Giselle's Choice

by Penny Jordan

  Giselle was in the bedroom when Saul unlocked the front door and silently glanced into the other empty rooms before making his way there. She was dressed and ready to go out, and would indeed have already left the house prior to Saul’s arrival if she hadn’t been distracted by the fact that the packaging from the pregnancy testing kits and the kits themselves were still in her handbag. She would have to discard everything discreetly—secretly, she corrected herself, with sharp dislike of her own ongoing need for deception. Her fingers closed round one of the positive tests. Unable to stop herself, she took it out of her handbag, driven by her longing for things to be different to look at it again, as though by doing so she could somehow change what it said and undo everything that it meant.

  It was whilst she was looking at it that Saul pushed open the bedroom door. Immediately Giselle thrust the tube back into her handbag, her face changing colour as she did so, and her voice unnaturally high and strained as she asked, ‘What are you doing back at home? I thought you were going to be in the office all day.’

  ‘Perhaps I wanted to see my wife and find out why she turned away from me in bed last night,’ Saul answered without emotion, his gaze tracking her loss of colour and obvious apprehension. She had put something into her handbag when he had walked in. What had it been? Her phone with a telltale message on it? A letter?

  ‘I told you. I was tired,’ Giselle responded.

  ‘Too tired to be bothered with me, but not too tired to go out today. Where are you going, by the way?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  Saul’s eyebrows rose.

  ‘I was going to the bank, that’s all. I wanted to draw out some money. I thought that my great-aunt might need some new clothes and I could take her out and buy them for her whilst I’m up there,’ Giselle told him, flustered by his look into saying something that was only partly the truth but that concealed the real reason she was going out.

  It was a plausible enough explanation, Saul acknowledged, but for the fact that Giselle hadn’t looked at him once whilst she had given it. In fact she was desperately avoiding making eye contact with him.

  Beneath the suspicion that had brought him home and the anger that was now burning inside him, Saul could also feel pain. Of all the people he knew, Giselle was the one person he had believed would not lie to him. Not ever.

  ‘Have lunch with me, and then we’ll go to the bank together,’ he offered, testing her. ‘No. I mean, I’d love to—but I know how busy you must be.’

  That immediate no had been a bad mistake, Giselle knew. She could see that from Saul’s reaction. He was now striding towards her, a very grim look indeed on his face. In her panic her handbag slipped from her perspiration-damp hands. The not-quite-closed clasp gave way as it hit the floor, the impact disgorging some of the bag’s contents in a tangle of packaging, lipstick, and— Her heart leapt inside her chest on a surge of wild panic as she spied the telltale test lying half-concealed by its packaging.

  Frantically she dropped to her knees, but she was too late. Saul had got there first and was gathering everything up. Kneeling on the carpet, facing him, Giselle saw first the confusion and then the realisation dawn in his gaze as he picked up the test kit and looked at it. Then he turned to look at her, to demand almost too quietly, ‘Does this mean what I think it means?’

  ‘If you’re asking if I’m pregnant, then, yes, I am,’ Giselle was forced to confirm. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she begged him. ‘It wasn’t deliberate. Being pregnant is the last thing I want. It’s the last thing I’ve ever wanted.’

  ‘Then how come you are?’ Saul demanded bluntly, as he fought against the shock he was too angry and proud to allow her to see. Giselle had deceived him. She had become pregnant totally against his wishes whilst pretending to agree with him about them not having any children. He had trusted her and she had deceived him. She had tricked him. That was something Saul’s pride could not tolerate.

  ‘I don’t know how it happened.’ Giselle defended herself. ‘I wasn’t very well just after we flew back from the island, and sickness can effect the efficiency of the pill. It’s the truth,’ she insisted, when she saw the way he was looking at her.

  ‘How long have you been pregnant?’ Saul asked grimly.

  ‘Just over two months, I think.’

  ‘Two months?’ His anger and disbelief was plain. ‘Am I supposed to believe that you’ve known for two months that you could be pregnant but you’ve waited until now to find out? You lied to me, Giselle. You lied to me about not wanting a child and now you’ve tried to trick me…’

  ‘No, that is not true. I don’t want a child any more than you do. I was on the pill. I had no reason to be suspicious or concerned… I just assumed at first that all the upset of Aldo’s death was responsible for the fact that I’d missed a period. There haven’t been any other signs, like early-morning sickness. I wish that there had been, then all this would be behind me and… I had no reason to suspect that I could be pregnant,’ she repeated. ‘And as for tricking you… Tricking you into what? Being a father when you don’t want to be? Do you really think I would do that, when I know just as you do how important it is for a child to be loved? Yes, I lied to you about the reason I wanted to come to London, but that was only because I needed to find out if my suspicions were correct.’

  There was too much conviction in her voice for her to be lying, Saul recognised, and some of his anger abated as he recognised that his outburst had been the result of shock rather than the fact that he genuinely believed Giselle might have tried to trick him into them having a child. He even felt guilty about his outburst. The truth was that he couldn’t bear to think of Giselle feeling that she needed to keep anything from him.

  ‘And now that you know that they were correct, when were you planning to tell me?’

  ‘Never,’ Giselle answered him truthfully

  ‘Never?’ Now he was shocked—and hurt. ‘You would have kept something so important from me, when we’ve always agreed on the importance of mutual trust?’

  ‘For your sake. I didn’t want to burden you.’ She hadn’t wanted him to suffer the dreadful guilt and grief that were now afflicting her. But, manlike, she suspected that Saul would look on it as his role to protect her, not the other way around. ‘I didn’t feel it was right to involve you,’ she continued, adding miserably, ‘There wouldn’t have been any point. I know your views. Your reactions now have underlined them. The problem is mine, not yours, since it is contained within my body.’

  ‘And you would never have said anything to me?’

  Giselle stood up and walked to the window. ‘It’s my problem,’ she repeated. ‘I’m the one who is pregnant, so it’s up to me to make the arrangements. To…to make things as we agreed they should be.’

  Saul discovered that he didn’t very much like the image of himself her words were conjuring up in his own conscience.

  ‘Is it? Or were those conversations you instigated about my need for an heir brought about because you already knew that you were carrying my child?’

  His pride was making him defend himself from the unpalatable image her words had caused him by attacking her. But his pride could not ease his conscience, nor his concern for Giselle herself.

  ‘No!’ White-faced, Giselle turned to confront him. ‘No. You keep doing this. You keep accusing me of secretly wanting a child and forcing one on you when that’s the last thing I would do.’

  The look on Saul’s face said that he didn’t wholly believe her. Seeing it, Giselle felt her self-control snap. Pain flooded through her, undermining her strength and her intentions. She couldn’t bear any more. She told him fiercely, ‘You are so wrong, Saul. So very, very wrong. And I’ll tell you why. Even if I did want a child I can’t have one. And that’s why I instigated those conversations about your “need for an heir,” as you put it. Because if you had wanted one then…’

  ‘Then what?’ Saul demanded. ‘I want the truth, Giselle, all of it.’

&nbs
p; She was caught in a trap of her own making, Giselle realised. ‘Then you would have had to find someone else to have that child. Because I could not be its mother—for its sake and for yours,’ she told him wildly. ‘And as for the truth…’

  Tears stung her eyes like minute pinpricks of glass. She had fought so hard and for so long to keep her secrets, so that she could protect those she loved—first her mother and her father, and now Saul—but her strength was gone, sucked away by Saul’s accusations and the shock of her pregnancy. Still, she tried desperately to cling on to her determination never to let anyone else know what tormented her.

  ‘You know the truth. I am pregnant with a child that you don’t want and I can’t have. I intend to end that pregnancy so that I can keep the promise I made to you.’

  ‘You’re lying to me, Giselle. There is something more to this. I can sense it, no matter how much you might try to deny it.’

  When she looked at Saul she could see hostility and wariness in his eyes, along with disbelief. The pain of seeing those emotions in the eyes of the man she loved, in the eyes that normally looked on her with love, took the last of her strength from her. She was too weak to keep back the truth any more, and part of her longed to be rid of the burden—to be able to stand free of it no matter what the cost. She owed it to Saul to stand away from the protection of hiding her deceit and let him see her—not just as she was, but as what she could become.

  ‘Very well,’ she told him tiredly. ‘If you want the truth then you shall have it.’

  And then she would see him look at her with horror and rejection before he walked away from her for ever.

  She took a deep breath and Saul stood up. ‘I lied to you by default, Saul, when I let you think you knew there was all there was to know about my mother and my childhood.’

  Whatever he had been expecting to hear it wasn’t this, Saul acknowledged. They had surely dealt with all the trauma Giselle had suffered through her mother’s death and that of her baby brother in a road traffic accident before they had married. ‘If you are going to tell me that you still feel to blame because you were safe and unharmed whilst they were killed in the accident…’

  He didn’t know that what she carried within her would destroy their lives together and their love. He didn’t know because she had lied to him. He did not know what she really was: a potential madwoman and a child-killer.

  ’It wasn’t an accident.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE FLAT CONVICTION in Giselle’s voice made the hairs rise up on the nape of Saul’s neck. There was a haunted, agonised look on her face, a bleakness and pain that made him want to go to her, but the minute he stepped towards her she stepped back, lifting her hand as though to ward him off.

  ‘Giselle,’ he protested. ‘I know how badly their deaths affected you—quite understandably.’

  As though she hadn’t heard him Giselle continued in the same flat tone. ‘My mother committed suicide. She took her own life and my baby brother’s life and she would have taken mine as well if she could. She tried to before…before my brother was born—when I was only a baby myself. She’d taken some pills and she was going to smother me, but my father found her and stopped her.

  ‘It was having us that did it—having children. It sent her mad. Lots of women suffer from postnatal depression, but my mother’s was very bad. A form of psychosis. She couldn’t help it. She thought that by killing us and herself she would be keeping us safe. She was supposed to be taking some medicine to make her well. My father had even got a nurse living in. She was supposed to be there to help my mother with the baby, but really she was there to protect him. You see, the specialist Dad consulted had told him that after Mum tried to commit suicide the first time it wouldn’t be wise for her to have another child. According to my great-aunt, though, after she’d recovered from my birth and the mental problems it caused her, she wanted to show my father that she was completely well. She wanted to have another child to prove to him that I had been the cause of her problems because I was a difficult child. My father loved her so much that in the end he gave in.

  ‘Apparently throughout her pregnancy she was on top of the world. I was too young to remember. She was so excited about the birth that my father thought everything would be all right. He loved her, you see, and he believed her when she told him that it was me being a difficult child that had caused her depression.

  ‘She didn’t want to have Nurse Edwards living with us. She wanted to do everything for Thomas herself. Then one day Nurse Edwards found him lying face-down in his cot, struggling to breathe. My mother said that I’d done it, because I was jealous of him. She wanted my father to send me away. I can remember him talking to me about it. Telling me that I must be an especially good girl and not upset my mother. He said that he wanted me to love Thomas and always make sure that he was safe and well.’

  Giselle paused to look out of the window, but Saul knew that her thoughts—the whole of her, in fact—was back in the past.

  There had been several times during her outburst when he had wanted to stop her, to comment and question, and most of all to reach for her and reassure her, but he had made himself stay silent, concerned that any interruption from him would cause her to stop talking and refuse to continue. So many different emotions had gripped him whilst he listened to her. Initially there had been astonishment, then a shocked awareness of how she must have suffered as a child, followed by anger that she’d had to suffer. He’d felt guilt too, because he hadn’t realised that there might be more to her mother’s death than she had told him.

  ‘The day it happened my father was called out unexpectedly to an emergency,’ Giselle continued quietly. ‘It was Nurse Edwards’ day off. Before he left the house my father told me he wanted me to promise him that I would look after my mother and Thomas. I said that I would.’ She stopped speaking again, before turning to Saul and telling him emotionally, ‘I gave him my promise but I failed to keep it. When my mother said that we had to go out I didn’t want to go, but she insisted. I should have stopped her—’

  ‘No, Giselle—’ Saul broke in, forced to when he saw how upset she was, stepping forward and continuing to step forward when she backed away from him, until she couldn’t move any further because of the wall behind her. ‘No.’ He put his hands on her arms, his heart aching for her when he felt the rigid tension of her body.

  ‘Yes.’ She overruled him. ‘Yes, I should have stopped her.’

  ‘You were six years old,’ Saul reminded her, repeating what he had said to her when she had first revealed to him her guilt over her mother’s and brother’s deaths.

  ‘I promised my father and I broke that promise. I gave you a promise too, Saul, and I promise you that I won’t break that promise. I should have told you about my mother before we got married. My great-aunt believes that I did, but I was so afraid that you wouldn’t want me any more if you knew. What man wants to marry a woman with madness in her genes?’

  ‘Postnatal depression isn’t madness,’ Saul corrected her. ‘From what I’ve read it happens to many women, and it can be treated, cured.’

  ‘Not always. Not when it’s as serious as it was with my mother—and, according to my great-aunt, her mother before her, although she did not suffer from it quite as badly. But then it wasn’t recognised so readily in those days. My father was warned that my mother’s case was serious, because of her behaviour after my birth.

  ‘All my life I’ve told myself that I can never fall in love or risk having someone fall in love with me, because it wouldn’t be fair to them. I knew that I could not risk having a child I might try to kill, as my mother tried to kill me—and succeeded in killing my brother. And then I met you, and I fell in love with you so fast that it was too late for me to do anything to stop it. But not too late to stop you from being affected by the…the faulty destructive genes I’ve inherited. You said that you didn’t want children and would never want them, and I thought that fate was sparing me because I’d
been punished enough. I was so happy, even though I knew that I wasn’t being honest with you.’

  ‘You should have told me.’

  ‘Yes, I should,’ Giselle agreed. ‘Because if I had you would have been spared this. You would never have married me.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I meant. You should have told me because I love you, Giselle, and it hurts me to think that you’ve suffered all this without me knowing. It hurts my pride as a man to know that you have shouldered such a burden. As the man who loves you, I should have been shouldering it with you. It hurts me too that you felt you couldn’t trust me or my love enough to be honest with me and let me share your burden.’

  As Saul spoke tears began to fill Giselle’s eyes and slip down her face. Very tenderly Saul wiped them away, drawing her carefully into his arms.

  ‘You must have been so hurt and so afraid.’ He could hardly bear to think of the torment she must have suffered as a child, not understanding her mother’s behaviour, but feeling guilty after her death because she hadn’t saved her, and then later as she grew up and began to understand the realities and complexities of the causes of what had happened. He ached to be able to do something to help her. ‘I can’t think of anyone more sane than you are, my love. Just because your mother—’

  Giselle stopped him. ‘I dare say she was sane too before she had me. She must have been, because my father would have known it if she wasn’t.’ She looked at him, and then told him wearily, ‘Now you know why the last thing I would ever do would be to try and conceive by accident. I was so afraid when I realised that I might be pregnant.’ She had started to tremble in his arms. ‘I wanted it not to be true so badly. You don’t know how it makes me feel to know that if I had a child I might end up wanting to kill it. My mother wanted to kill us because she felt it was the only way she could protect us from the pain of being alive. Like I’ve already told you, it’s a form of madness. A form of madness that can be passed on from mother to daughter and granddaughter.’