The Price of Deceit

by Cathy Williams

  ‘But,’ he said, not looking at her but idly looking at Claire, who was busy dressing and re-dressing her new dolls in various sets of clothing, ‘you do need to let go of those bits of your past that are still hanging over you. Your mother may have had her opinions of you, and doubtless made her thoughts perfectly clear, but it’s time you shrugged that off and realised that you’re your own person now.’

  ‘Oh.’ Katherine looked at him from under her lashes. ‘You feel sorry for me. I’m really quite an independent woman, you know.’

  Dominic’s eyes shifted over to her and he shook his head with an expression of resigned impatience, but whether he intended prolonging the conversation or not, Katherine didn’t know, because Claire was now fed up with playing on her own.

  She enlisted their input and, until the caterers arrived at eleven, they found themselves trying to figure out how to erect the doll’s house, which proved to need the genius of a mathematician and the skill of a cabinet-maker.

  ‘It’s wonderful!’ Claire informed them, awestruck, once the thing had been fitted together.

  ‘It looks precarious,’ Katherine commented, tilting her head at an angle to scrutinise it.

  ‘Aren’t these things made of wood any longer?’ Dominic complained lazily. ‘When I was a boy, there was none of this plastic stuff around.’

  ‘But that was a hundred years ago,’ Claire said gravely, and Katherine smothered a laugh.

  She couldn’t remember having had such a good time on Christmas Day. Ever.

  Last year, she had opened her small collection of presents with David, and they had had a quiet day at his mother’s house. And the same the year before that, and the year before that. And when she dredged up memories of her own childhood Christmases, all she could remember was sitting cross-legged under the tree, opening her small parcels one by one under the eagle eye of her mother, who would make scathing remarks about most of them. She couldn’t remember anything like this atmosphere of joyous glee and anticipation.

  The caterers arrived, laden with food, and shortly afterwards Dominic’s guests arrived, a couple in their mid-thirties, with their two young children, and Claire vanished, seemingly for the remainder of the day, reappearing for lunch and making nearly as much fuss over the nonsense in the crackers as she had done over the much larger gifts she had opened earlier.

  It was only later, when the guests had gone, leaving behind them the usual chaos that seemed to accompany children wherever they went, that Katherine wondered where David and Jack were and what they were doing.

  Presumably they were now entrenched in a state of married bliss. They, at any rate, had overcome their hurdles. How ironic that their victory had left her own life in a state of flux, because she doubted that she and Dominic would ever have made love had it not been for them. The situation would simply never have arisen.

  She curled her legs under her and sipped her coffee, liking the warm glow that filled the room from the fire burning in the grate, liking the feeling of peace she had at being here, in this house, with Dominic upstairs settling Claire. A very domestic scene, she thought. A very domestic day, in fact. She knew that if she wasn’t careful she would end up being lulled into a dangerous illusion that this might just last forever.

  She didn’t look up when he entered the room, and he said, with a smile in his voice, ‘You look like a cat sitting there in front of the fire.’

  ‘I’m hypnotised by the fire,’ she said, glancing at him as he settled on to the sofa next to her. ‘In a minute I’ll start braving myself to face the cold outside.’

  ‘Why?’ he murmured, reaching forward to take his coffee-cup from the table in front of them, and then looking at her over the rim of the cup. The green eyes were fathomless in the darkened room. As mesmerising as the fire and a lot more lethal.

  ‘It’s called going home,’ Katherine told him, ‘at the end of a very enjoyable day. Thank you.’

  ‘You don’t want to go,’ he said, depositing his cup on the table and then doing the same with hers. ‘You don’t want to uncurl your body from this chair, you don’t want to get into your coat, you don’t want to drive back in the dark to an empty house.’

  When he spoke like that, in that deep, velvety voice that seemed to hold the answer to every question she could ever ask, she could feel the blood stir thickly in her veins.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she agreed, ‘but that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to.’

  He stretched towards her and curled his fingers in her hair and pulled her towards him, so that she was lying against his body and could hear his heart beating through his shirt.

  He slowly unbuttoned her blouse. She could feel the brush of his fingers against her skin and her body quivered.

  ‘You want to stay here with me,’ he murmured into her hair, and he slipped his hand under the blouse and cupped her breast. His fingers played with her nipple, stroked her stomach, edged beneath the waistband of her skirt.

  He held her captive, and the thought flashed through her mind that perhaps this was precisely what he wanted. To gain entry into her life so that he became the one calling the shots, so that he could be the one who dictated the length and breadth of their relationship.

  ‘No,’ Katherine said softly, ‘you want me to, and I’d really like to know why.’

  ‘Because,’ he said, breathing deeply against her neck, ‘I’m a fool.’

  Or, at least, that was what she thought he said, and she squirmed to face him. Tomorrow, she thought, tomorrow she would sort everything out in her mind. Tomorrow she would put an end to this lovemaking which would kill her in the end.

  She knelt on the sofa and opened the blouse, guiding his head to the valley between her breasts, and as he kissed them she flung her head back, offering herself to his mouth, a willing victim.

  With unsteady fingers, she unclasped the waistband and the skirt fell around her thighs.

  Dominic groaned, a low, hoarse sound, and pushed her back against the sofa, quickly pulling down the skirt, and through the lacy underwear he massaged the aching mound of her femininity. She shuddered and moved against him, and he slipped his hand beneath the lace and she stifled a deep groan of satisfaction.

  How could she think when her body was in flames? She had been asleep before he arrived, before he crash-landed back into her life, and his first kiss had awakened her from her slumber. She felt alive now, in tune with everything around her, and not like someone trapped in some strange limbo of vague contentment, unable to move forward.

  She saw that his hands were unsteady as he removed his clothes and that gave her a heady sense of power.

  She had never understood, then, why he had found her attractive, and she could understand it even less now, but she refused to stop and analyse the questions that that raised. She stretched out her arms and, as it covered hers, felt the weight of his body with a great surge of love and desire. She wrapped her arms around him and felt the tight muscles beneath her palms with delight.

  He had both breasts in his hands and was giving them his undivided attention and her body relaxed so completely that it was as if all her bones had melted under the heat of their lovemaking.

  He pulled her up towards him so that they were facing each other, and with an easy movement she eased herself on to him, feeling his hardness move inside her, feeling at one with him in a way she knew that she could never feel with anyone else.

  She watched his face as they reached the pinnacle of pleasure, and as he exhaled a long breath of satisfaction she impulsively kissed him on his neck, a small, chaste kiss that contained everything she had ever felt for him and everything she ever would.

  He opened his eyes and looked at her.

  ‘I know we said that we would never discuss this,’ he murmured, ‘but there never was a man, was there? You didn’t walk out on me for someone else.’

  ‘No.’ She looked back at him and trailed her finger along his cheek, then along the strong, determined line of his jaw. ‘No
, there was never another man.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say so from the beginning?’

  ‘I had my reasons,’ she said, looking away with a frown.

  It wasn’t true that they could dissect their lives like a piece of meat, cutting away the past, snipping the edges of all the uncomfortable bits. She had known that all along, but she had preferred to let herself be persuaded by him that it would work, that they could make love and ignore everything else that threatened to intrude on that.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, curling a strand of hair around his finger and staring at it absent-mindedly.

  It does matter, she thought, disturbed. It may not to you, because there’s no emotional involvement on your part, but it matters to me.

  ‘I need a shower,’ she said, standing up and haphazardly putting on her clothes.

  ‘Not yet.’ He pulled her down again so that she was sitting on the edge of the sofa.

  Katherine looked at him. In the semi-darkened room, lit only by the glowing flames of the fire, there was something almost unreal about him. His long, powerful body was so perfect, so exquisitely fashioned, that he seemed to have stepped out of a myth, a Greek god reclining in lazy abandon next to her.

  No god, though, she thought, just human. A human being with all the usual human failings. What would he say if she were to entrust her story to him? Would he still give her that devilish, charming smile? Would he be able to dismiss the past so easily?

  She stood up and began walking towards the top floor, sprinting up the stairs to the shower.

  She was hardly surprised when he joined her, but her thoughts, this time, were somewhere else. And she could see that he was tuned in to the fact that her mind was a million miles away because he didn’t try to touch her. He simply watched her, his face inscrutable.

  ‘You look as though you need a drink,’ he said, once they were dressed, and she glanced across at him with a worried expression.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because,’ he muttered, ‘contrary to popular belief that I’m utterly and completely insensitive to other people’s feelings, I would have to be blind not to see that something’s bothering you.’

  She followed him down to the drawing-room and accepted a glass of brandy, a drink which she secretly abhorred, but they did say that it gave you courage and, right now, she felt that she needed all the courage she could lay her hands on, because the time had come. There was no point in pretending that this temporary vacuum they had created for themselves could exist indefinitely. It couldn’t.

  No, she thought, taking a long swallow of the liquid and feeling a hot sensation rush down her throat, the time had finally come for the truth to be told.

  ‘Dominic,’ she said, putting the glass down carefully on the table next to her, ‘there’s something I feel you ought to know.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  DOMINIC didn’t say anything. He just sat there on the chair, cradling his glass in his hands, but Katherine could feel the shift in the atmosphere. There was a sudden watchfulness about him that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Even the room seemed to have become colder, although the fire was still burning as brightly as it had been half an hour ago.

  Now that she had come to this, of course she didn’t know where to start, but he was clearly in no rush for her to start anywhere, because he didn’t say a word. In a way, his silence was even more alarming than if he had bombarded her with a series of questions.

  She looked at him from under her lashes, and took a deep breath.

  ‘It does matter, you know,’ she said, realising that she was starting at the end, or at least somewhere in the middle, and not at the beginning as she had intended. ‘I know you say that we can just sweep the past under the carpet, as though it’s some kind of inconvenient bug that can be hidden away and forgotten about, but it’s not going to work for me.’ She twined her fingers together, then untwined them, a nervous movement that helped to distract her from the sickening rush of nerves she felt in the pit of her stomach. ‘It would be so easy if we could just bottle up the unpleasant things in life, the things we don’t want to remember, and pretend that they never really existed, but I can’t do that.’

  ‘There’s no need to drag it all up now,’ he said, and his voice startled her. ‘Do you think that a confession will cleanse your soul?’

  ‘Something like that, I suppose.’

  ‘You told me yourself that there was no man. Were you lying?’

  Katherine shook her head desperately. ‘No, I wasn’t lying.’

  ‘I didn’t think so. It seemed all wrong at the time. It didn’t make sense.’ He had been leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees. Now he relaxed back and looked at her from under his lashes. ‘You were afraid,’ he said calmly. ‘Everything happened quickly between us and somewhere along the line you panicked and took flight. It happened. It’s over and done with. We’ve both learnt lessons from that.’

  ‘You don’t understand!’ The words were wrenched out of her, and she anxiously began pacing the room, trailing her fingers along the edge of the sofa, over the gleaming bits of furniture, along the glass-fronted cabinet along the wall of the room.

  ‘Start at the beginning.’ His voice was calm and she realised that he thought he knew it all, but he was wrong, and she couldn’t think where she ought to begin. Wherever she started, it would be the wrong place, but there was no backing out now. Things had to be said which, she knew, should have been said a long time ago.

  ‘Yes.’ She stopped behind the sofa and rested against the back of it and looked at him.

  The beginning. The moment her father had walked through the door and never come back. Wasn’t that where it started? The years she had spent as a child, then as a teenager, growing up to believe that, whatever she possessed, it was never quite as much as everyone else did.

  ‘My mother,’ she said slowly, ‘was a difficult woman. I don’t mean to sound self-pitying, but I never really had a great deal of self-confidence. I suppose over the years it all drained away from me and later, when I could understand why she had been the way she had, I just didn’t know where to start to put it back together again.’ She looked at him to see whether she could spot any incipient signs of boredom, but there were none. He was listening intently, his head crooked to one side.

  ‘I never had much excitement,’ she continued, without bitterness, ‘and I really don’t think I ever missed it. At least, not so much that it ever occurred to me to rebel. Of course, I had my daydreams, but mostly I was content to study, because studying was the only way I could see of ever escaping. I wanted to be a teacher, you see. Do you think that was a very dreary ambition?’

  ‘A very brave one,’ he said in a low, sympathetic voice. The sympathy was what made her wince. She didn’t want sympathy.

  With a sudden flash of insight, she realised what he thought. He thought, in retrospect, that she had walked out on him because she hadn’t had the self-confidence to believe that she could ever marry and keep a man like him. He would have thought that without any vanity or arrogance, simply as a statement of truth. That was why he had given her that odd Christmas present. If only it was as simple as that.

  ‘When my mother died,’ she said, with a sigh, and with a feeling that this was uphill going all the way and no hope of it getting any easier, ‘I moved up here and took a job at the school I’m teaching at now.’

  ‘Did you think that everything would change?’ he asked gently.

  ‘It was the first taste of independence I’d ever had,’ Katherine admitted. ‘It was not as sweet as I had hoped, but I was happy anyway.’

  ‘Until one day you decided to go to London and see for yourself what else there was out there. Katherine, I understand, believe me.’

  ‘You only understand a small part of it,’ she said in a voice stronger than she felt inside. It was as though he had gathered together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and slotted them all together,
but the picture he had was a one-dimensional one. It seemed to make sense; it was only when you looked at it from different angles that you could see the inaccuracies, the gaps, the missing links.

  ‘I had been teaching for a while, and everything was moving merrily along, when I began to get headaches—dreadful, blinding headaches.’

  He hadn’t expected that. He sat up and looked at her and the alertness was back on his face once again.

  ‘I could hardly concentrate on what I was doing,’ she said. She could remember as though it was yesterday the agony of lying in bed with the lights dimmed and a cold compress over her eyes. Every movement had hurt. It had even hurt to think. ‘In the end, I decided to go to the doctor and he sent me along to the hospital to have a scan done. I can’t remember what the technical word for it was, but he said that it would show if there was anything seriously wrong. He seemed to think that it was stress. He said that people underplayed the importance of stress and only realised it was there when something like that began happening.’

  He had been very sympathetic. He hadn’t acted as though she was a deranged woman fabricating symptoms which didn’t exist. She still went to the same surgery now, although that particular doctor had long retired, replaced by a doctor who seemed only just to have outgrown his boyhood acne. Katherine always thought with amusement that that was a sure sign that she was getting old.

  Dominic stood up and poured himself another drink, and he remained standing, as though there was a sudden restlessness in him that couldn’t be contained.

  ‘And then what?’ he asked tightly. He raked his fingers through his hair and drank a bit more from the glass.

  ‘I went along. They did whatever they had to do and said that the results would be with the doctor within a week, but in fact my doctor telephoned me before that. He said that he needed to see me immediately.’ She put her hand to her forehead and realised that it was shaking, either from the sheer power of her memories of that time, or else from the near-panic she felt at the thought of continuing.