her out to dinner, and followed
it with more invitations. She had never asked him why he let so much time elapse before contacting her, but sometimes had an uneasy suspicion that it had been a purposeful ploy to keep her in suspense and make her more eager to go out with him.

  He had wined and dined her, and made her laugh. He had an ironic sense of humour that she enjoyed, and she even brought a crack of laughter from him on occasion, because she had a quick mind, a sense of the ridiculous, and an ability to spin words which he encouraged. She loved to marriage under fire dance, and he took her dancing at places her younger escorts could never have afforded. He even bought her flowers.

  When he kissed her, he did it with a light expertise that promised more, until the day came when she felt her wary reserve with him melt away, and kissed him back with her arms about his neck.

  He pulled back from her, looking down at her face, muttered. 'I've been waiting for that,'

  and kissed her again.

  This time it was quite different. Her mouth parted under a gentle, insistent assault, and Jason's hand possessed her breast, while his other arm curved her body closely to the contours of his. They seemed locked together for an eternity in an agony of sensation, and she discovered that she loved the warmth, the unbelievable intimacy of his mouth on hers, tasting, exploring, taking her over.

  When he gradually eased his hold she was shaking and gasping, and he pushed her head into the curve of his shoulder and held her loosely, his hand stroking her hair, until she leaned quietly against him.

  His lips touched her forehead, and she heard him murmur, 'Sweetheart, have you ever been with a man?'

  She shook her head, feeling her face grow hot, glad that she didn't have to look at him.

  His chest rose and fell in a sigh, and he moved her away from him. Catherine couldn't read the look in his eyes. Then he tipped her chin with his hand and dropped a kiss quickly on her mouth before he left her.

  In her mind she had relived that kiss over and over again before their next meeting.

  They had gone to a show, and when he stopped the car outside the door of the flat she shared with two friends, and drew her into his arms, she went stiff with nervous tension.