The Price of Deceit

by Cathy Williams

  There was no longer any sympathy on Dominic’s face. His expression was shuttered and somehow alarming.

  ‘Go on,’ he grated.

  ‘Of course, I knew that something was wrong. Doctors never get in touch with you unless the news is bad, do they? Usually, you assume that if you don’t hear from them, everything’s all right. Anyway, I went along suspecting the worst, but nothing I suspected could have been as awful as what he had to say. I don’t want to go into the details of that conversation, I still feel giddy when I think about it now, but the upshot was that I was given months to live.’

  There, it was out, and she couldn’t bring herself to look at him. She knew, without having to see, that what little he had felt for her had turned to ice.

  ‘That was when I decided to go to London. I wanted to throw away all my inhibitions and live a life I had never tasted, even if it was going to be for a short while, so I got in touch with my friend, and that’s where it all began.’

  She looked up at him and her fingers clenched on the back of the sofa as she saw the shock on his face give way to the icy depths of dislike.

  How, she wanted to scream wildly, could she have known that she would meet him? By the time she had become involved, her deception had been so embedded that there was no way that she could tell him the truth.

  He didn’t say anything, not a word. He didn’t have to. His eyes said it all on his behalf.

  ‘I hadn’t given anyone my forwarding address,’ she continued, compelled now to finish what she had begun. ‘I explained to the principal that I needed compassionate leave of absence, but I didn’t tell her where I was going, so I never received the letter from the surgery. It was waiting for me after—when I returned here. In the meantime, the headaches had gone. I didn’t think about that. I assumed that that was just the natural course whatever I had would take. Please say something, Dominic,’ she pleaded.

  ‘What is there for me to say?’ he asked coldly. ‘I certainly can’t tell you that I understand, because I don’t.’

  ‘I never suspected that you would come along!’ she cried out.

  She stretched out her hand to him and he looked at the gesture with a distaste that seemed to have frozen him into immobility.

  ‘You might as well finish,’ he said in a grim voice, and she nodded miserably.

  ‘I gather that they tried desperately to get in touch with me. My doctor went and saw the principal and explained the situation and they tried various ways to find me, but in the end they had to give up. I had vanished, and every avenue they took led to a dead end. You see, it had been a bureaucratic mistake. The results of the tests that they’d given my doctor referred to someone else who happened to have the same surname.’ A tear spilled down her cheek and she wiped it away with the back of her hand.

  ‘And why,’ he asked, in the same flat, glacial voice, ‘didn’t you tell me about your condition at the time? Why?’

  ‘I just couldn’t. I never thought…never imagined…’ She had spoken so softly that she didn’t know whether he had heard, but she wasn’t going to repeat herself, and she wasn’t going to launch into a retrospective explanation because she could see from his face that anything she said would simply bounce off him now. He would have been prepared to forgive her insecurities, but he would never forgive her deception.

  She could see clearly enough how she must appear to him. A selfish monster who had used him in the worst way possible, conducting an affair with him when she had known that it was leading nowhere.

  How could she explain that she had simply been carried away on the wings of something so wonderful that by the time she had realised how deeply she was involved, it had been just too late?

  He had told her how much he admired her openness and she had been open, yes, in everything but that. She had not been able to bring herself to tell him that she was living with a time-bomb ticking inside her, waiting to detonate. She had known that she had fallen so sweetly headlong into love, and it was only later, when it had dawned on her that the impossible had somehow happened, that he was as involved with her as she was with him, that she had realised that she had to end the relationship.

  What, she wanted to ask, would he have done if she had told him the truth? How could she have done that to him? He would either have walked away or else he would have felt compelled to stay with her to the end, and how could she have put him through that? I was weak, she wanted to say, but in the end, I left the way I did because of you, because I loved you. And then, later, when she had found out that it had all been a mistake, a terrible mistake, she had already realised what her subconscious had been telling her all along, that their worlds were too different, that she had pretended to be someone she wasn’t, and that in reality they were little more than two individuals, hurtling through space, briefly making contact and thinking that the contact bound them, when in fact it had only emphasised, quite clearly to her, how dissimilar their orbits were.

  He had fallen in love with a mirage. He hadn’t fallen in love with a teacher with a dowdy wardrobe of clothes, he had fallen in love with a bright young thing dressed in borrowed finery. How could she hope to recreate the magic? The mistake that had set her free had in the end nailed her firmly to reality.

  ‘No,’ he said with biting sarcasm, ‘you just couldn’t say anything, could you? It was just much easier to ride the roller-coaster you had found. What a shock it must have been when I proposed to you. Was that when your scruples got the better of you?’

  ‘No, you must see that—’

  ‘I see what’s staring me in the face!’ he roared. ‘It was all one complicated web of deceit from beginning to end! And to think that I thought you were the one in a million, the one woman who was as transparently clear as running water. It would have been better if there had been someone else,’ he snarled. ‘At least then you could have been excused on the grounds of passion. As it is, what you’ve just told me shows you for what you are—a cold, scheming bitch, who didn’t think twice about using a man for what he could provide. You wanted excitement and you took it without a backward glance, knowing that the limits to what you could give in return were as rigid as the cords of a noose around your neck!’

  ‘Don’t say that!’

  ‘Why?’ he sneered. ‘Does the truth hurt?’

  ‘I admit that what I did was wrong… I was weak, yes, but I was never manipulative.’

  ‘I’m surprised that you bothered to tell this sordid little tale,’ he said, ignoring her. ‘I’m surprised that you didn’t just take what was on offer once more.’

  She didn’t say anything. What was there left to say? She felt numb, like a block of ice, drained of everything.

  I loved you then, she wanted to say, and I love you now. But she couldn’t bear the thought of the mockery those admissions would evoke.

  She walked across to her coat, slipped it on, and said in a low voice, ‘I think you will agree that it’s time for me to leave.’

  Was it only a few hours ago that she had been enjoying the best Christmas she could remember? Was it only a few hours ago that she had been eating a meal and laughing around a noisy table with crackers? It seemed like decades ago.

  If she looked in a mirror, she was convinced that she would see a head full of grey hair. She felt a thousand years older than she had that morning.

  ‘Was it your ambition to lose your virginity?’ he asked, moving across to her with the stealth and speed of a leopard. ‘Was that on your list of things to do when you started going out with me?’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘And did you really enjoy the lovemaking, or was that a farce as well?’ he asked, overriding her protest, and she looked up at him, her eyes wide.

  ‘What do you think?’ she whispered bitterly.

  ‘I think that that was probably the only real thing you ever showed me,’ he said, staring at her as if she was a stranger he had never seen before, an enemy he had suddenly discovered in his midst. ‘Well, why don’t you tak
e the memory of this with you?’ And he inclined his head towards hers, and his mouth crushed hers with a force that propelled her backwards against the wall.

  She struggled against him, but her efforts were useless. He pulled her head back, coiling his fingers in her hair, and kissed her with anger and hatred.

  He pushed aside her coat and his hand gripped the swell of her breast and she struggled against him.

  ‘Please!’ she said, turning her head from side to side.

  ‘But you enjoy me making love to you,’ he said, his mouth against hers. ‘Wouldn’t you like one final act of passion?’

  ‘This isn’t passion, it’s hatred!’

  ‘It’s what you deserve.’ But he stood back from her, and even his posture was unforgiving.

  ‘I was a fool,’ Katherine whispered, ‘but I wasn’t ruthless.’

  ‘That’s debatable.’ They stared at each other, then he turned away and said, with icy control in his voice, ‘I shall be removing Claire from the school immediately. She won’t return after the Christmas vacation.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ Katherine said in a high voice. ‘Don’t embroil her in this. She loves going to school there! She has friends. This has nothing to do with her!’

  He turned round to look at her and she could see that she was talking to a brick wall.

  ‘Close the door behind you.’ Then he moved to the bar, and the last thing she saw of him was his downbent head as he poured himself another drink. Then she flew out of the room, out of the house and away back to her own house, coldly awaiting her.

  Her mind refused to think. At least not coherently. She drove far too fast through the narrow lanes, her face aching from the effort not to burst out crying.

  But once she was inside the house she sat down on the sofa, without bothering to remove her coat and without bothering to switch on the overhead light, and let the tears fall down her face like a river, inadequately mopping them up with her hands because she had no handkerchief.

  This will all pass in time, she told herself later, in bed. Her eyes were red and puffy and she felt exhausted from weeping. There couldn’t possibly be any tears left inside her. She remembered reading a story once of a child who cried so often, and over such trivia, that one day her tears all dried up and she found that she could never cry again, even when something terrible happened. Katherine felt as though she had cried everything there was in her.

  She spent the next few days in a state of dreamlike misery. She couldn’t seem to rouse herself to do anything at all. Normality was just too much at the moment, a little beyond her.

  She had fully expected to spend the remainder of the Christmas vacation in a state of complete isolation, but on New Year’s Day the doorbell went and David stood there beaming at her, a face from what seemed a million light-years away.

  ‘You look terrible,’ he told her, ‘and by the way, a very happy New Year to you.’

  ‘I have flu,’ she lied, ‘and a very happy New Year to you as well.’

  She tried to summon up some semblance of enthusiasm, but she wished that he hadn’t come.

  Jack, it seemed, was with Dominic and things, it appeared, were wonderful. Married life, he assured her, was the answer to all of life’s questions.

  ‘And have you seen Dominic?’ she asked, with her back to him, hungry for each morsel of information about him, and angry with herself for feeling that way.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ David said. ‘I thought, to be honest, that he would be far more alarming than he actually was. Poor Jack was in a state of nerves for hours beforehand, but it was all a bit of an anticlimax. He didn’t seem all that bothered about the fact that we’d got married. No sermons on my unsuitability. He barely flickered an eyelash about it all. Unpredictable, I suppose, but I was well relieved, I can tell you.’

  But how was he looking? she wanted to ask. Did he mention me?

  ‘What will you do about school?’ she asked, sitting down at the kitchen table opposite him and cradling a mug of coffee in her hands.

  Everything, it appeared, had been thought out and worked out to the last detail, and she spent half an hour listening to David’s plans for moving to the South of France, where Jack could get a job and he could find work teaching English in one of the schools, and during the long holidays he would begin writing a novel. He would write about political intrigue in a school. He was full of ideas. She looked at his face, brimming over with enthusiasm, and wished that some of it could rub off on her.

  ‘And what about you?’ he asked as a postscript, and more or less on the way out, and she shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘What about me? School begins in a few days’ time. I shall carry on there as normal. Of course I shall miss you, but I’m really so pleased that everything’s worked out between you and Jack. I’m sure you’ll be very happy.’ There didn’t seem a great deal left to say on the subject.

  ‘I’ll miss you too,’ David said, standing by the door and throwing her a rueful smile. ‘But of course, I shall keep in touch, and whenever we’re up this way we’ll make this our first point of stop-over. After Mother, of course.’ He laughed, and she laughed with him because they both knew how possessive his mother was about him.

  The house seemed empty after he had gone, but his visit did do one thing: it made her snap out of the torpor that had filled her for the past few days. She spent the day vigorously cleaning the house. She filled five dustbin bags of rubbish. She went through her wardrobe like a tornado, parcelling up clothes which she would never wear again.

  Six years ago she had left Dominic Duvall, because she had wanted to spare him the unutterable pain of watching her decline, because she had wanted to spare him more hurt. And then, too, she had been so convinced that he had only seen in her those things which she did not really possess. And maybe, to a large extent, she had been right. Maybe if he had met her without the sparkle and the glitter that initial attraction would not have been there.

  But she was never going to take refuge behind drab colours again.

  She went into Birmingham for the January sales, and spent money without thinking too hard about it. She bought bright things, colourful clothes, some new ornaments for her house. She would wallpaper the sitting-room. She had been meaning to do it for years but had never got round to it. At the back of her mind, she thought that now she would have all the time in the world to get round to all those things which she had not done before.

  It gave her a great sense of purpose, and she actually managed to go a long way to convincing herself that life could carry on without Dominic Duvall.

  She would miss Claire, though. She had become accustomed to that serious little face in her class; she had enjoyed watching her progress from timid bystander to a child who had gradually begun to join in.

  She was stunned, when she went in to school on the first day back, to find that Claire was there, in her uniform, waiting with the rest of the class for lessons to start.

  She waited until three, after school had finished, then she called Claire up to her desk and said gently, ‘It’s wonderful to see you here. Your father mentioned that he might be sending you to a different school.’

  Claire gave her a proud little smile. ‘I said no.’

  ‘You said no?’

  ‘I told him that I did not want to go to another school, that I like this one, that I liked you.’ The smile wavered a bit. ‘You do not mind that I used your name?’

  ‘I’m glad you’re back.’ She squeezed the small hand resting on the top of the desk, and grinned. She could imagine how furious he would have been, being held to ransom by a child.

  ‘Jack is going to France at the end of the week,’ Claire said, apropos of nothing in particular. ‘She said that I can go and stay with her any time I want. She said the weather will be better than over here. The house you and Daddy built for me has broken.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll mend it.’ She had to look away, because the memory of that fleeting bond of intimacy between them didn�
��t bear thinking about.

  ‘Will you tell him to?’ Claire asked quickly, with a frown.

  ‘I think you should.’

  ‘He’s never around,’ Claire argued. ‘He is going out with a lady-friend.’

  Katherine’s face froze and she cleared her throat. ‘Perhaps his lady-friend could give you a hand,’ she said. Things move on, she thought with pain. People get married and move away, life carries on. Did you expect him to pine? He might have been physically involved with you, but he wasn’t emotionally involved. There must have been dozens of lady-friends waiting round the corner, ready to snap up a catch like Dominic Duvall. That’s life, isn’t it?

  ‘I hate her,’ Claire said bluntly, still frowning. ‘She fusses in the kitchen and she won’t let me eat fish fingers for tea.’

  ‘That’s no reason to dislike her,’ Katherine said, trying without much success to sound bright and cheerful when all she could think was that someone else was touching his body, seeing him smile, hearing his deep, velvety voice and probably feeling the same way that she had.

  ‘She wears too much make-up,’ Claire carried on, caught up on her own momentum now. ‘She’s no fun. Not like you. Can’t you come and cook for Daddy?’

  ‘I’m a very poor cook,’ Katherine said briskly. ‘Now, love, it’s time you hurried back home. You’re doing very well with your reading. You mustn’t forget your homework. Three pages tonight.’

  Talking was difficult. Her throat felt as though it was closing over and, even though she was saying the right things, her mind had veered off on a completely different tangent, and it was making her feel slightly sick and giddy.

  ‘But will you come and visit?’ Claire pleaded, and Katherine nodded vaguely. ‘When?’

  ‘Soon,’ she promised.

  ‘Today?’

  ‘No, love. I’m busy today, but another day.’

  ‘But you have to come today,’ Claire protested. ‘Gail is coming over to cook and I don’t want to eat her food!’ Tears of frustration were welling up and Katherine said, in the same brisk voice, something about home cooking being much healthier than fish fingers and that carrots would make her hair grow.