Reluctant Wife

by Lindsay Armstrong

  ’I … ‘ Adam started to say something, but it was clear she taken him by surprise again.

  ‘Oh, I’d got over that, or thought I had, but when you asked me to marry you I thought how… safe and uncomplicated it sounded—it was more like a business proposition, although you said you found me desirable. That was why I married you. It seemed to cancel out the stigma of … of,’ her voice cracked, ‘other men thinking I was … something I had no desire to be. It seemed to offer protection from the kind of agony Mrs Howard was going through. And because I really had no idea what else I could do,‘ she finished honestly, ‘I said yes.’

  ‘But,’ she swallowed. ‘Subconsciously, perhaps, I also vowed to keep it that way—safe and uncomplicated. Nor did I really understand how Mr Howard’s view of me had affected my vision of myself, made me determined to stamp out any vague resemblance to the kind of woman he assumed I was, whether in his own defence or not.’ She stopped and put a hand up wearily to her face. ‘I got terribly mixed up, I suppose you could say. And l was only able to start unravelling it all the night you rang me from Tokyo.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Adam very quietly.

  Roz dropped her hand and straightened her shoulders. ‘It… that phone call crystallised all the fears I had since you’d suggested we have a break from each other, Together, those two things were the turning point, Adam.’ She looked at him directly. ‘I can’t deny it. But they made me understand I’d fallen in love with you, why I’d been fighting you, why I was so terrified to accept how I felt. Also to remember that it hadn’t been part of your plan …‘

  He stared at her with the line of his shoulders taut and rigid.

  ‘It certainly hadn’t been part of my plan to imagine you in the arms of some lovely geisha and feel like dying,’ she confessed huskily.

  ‘I told you—you told me, Roz …’

  ‘I know.’ She smiled sadly. ‘All the same, I did. And even if I got the girl wrong …’

  ‘You got the scenario right,’ he said roughly.

  ‘Perhaps, but I knew l only had myself to blame. You … ’ She stopped and stared down at her hands, then lifted her lashes abruptly. ‘You thought I didn’t mind what Lucia told me. You were wrong, but I’d already faced it, you see—and done something about it which may not have seemed earth-shattering to you, but it was something I once would never have believed I could do. I mean, fight you for the right to love you … with my body.’

  ‘You could have told me!’

  She stared at him and thought he looked so tall and forbidding, and unmoved. She made a futile little gesture. ‘I couldn’t prove it then any more than I can now, it seems. I can only say that all this means nothing to me except for the people—Milly, Jeanette, your mother—everyone. They came to mean a lot, such a lot. But I would have gladly even traded them for the ability to bear you a child. I can only say it …’

  She broke off and realised she was crying again, and whirled around suddenly and ran out of the room.

  She must have taken him by surprise, because she was out of the house and running through the back garden before he caught her. Then the earth and the sunwarmed grass tilted as she tried to evade him and break free of his arms, but ended up in them and backed up against the trunk of an old gum tree.

  Adam stared down at her upturned face and panic-stricken eyes and tightened his arms around her as she moved convulsively. ‘Roz-—I meant that you should have told me about Mike’s father. Because it would have been the best news of my life.’

  ‘But it was so awful!’

  ‘Awful for you, , , I agree,’ he said sombrely, ‘but terribly damaging to keep locked up inside you, But at least it explains the damage I didn’t do with my bloody stupid ideas about love, and that’s why it would have been good news.’

  Her lips parted, but she couldn’t speak,

  He went on, ‘Roz I swear the only reason I suggested the break was because I was getting desperate and getting nowhere with you other than seeing you becoming more tense and nervous, so much so it was even affecting you physically.’

  ‘Oh, Adam,’ her lips quivered and her voice broke, ‘you could have told me!’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ he said with savage mockery, ‘that was the last thing I was able to do. Do you remember saying to me once that despite all my cynicism I was determined to make you fall in love with me?

  Roz nodded dazedly after a moment.

  ‘You were right, but not, I realised in a blinding flash when you said it, because I couldn’t bear to think of even one woman being unaffected by me, but because I’d fallen in love with you. All the frustration, even the desire to hurt you, added up to one thing suddenly. That was the

  night l made the decision that perhaps the only chance I had of winning your love was to let you go for a while. Because I knew I couldn’t tell you, not me,’ he said with a grim little smile. ‘It was a miracle I even admitted it to myself, and—well, I’ve told you how, even after I’d worked it out, I tried to … deny it. But admitting it to myself was as far as I was going to go until I was convinced you could love me in return. In the end I have gone further, though.’

  ‘You … just now, inside, you looked as if you hated me rather than anything else,’ whispered Roz. ‘And even when I did start to …‘ hope, after you told me about Louise, you were-—in between times you were distant, and I thought it was all only an act of kindness on your part. That’s why when Lucia told me, it all seemed to fall into place. I thought you must have fallen in love with someone but you couldn’t work out what to do with me. And today, I didn’t know what to do, how to behave-—it was mostly out of fright, terror, the way I was …

  ‘Roz,’ he sighed, and swivelled around so that he was leaning against the tree and she was resting against him, ‘if I was distant at times, it was because of seeing Louise—no, wait,’ hesaid softly as she tensed, ‘let me explain. And coming to understand that my stupid pride was leading me into another trap. Also, coming to realise that I was going to have to lay it down even if you were … rather brilliantly acting the part of a loving wife because you were afraid of being on your own again, But my pride and I don’t part that easily, Roz, and on top of it

  there was the guilt about Tokyo which you magnified in a curious way.’

  She stirred in his arms, ‘If—it happened as you say,’ she murmured huskily, ‘perhaps the intention wasn’t really there.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said with a faint smile twisting his lips. ‘Don’t think I haven’t told myself that. By the way, that was one of the reasons you had to fight so hard to seduce me, something to do with the male psychology, no doubt, particularly the inflated type, like mine, Adam added wryly.

  ’What … oh, you mean …?’

  ‘Mmm. But in the end you … restored my confidence beautifully, my darling.’

  ‘I didn’t—I had no idea, oh, Adam!’ Roz sighed

  ’Don’t cry,’ he whispered.

  ‘I can’t help it, I can’t believe … I just love you so much… ’

  Presently he said, ‘That surprise I brought you from Tokyo—would you like to see it?’

  ‘So it did arrive?’ she exclaimed.

  ‘I thought you’d forgotten,’ he said ruefully, and kissed her again, but gently.

  ‘No, I thought you had—I didn’t know what to think,’ Roz confessed.

  ‘Come and see it now,’ he invited, releasing her but taking her hand, ‘And you might understand why I … didn’t quite know what to think.’

  ‘Oh, Adam!’ she breathed minutes later, when his surprise was all laid out on her bed.

  ‘This, I’m told,’ he said gravely, picking up a length of thin silk, is a traditional koshimaki, and you wear it around your waist in place of underpants. And this is a sort of undershirt … ’ This was a cotton gauze sort of front-wrap garment. ‘Then comes the under-robe.’ He laid the undershirt back and fingered the splash of yellow silk that lay beside the most exquisite pale pink damask kimono and a brocad
e obi of gold and silver chrysanthemums.

  ‘Oh, Adam,’ said Roz again, ‘you bought it for me!’

  ‘Yes, but I did have help.’ He looked at her straightly.

  ‘I understand,’ she said quickly.

  ‘Do you, Roz? She said, after the fiasco and I’d explained some things, that you must be very special and she’d like to help me choose something very special to take home to you. But …’ He stopped.

  ‘Then you couldn’t give it to me because I reminded you of … ?’

  ‘Something like that—my guilt haunting me.’

  She moved into his arms. ‘Can I try it on? I’m dying to, but I’ll have to take these clothes off and …’

  ‘I’ll help you.’

  ‘And I should take a shower first because I’m … ‘

  ‘I’ll help you there too,’ he said perfectly seriously. ‘I’ll take a shower with you. You have the most .brilliant ideas sometimes.‘

  ‘I don’t … that wasn’t … ’ Her colour fluctuated and her lips trembled.

  ‘Not the same idea you had about the dining-room table? What a pity,’ said Adam very softly, and with a smile lurking at the back of his eyes.

  ‘You’re never going to let me forget that, are you?’ whispered Roz.

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘No. I love you, I love the way you’re holding me, and I’d love to do it in the shower … ‘

  But later, hours later, she stirred in his arms and said, ‘Adam, what if we can’t have babies?’

  He kissed her bare shoulders lingeringly. ‘We’ll cope,’ he murmured. ‘We could go a bit dotty and run a zoo or a home for broken-down horses, but so long as we have each other … But Roz,’ he raised his head and pushed himself up on one elbow and stared down at her as he caressed her breasts, ‘we’ve come a long way, and if you can be happy now and at peace with me and with yourself, don’t. be surprised if we do. Would you like to have a small wager with me?’

  ‘No,’ she said with a smile. ‘I’ve got the feeling you always win your wagers! I love you … I can’t seem to stop saying that.’

  ‘Don’t even try, because——’ he paused, then sat up suddenly, and she caught her breath as he exclaimed, ‘Bloody hell! That was a car. This place is becoming like a railway station! Are you expecting anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just don’t let it be …’ He slid out of bed and strode over to the window, then swore again. ‘I might have known,’ he added bitterly.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Mother—and Lucia. Come to try and heal the breach, no doubt. I don’t know anyone who has such an annoying, interfering damn family but this …’

  ‘Adam,’ Roz broke in, sitting up, ‘you mustn’t be angry with Lucia.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be, but I’m going down, to tell them … ‘

  ‘No, Adam,’ she pleaded, ‘you don’t understand.’

  ‘… to tell them,’ he finished, sitting down beside her and gathering her up, ‘to stay away for at least six months.’

  ‘But there’s something … ‘

  He overrode her in a way that made it impossible to speak. He kissed her deeply and urgently and as if it was a matter of extreme urgency for him. So that she forgot what she’d been going to say.

  Until he lifted his head at last and released her from the crushing grip he had her in, and said. ‘And to tell them that all is well and that nothing will ever again come between me and my geisha.‘