by Penny Jordan
Maybe in that short space of time she had developed an emotional rapport with him, an emotional intimacy which had led to her telling him things about herself that she had never dreamed of confiding to anyone else. Maybe during that time she had developed an emotional need for him, an emotional hunger and intensity... which he quite plainly had not reciprocated, she reminded herself flatly. If he had...
As she cleared away her and Sally’s dirty coffee-mugs she paused to stare blindly out of her kitchen window. Next week it would be three months since the wedding. She had put a red cross by the date on her kitchen wall-calendar.
As she glanced desolately at it she reflected grimly that at least she of the trio who had fallen into Sally’s carefully orchestrated trap would be able to keep their rendezvous knowing that there was no chance of her breaking the light-hearted vow they had all made to remain single.
Quietly Brad watched from the sidelines as his family busied themselves with their self-appointed tasks.
Today they were holding their annual barbecue—an event that Brad himself had instituted the year after their parents’ death, when, instead of grieving and mourning their loss in the traditional way, for the sake of the younger siblings and to ensure that their parents were never forgotten he had decided to hold a small barbecue to celebrate the fact that they were still together, that their parents had loved them and still loved them, even if they could not be there with them to show it.
Over the years the original small, homely event had expanded until it was now almost a local institution, with virtually the whole town seeming to attend, its venue having moved from the backyard of their home to a site on the lake shore.
Spring was just beginning to give way to summer and the days were longer and warmer. Later in the year this tree-sheltered site would be enervatingly stifling, but right now it was just protectively warm enough for the younger members of the group to beg pleadingly to be allowed into the water.
Brad smiled ruefully to himself, witnessing the clumsy, unpractised flirtation that one of his nephews was attempting with a disdainful redhead who one day was going to be stunningly attractive but who right now still wore her hair in braids and had a sexually pre-adolescent, thin, leggy body.
Once it had hurt him almost unbearably, knowing that his parents had died at this time of the year when nature was so full of promise and vigour, when everything was green and fresh and growing, but over the years that pain had softened into acceptance.
‘You look very pensive.’
Brad smiled as Mary-Beth came over to him, slipping her arm through his and resting her head on his shoulder.
‘I still haven’t thanked you properly for insisting that I come back and talk properly to Abe. If I hadn’t done...’ She gave a small, rueful shake of her head. ‘That temper of mine; you’d have thought by now I’d have learnt not to trust it.’
‘I’d have thought by now you would have learnt to trust Abe,’ Brad told her dryly.
‘Well, you know how it is... Somehow, losing Mom and Dad...I guess I’m always going to feel a bit insecure... like thinking that Abe was having an affair when he was doing no such thing. But you’re not much better,’ she accused her brother. ‘Look at the way you’ve stayed single...avoided any emotional commitment.’
Avoided emotional commitment. Brad frowned as he looked back at her. ‘And how the hell do you work that one out?’ he demanded grimly. ‘Look around you, Mary-Beth, and tell me that again.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean you’ve avoided any emotional commitment to us,’ Mary-Beth protested. ‘You’ve been the best brother...the very best there could ever be. But...haven’t you ever wanted anyone of your own, Brad? I mean we’ve all married... Don’t you feel lonely sometimes, wish that you’d...?’ She bit her lip as she saw the way that he was looking at her.
‘Now don’t you go putting that stern elder-brother look on your face with me. We all know how much you’ve sacrificed for us, how much you must curse us all to perdition at times, especially the uncles...’
She paused, drawing an abstract pattern in the sandy earth with the toe of her shoe. ‘We all know you didn’t want to go to Britain...nor to come back and take over the business. And I know, even if the others don’t, that the old boat you’ve got down at the jetty is your equivalent of what us kids used to call our “running-away money”. But if you really left here to sail around the world on your own, Brad, you’d hate it. You’re a family man...a patriarch—’
‘Don’t bet money on it,’ Brad advised her harshly, preparing to walk away, but Mary-Beth tugged on his arms, restraining him.
‘Don’t go yet; there’s something else I wanted to say. We all know that Uncle Joe wouldn’t have survived his heart attack if you hadn’t come back...if you hadn’t been in there pitching for him, but he’s never going to be strong enough to go back to running the business, Brad, and we—’
‘You what?’ he asked her grimly. ‘You’ve been deputised to soften me up and make sure I won’t get any ideas about wanting to lead my own life, is that it?’
‘Brad...’
Brad knew how much he’d upset her and cursed himself under his breath as he saw the tears in her eyes.
‘You’ve changed so much recently,’ Mary-Beth accused him. ‘Become so withdrawn...so... so angry. All we want is for you to be happy.’
Later on, after they’d hugged and made up, Brad watched as she walked to join her husband and children.
Everyone here bar him had someone of their own, he reflected bleakly. Once that would not have bothered him; once he would not even have had such a thought, because they were all his family—a part of him, as he was of them; once he would never have spent an event like this standing on the sidelines wishing with all his heart that he were somewhere else, and with someone else.
Why hadn’t Claire returned his phone call? He had tried so hard to make time to talk properly, privately with her before he and Mary-Beth had left, but the opportunity had just not been there. And then arriving home to be greeted by the news that his uncle Joe was seriously ill and was not expected to survive had meant that his own personal emotional needs and desires had had to be pushed to one side whilst he dealt with the practical problems that his uncle’s heart attack had caused.
When he had finally got the time to himself to ring her she hadn’t been there and he had had to speak to Tim instead to explain what had happened. All week he had expected Claire to ring, rushing home whenever he could to check his answering machine.
But when one week had gone by and then another without her getting in touch he had told himself that he already had the answer to the question that he had secretly wanted to ask her, and that there was no point in going over and over in his mind...in his body those precious, gut-wrenching hours that they had spent together as lovers, that special, heart-aching time when he had hoped...believed...when he had finally recognised that he had at last found the thing—the person—that he had subconsciously been looking for all his adult life, and that without her in it his life would go on being incomplete.
He would go on being incomplete. This...she was the reason for all the dissatisfaction he had felt with his life over the years; she was the reason she had never felt able to reach out to any other woman in a way that would make her a permanent part of his life.
Was it his fault that she did not feel the same way? Had he rushed her...frightened her...put her off with his inability to control his sexual desire for her? Knowing what he did about her past, shouldn’t he have been able to take things more slowly, to let her set the pace for any physical intimacy between them?
But it hadn’t been any chauvinistic male need to prove either to her or himself that he possessed some magical ability to restore her sexuality to her, to reactivate it, that had motivated him; he knew that. He had simply wanted her so much...been so overwhelmed by his love for her that the sad, pathetic truth was that he had been totally unable to stop himself.
What kind of admissi
on was that from a grown man...a mature man to have to make? he wondered in dry self-disgust. And he was surprised because Claire didn’t want anything more to do with him?
On the other side of the clearing his uncle Joe, still restricted to a wheelchair but very much back in control of his life, beckoned to him. Warily Brad crossed the clearing and crouched down beside his uncle’s wheelchair, asking him with a cheerfulness he didn’t feel, ‘How do you think it’s going, Joe? Seems like everyone is having a good time.’
‘Everyone but you,’ his uncle told him forthrightly. ‘No, don’t bother denying it,’ he added before Brad could speak. ‘I’ve been watching you this past half-hour and it seems to me...’ He paused and then said shrewdly, ‘Seems to me you haven’t been the same since you came back from England.’
‘Much you would know,’ Brad scoffed banteringly. ‘When I came back from England you were in Intensive Care, giving us all the fright of our lives.’
‘Well, I’ve made my three score and ten—and some besides,’ Joe reminded him virtuously, but Brad wasn’t deceived. He knew his uncle and his soft-spoken determination to live to celebrate his one hundredth birthday.
‘You’re an old fraud,’ he told Joe ruefully now.
‘And you’re a fool,’ the older man came back, watching him with fierce fondness. ‘None can deny that you’ve done a good job standing in for your parents, Brad, nor that you’ve always put others before yourself, but they’re all grown and gone now and unless you want to end up lonesome and alone...
‘Who is she?’ he asked craftily. ‘Someone you met in England...? I was stationed over there during the war, you know; nearly married an English girl myself... My, but they’re pretty. Would have married her, too, if she hadn’t decided she preferred a fighter pilot to me. Worse mistake I ever made.’
Brad gave his uncle a frowning look. Joe, as he knew from wide experience, was a shameless manipulator of the truth when it suited him and this was certainly the first that he had ever heard of a wartime romance. His uncle’s shrewdness in guessing about Claire had thrown him off guard, though.
‘I’ve never heard about any English girl before,’ he told his uncle.
‘That’s because I don’t mention her. Don’t like to admit to having made a mistake. That’s a trait we both share... Should have married her when I had the chance, only I thought I’d kinda make her wait a little. I was young and I dare say a little swelled-headed at. times. She didn’t want to wait, though, and I lost her...
‘Oh, I got over it... kinda... I came home after the war, met your aunt Grace and we got married, but I never forgot my English girl. Margaret, her name was. Peggy, they called her. Pretty as a rose, she was, with the softest skin.’ He gave a sentimental sigh.
‘Oh, Grace and I got on well enough together. She’d lost a fiancé during the war herself and so we both knew the score. Kinda makes you think, though. When I look around me now, see all of you together... If I’d married Peggy perhaps my grandchildren would be here now. There’s nothing like having a family of your own, Brad.’
‘I have a family,’ Brad pointed out brusquely to him. And besides, she...my English girl...doesn’t want me, he wanted to say, but the habit of keeping his own problems to himself, which had begun with his parents’ death, was too deeply ingrained now to be overcome.
‘A man belongs where his heart is, Brad; that’s his true home,’ his uncle told him quietly.
His uncle was right, Brad acknowledged later as the first of the early-evening shadows started to fall and the family gathered around the fire, the little ones snuggling up to their parents, the older ones—the soon-to-be teen . agers—hanging together in their own small, private group, too old now to want to mimic those they saw as the babies of the family by staying with their parents and still too young to be allowed to separate themselves from the family group.
Abe picked up his guitar; he was a good musician, with a tuneful voice. When Mary-Beth had first met him he had been the lead singer in a local group; Brad smiled to himself, remembering how he had come the stern, heavy older brother, warning her about getting involved with a boy who played in a band.
Abe started to sing an old folk tune familiar to all of them; the other adults joined in, their voices gradually swelled by those of the youngsters, the unlikely mingling of all their voices producing a surprisingly harmonious sound—rather like the mingling of the family itself, Brad reflected. But for him a vitally important note was missing—a vitally needed sweetness, a vitally important person.
Quietly he turned away from the fire.
On the other side of the lake his boat still waited for those all-important repairs, but his dream of sailing her had lost its savour. His life felt empty...he felt empty, he recognised.
His uncle had been right. His heart wasn’t here any longer; it was thousands of miles away across the Atlantic with a woman whose soft cries of love still returned at night, every night, to haunt and torment him.
Claire...Claire...
CHAPTER TEN
SHE was obviously the first to arrive for their lunch rendezvous, Claire recognised as the head waiter escorted her through the almost empty restaurant and into the conservatory, seating her at a central table with a wonderful view of the hotel gardens with such a flourish that she felt it was a shame that there was no one else there to witness it.
Giving him a warm smile as a reward for his professionalism and a compensation for his lack of a worthy audience for it, she refused his offer of an aperitif.
If she hadn’t spoken to the other two earlier in the week to confirm their arrangement she would have been tempted to think that they weren’t coming.
Her heart had gone out to Poppy when she had telephoned her and heard her subdued voice.
‘The most peculiar thing has happened,’ Sally had told her importantly the day prior to her telephone call. ‘Chris has forbidden me, on pain of total withdrawal of my chocolate-bar allowance, to talk about it, but...’
‘But...?’ Claire had pressed, but Sally had shaken her head regretfully.
‘I can’t tell you, but if it is true I just can’t believe... Although Chris says he always thought that...’
‘Poppy’s fallen in love with someone else?’ Claire had suggested helpfully.
‘Well...no...no...’ Sally had shaken her head firmly. ‘I promised Chris I wouldn’t say anything. It’s all a bit delicate, you see...a bit...well, a bit difficult...and, to be honest, I’m still not sure I believe...’ She had given Claire an apologetic look. ‘I want to tell you but...’
‘It’s all right,’ Claire had comforted her. ‘Poppy is in a very vulnerable position at the moment,’ she had added gently, inwardly reflecting on how much she would hate it if she thought that people were gossiping, speculating about her relationship with Brad, especially since the semi-public knowledge of their jokingly made vow of celibacy seemed to have added a certain piquancy to any gossip about their love lives. ‘Obviously Chris wants to protect her from any additional hurt; that’s only natural.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Sally had agreed, giving her a grateful hug. ‘You will let me know if there are any signs of cracks appearing in the walls of female single solidarity, though, won’t you?’ she had added more light-heartedly.
‘Certainly not,’ Claire had told her roundly. ‘It’s one for all and all for one and you’re the last person I would tell,’ she had added teasingly.
‘Mmm...well, I haven’t heard anything from Star,’ Sally had continued, ‘in simply ages. I know she’s been away a lot. Did you know, by the way, that Uncle Tim has consulted her about a new PR image for the company? Aunt Irene told me.’
Claire had made a noncommittal response, only too well aware of the fact that she had been avoiding Irene and all too well aware of how easily her sharp-eyed and even sharper-tongued sister-in-law could destroy the fragile barrier of self-protection that she was trying to erect around herself.
It was no use deluding herself, she adm
itted wearily now; there was no real protection, no real escape from the heartache of loving Brad. She might be able to banish him from her thoughts during the day but she had no control over her subconscious at night, and she had lost count of the number of times she had woken up, her face wet with tears, aching with loneliness and longing for him...
‘Good, I’m not the last, then.’
Claire smiled as Star came hurrying towards her.
‘Poppy not here yet?’
Claire shook her head as she smiled at the younger woman. ‘She will be coming, though,’ she told her. ‘I spoke to her the other day.’
‘Mmm...she may be coming, but if the gossip I’ve heard is true she won’t—’ Star broke off as Poppy herself came into the conservatory.
If the gossip was that Poppy had fallen in love with someone new, then her appearance certainly didn’t bear it out, Claire reflected compassionately as she smiled at the new arrival. If anything, Poppy looked thinner and more unhappy than she had done the last time Claire had seen her.
As she patted the empty chair next to her own in a motherly fashion she studied her discreetly.
Poppy had definitely lost weight and she was very much on edge, glancing nervously over her shoulder as she sat down and lowering her voice as she greeted them, even though they were the only people in the conservatory.
‘Well, I don’t know about you two,’ Star announced, reaching for the menu that the head waiter had left on the table, ‘but I am hungry and fully intend to celebrate our first three marriage-free months. At least mine have been—marriage- and indeed man-free,’ she added archly, looking questioningly from Claire to Poppy. ‘Have you two...?’
‘I don’t have any plans to marry,’ Claire told her hastily, mentally crossing her fingers as she acknowledged her inability to claim the true spirit of their pact.
‘Nor do I,’ Poppy echoed, but her face was slightly flushed and Claire could have sworn that she saw the sheen of tears in her eyes before she blinked them away.
