Second Best Wife

by Isobel Chace

  It was strange to feel such a strong liking for her old enemy as she did now. 'I'm still one black eye to the good,' she reminded him. 'Perhaps it doesn't count,' she added, 'because I repented it almost at once. And it was partly your own fault. You practically dared me to hit you!'

  'I can't say I thought you would,' he retorted dryly. 'You won't get through my defences as easily another time.'

  'I may not want to hit you again,' she murmured.

  'You will! One little kiss — that's all it takes with you, Georgie Porgie! But I'll tame you in the end. I'll have you eating out of my hand, a reformed character, you see if I don't!'

  She was silent. Back in England she might have argued the point with him, mostly because she was afraid that she already liked the feeling of his hands on the reins far too well, but here it would have seemed strident and out of place to have denied the possibility that there might come a time when she wouldn't want to fight him—if that time wasn't already upon her.

  One little kiss!

  The memory of the brief kiss he had given her the evening before stirred her blood and she found herself speculating on her reactions if he should want more than a few kisses from her. The thought of it made her burn with an emotion she had never experienced before.

  The Moslerruwomen in the village they were passing through covered their heads with the loose folds of their saris, but they too were out in the street doing their shopping and standing in little groups exchanging the day's gossip. She felt very close to them. She felt very close to all women at that moment, for they too, some of them, had been caught up in the tide that held her in its grip for the first time in her life. They too knew what it was like to be submerged in a need for someone else — only why did it have to be William? How much easier life would be for her if she could have gone on hating him in peace!

  'Kandy isn't far now. We'll stop there for lunch and go on to Nuwara Eliya afterwards,' he told her.

  'Is that where you're going to be working?'

  'Fairly near. I'll be able to get back most nights. I was fortunate to be offered the use of this house on one of the tea plantations there. It'll be more comfortable for you and Celine than anything the site will be able to offer.'

  'I don't mind roughing it,' Georgina asserted. 'I don't want any favours from you!'

  'You won't get many, but Celine deserves something better than the dust and grit of a dam in the building. Her father always gave her the best, and so shall I!'

  Which meant that Georgina would be expected to do so too, she thought wryly. Oh well, it wouldn't be new to her to come second to someone else. What else had it ever been with Jennifer?

  'Have you seen the house?' she asked, making conversation because she didn't want to be left to think her own thoughts an instant longer.

  'No. I've only been to Sri Lanka once before and that was on a brief trip from a job I was doing in India. I thought I'd like to spend longer here, so I applied to help build this dam. I was very much interested in the historic aspects of their irrigation systems here. They're absolutely fantastic!— and built long before our modern machinery came along. I want to make a study of how they were done, to see what we can learn from it. It's a pity they were so neglected later on, but the European conquerors weren't interested in rice or the hinterland, they were attracted by the cinnamon and other spices and weren't any too nice in their methods of getting as much of the stuff as possible. The "bunds", as they call the dams here, and the "tanks", or artificial lakes, fell into disrepair and are only being put right now. At one time Ceylon fed twice the population she has now and still had rice over for exporting, now she has to import about a third of what she eats. It's getting better, but they still have a long way to go to catch up with their own history.'

  'But surely nowadays — '

  'Don't underrate the men of old,' he said dryly. 'We have the technology to do wonderful things nowadays, but have we the will? They lacked our machinery, but their deeds survive them to tell of their genius. We haven't yet built any comparable irrigation system in our time.'

  Georgina was impressed. 'Was it very long ago?'

  'I'm afraid it was. Europe had a long, long way to go in those days.'

  Georgina made a face. 'I'm suitably chastened,' she said. 'Does it give you a good feeling to be treading in such august footsteps with your own project?'

  He flushed absurdly, looking young and eager. 'It does, but I hadn't expected you to understand something like that. You're a much more complicated person than I thought!'

  'Perhaps we all are,' she suggested. 'I mean, I don't think I know you very well either. I thought I did, but we're strangers really, aren't we? First impressions aren't always the most accurate after all. How I hated you that day!'

  He laughed. 'It showed!' he said. 'You've been trying to hate me

  ever since, haven't you?'

  'Not more than you despised me. And I still hate you! I hate you every moment of every day!'

  He slowed the car, his eyes flicking to her face and back to the road. 'Who are you trying to convince, yourself or me?'

  She clenched her fists and found one of them covered by his own, much larger hand. 'I don't know what you mean,' she declared. 'I don't have to convince anyone about that! Ask anyone!'

  'Funnily enough, I did. I asked my mother.' His eyes flicked over her face again, noting the strain beneath her hardly won composure. 'Did you know she prefers you to your sister any day?'

  'Yes.'

  'Ah, but did you know why?'

  She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.

  'She thinks you have courage. I hope you're not going to prove her wrong by continuing to insist you hate me, because you don't, do you, little Georgie? She doesn't think you ever have.'

  Georgina chewed frantically on her lower lip. 'I don't like you!' she managed at last.

  'Liking is a very pale emotion. It doesn't warm the blood —as I can warm yours any time I choose. That's something else!'

  Georgina lifted her chin. 'Any attractive man could do the same! It doesn't mean anything. I don't think it's anything to congratulate yourself about. It — it doesn't make me like you any more!'

  'Nevertheless,' he said with a smile she could only think would have done justice to the Bad Baron in a pantomime, 'it gives me a great deal of pleasure to know I have you at my mercy—'

  She trembled. Was it possible he knew of the strange excitement that burned inside her whenever he came near? If he did, she would have to make it equally clear to him that she was ashamed of all such emotions. But how to do it?

  'You're making far too much of very little! What makes you think I shall ever change my mind about you? I'll fight you to the last ditch! Just because you took me by surprise and —and kissed me, and I didn't say anything, it didn't mean I liked it!' She took a deep breath, preparing to hurry on with her castigations of his behaviour, but he seemed totally unperturbed. The hand that was covering hers patted her lightly on the knee.

  'Took you by surprise? My dear girl, husbands are usually expected to kiss their wives. Indeed, the complaint is usually that they don't do it often enough!'

  'In the normal way.' She cast him a glowering look. 'Ours isn't a normal marriage! Do you think I want to be kissed by someone who is obviously wishing I were somebody else? You should have put up more of a fight for Jennifer. Haven't you always thought of her as a nice, biddable girl? Well then, why didn't you make her change her mind about Duncan? She would have done if you'd pressed hard enough.'

  His lips twitched. 'Somehow I prefer greater enthusiasm in my wife — '

  'Then you shouldn't have married me!'

  He grinned. 'But I did marry you, my dear, and now I'm looking forward to the rewards of having done so.'

  She swallowed the lump in her throat, making a supreme effort to keep her voice light and airy. 'What makes you think I shall be any more loyal than Jennifer?' she taunted him. 'We are sisters, after all! And I'm not at all in love w
ith you!'

  His hand closed over hers, his fingers as hard as steel bands. 'Try it and see what happens to you. I'm not the type of man who competes for the favours of his wife, Georgina, and you are my wife, whether you like it or not.'

  'Only because —'

  'You can't argue your way out of this one, Mrs. Ayres. You're caught in a snare of your own making when you said the words that made you a wife. My wife!'

  'I didn't have much choice,' she protested, but there wasn't a great deal of conviction in her words. Nobody could have made her say the words, nobody but herself, so why had she?

  'Your jealousy of Jennifer made you,' he countered dryly. 'You never count the cost when it comes to the long-standing rivalry between you! However, I'm not complaining. Haven't you promised me that you're better than she is?'

  She flushed. ‘I only meant —' She broke off, finding it impossible to discuss with him whether she or Jennifer had the better figure. When one was loved such things hardly mattered, and if one was not loved it mattered even less.

  ‘Yes?'

  ‘I'm not jealous of Jennifer!' she protested in a whisper. ‘Why should I be? She hasn't anything I want and she never has had!'

  ‘Not even the ability to attract every man in sight?' he put in dryly. ‘When she was around nobody ever looked twice at you, did they, Georgie, not unless you forced yourself on their attention with your fists! Going away to college should have given you the space to find yourself. I wonder why it didn't. Away from your sister, you're not as strident as you are in her company. When you hold on to that temper of yours you're quite an attractive girl. Why didn't you take the opportunity to make your own friends?'

  She uttered a mirthless laugh, hunching up her shoulders and refusing to answer. How could she tell him that most of the friends she had shared with Jennifer had been hers in the first place? He would never believe that it wasn't she, but Jennifer, who had resented her popularity and had done everything she could to subvert her friends to herself. Georgina had never cared sufficiently to bother about her sister's activities, but now she wished she had. She would have liked to have flung half a dozen potential lovers in William's face! It would have given her a most rewarding pleasure to have flicked her fingers at him and gone off with somebody else — somebody who would have more charm in his little finger than William had in his whole body, a fact she would have brought home to him with the kind of insolent derision to which he frequently treated her!

  When the haze of tears cleared from her eyes she found the car had stopped and they were parked in the centre of a town whose buildings could only have been built by the British but which, nevertheless, was completely foreign to the English high streets it so closely emulated. Of course the people who thronged the pavements could never have been English. There were the men, spare and narrow hipped in their sarongs, and the women as bright as butterflies in their distinctive saris if they were rich enough to wear such a costume; some of them seemed to have no more than a much washed skirt, similar to those worn by the men, and a bolero top that accentuated their very feminine figures.

  'Never mind,' said William, 'you have me now.'

  She jumped, wringing her hands together. 'What?'

  'You may have few friends, but you've landed yourself a husband, Georgie Porgie.' He stroked her cheek with his forefinger. 'Wake up, Madam wife, this is Kandy. Are you hungry?'

  She stared at him, not really seeing him at all. 'Really, William, how Victorian can you get? Madam wife, indeed!'

  'Why not?' His smile forced a shiver up her spine. 'I have very Victorian ideas about marriage. He for God only; she for God in him! It goes with the decor the British Raj left behind!'

  'That was in India,' she pointed out in husky tones. The shiver had settled into a space round her heart, increasing in intensity until she was afraid it would explode inside her. 'Yes, let's go and eat! And may we stop for a while and see the Temple of the Tooth? Is it genuinely a tooth from Buddha himself? I'd love to see that!'

  'A whole lot safer than crossing swords with your husband?' he suggested, mocking her hurried, breathless speech.

  'Not at all! I'm hungry!'

  He shrugged his shoulders. 'Why not? The rest will keep until after you've met Celine.'

  Georgina's spirits deflated with all the speed of a pricked balloon. Celine! How could she have forgotten all about her, even for a moment?

  'I suppose Celine is your Victorian romantic dream?' she murmured, and then almost immediately, 'I shouldn't have said that. I'm sorry—only you did ask for me to say something nasty. You seem to enjoy getting me all riled up about nothing at all.'

  He studied her closely and she could feel herself colouring angrily under his regard. 'I like to have my first impressions confirmed. They're not as inaccurate as you would like me to believe, my Georgie Porgie! You never miss an opportunity to rise and snap, do you? But be careful! There's a hook in the bait when you play such games with me. I always play to win and, unlike the Duncans of this world, I never, never cry!'

  'You may do one day,' she muttered, put out. 'Everyone cries sometimes!'

  His eyes narrowed. 'I shouldn't bet on it.'

  She would have liked to have turned away and have talked about something else — anything, as long as it didn't mean they had to go on fighting. But she was far too stubborn to allow him to see she was worsted.

  'Are you as nasty to poor Celine too?' she asked him, looking him straight in the eyes.

  'You'll have to judge for yourself,' he said, and added, 'Celine doesn't answer back. She's all woman in that way, having learned that more victories are won with soft words by the fair sex. Why don't you try it some time?'

  'I wouldn't be so patronising!'

  He placed a finger across her lips, effectively silencing her. 'Is that what it is? My, my, but you tempt me to teach you better! All is fair in love and war, my dear.'

  'And which is it in Celine's case?' she demanded, resisting the temptation to bite his finger. 'I already know which it is with me!'

  'Do you? I wonder?' He reached into the car for his coat and shut and locked the doors. 'Come along and we'll eat! I'd like to show you the Temple today, Georgie, but we haven't any time to spare if we're to get to Nuwara Eliya before dark.'

  Georgina was unbearably disappointed. 'Does it matter?' she pleaded.

  He nodded. 'It's raining in the hills and that may delay us considerably as it is. I'm sorry, my dear, but there'll be other times.'

  But she wouldn't be alone with him then, she thought, and wondered why it should be so important to her that she should have his full attention all to herself. She gave in with a good grace, however, accepting the inevitable with a gallant smile that he found touching in its insouciance. It was a little surprising too, he reflected, for he had always been led to believe that Georgina would bear a grudge for years, sulking over what everyone else had long forgotten.

  But this Georgina had courage, as his mother had suggested, and scorned to fight with weapons others might well have seized upon, fair or not. This Georgina had a tough, honest quality that he found he admired almost as much as it amused him.

  They had lunch at a small local restaurant overlooking the lake which lends an air of enchantment to the whole city. William advised Georgina to follow his example and eat one of the curries that had pride of place on the menu. Georgina, who had a taste for hot, spicy foods, agreed readily and was delighted with the result. Half a dozen dishes were brought to their table, some of them familiar and some of them not, and she had an extremely agreeable half-hour tasting them all one by one.

  William eyed her with a tolerant air. 'I don't believe it's even occurred to you that you might upset your tummy with all this strange food,' he observed.

  'Why should it?'

  'It has been known to. A change of germs more than a change of food probably, but the results are the same.'

  'Pooh,' said Georgina. 'A few germs? I won't allow them to get the better of me! I'm enjoy
ing myself far too much!'

  'I hope you're right,' he said dryly.

  The rain had already started when they left the restaurant. It was more low cloud that had got trapped between the hills than actual rain, but there was a distinct dampness in the air and the sun had completely disappeared for the day.

  'It's still beautiful even in the rain,' Georgina sighed, turning round in her seat to see the last of Kandy. 'Did you see those gorgeous flowering trees? The university campus is full of them! I've never seen anything like it!'

  'The mauve ones are jacaranda, the scarlet flamboyant— no, that one is a flame tree, I think. The pink ones are new to me too.'

  'And the bushes?' she asked eagerly.

  'Bougainvillea. I can remember a time when they trailed over things, but they seem to have got them to stand up by themselves nowadays, and to come in so many colours that they're a feast to the eyes all by themselves.' He pointed with a finger at another, darker

  tree in the middle distance. 'There's an ebony tree.'

  Georgina sat back, contented. 'It was worth coming just to see the flowers and the paddy fields and—and everything,' she said.

  'But it would be better still without me?'

  Georgina was surprised by the question. She averted her face and stared out at the grey drizzle. 'No, you make a good guide,' she said grudgingly. 'I wouldn't have known what anything was by myself.'

  'A good book could have told you.'

  She moved uncomfortably. 'I never recognise flowers and birds in books. They always look different somehow.'

  He grimaced at the wet road ahead. 'Well, thank you for that recommendation at least,' he drawled. 'It doesn't say much for my personal qualities though, does it?'

  'You don't think much of mine,' she retorted.

  The rain grew steadily heavier as they climbed higher. It was strange to see the heavy grey skies dominating the countryside that always, in pictures, was bathed in eternal sunshine. The hairpin bends became more and more slippery too, demanding William's total concentration. Georgina was glad of the silence. She had thought the lower slopes spectacular, but the higher they went, the more beautiful it became. There were waterfalls everywhere and glistening white stupas of Buddhist temples hidden away in unexpected valleys. Sometimes, too, the heavily carved square towers that tapered inwards towards the top that marked the Hindu temples rose above the simple buildings of the villages, lending an exotic touch in contrast to the down-at-heel squalor of these high country villages. The Tamil workers, imported from South India for the backbreaking endless task of picking the tea, were the poorest people in the land, and it showed.