Secret Obsession

Nerissa and Philip had gone there, together, on the school bus which picked them up at the end of the lane running past the farm gates. In time they had both graduated to a large comprehensive, even further away, which meant a very long journey every day.

In the school holidays, and in the evenings and at weekends, they had helped on the farm, of course; Uncle John needed every spare hand he could get.

Farm work was hard, but it could be fun, toohelping to clear out ditches, cut back hedges, wheel barrows full of stones for mending drystone walls, prepare food for the various farmyard animals, muck out the stables, tramp the fields to check on sheep which had wandered and round them up with the help of the two sheepdogs.

Doing it alone wouldn’t be so great, but when there were two of you—talking, playing jokes on each other, laughing—the time flew and you hardly noticed what you were doing.

There was always something new to do, too. Every day brought a new job—help to run the sheep through the bath of disinfectant every year, hold sheep for the vet while he injected them against the innumerable ills sheep were prone to, feed chickens or the few pigs they kept, whitewash outbuildings, slash back the nettles which invaded the yards if you didn’t keep them down in summer.

Nerissa and Philip hadn’t minded doing any of that. They’d enjoyed the variety of work on the farm; the jobs followed the seasons, changing all the time with the rhythm of the year.

Whatever they’d done, though, they’d done together. They’d always been together—inseparable—riding ponies across the fields to take them to the blacksmith to be shod, jumping walls and ditches, or in the summer lying in the sweet-smelling hay stored in the barn, talking and arguing, or in the fields, chewing ears of wheat and watching the poppies quiver in the warm air while Uncle John drove the harvester backwards and forwards across a field, and the blue sky wheeled overhead.

It seemed years ago. Nerissa winced, her blue eyes haunted by memories of how Philip looked now, how he had looked yesterday, in the hospital.

‘I hate to think of him lying there, day after day! Philip always hated sitting still. He was full of energy.’

‘Don’t talk in the past tense!’ snapped his mother. ‘He isn’t dead! And he isn’t going to die, so stop talking like that!’

‘I’m sorry,’ Nerissa said. ‘It’s just…I feel so helpless. If only there were something we could do!’

‘We’re doing everything we can,’ his mother said. ‘Don’t let it get to you, Nerissa. You won’t help Philip by making yourself ill with fretting.’ She smiled at her again, comfortingly, then looked at her watch. ‘Let’s be on our way.’ She began to clear away the breakfast things and Nerissa got up to help.

Maybe there would be some change! she thought as they drove to the hospital later. Sooner or later he would open his eyes, surely! He must. He couldn’t stay the way he was, a living statue, locked inside his own mind, dead to them.

But there was no change at all. That day was much the same as the previous two had been. They talked, while Philip lay unmoving, without expression. Nerissa read to him from the day’s newspaper, began reading Treasure Island to him, because it had always been his favourite book—he had read it over and over again when he was a boy.

John Thornton arrived and spent an hour with his son, then Aunt Grace sent them both back to the farm.

‘Go to bed and try to sleep, Nerissa,’ she said as they left. ‘Promise me you will.’

‘I’ll see she does!’ John Thornton said and his wife nodded, patting his arm.

‘Good lad.’

Nerissa watched and was overwhelmed with affection for her aunt; she was an astonishing woman, proud and strong, and full of warmth and kindness. She held them all together; without her they would be lost.

When they reached the farm Nerissa made tea, and she and Uncle John had a cup together in the kitchen before he got up, sighing.

‘A farmer’s work is never done, especially if he runs sheep!’ he said. ‘Stupid animals. I can’t think why I bother with them, sometimes.’

He tramped off into a rainy mist, which had come from nowhere, and Nerissa went up to her bedroom and found to her grateful surprise that Uncle John had lit a fire in the tiny grate. She stood in front of it and undressed down to her silky white slip, bra and panties, then lay down under the old, patchwork quilt, the curtains drawn, the fire dying down a little but a few flames still making black shadows climb the bedroom walls and the soft sound of rain soaking into the garden making a gentle lullaby.

A sound woke her. Her lashes fluttered, lifted. Drowsily she wondered what she had just heard—not a loud noise, a very quiet one. The sound of ash dropping through the fire grate? Or a log cracking apart in the flame? Her uncle’s tractor far away on the hill?

What time was it? She rolled over to look at the clock and froze as she found herself looking into Ben’s eyes. For a second she actually thought she was imagining it, calling him up from her unconscious because she was so terrified of seeing him again.

But she wasn’t imagining anything. Ben was there, sitting beside her bed, and looking as if he had been there for some time, watching her while she slept.

Her body seemed to drain of blood. She stared into his eyes and felt like someone looking out into a winter landscape—grey and icy, impenetrable.

She was so stunned that she blurted out stupidly just what was on her mind. ‘I thought you were going to be in The Hague for a week?’

The cold lips parted just enough to bite out a few words. ‘So you hurried back to him.’

She winced as if at a blow from a lash. ‘You don’t understand——’ she began, and was interrupted.

‘Oh, I understand. You’re still obsessed with him; you couldn’t keep away.’

‘No, you’re wrong, I——’

His voice overrode hers. ‘Have you been sleeping with him?’

‘Philip’s in hospital!’ she shouted, sitting up, dragging the quilt with her to cover herself. ‘He’s in a coma; he doesn’t even know I’m here.’

Silence. Ben stared fixedly.

She shrank back against the bedhead, went on flatly, ‘He crashed his car nearly a week ago. His injuries were pretty bad. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt; his head was…’ She swallowed, not bearing the idea of what had happened to his head. ‘He had to have surgery to relieve pressure on the brain and he’s been in a coma ever since. They can’t say if…when…he’ll wake up. It could be days, or weeks, or months—they just don’t know.’

Ben’s mouth indented. ‘I’m sorry, I’d no idea,’ he said in a low, harsh voice. ‘No wonder you look like grim death.’

‘We’re all very worried, obviously,’ she muttered, pushing back a strand of her dark hair which had strayed across her face. ‘His mother’s at the hospital with him, now—we’ve all been there, we go every day—but she sent me home early because she thought I looked tired.’

Ben’s grey eyes roamed over her delicate face, bone-white at the moment except for the smoky shadows under her great blue eyes.

‘That’s why I was in bed at this time of day; I’ve been sleeping,’ she added, very aware of his gaze and feeling her skin prickle with a familiar slow, sensual response. From the minute they’d met she had felt this unwanted reaction to him—not to the man himself, whom she had not even known at first, but to the male animal inside his expensive designer suit, to that powerful sexual mix of bone, muscle, flesh and dominating drive. Women always noticed Ben; she had seen it happen over and over again. The insistence of his personality made them gravitate towards him even in a crowded room. Nerissa had felt a strange pang many times as she’d watched his effect on other women, recognising it from her own first reaction to him.

It wasn’t love, after all—how could it be? No, what she had felt—and still felt—was pure sexual desire, and she despised herself because it happened every time she saw him—even now, when she was so worried and unhappy over Philip.

She had always believed that you only felt like that about a man you loved. She wasn’t sure yet exactly what she did feel about Ben, but she didn’t think you could call it love.

Oh, he had become necessary to her—she wanted him, she thought about him when he wasn’t there—but she didn’t understand him the way she understood Philip. She didn’t know him the way she knew Philip. The wordless, warm, certain love she had for Philip was a world away from the disturbing power Ben had over her.

If she could have married Philip…Her heart winced at the thought of how different her life would have been.

But fate had played a savage trick on them; they had been wrenched apart forever, with no hope of any future for them.

‘How long have you been here?’ Ben asked curtly, sitting down on the edge of her bed.

She couldn’t meet his eyes. After a moment she whispered, ‘Since the day you left for The Hague.’

A silence, then he bit out, ‘They rang and told you about the accident after I’d left?’

She swallowed, cold sweat breaking out on her forehead. ‘No, they rang me the day before.’

He didn’t move or speak but the silence vibrated with violence. She sat there, trembling, afraid to look at him.

‘And you didn’t tell me.’ His voice grated on her nerves; she wanted to scream, and couldn’t. ‘You let me leave, without saying a word, and as soon as I was out of the way you rushed up here without even leaving a note to tell me where you had gone.’ He got up suddenly, walked across the room and back, and she picked up the simmering rage inside him.

This was the reaction she had been expecting. She knew how Ben felt about betrayal. His first wife had had an affair with his best friend for a year before Ben had found out. He had come home one day to find them in bed together. There had been a fight between the two men; Ben had put his ‘friend’ into hospital with a broken nose. Ben’s wife had gone with the ‘friend’ in the ambulance after screaming abuse at Ben. Two years later Ben had divorced her; it had been another six years before he met Nerissa.

Nerissa knew he still carried the scars of disillusion and bitterness. Whatever he had been like before the day he’d come home to find his wife in bed with someone else, he was now a hard, remorseless man, determined never to let himself fall in love again. All he wanted from her was pleasure in bed. Love did not enter into their bargain.

He stopped at the bed and looked down at her, his eyes a blaze of rage. ‘What were you going to do at the end of the week? Come back to me without ever mentioning that you had been away? Did you really think you could get away with it?’

‘No, of course not! I knew you would find out but, anyway, Philip might be like this for weeks, months, and I—’ She broke off, biting her lip.

‘Didn’t mean to come back at all,’ Ben finished for her, his voice slow, his mind working all the time as he watched her. ‘You’re going to stay here,’ he thought aloud. ‘You never intended to come back to me.’

She clutched the quilt tighter, her small hands white-knuckled, her chin lifted and defiance in her eyes.

‘He needs me,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t leave him now, not like this, and it isn’t just Philip—Aunt Grace and Uncle John need me, too. This has hit them pretty badly.’

Ben’s mouth curled coldly, cruelty in the lines of it. ‘Uncle John!’ he repeated, and laughed.

‘Don’t!’ she said, dark red invading her pale face, her eyes stricken.

Ben muttered under his breath and swung away again, walked back to the window, pulled aside the old tapestry curtain and looked out. A shaft of grey, rainy light entered the bedroom.

‘Where are they both? I knocked on the front door but nobody answered, so I went round the back and the kitchen door was open, but there was no sign of anyone downstairs.’

‘Aunt Grace is still at the hospital with Philip. Uncle John’s somewhere on the farm, working. He has to spend so much time at the hospital, he has got behind with his work. He says he’ll have to get someone to help out for a while, but the farm only just pays enough for the three of them to live on—it will be a drain on their budget to have to pay wages to an outsider.’

‘And they hate outsiders, too,’ Ben said in that cold, angry voice, swinging to face her.

She bit her lip. ‘That’s a bit over the top. I wouldn’t say that; it’s just that they…they are conservative.’

‘They hated me from the minute they saw me!’

She pleated the quilt hem with her shaking fingers. ‘That isn’t true; they didn’t hate you! They were…taken aback…when I brought you here. They hadn’t expected—’

‘You to find another man?’

‘I was going to say someone like you!’ she retorted, very flushed. ‘Life here is so different from life in London. People like them…you just don’t understand them; they’re not like anyone you know.’ Her eyes softened, her voice filled with affection and Ben watched her intently, frowning. ‘They rarely meet strangers,’ she said. ‘They never go anywhere very much. Oh, they go to market once a month, they go to Durham to do Christmas shopping, but otherwise they almost never leave the farm. The furthest I can remember them going is to Scarborough, for a seaside holiday, and they don’t do that every year even now, when Philip can take over and run things while they’re away. They couldn’t afford to go abroad. Hill farmers don’t make enough money for foreign holidays. I don’t think Uncle John has even been to London.’

Ben flared suddenly, his voice harsh. ‘Why do you go on with this pretence? Isn’t it time it all came out into the open? What the hell is the point in going on with these lies and half-truths? This whole business is so ingrown and contorted—if you once faced up to facts you might actually work out a few things about yourself.’

‘Do you think I haven’t?’ she huskily threw back, looking up then, her eyes almost black with emotion in that white face. ‘Once I knew…I realised I had to go away, and I did—you know that!’

Ben brooded on her, his face grim. ‘How could they lie to you all these years? That’s what I don’t understand. The lies. Why couldn’t they come out and tell you, years ago?’

‘Pride,’ she said, sadness in the line of her mouth, in her eyes. ‘I said you didn’t understand them. Can’t you see? It was their pride that kept them from telling me.’

‘Their pride?’ exploded Ben. ‘They cheated you for their own selfish reasons—you grew up unaware that you had a living father, not a dead one! If they had told you when you were small…’

‘They couldn’t bear to!’

‘To hell with what they couldn’t bear! What about you? Look what they did to you, with their pride and their lies! If they had ever cared twopence for you they’d have told you the truth years ago, and you would have been spared a lot of grief.’

‘If they had known it was ever going to matter they’d have told me, but how could they guess? They couldn’t see the future; they didn’t have second sight.’

Ben’s grey eyes flashed contemptuously. ‘You’re a born victim, aren’t you? No matter what they did, you forgive them. Where’s your pride, for heaven’s sake? Where’s your self-respect?’

Nerissa watched his hard, remorseless face and knew how he had looked when he’d seen his first wife, Aileen, in bed with her lover. Ben was not the forgiving type; from that instant his first marriage had been finished. And although he had told her, when they’d first met, the bare outline of what had happened he had never mentioned his first wife’s name since. He had excised her from his life ruthlessly.

Nerissa was in no doubt that he would do the same with her. It would be easy enough; Ben had never been in love with her. She suspected that his capacity for love had died with Aileen’s betrayal. One wound had been enough for Ben; he had made up his mind there and then never to let himself be vulnerable to such hurt again.

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