Lingering Shadows

She had no close friends to whom she could confide her doubts and feelings of guilt and despair. Her family doctor was old, and a friend of her father’s, and even if she had been able to pluck up the courage to consult anyone about her growing dislike of sex she could never have explained to him the way she felt, the tension she felt whenever Gregory touched her, the dread almost.

It was her fault, of course. It had to be, and she knew that Gregory must be as disappointed as she was herself, even though he made no complaints.

She was glad when she had her period and was relieved of the necessity of having to lie tensely in bed praying that Gregory would not touch her, and yet even in her relief she was conscious of other feelings, of a heavy, leaden sense of somehow having lost something; of having been cheated of something.

She refused to allow herself to remember those tormenting pre-marriage dreams, the feeling she had experienced. She had just imagined them; they hadn’t been real. If they had been, she would have experienced them with Gregory, she told herself firmly.

It was on the night of their first wedding anniversary that Gregory told her that during their honeymoon he had made love to the courier.

The moment he told her she knew that it was the truth. He had come home late, too late for the special dinner she had prepared. Her father was out playing bridge. They had had a row. She had promised herself that tonight she would try, really try to overcome her dislike of sex, but then Gregory had come home late, and she had smelled the perfume on him immediately.

When she asked him whose it was he had told her about the girl he had been seeing. A girl who, unlike her, was good in bed and who knew how to please a man.

Shocked, distraught with despair, Davina had demanded to know why, then, he had married her.

Gregory had told her.

‘For your father’s money,’ he said brutally. ‘What the hell other reason could there be? Why the hell would a man … any man want you? And don’t bother going running to your father over this, Davina. He thinks you’re as useless as I do. Why do you think he was so keen to see us married? A divorce is the last thing he’d want.’

A divorce! The brutality of the ugly words hit her like a blow. Divorce was something that happened to other people. In Davina’s world it was still seen as a stigma, as a sign of failure on the part of a wife, as a wife and as a woman.

The very sound of the word terrified Davina. It would be a public acknowledgement of her failure.

It was only later, curled up into a tight ball of misery on her own side of their bed, that she confronted the true enormity of what Gregory had told her.

He did not love her. He had never loved her. She felt sick inside … not at his lack of love, but at her own folly in believing that he might have loved her. From this point onwards Davina had had to acknowledge that their marriage was a sham.

Outwardly their lives went on as normal. Occasionally Gregory made love to her, and when he did Davina gritted her teeth and prayed that she might get pregnant. They both wanted children, but for very different reasons.

Davina’s father had started dropping hints about grandchildren, but both Davina and Gregory knew that what he wanted was grandsons.

Gregory told Davina that it was her fault. She underwent a whole series of tests before a young and sympathetic female doctor suggested to her that the reason she had not conceived might lie with Gregory and not with her, since they could find no reason why she should not conceive.

Davina contemplated putting the doctor’s theory to Gregory with a certain amount of grim mental despair. She had changed from the girl who had married Gregory in such blissful ignorance, even though barely twenty-four months separated the woman she now was from that girl.

No, she would not tell Gregory what the doctor had said, she acknowledged wearily as she drove home.

Slowly she started to forge a life for herself. A life apart from Gregory’s. She was a married woman now, not a girl.

She ran the house smoothly and efficiently, and, since both her father and Gregory rejected any suggestions she tried to make that she could fill in some of her spare time by working for the company, she looked for another avenue to occupy her.

Davina needed to keep busy. That was the only way she had of keeping at bay her despair over her marriage. If she just kept herself busy enough she did not need to think about her marriage at all. She did not need to think about the fact that Gregory was unfaithful to her. She knew that because he made no attempt to hide it now.

In front of her father he used the pretext of work as an excuse for his absences. To her in private he didn’t bother to conceal what he was really doing.

It shamed Davina more than she could bear to admit that she was actually sometimes glad, grateful that she was not the recipient of his sexual favours. Now she dreaded those times when he did touch her. Just occasionally, when her concentration lapsed, she sometimes remembered how she had felt before she married him, but she fought hard to keep that kind of weakness at bay. She was married to him, and at least he had the discretion to conduct his affairs outside their own small social circle. Davina had seen the way the other wives looked at Gregory, and she dreaded the day he returned any of their interest.

Sometimes she was sickened by her own weakness in staying with him, but she was too afraid, too conventional to break out of their marriage—and to what purpose, anyway? There was none. She was empty of all hope, all pleasure, all desire; a woman unwanted, unloved and undesired by the man to whom she was married.

But she was married and she must make the best of it. Behave like an adult and not a child.

Wryly Davina shook her head, dismissing her thoughts of the past. What was the point in dwelling on the past? She had chosen to marry Gregory, no one had forced her, and it was pointless wondering what her life might have been had she married someone like Giles. Gregory was dead now, and his death had brought her far more important things to worry about than the emotional barrenness of her own life.

It had been cowardice, and a too strongly rooted dread of offending against her father’s idea of convention, that had kept her in her marriage; it was that which had trapped her just as much as Gregory’s manipulation of her. She couldn’t blame everything on him.

Not even the failure of the company?

She closed her eyes tiredly. That was a different matter. What on earth had prompted him to get involved in something as volatile and dangerous as the currency market, and with money that should have been used to secure the future of the company and of its employees?

How much real chance did she have of finding a backer … an investor? Virtually none, the bank manager had told her grimly. These were difficult times for industry; money was tight, especially the kind of risk-money involved in supporting something like Carey’s.

Davina turned into the drive. She was home. Home; she smiled mirthlessly to herself as she stopped the car and got out.

She had lived in this house all her life and she felt very little affinity towards it. It had never truly been hers. During her father’s lifetime it had been his, and after his death … Well, he might have willed it to her, but she had never truly felt it belonged to her.

It had been Gregory, during one of his many affairs, who had produced the interior designer responsible for its present décor; she and Gregory had been having a passionate affair at the time, and even though she knew it was quite ridiculous, since she knew Gregory could never have had sex with her here at home, Davina felt somehow as though the very fabrics the woman had chosen were impregnated with the musky odour of sex.

She loathed the brilliant harsh colours the woman had chosen, the dramatic blacks and reds, the—to her—ugly rawness of so much colour and emotion. They made the rooms seem claustrophobic, reminding Davina of that awful honeymoon hotel with its cramped room and lack of air.

As she unlocked the front door and walked into the hall she wondered with a certain wry amusement if she was always to associate sex with a lack of breathable air. She also wondered even more wryly if, had it not been for Matt, she would ever have felt this faint stirring of curiosity about Giles. If all she had ever known was Gregory’s lovemaking, somehow she doubted it.

It had been a long time now since she had finally recognised that Gregory might not have been the skilled lover he had always claimed. Five years, to be precise.

But now wasn’t the time to think of Matt.

‘Lucy, I’m home.’

Giles tensed as he heard the sound of pans being slammed in the kitchen. Increasingly these days he dreaded coming home, dreaded the inevitable row that followed his arrival.

Ducking his head to avoid the house’s low beams, he walked slowly towards the kitchen. Outside the closed door, he paused, mentally willing away his involuntary mental image of opening the door and finding not Lucy, his wife, waiting there for him, her face sharp with temper, but Davina.

Davina, who always looked so cool and calm; Davina, whom he had never once heard raise her voice; Davina, who was always so relaxed, so easy to be with, her manner directly the opposite of that of his emotional, highly volatile wife.

He must stop thinking like this, he told himself fiercely as he took a deep breath and then pushed open the kitchen door.

Lucy was standing by the sink.

She was tall and slim, her thick, dark red curls a fiery glow of colour round her small pale face. Her eyes, green and almond-shaped, glittered with temper. Giles could almost see it vibrating through her tense body as she glared at him.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ she demanded. ‘You were supposed to be back at half-past five.’

‘I had to talk to Davina.’

‘Oh, you did, did you? And did you tell her that you were leaving? That she wasn’t going to have your broad manly shoulder to cry on for much longer?’

Giles winced at the bitterness, the acidity in her voice.

She had gone too far. She could see it from Giles’s face, and for a moment she was afraid. She had thought she had learned to control these rages, these outbursts of temper fuelled by fear and insecurity.

‘Well, I hope you’ve had something to eat,’ she told Giles, ‘because there certainly isn’t anything here for you. Half-past five, you said. It’s almost seven.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ Giles told her wearily. ‘I’ll make myself a sandwich later.’

‘Why bother?’ Lucy goaded him, driven relentlessly towards self-destruction by her fear and anguish. ‘Why not ring Davina and have dinner with her? She’s a wonderful cook … although rumour has it that she wasn’t much good in bed. Still, that won’t bother you, will it, darling? You haven’t had much interest in that department yourself recently, have you? Or is it just me you don’t want?’

‘Lucy, please,’ Giles begged her wearily. ‘Not now. I——’

‘You what? You don’t want to discuss it. All right, let’s discuss something else, then, shall we? Like your telling Davina that you weren’t going to stay. You did tell her that, didn’t you, Giles?’

Giles sighed. ‘I … I tried. Look,’ he said desperately when he saw Lucy’s face, ‘it won’t be for much longer. Only another few weeks. She needs me, Lucy.’

He knew the moment he said it that he had said the wrong thing, but as he watched the way Lucy’s face closed up, her eyes as hard and flat as dull river pebbles, he also knew it was too late to call back his words.

As Lucy slammed down the pan she had been holding and walked past him he said desperately, ‘Lucy, please try to understand …’

As she opened the door she turned on him, feral as a maimed cat. ‘I do understand,’ she told him. ‘I understand that Davina James is more important to you than I am.’ As she slammed the door the whole house seemed to shake.

It was an old house, parts of it dating back to the fourteenth century, a long low-timbered building. They had bought it eight years ago when they first moved here shortly after their marriage.

They had been so happy then. So much, so passionately in love. When had it all changed? Why?

He had thought himself so blessed when he met Lucy, bemused by the way she had flirted with him, teased him and coaxed him, dazzled by her fire, by the life, the energy that filled and drove her. She had been a passionate lover, overwhelming all his hesitation, overwhelming him.

He had been thrilled, disbelieving almost when she had told him she wanted to marry him, shy, hesitant, unsure of him for the first time in their relationship. He had loved her so much then. And he still loved her now. At least, a part of him did; another part of him …

He tensed as he heard the front door slam and then the sound of her car engine starting up.

It had been unjust of her to accuse him of not wanting her any more. She had been the one to reject him, to turn away when he reached for her, to let him know without words that his body, his touch no longer aroused her.

Helplessly Giles sat down, his head in his hands. Maybe for the sake of his marriage he should have stood firm and told Davina that he could not stay on. Maybe he should have done, but the truth of it was that he hadn’t wanted to. The truth was that he had looked at Davina and had ached to take her in his arms, to hold her, to protect her. Davina was that kind of woman. She did not, as Lucy had always done, challenge his masculinity, she complemented it. Where Lucy was all fire and passion, Davina was all loving, comforting serenity, and something within him ached to have that serenity wrapped around him.

He was so tired. Tired of Lucy’s wild outbursts of temper, her volatility, of all the things about her that had once held him in such thrall. Including her passion? Her love for him?

Sick at heart, he groaned helplessly to himself.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘I’M SORRY, Saul, but I’d forgotten when we arranged for you to have the children this weekend that we were going to stay with the Holmeses. Tom adores it down there. He and Charles Holmes are such good friends——’

‘And Josey?’ Saul interrupted his ex-wife grimly. ‘Does she adore it too?’

It was pointless losing his temper with Karen. He knew that, but he could feel the emotion surging through him, battering down his self-control, demanding an outlet. What was happening to him? He had always been so sure of his self-control, of his ability to hide his real emotions, especially when they were unwanted ones.

‘Saul, please. Don’t be difficult about this. Josey’s got her own friends. Her own life. She’s growing up.’

And the last thing she wanted to do was to spend time with him, Saul recognised as he heard Karen out in acid silence. It was hard to remember now that they had once been married, that they had once shared all the intimacies of a married relationship, and sometimes it was even harder to recall why they had married, to recall the emotions he had once felt.

He was drained of those emotions now, incapable almost of experiencing them, even in retrospect. Increasingly he felt as though he had somehow lost pace with the rest of the human race, as though he was isolated from it, living in a void, a vacuum, where nothing existed other than his own unfamiliar, terrifying doubts.

‘Why don’t we arrange for them to come to you next weekend?’ Karen was saying.

‘I’m afraid next weekend is out,’ Saul told her. ‘I’m leaving for Cheshire next week.’

‘You’re going to see Christie?’

He could hear the astonishment in Karen’s voice and just in time stopped himself from correcting her and telling her that he was going to Cheshire on business.

His body suddenly felt cold with shock at the thought of how easily he might have made such a self-betraying mistake. It showed how much his concentration was slipping … his control. The purpose of his visit to Cheshire was supposed to be confidential—not that Karen was likely to realise its significance if he had told her that he was going there on business, but that wasn’t the point.

He ended his phone call without asking Karen if he could speak with either of his children, not because he hadn’t wanted to, but because he had recognised that neither of them was likely to want to speak to him. His fault and not theirs. As a father he hadn’t been much of a success, had he? He hadn’t been ‘there’ for them.

Not like his own father. He had been there for him. He had always been there for him; through his childhood, through his young adulthood, and even after his death Saul had felt his presence, had been comforted by the knowledge that he was fulfilling his father’s dreams for him, but just recently that closeness he had always felt had somehow slipped away from him. That inner conviction he had always had that in fulfilling his father’s ambitions for him he was also fulfilling his own dreams had somehow become lost to him.

He and his father had always been so close. It was a closeness that Christie had resented and rebelled against.

He smiled wryly as he thought about his sister. She had always been a rebel and in some ways she still was. She was unorthodox, idealistic, tough, gritty, and so determinedly independent that he wasn’t surprised she had never married.

She was also a marvellous mother. A much better mother than he was a father. He admired the way she had brought Cathy up herself, just as he admired the way she had doggedly pursued her chosen career and qualified as a GP.

Cathy had been born soon after she’d qualified, and even now, over twelve years later, he still had no idea exactly who his niece’s father was, only that he’d been married and had wanted nothing to do with his child—or its mother.

He dialled her number, smiling as he heard the familiar huskily abrupt sound of her voice.

‘You want to come and stay? Well, yes, of course you can, but why? What’s wrong?’ she demanded with sisterly candour.

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Saul told her. ‘It’s just that I’ve got some business to attend to there and I thought …’

‘You’d save money on hotel bills by staying with me. Since when, Saul?’ she scoffed. ‘More like you’re involved in something underhand and machiavellian for that precious boss of yours. I know you. There’s no way you’d voluntarily give up the luxury and comfort of staying somewhere like the Grosvenor for the chaos of my place unless you had some ulterior motive.’

‘Unless of course I just happened to want to see you and Cathy,’ Saul told her grimly.

Her comment had caught a raw spot, rubbed against an inflamed patch of his conscience, but even as he became aware of it he was aware also of his inability to control or conceal his reaction to it.

‘OK … OK …’ he heard Christie saying wryly. ‘Of course you can stay, Saul. As a matter of fact,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘you could be the answer to my prayers. I’m due to attend a conference at the end of next week. Cathy was going to stay with a schoolfriend, but the whole family’s gone down with mumps and I can’t inflict her on them as well.

‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of your extending your visit until after the conference, is there?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ Saul told her. He had only intended to spend a couple of days in Cheshire, but there was no reason why he shouldn’t stay a little while longer. The thought of putting some distance between himself and Sir Alex was one that appealed to him.

Alex was trying to manipulate him, to threaten him into submission. ‘Get me what I want or else’ had been implicit in his comments, and what the hell did he care about the damage he was about to inflict on the company he wanted to acquire?

Come to think of it, why should he care? Saul asked himself ten minutes later when he had finished speaking to Christie. He hadn’t minded in the past, had he?

At least not until Alex had wanted to take over and dismantle Dan Harper’s family company. Then he had minded.

He moved irritably from his desk to the fireplace. He had bought this apartment after the break-up of his marriage in what had then been an unfashionable part of London. The Georgian house was four storeys high and his apartment occupied the entire second floor. It was too large for a single man, but when he had bought it he had had the children in mind. The apartment had three good-sized bedrooms, each with its own bathroom.

He grimaced to himself. He could probably count quite easily on the fingers of both hands the number of times Josey and Tom had stayed with him for any period longer than one night, especially recently. Recently their visits had become even more spasmodic. Josey in particular seemed to be showing increased antagonism towards him.

Beside his bed he had a photograph of them, next to the one of his father.

His father. Why was it that, when he thought of his father these days, as well as all the love and the positive emotions he had always felt for him he now felt anxiety, a fear almost that somehow he was letting his father’s dreams for him slip away from him?

His father’s dreams for him. Wasn’t that the crux of the problem, of the doubts, the anxiety, the increasing awareness possessing him that his whole life had narrowed down to a tunnel which had become a trap, and that in continuing down that tunnel he was going against his own instincts, his own desires? Wasn’t that partially why there was so much antagonism between him and Alex? Wasn’t it true that somewhere deep inside him an unwanted voice was beginning to question what exactly it was he wanted out of life, whether the ambitions he was pursuing so relentlessly were really what he wanted?

And didn’t his thoughts always come back to this … this ongoing and increasingly stressful battle inside him to force himself to fulfil the tacit promises he had made his father?

For as long as he could remember, Saul had known that as his father’s son it was his duty to succeed and do well in life.

His earliest memories of conversations with his father were of the tight, painful feeling he got inside his stomach when his father told him how much he regretted wasting his own opportunities, how hard it was to bring up a family on his modest income and how, if he was wise, Saul would not do as he had done and ignore the importance of becoming a success.

Saul had hated those conversations. They had left him feeling sore inside and afraid. He loved his father and he was proud of him, and he hated knowing that somehow his father was not proud of himself; that in some way he felt as though he were a failure.

And yet, when Saul looked for an explanation as to why his father should feel this, he could not find it. He was loved by his family, especially Saul himself. His parents had lots of friends; there always seemed to be people dropping in; the large kitchen was always full of warmth and laughter, and, if his mother frowned sometimes and sighed anxiously when he tore his jeans, she still hugged and kissed him and told him he mustn’t worry when he asked her if it was true that they were poor.

Saul had not understood then why his father worried so much about money. It seemed to Saul that there could be no better place to live than here in their small, cosy, well-filled house with its untidy garden; that there could be no better feeling than the one he got when he came home from school to find his mother waiting for him in the kitchen with a smile and a warm hug. In fact, if it had not been for the fact that his father was so often worried and unhappy, Saul would have thought their family was very lucky indeed. But he knew that he must be wrong, because his father was not happy, his father was always urging him not to make the mistakes he had made, and that confused and worried him, because he loved his father and he wanted him to be happy.