The Ultimate Betrayal

Michael was kicking madly, trying to catch his father’s attention—attention that was firmly fixed on Rachel. The baby let out a frustrated cry, going red in the face in his effort to pull himself into a sitting position, and Rachel smiled instinctively at his efforts, capturing a waving hand and feeling the instant tug as the child tried to use it for leverage.

Daniel came over to the bed, stretching out to recline on the other side of their son and automatically reaching for the other small hand, which was all Michael needed to lever himself into a sitting position.

‘Da!’ he said triumphantly, twisting free of both of them so that he could pat his satisfaction on the soft duvet.

Rachel kept her eyes firmly on her son while she felt the searing appeal in Daniel’s gaze sting into her pale cheeks. ‘Rachel please look at me.’ It was a gruff plea that twisted at something wretched inside her, but one she refused to comply with, shaking her head.

‘No,’ she whispered, keeping her voice level with effort, and Daniel sighed heavily, then reached for Michael, lifting him to kiss the soft baby cheek before placing him further up the bed.

Alerted, Rachel moved to get up, but Daniel was too quick for her, his hand circling her wrist and pulling gently until he had hauled her across the small gap separating them, then enclosing her in the warm strength of his arms.

It’s not fair! she thought piteously as her insides dipped and dived with a need to immerse herself in the comfort he was offering her. Her chest became tight, then began to throb with the need to weep, and she let free a constricted gulp in an effort to stop the flood.

‘Don’t,’ he murmured unsteadily.

It had been the wrong thing to say, because the instant he showed her tenderness her control went haywire and she was sobbing deeply into his shoulder. He tightened his arms around her, and lowered his head on to hers. ‘Sorry,’ he kept saying, over and over. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry…’

But it wasn’t enough, was it? It would never be enough. He had killed everything. Love, faith, trust, respect—all gone, and sorry would never bring them back to life again.

‘I’m all right now,’ she mumbled, making the monumental effort to pull herself together and draw away from him.

But his hold tightened. ‘I know I’ve hurt you unbearably, Rachel,’ he murmured, trying to keep a rein on his own distress. She could feel the tension in his chest, in the erratic thump of his heart. ‘But don’t make any rash decisions while you’re in such an…’ Emotional state, she guessed he was going to say, but he stopped himself. ‘We have everything going for us if you’ll just give it another chance. Don’t throw it all away because of one stupid mistake on my part. You can’t throw it all away!’ he insisted thickly.

‘I didn’t do the throwing away,’ she countered, and this time, when she pulled, he let her go, his eyes dark and bleak as he watched her get up from the bed to begin moving around the room searching out fresh clothes, an electric current of suppressed emotion following her as she went from wardrobe to drawers then back again without really being aware of what she was choosing to wear.

All those years of blind trust she had given him, years of quiet understanding and acceptance of his deep personal need to achieve his ambitions. Through all those years she had stayed at home like some pampered pet dog and, so long as he gave her frequent pats of affection, fed the few basic needs she had, like food to eat and water to drink and the occasional trip out in the evening, she had been quite content with her lot.

What a pathetic creature you are! she jeered at herself now. What an utter bore!

Michael let out a wail, and they both started. He wanted his breakfast, and the playful game he had been having with himself had now turned into a demand for some attention.

Rachel stood hovering in the middle of the room, with her clean clothes clutched in her hands while her bemused mind grappled with the problem of what she should do next. Get dressed first or see to Michael first. A simple choice, but she couldn’t seem to make it.

It was, in the end, Daniel who lifted the baby into his arms and walked towards the bedroom door. ‘I’ll see to him,’ he said. ‘Take your time. It’s still quite early.’ He let himself out, and Rachel literally sagged beneath the strain of it all.

Breakfast was awful. She seemed intent on flying off the handle at the slightest provocation: from Kate for talking too much, Sam for not putting enough milk on his Weetabix so the biscuits congealed in his dish like two cement bricks which he proceeded to hack at with zeal. She put too much coffee in the filter bag so that it tasted so bitter it was barely drinkable. In the end, angry with herself for over-reacting to everything, frustrated with her inability to cope with her own distraught emotions, she turned on Sam, remembering that he had left his computer out the night before with his selection of games spread all over the floor. By the time she’d finished Sam was stiff and pale, Kate was appalled, Michael silenced and Daniel…Well, Daniel just looked grim. The rest of the morning routine went off in total silence. The children looking openly relieved when Daniel eventually sent them off to their rooms to collect their school things.

‘There was absolutely no reason for you to let fly at Sam like that!’ Daniel gritted as soon as there was only Michael left to listen. ‘You know as well as I do that he’s usually the tidiest one of us all! You’ll have all three of them a bag of nerves if you don’t watch out,’ he warned. ‘They’re good kids. Well-behaved kids for most of the time. I won’t let you take it out on them because you’re angry with me!’

She whirled on him. ‘And since when are you around enough to know how they behave?’ she threw at him, seeing to her deep and bitter satisfaction that he stiffened as the thrust went home. ‘You see them at breakfast, but only from behind your precious Financial Times! You don’t even know you have three children most of the time! Y-You love them like you 1-love that…Lowry painting you bought—when you remember you’ve got them, that is. So don’t…don’t you dare start telling me how to bring up my children when as a father you’re damned useless!’

What was happening to her? she wondered as she took a jerky step back and Daniel lurched angrily to his feet, glowering at her across the kitchen table and looking fit to hit her. I’m cracking up! she realised dizzily. I’m going to shatter into a million tiny pieces and I don’t know if I can stop it!

‘You can accuse me of many things, Rachel,’ Daniel was murmuring roughly. ‘And most of them I probably deserve. But you cannot accuse me of not loving our children!’

‘Really?’ she questioned in sarcastic scorn. ‘You only married me in the first place because you got me pregnant with the twins! And even little Michael was a mistake you took your time coming to terms with—!’

His fist slamming down on the table-top stopped her in mid-flow, and her eyelashes flickered nervously as she watched him swing his long body around the table, shifting the heavy pine a good foot off its usual setting when his thigh caught the corner in his haste to reach her. The violence in the air was tangible. Rachel could taste it on her suddenly dry lips as he approached her with his hands outstretched as if he intended throttling her.

As the very last second he changed his mind and grabbed her shoulders instead. It cost him an effort; she could feel him trembling with the need to choke the bitterness right out of her even as he suppressed the urge. ‘He’s too young to understand the implications of what you’ve just said,’ he rasped out harshly, nodding towards a fascinated Michael. ‘But if the twins overheard you, if you’ve given them any reason at all to think I don’t love them, I’ll…’

He didn’t finish—didn’t need to. Rachel knew exactly what he was threatening. He glared at her for a moment longer, then unclipped his hands from her and turned to walk out of the room.

Rachel gulped in a deep breath of air and it was only as she did so that she realised she had stopped breathing altogether. It was pure instinctive need for comfort that made her pick Michael up and cuddle him close.

She felt ashamed of herself, and angry, too, because in lashing out wildly at Daniel like that she had given him the right to attack her when, until that moment, she’d had everything stacked her way.

CHAPTER THREE

IT WAS the weekend before the twins really began to notice that things weren’t quite as they were used to seeing them. And as usual it was the sharp-eyed and more outspoken Kate who wanted to know the reason why.

‘Why are you sleeping in Michael’s room, Mummy?’ she demanded on Sunday morning while they all lingered around the breakfast table, as was their habit on the one day they had to be lazy in the morning.

They had only discovered her new sleeping arrangements because Michael had slept later this morning and, stupidly, Rachel had overslept along with him. Several nights of restless turning in the small bed while her mind tormented her with everything painful and self-pitying it could throw at her had left her exhausted, and last night when she had crawled beneath the Paddington Bear duvet she had achieved—to her relief—an instant blackout, which remained deep and dreamless right up until Sammy came to bounce on her to wake her up.

She still felt haggard, because what the sleep had made up for in hours, it had not made up for in spiritual relief. Wherever her dreams had gone off to last night, they had not eased her aching heart, or her anger, or the waves of bitterness and the soul-crushing self-abhorrence she was experiencing at the way she was letting the whole thing just drag on without doing something about it. Daniel had advised her to make no decisions until she was feeling less emotional and, like the pathetic creature she was, she had used that advice as an excuse to fall into a state of limbo where life had taken on colourless shapes of muted greys and nothing came into full focus any more.

Daniel looked no better, the same strain pulling at the clean-cut lines of his face too. He had been home by six-thirty every night since their cosy world had exploded around them. She suspected that the reason for this was her criticism of him as a father rather than a means to prove to her that his affair was over. She knew she’d hit him on the raw there.

So now he came home early enough to take over the bathing and putting to bed of the children while Rachel prepared their dinner. And on the surface everything appeared perfectly normal, as they both made an effort to hide their colossal problems from their children.

Until quietness engulfed the house—then they would eat their prepared meal in stiff silence, Daniel’s few attempts at conversation quashed by her refusal to take him up on them. So he would disappear into his study as soon as he possibly could, and she would clear the remnants of a poorly eaten meal, feed her bleeding emotions on unreserved bouts of self-pity, then go to bed in Michael’s room, feeling lonelier and more depressed as the days went by.

She was still labouring beneath the weight of a nullifying shock. She could acknowledge that even as she continued in her zombie-like existence. And Daniel just watched, grim-faced and silent, waiting, she knew, for the moment when she would crack wide apart.

Now she had her daughter’s curious enquiry to deal with, and as the truth flooded into her mind and sent what vestige of colour she had left fleeing from her face, she managed an acceptable reply. ‘Michael is teething again.’

The corner of Daniel’s Sunday paper twitched, and Rachel knew he was listening, maybe even watching her over the top of that twitched corner. She didn’t glance his way to find out. She didn’t really care what he was doing.

Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, the uncanny image of her mother, Kate nodded understandingly. Michael’s teeth had been the scourge of their nights’ rest before— although Rachel had not so much as considered swapping beds to be closer to him then. But that did not seem to occur to Kate, who was already turning her attention to her darling daddy.

‘I bet you miss having Mummy to cuddle, Daddy,’ she remarked, getting down from her chair to go and climb on to Daniel’s knee, her long hair flying as she blithely shoved his newspaper aside and made herself comfortable in those big, infinitely secure arms, with the certain knowledge that she was welcome. ‘If you’d just told me,’ she murmured, with typical Kate guile, ‘I would have come and cuddled you instead.’

Tension leaped to life, unspoken words and acid replies flying about the room without being captured.

‘That’s nice of you, princess.’ Daniel folded his paper away so that he could give his adored daughter his full attention. ‘But I think I can manage for a little while longer without feeling completely rejected.’

If that last remark had been meant as a message to Rachel, she ignored it, and sat there sipping at her coffee without revealing the effort it cost her to do it.

He was sitting there dressed only in his blue towelling robe, and the cluster of dark hair at his chest curled upwards from between the gaping lapels. He dropped a kiss on his daughter’s silky cheek, his smile so openly loving that Rachel felt her stomach tighten then sink, as jealousy, like nothing she had ever experienced before, shot through her, forcing her abruptly to her feet, appalled by what was going on inside her!

Jealous of your own daughter! she castigated herself. How bitter and twisted can you get?

Sheer desperation made her start gathering pots together. Daniel’s watchful gaze lifted to her face, and she couldn’t stop herself from looking back at him. Something must have shown in the bitter blue glint of her eyes, because his own narrowed speculatively before she spun away and deliberately ruined the relaxed atmosphere by banging around the kitchen, clearing up.

She became even more embittered when her tactics to shift them all didn’t work. In fact they simply ignored her as Sam was drawn into conversation with Kate and Daniel, and even Michael, when he insisted on coming out of his high-chair, was promptly placed on Daniel’s spare knee where he chattered blithely away to them all in his usual gibberish.

She couldn’t stand it. Something in the cosy little scene gnawed into her ragged nerves. She felt left out, alienated by her inability to go over there and join in as she would normally have done. Lydia stood in her way like some huge unscalable wall, blocking her off from her family, from the love and affection she had always taken for granted as her right.

Giving up on clearing up before she broke something, she turned and left the room with a mumbled, ‘I’m going to make the beds,’ knowing no one heard her, and feeling even more cast out.

She was standing in the middle of their bedroom, just staring blankly into space, when Daniel came in. With a nervy jerk she moved off towards the en suite bathroom, trying to look as if that had been where she was making for when he opened the door. When she came out again Daniel was still there, standing at the window with his hands thrust into the deep pockets of his robe. He was big and lean and looked so damned appealing that she wanted to throw something at him— anything to ease this awful ache she was suffering inside.

Forcing herself to ignore him, she began tidying things away. She wanted to make his bed but was now avoiding so much as looking at it while he was present. It had taken on the proportions of a monster since Mandy’s call, and each morning she’d had to force herself to come in here to fluff up the pillows and shake out the duvet. It smelled of Daniel—that clean male smell that was uniquely his. It ignited senses she would far rather remained dormant, especially since she wanted to believe he had killed them. But, if anything, her awareness of anything purporting to Daniel seemed to have been intensified rather than dulled. She had found betrayal fed a hateful awareness inside her, and anger fed desire, and pain fed her ability to torment herself with all those feelings she had previously taken for granted.

He turned slightly, watching her in silence as she moved around the room. After a while, when the throbbing silence threatened to choke the very atmosphere in the room, he came to stand in front of her, blocking her path. ‘Rachel…’ he said gently, willing her to look at him while she was equally determined not to. She looked at the floor between them instead. ‘You have remembered I’m in Birmingham all next week?’

No, she had not remembered. But she did so now. Anger at his daring to put his business first, while his private life was in crisis, took the form of ice-cold efficiency. ‘What shall I pack?’ Was Lydia going? Was it to be a nice cosy double room for two for a week, with no hostile atmosphere to spoil their fun?

Her heart slammed against her breast and she had to fight not to take a step back from him. It would be like conceding some small if obscure point to him to back away, so she stood stiffly, eyes lowered, face a wretched blank.

Physically, it was the closest they’d been to each other since the night the bomb fell on her, and she was tingling all over with that bitter sense of awareness of him.

‘Anything,’ he dismissed impatiently. She had always packed his case for him when he went off on one of his trips—lovingly folding freshly laundered shirts and carefully counted socks, underwear, handkerchiefs, ties, several suits to wear. And even now, while she silently prayed for him to move out of her way so that she could put a safer distance between them, and her mood wanted to tell him to pack his own bloody case, she was making a mental list of everything he usually required.

Conditioned you are, Rachel! she scoffed at herself. Expertly programmed.

He didn’t move, and the tension between them became intolerable. ‘Will you be all right?’ he asked at last, as though the question was a reluctant one, one he did not want to voice in case she used it as an excuse to attack him. He had been very careful this week to give her nothing which could start the avalanche. ‘I…I could get my mother to come and stay if you feel the need for company or—’

‘And why should I be in need of company?’ She flashed him a bitter look. ‘I’ve managed before when you’ve been away and I shall manage this time, no doubt, without the need of a baby-sitter.’

He took the taunt about her being one of his helpless children with a tightening of his jaw but without taking her up on it. ‘I was not questioning your ability to cope,’ he said quietly. ‘But you look—tired. And I just wondered if—with everything—you would rather not be on your own right now, that’s all.’

Tired, she repeated inside her head. She didn’t just look tired, she looked haggard! ‘Is your secretary going with you?’ Damn, she hadn’t meant to ask that question. In fact, she had been determined not to so much as breathe it!

‘Yes, but—’

‘Then I won’t have to concern myself about your comfort, will I?’

‘Rachel,’ he sighed, ‘Lydia isn’t—’

‘I don’t want to know.’ She pushed by him, preferring to let her body brush against his than to stand here any longer enduring this kind of conversation.

‘Why did you ask the damned question, then?’ he barked, then made a concerted effort to control himself again. ‘Rachel, we have to talk about this!’

She was making the bed now, gritting her teeth and getting on with the job because it was the only thing left in the room to do.

‘It can’t go on any longer.’ He appealed for common sense. ‘You must see that! Kate has noticed, which means she’ll be on the alert from now on, watching, calculating how long you stay in Michael’s room when—’

‘And we must not upset your darling Kate, must we?’ she flashed, then almost cried out in horror at herself. How could she be feeling jealous of her own child! Blindly, horribly jealous of that poor sweet child who possessed her father’s love by right!

‘Uncalled for, Rachel,’ Daniel grimly rebuked, and she agreed, sickeningly so.

The bed was made. Now she could get out of…

‘Let me just explain about Lydia,’ Daniel said carefully. ‘She isn’t—’

‘Are you planning on being here for the rest of the day?’

That threw him. It shut him up about his precious Lydia, too. ‘Yes.’ He frowned in puzzlement. ‘Why?’

‘Because I want to go out, and if you’re here it saves me having to ask your mother to come and mind the children.’ Why she had said that, Rachel had no idea. It had not been a conscious decision to go anywhere. But, once said, she found the idea of being on her own for a while—completely on her own—something that was suddenly vital to her sanity.

She made a dive for the wardrobe, trembling in her sudden urgency to get out of the house and away from them all. She dragged out the first thing that came to hand—her rainproof anorak. Daniel seemed momentarily stunned, and just stood there staring at her for the time it took her to shrug the coat on.

Then he sprang to life. ‘If you want to go out somewhere, Rachel, you only had to say so!’

The zip was being stubborn and she stood, head bent, grappling with it. It was so hot in here today! Struggling with the zip was making her hot. Was it possible to suffocate in one’s emotions? she wondered frantically. Because that was what she felt she was doing. People closing her in, walls…feelings.

‘Give me ten minutes while I get dressed myself, then we’ll all go out together…’

Shoes! She hadn’t put on any shoes! On another jerk, she was crouching on the floor and scrabbling around in the bottom of her wardrobe while Daniel seemed glued to the spot in stunned confusion.

She found her black leather boots and sat down on the carpet to pull them on, tucking the bottoms of her narrow jeans inside with fingers that shook.

‘Rachel…don’t do this!’ It must have hit him then that she really meant to go out alone because his voice was rough and urgent. ‘You’ve never gone out without us before,’ he rasped. ‘Wait until we can all…’

She was vaguely listening to him, though only from behind a wall of dark self-absorption. But one small part of what he had said got through. Daniel was right, and she never did go anywhere without one or all of them accompanying her! If it wasn’t Daniel, then it was the children—or his mother! All her adult life she had lived beneath the protective wing of others. Her parents first, her more outward-going friends, Daniel! Mostly Daniel.

She was almost twenty-five years old, for God’s sake! And here she was, a dowdy little housewife with three children and a husband who…

‘I’m going alone!’ she raked at him. ‘It won’t hurt you to have the children to yourself for once!’

‘I never said it would!’ he sighed impatiently. ‘But Rachel, you’ve never—’

‘Exactly!’ Jumping up she spun away from him when he made a grab for her, concern raking at his taut face. ‘While you’ve been busy making your fortune, chasing your personal rainbows and having your affairs,’ she threw at him bitterly, ‘I’ve been quietly sitting here in this damned house—stagnating!’

‘Don’t be stupid!’ He made another lunge for her wrist and caught it this time. ‘This is ridiculous. You’re behaving like a child! It—’

‘But that’s just it, Daniel, don’t you see?’ she cried, appealing for his understanding even while rebellion ran crazily through her veins. ‘That is exactly what I am— a child! A very spoiled, very overprotected child! I never grew up because I’ve never been given the chance to grow up! I was seventeen when I married you!’ she choked out wretchedly. ‘Still at school! And, before you came along, my parents used to wrap me in cotton wool! My God, what a shock it must have been to them when they discovered their sweet little innocent daughter had been sleeping with the big bad wolf without them knowing it!’

He laughed; she knew he couldn’t help it because her description of himself was so damned accurate that it was either laugh or weep.