The Price of Deceit

by Cathy Williams

  She didn’t want him in her house, she didn’t want to have a meal with him, she didn’t want even to look at him. He had been right. She was absolutely terrified at what she felt whenever he was around. She was terrified at the way she lost her grip on reality; she was terrified that he would see her vulnerability.

  But she couldn’t stop him, short of losing him down one of the dimly lit side-streets, and, anyway, he knew where she lived.

  So she made her way miserably back to her house, stuck a composed expression on her face as she got out of her car and then, once they were inside, she said, slipping off her coat, ‘There’s no need to take me out for a meal. You can say whatever you want to say right here. I can make us some coffee.’

  ‘A meal would be so much more civilised, though, wouldn’t it? Why don’t you go and change?’

  He had stuck his hands in the pockets of his coat and was looking at her politely.

  ‘All right,’ she said with reluctance, and vanished into her bedroom, making sure to lock the door behind her, but very quietly. She wasn’t going to invite any more insulting, humorous asides at her expense.

  She had a shower, changed into a neat navy blue suit, which, like everything else in her wardrobe, could comfortably fit into the category of self-effacing and went back into the lounge, where he had directed his attention to her books, an inordinate number of them, which were squeezed into several shelves in one of the alcoves by the fireplace.

  ‘I’m ready,’ she said briskly, and he turned to look at her.

  ‘Haven’t you got anything less formal?’ he asked, and she could tell from his tone of voice that he was distinctly unimpressed with her choice.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with this suit,’ Katherine said defensively.

  ‘No.’ He shrugged and walked towards the door. ‘What happened,’ he asked, turning round to her with his hand on the door-knob, ‘to all those clothes you wore in London?’

  Borrowed plumage, she could have told him. Instead she said shortly, ‘I burnt them.’

  ‘You burnt them?’

  ‘Metaphorically speaking.’

  ‘Why? Were you so bitter at your boyfriend’s rejection?’

  ‘Something like that,’ she answered, and he turned away, opening the door and walking towards his car.

  She slipped into the passenger seat and obligingly discussed restaurants, but her knowledge of them was limited to the cheaper variety and, as she expected, he ignored them all and drove to an expensive Italian restaurant which she had heard of but had never visited. On a teacher’s salary, luxurious dining out was not a matter of course. On her birthdays David had always taken her out, but to local bistros, where the music tended to be over loud and the food cheap and cheerful.

  ‘I’m not dressed for a place like this,’ she said to Dominic, as they waited to be seated.

  ‘You shouldn’t have burnt your clothes,’ he told her shortly. ‘Metaphorically speaking, of course. I never knew a woman who voluntarily got rid of designer clothes so that she could run out and buy a wardrobe full of suits.’

  ‘Not among the women you know, at any rate,’ Katherine muttered under her breath.

  The restaurant was small, intimate, with candles and flowers on the tables, and waiters who appeared to have taken degrees in subservience.

  They were ushered like royalty to a table in the corner of the room, half hidden by an exotic-looking plant, and as soon as they had sat down, she said, ‘Now, what was it that you wanted to discuss?’

  ‘What happened to your friend in London?’ Dominic asked, ordering drinks for both of them and, to her surprise, remembering precisely what she had liked—white wine with soda water.

  ‘I still keep in touch with her,’ Katherine said, shrugging and playing with the stem of her wine-glass.

  Not quite a complete lie. They did still keep in touch, but only via the occasional letter and Christmas cards. Twice, Emma had come to visit, but country life bored her and she had spent the entire time trying to rouse Katherine’s interest in returning to the much more exciting playground of London.

  ‘Well, it’s heartening to know that she didn’t go the way of the clothes,’ Dominic murmured, and she looked at him warily from under her lashes.

  ‘I don’t suppose you came here to discuss me.’ Back to the brisk tone of voice. It was the one she felt most in control with.

  ‘Why do you suppose that?’

  The waiter handed them their menus, great, ornate things, which looked as though they should have far more important contents than descriptions of food.

  ‘Because I am a very boring subject.’ She was busy scanning the menu and didn’t realise that he hadn’t answered until she looked up at him and found that he was staring at her.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ she asked, a little taken aback. ‘I think I’ll have the sole.’

  ‘Was that the reason your boyfriend gave you when he walked out on you?’

  ‘I don’t want to discuss all that. It’s in the past.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said smoothly, coolly, ‘so why should it bother you if we discuss it or not? Why do you think that you’re boring? You had a great deal more self-confidence when I knew you. You didn’t continually act as though you were running away from something.’

  ‘Everyone’s running away from something,’ she muttered ambiguously, and when he raised his eyebrows she continued irritably, ‘You don’t give up do you? All right, I’m not boring, I’m vastly exciting, with my wardrobe of suits and my early nights and my sensible job!’ She knew that she sounded bitter and she hated the way he had managed to draw this heated response out of her when she had spent thirty-five minutes in the car rehearsing her composure.

  ‘Well, well, well.’ He sat back and looked at her with such undiluted concentration that she began to feel jumpy and defensive and hot under the collar.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking.’ She gave him a chance to jump in here and conduct a little psychoanalysis on her, but he remained silent, which propelled her into more murky waters. ‘I’m really quite a self-confident person.’

  ‘You must be,’ he agreed, ‘to hold down a job like the one you do. Children soon see through someone who’s not at ease with them.’

  Katherine laughed, an open, honest sound. ‘I’m not entirely sure about that. At the age of four and five, they’re far more concerned with what’s happening around them than they are with the mental state of their teacher. They’re also terribly trusting. The urge to take advantage of people’s weaknesses comes later, I think.’

  ‘Is Claire finding it hard going?’ he asked, looking at her intently.

  That was something she had forgotten over the years, the way he could give his undivided attention to whatever was being said to him.

  ‘She did to start with, I think,’ Katherine said, pausing while their food was elaborately laid in front of them, then continuing between mouthfuls of sole and vegetables. ‘She speaks English very fluently, but her mind just didn’t work fast enough sometimes to catch on to what the other children were saying. Now, she’s marvellous. Not boisterous, but then, I don’t think that she’ll ever be, do you?’

  ‘No,’ Dominic said thoughtfully. ‘She’s always been quite an introverted child.’

  ‘Yes. I know. I can sympathise.’ She stood back and looked at what she had just said, and then murmured, unwillingly drawn into confiding, ‘I was quite the same. My father left home when I was very young, and my mother…’ She paused. She never spoke about her mother to anyone. She had internalised all the problems she had endured and had always made the best of them. It was only in later years that she had been able to realise how much things had affected her.

  ‘Your mother…?’ There was interest there, but not pressing, and she plunged on.

  ‘My mother resented my father’s leaving. She always maintained that he had abandoned us, which of course he had, but…’

  ‘She blamed
you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She made you pay for his desertion?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Katherine laughed nervously. ‘I told you I was a terribly boring person.’

  ‘You never really discussed your past with me all those years ago,’ he murmured, ‘did you?’

  Katherine met his eyes steadily and said with utter truthfulness, ‘When I met you, I had no past and no future.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Dominic said, and there was a latent urgency in his voice that unsettled her.

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘Tell me what you’re hiding.’

  She lowered her eyes. She could feel the fine prickle of perspiration. Tell him? she thought. The truth? The long, involved truth that had cost her so dear? He had said that the past no longer mattered because what they had had was finished, that two strangers who had briefly crossed paths no longer needed secrets, but she felt otherwise. He might have eliminated her from his life, but she was honest enough to realise that she had never managed to do the same to him. It was pointless trying to analyse what, precisely, she did feel for him, but she knew that it certainly wasn’t the indifference which she would have needed if she were to suddenly plunge into a polite, amusing confession of things that had happened six years ago.

  ‘I’m not hiding anything,’ she said, keeping her eyes lowered.

  ‘Were you involved with the two of us at the same time?’ he asked, with a sharp narrowing of his eyes which belied the mild curiosity in his voice. ‘Did you get pregnant by him?’

  Katherine looked at him, startled, then she laughed, throwing her head back, leaning back into the chair.

  ‘Do share the joke,’ Dominic said coldly, and her laughter subsided into bursts of giggles.

  ‘I have never been pregnant in my life,’ she said, thinking that pregnancy by a fictitious lover would certainly have guaranteed her a place in the Guinness Book of Records. ‘That is the most absurd suggestion I have ever heard in my entire life.’ Which made him frown even more. ‘Have you ever thought of going into writing fiction?’

  ‘Very droll, Katherine,’ he muttered, unamused, judging from the look on his face.

  ‘I don’t know why you feel the need to get to the bottom of all this,’ she said seriously. ‘I suppose it has something to do with male pride, but I have no intention of satisfying your urge to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. I mean, would you ever have wondered at all if chance hadn’t made us meet once again?’

  ‘Unfinished business never goes away,’ he said, signalling to the waiter for the coffee. He leaned towards her. ‘And the fact is that we have met once again, and I won’t give up until I’ve worked out what motivated you then and what motivates you now.’

  She looked at him with alarm.

  ‘Why? What would you gain from that?’

  ‘Satisfaction, Katherine.’ He sat back, and when he smiled there was the promise lurking there that he meant every word he had said.

  That frightened her even more than if he had admitted that he needed to find out what had gone wrong so suddenly six years ago because of sheer, naked curiosity, because the way he said it spoke of something very impersonal, very cold. A detached desire to work it all out in the same way that he might feel the desire to solve a complicated intellectual enigma.

  He had ceased being interested in her a long time ago, and certainly the woman sitting here now in front of him meant nothing at all to him, but there was a ruthless logic about him that would not permit this enigma to pass by unravelled.

  The waiter approached and asked the usual questions about whether they had enjoyed the meal or not. Katherine wondered what he would do if she stood up and said that she hadn’t. Would it ruffle that efficient, mask-like courteousness? Would he throw his hands up in horror? Would he drag the chef out and demand a full explanation of what had gone wrong?

  It was all a technicality, anyway, because the food had been very good, and even if it had been totally inedible she would have bitten back the criticism. She had had too many years of self-effacement ever to indulge voluntarily in histrionics.

  ‘Why do you think Claire is so introverted, as you put it?’ she asked him suddenly, and he answered immediately, as though the abrupt shift in their conversation was not at all disconcerting.

  ‘A reaction to her mother’s personality, I should think,’ he said smoothly. ‘Franise was a very flamboyant woman. She tended to overshadow most people, and that included her daughter.’

  ‘Is that why you married her?’ Katherine asked carefully. ‘Because she was flamboyant?’

  ‘I married her because she was pregnant.’

  He sipped some of his coffee and stared at her over the cup, as though awaiting her next question with some amusement. She knew that he would answer her only if he wanted to, and if she overstepped the mark he would simply, coolly and very abruptly, stop.

  She realised with a jolt that if he hadn’t known her, then she had not really known him either. For six months they had existed on a sort of surreal plane of pleasure. It seemed unreal that something so short could have been so powerful and could have had such far-reaching consequences.

  ‘Poor Claire,’ she said with sympathy. It was all she could find to say. She might have wanted to ask him more, ask him about himself, but that game of courtship was not one in which she was free to indulge. Teachers could ask so much and no more, and personal questions were forbidden by some general, unspoken code of ethics.

  ‘We’ve finished eating,’ she said instead, ‘and you still haven’t told me why you asked me here in the first place.’

  ‘So I haven’t.’ He sat back, folded his arms and said silkily, ‘I want to know what’s going on with my sister.’

  ‘Your sister?’ Katherine looked at him with surprise. ‘Why on earth should I know what’s going on with your sister?’

  ‘Because she seems to like you. If she had needed to confide in someone, you probably would have fitted the bill.’

  What a staggering compliment, Katherine thought acidly. Dull enough to fit the bill as eternal confidante to the masses. Opiate of other people’s emotional headaches, the human equivalent of an aspirin.

  ‘If your sister had confided in me, then I’d hardly be likely to tell all to you, would I?’ she retorted.

  ‘Has she told you what the hell is going on?’ he asked, as though she hadn’t spoken. ‘She’s developed a taste for going out at night, which isn’t unusual for my sister, but it’s quite unusual in that I don’t see any of these so-called friends she’s going out with.’

  ‘Why should it worry you if she goes out, for heaven’s sake?’ Katherine asked, perplexed. ‘She’s not a child.’

  ‘From what I can see, she’s hardly an adult either.’

  ‘Maybe you should look a bit harder.’

  The waiter glided over with the bill, and while Dominic paid she tried to fathom out where his suspicions were leading, because they were leading somewhere.

  ‘Jack,’ he said, resuming their conversation in the car as though there had been no lapse in between, ‘is high-spirited. Too high-spirited for her own good.’

  ‘That’s no bad thing,’ Katherine murmured, thinking back to her own youth. Maybe if she had been high-spirited then, she would not have felt that desperate urge to throw everything to the winds when events began snowballing.

  ‘She’s also extremely gullible,’ Dominic said from next to her.

  ‘And so you see it as your duty to steer her away from temptation.’

  ‘I see it as my duty to make sure that she doesn’t land herself in a situation from which she might find it impossible to extricate herself.’ His voice was hard.

  They had reached her house, and she opened her door and said, in a winding-up sort of voice, ‘Well, I’m sure that she can take very good care of herself.’ She headed up the path to her front door, and with a sinking heart heard his door slam behind him.

  ‘I want to know if she has told y
ou anything,’ he said, following her into the house and proceeding to settle himself on the sofa in the sitting-room as though he had every right in the world to be there.

  ‘Not a thing,’ Katherine informed him truthfully. ‘Not one single thing. And I can’t imagine what good it is going to do if you now decide to put the bloodhounds on her trail. She has to be allowed to live her own life.’

  ‘Is that what they teach you in your teacher training courses?’ he asked with a hint of derision.

  ‘No, I think it’s called common sense. Over-protect someone and sooner or later they’re going to rebel against it, whereas if you just let them live their own lives, they’ll learn from their mistakes and arrive at the right conclusions in the end.’

  ‘What a trusting philosophy of life,’ he said curtly, which made her hackles rise.

  ‘She won’t appreciate it if you decide to start quizzing her on her every movement. Can’t you see that? There are some things in life that you can’t control.’

  ‘I will not allow her to do anything foolish,’ he said with utter calm.

  ‘I’m sure she won’t,’ Katherine murmured, refusing to be needled into an argument. ‘And even if she does, does it matter? It’s inevitable, isn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t seem to understand,’ he said coldly. ‘Any mistake that Jack makes could turn out to be a very costly one indeed.’

  ‘So it all comes down to money, does it?’ she asked. ‘You’re not all that bothered by your sister’s emotional welfare. What really bothers you is that she could end up costing you money.’

  He threw her a glance of brooding impatience. ‘Stop being deliberately naïve. It’s obvious that my sister is involved with a man, and it’s equally obvious that he’s undesirable, because she hasn’t seen fit to bring him home.’

  ‘For you to inspect,’ she murmured. ‘Frankly, I can understand why.’

  He looked at her savagely, then stood up and began pacing the room.

  ‘Is she going out with that David fellow?’ he asked eventually, and she drew her breath in.

  ‘What on earth makes you think that she is?’