He nodded slowly and seemed about to say something on the subject of unhappiness, but asked instead, ‘How about some coffee?’
‘Okay.’ Ursula respected his need to focus on the mundane—in times of crisis it could be the only thing which kept you sane. Cups of coffee were easier to think about than where his wife might have gone. He looked white with worry and fatigue. ‘I’ll make some,’ she said, moving to rise from her chair, but Ross stopped her with an irritable shake of his head.
‘No, sit down. I’ll make the coffee, Ursula,’ he told her tetchily. ‘You cooked the meal, and we’re not at work now. Are we?’ He flashed her a look of pure challenge as he rose to his feet, towering over her in a way which was making her feel almost delicate. His mouth hardened. ‘Or have you slotted me into the hopeless chauvinist category—the kind of man who can’t cope in a kitchen? Or won’t cope in a kitchen if there happens to be a woman around?’
Ursula laughed, amused by his overreaction. ‘Skip the lecture on equality, Ross!’ she teased him gently. ‘I’d love a coffee—and I don’t have the slightest problem with you making it! Shall I stack the plates in the dishwasher while you’re making it, or would you rather do that yourself?’
‘Stack away.’ He smiled thinly.
He was just reaching out towards the kettle when she heard him make a muffled exclamation beneath his breath. Ursula glanced up from the dishwasher to see him pulling out a white envelope from where it stood propped at the back of the coffee jar.
That’ll be from Jane, she thought, feeling her pulse begin to rocket, but she didn’t say a word as she watched Ross rip the envelope open and then pull out the single sheet of typewritten paper which was inside, his eyes scouring it rapidly, like a speed reader.
She carried on methodically stacking the dishes, then wiped stray crumbs off the table and prayed that Katy wouldn’t come in for a minute or two—or at least until Ross had had time to compose himself. Ursula didn’t dare look at him—she didn’t know if she could cope with seeing his heartbreak—and seconds ticked by excruciatingly.
‘She’s gone,’ said Ross baldly, as he balled the sheet of paper within his large fist and tossed it disdainfully down onto the work surface.
She dared meet his eyes at last, reading bitterness and anger there. But no regret. Maybe that would come later, she thought, once the initial shock had passed.
‘It’s from Jane?’ she said dully, because it was the kind of situation where the obvious kept being stated—maybe as a way of drumming in the hard facts.
He nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he drawled with distaste, as if the word had been contaminated. ‘It’s from Jane.’
Trying to keep her face impartial, Ursula merely nodded. ‘And does she say where she’s gone?’
‘Not precisely. Here—read it!’ And he picked up the crumpled ball of paper and threw it to her.
Ursula caught it with a protest. ‘I can’t read this, Ross!’
‘But I want you to,’ he said stubbornly. ‘Go on—read it!’
She was woman enough and curious enough to protest no more, and Ursula smoothed the crumpled letter out onto the table. It was addressed only to Ross, she noted—not Katy. She read:
Dear Ross,
By the time you read this—I will be gone. (Oh, God—did I really write that? Why do major life events always have to sound so corny and predictable?!)
Ursula flinched and stole a brief glance at Ross, but he was standing in front of the kitchen window staring out at the golden beauty of the summer evening. He was perfectly still—so still that he might have been carved from stone, his whole body frozen into immobility. A muscle flickering in one cheek was the only outward sign that anything was wrong.
Ursula carried on reading.
I am sure that my departure will come as no great shock to you (except, perhaps, for its suddenness), since we both know that things haven’t been good between us for a while now. Or could that classify as an understatement? Yes, I think it probably could!
Ursula’s heart picked up speed, and she was appalled to acknowledge that those last few flippant words had given her some kind of gruesome pleasure. How could she? How could she delight in the fact that their marriage had been in tatters? She swallowed down her guilt and continued.
I need some space, Ross—and yes, I can see you screwing your face up with distaste as you read those words, but I can’t help it if you seem to have a problem with commonplace phrases which everyone else uses except you.
I’m going to Australia, with Julian, but it’s too early to say whether my relationship with him will grow into something more than it is at the moment. Whatever happens, I’ll contact you from there.
Please send Katy all my love, and tell her that I’m sorry. That everyone only gets one shot at life, and that one day she may understand why I had to do this.
Yours, Jane.
Ursula’s fingers were trembling as she held the letter out towards him. ‘Here—’
‘I don’t want it!’ he snarled.
‘Then destroy it!’ she urged. ‘Unless, of course, you want Katy to see it?’
His laugh was cold and cynical. ‘What? And show her that she rated a nothing more than a couple of brief sentences right at the end of her mother’s letter?’ He spat the last word out with contempt.
‘A lot of men might have been tempted to show her for precisely that reason,’ observed Ursula quietly.
‘What? To demonstrate what a bitch my wife can be, and hurt my daughter even more in the process?’ Ross’s dark eyes glittered. ‘I may be feeling pretty angry, Ursula, but I’m not into scoring cheap points like that!’
Now he seemed to be attacking her! But Ursula recognised that he needed someone to lash out at right now, someone who wouldn’t take it personally...and that someone happened to be her. ‘I wasn’t for a moment suggesting that you were,’ she responded calmly. ‘You’re a good man, Ross. And a good father.’
‘You can’t possibly know that!’ he snarled.
‘Oh, yes, I can,’ she contradicted, meeting his blazing eyes with confidence. ‘I know the first part, certainly—I’ve worked with you long enough to judge that for myself. The second part I can only base on the times I’ve seen you with Katy, and the way you interact with each other—there’s no hiding the love she obviously feels for you.’
‘Thanks.’ He closed his eyes with something approaching despair. ‘But I’m no saint, Ursula,’ he whispered suddenly. ‘Don’t ever think that.’
Her throat constricted. Were a thousand fantasies about her perfect man about to crumble to dust? ‘Are you trying to say that you were unfaithful to Jane?’ she whispered.
He shook his head. ‘Never.’ The denial was too swift and too emphatic to be anything other than the truth. And then his eyes glittered again. ‘Perhaps I’ve been guilty of impure thoughts from time to time, but nothing more than that.’
‘And Jane?’ she asked quietly.
‘Our relationship may have been spiralling into freefall,’ he observed caustically, ‘but I’m not the kind of man to be cuckolded, least of all by the mother of my child.’
No. Ursula winced. This was more painful than she had expected. Yet something drove her on to expose herself to even more pain. ‘But how can you be so sure about that, Ross?’
He looked at her assessingly, as if wondering just how frank to be. ‘Because I know my wife,’ he said slowly. ‘I know her moods...and her body language. Believe me when I tell you that she was never unfaithful to me. Until now.’ He paused. ‘That’s why she’s gone. Because she can’t look me in the eye any more. She’s fallen in love. I knew it would happen eventually. It was just a question of waiting.’
‘But don’t you mind?’ she asked breathlessly, because part of him sounded almost glad about it.
His smile was cynical. ‘When something is dead, you can’t bring it back to life,’ he said flatly. ‘But she shouldn’t have left that way. Her behaviour has been that of a child, not a woman and
a mother. For Katy’s sake, she could have handled it better.’
‘But how on earth could she have done that?’
‘We had an understanding,’ he said simply. ‘Based on honesty.’
It struck Ursula that it was an old-fashioned word to use. And that she had no right to ask him exactly what that understanding had been.
‘She knew how important the truth was to me,’ he said quietly. ‘Yet she chose a devious way of getting what she wanted. Running away like a fugitive,’ he added in disgust. ‘And deceit like that has the power to destroy what little harmony remained between us. I didn’t want that to happen. For Katy’s sake.’
‘But how did it all go so wrong, Ross?’ she questioned. ‘Was it because you married so young?’
He shook his head. ‘We were both twenty-one. Not infants. No one held a gun at my head.’ He gave a low, cruel laugh. ‘Though maybe in a way, they did.’
She tried to imagine him getting married at twenty-one. It was a mental image which stubbornly refused to appear. Maybe because it made her heart turn over with jealousy. She had seen a photo of him at that age and he had looked impossibly young and unimaginably beautiful. ‘It must have been a grand passion,’ she observed quietly.
His gaze mocked her. ‘Don’t play games with me, Ursula—’
‘I’m not—’
‘You must have been able to work out from the time-scale involved that Jane was pregnant with Katy when we got married.’
‘Well, then,’ said Ursula triumphantly. ‘It must have been a grand passion, mustn’t it, for you to have taken risks like that? Or did you just not take contraception into account?’
He looked at her steadily. ‘I presume that’s meant to be a criticism?’
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t mean it to be. I was just brought up to believe that sex was too important not to think about the consequences.’
Ross’s eyes widened by a fraction, as though he couldn’t quite believe what she had just said. ‘Do you know, I can’t decide which I find the more endearing quality—your total innocence or your touching faith in human nature!’
‘Don’t make fun of me.’
‘I’m not. Really, I’m not. I admire your morality, if you really want to know. And I’m just trying to find a practical solution to this whole damned situation. The best way forward for Katy.’
‘You could always get another au pair?’
He shook his head. ‘No, I couldn’t. I don’t want to bring a stranger in to care for Katy—not at a time like this. A young girl with no experience of children—keener on having a good time than dealing with a child who may be troubled.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
He paused and watched her, as a cat would a mouse, until his silent scrutiny compelled her to look directly into the dark, glittering vortex of his eyes. ‘Would you help me, Ursula?’ he asked her deliberately.
She was genuinely confused. ‘Help you with what?’
‘Help me with Katy—’
‘Ross, I don’t know anything about young girls—’
‘Yes, you do,’ he contradicted. ‘You have a younger sister.’
‘But Amber’s grown up now!’
‘But she wasn’t always, was she? And you virtually brought her up single-handed when your mother was sick—you told me that yourself. And little girls don’t change that much. Not fundamentally.’ He stared at her from between narrowed eyes.
Ursula lifted her fingertips to one rather flushed cheek, and fleetingly thought what a mess she must look. ‘What exactly are you asking me, Ross? That I give up my job in order to care for Katy? Because she’s going to need someone here when she gets home from school and during the holidays. And the summer holiday starts very soon. Unless...’ She hesitated, unable to keep the horror from her face. ‘Unless you’re planning to send her away to boarding-school?’
‘Never, ever.’ He shuddered. ‘And the last thing I want is for you to give up your job—I’m far too selfish for that. We’ve worked together for so long I can’t imagine life without you.’
I wish he wouldn’t say things like that, thought Ursula fiercely. Doesn’t he know how stupid compliments like that could turn a woman’s head? Especially a woman who isn’t used to receiving them. But she kept her expression deadpan. ‘What, then?’
‘We could easily arrange to work here, so that there’s always someone here to greet Katy.’
Ursula blinked. ‘Just like that?’
‘Why not? I’m the boss—well, Oliver is, too—and the creative side of the business is what I do best, and I work best where I’m happy. And I’ll be most happy if I know that my daughter doesn’t have an empty house to come home to. Think about it, Ursula. Term-times will be easy. We already schedule most meetings for the mornings. What do we do in Soho that we couldn’t do right here? And I’m only talking from three until six every day.’
Ursula frowned. ‘Well, I suppose when you put it like that...’
‘School holidays will obviously take a bit of planning—but we could work it out between us, surely?’
Ursula nodded. ‘I can’t see too many problems with that. Lots of people are away during school holidays.’
Those dark eyes of his looked so appealing...? Almost too appealing, really, and suspicion entered Ursula’s heart. She gazed at him sceptically as her thoughts slotted themselves into some kind of pattern. ‘This isn’t the first time you’ve thought of this brilliant idea, is it, Ross?’ she said slowly.
Wariness replaced appeal. His eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, it hasn’t just come to you out of the blue, has it? It’s much too well thought out to be a sudden brainwave,’ she challenged. ‘Even for you. And, now that I come to think of it, you’ve been making odd remarks and asking unusual questions over the last few weeks—’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, “Ursula, do you like working in the centre of London?” and “Ursula, have you ever felt like changing your job?”’ His eyes looked almost black as she stared at him. ‘Did you know that Jane was going to leave you?’
There was an odd kind of silence. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘Not exactly. But I sensed that the situation was building up towards some sort of crisis.’
Ursula stared at him. ‘Well, why the hell didn’t you come right out and ask her about it, instead of letting it reach this kind of situation?’
For the first time since they’d arrived back, he snapped. ‘Oh, no, Ursula!’ He shook his head in denial. ‘Don’t try and use your obvious inexperience to offer me advice on what I should have done—’
How dare he throw her inexperience back in her face? ‘I don’t have to stay here if you’re going to insult me, you know!’
‘No, I know you don’t,’ he answered back. ‘Just trust me when I tell you that sometimes the best thing you can do is just sit back and let things happen. Even if something at the very heart of you screams out that it’s all wrong.’ His face was etched with pain. ‘That whenever there is a child involved the status quo, however unsatisfactory, seems preferable to ripping apart the very fabric of that child’s life.’ He looked at her. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’
She nodded. ‘I think so.’
‘I was in a bad marriage where we’d lost the ability to communicate a long time ago. If I’d challenged Jane simply to save face, I’d have risked losing Katy. And it simply wasn’t worth it.’
Ursula stared at him in astonishment, as if he had just announced that he had spent most of his formative years in jail! ‘But you never said anything to me, Ross! You’ve never mentioned a word about this before! You used to come into work, day after day, always with a smile on your face. I would never have guessed that anything was so wrong in your life!’
He gave an odd kind of smile. ‘What’s to say? What would be the point of coming into the office saying, “Morning, Ursula—oh, by the way, did I ever tell you that my marriage is in one hell of a mess?”?’
He regarded her steadily. ‘And, to be honest, I wanted to keep my marriage completely separate from my job. The office became like a kind of sanctuary. Work has always fulfilled me—that and seeing Katy grow up. And you were always so steady and so sweet and so funny. Like a balm to my raw senses. I actually looked forward to coming in each morning.’
Ursula’s heart resumed its thundering, but she forced herself to take his words at face value, not to read anything else into them. He had flattered her by revealing that he found her easy and comforting company in the midst of his personal crisis, but that was all. ‘Then why didn’t you do something about it sooner?’ she questioned. ‘Why let something bad drag on and on?’
‘If you mean divorce then the reasons are the same as the ones I’ve just given you.’
‘No!’ she denied defensively, firmly telling herself that divorce had been the furthest thing from her mind. Definitely. ‘I didn’t mean divorce. I meant reconciliation. Counselling. Or something.’ She shrugged. ‘Whatever it is that people do these days. I don’t know! I’ve never been married.’
‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘Some options we had already explored. Unsuccessfully—as you’ve probably guessed’
She saw the strain intensified on his face, and realised that Katy would be back any minute. And she owed Ross more than this frosty kind of questioning.
Much more.
‘Yes, I’ll help you with Katy,’ she told him softly. ‘Of course I will. And I’ll do whatever it takes to ease the pain, and confusion.’
Some of the tension around his mouth eased, and the look of gratitude he gave her made her feel as mushy as a soft-centred chocolate.
‘But there’s just one thing I want you to promise me, Ross,’ she said.
‘Name it.’
‘I don’t want my sister to know anything about this arrangement we’ve made.’
He frowned. ‘But I hardly ever see Amber, do I?’
One Husband Required! Page 7
