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Джордан Пенни
Lingering Shadows
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CHAPTER SIX
GUILTILY aware of how long it had been since she had last seen Lucy, and of the discomfited look on Giles’s face whenever she mentioned his wife to him, on Saturday afternoon, knowing that Giles would be playing golf and that Lucy would be on her own, Davina decided to call round and see her.
She had done nothing wrong, she assured herself as she drove through the village. It was her duty to do all she could to protect the livelihoods of those who worked for Carey’s, and without Giles’s help she could not do that.
But Giles was Lucy’s husband, and one of the reasons she had been able to persuade Giles to stay on had been his feelings for her. Feelings which neither of them had discussed … admitted, but which both of them knew were there. Did Lucy know as well?
Davina’s heart sank. The last thing she wanted to do was to hurt anyone, and she genuinely liked Lucy. Oh, she knew that there were those in their small, tight-knit local circle who disapproved of her; Lucy wasn’t like them. She was flamboyant, outspoken, turbulent and passionate. She was also extremely attractive, Davina reflected as she drove through the soft Cheshire countryside.
And extremely unhappy?
Davina pushed the thought away. Lucy’s obvious disenchantment with her life and with her husband had nothing to do with her. Lucy was not a woman’s woman. She had no interest in cosy, gossipy chats over cups of coffee, comfortable womanly discussions on the failings of men in general and husbands in particular, rueful, sometimes too dangerously honest admissions that there came a point in a relationship when sex was no longer its prime motivating force, when, as one long-married wife had once put it in Davina’s hearing, she ‘got more excitement out of watching Neighbours than making love with her husband’.
Lucy was openly, too openly sometimes, scornful of that kind of female intimacy. Lucy was different, and, because she was different, other women found her dangerous.
Davina didn’t find her dangerous. Davina liked her, and when Giles had first come to work for Carey’s Davina had envied her. Things had been different then. She had not yet met Matt, and Lucy and Giles had been so obviously, so passionately, so blindingly in love with one another that it had made Davina’s empty heart ache just to see them.
She remembered calling round early one afternoon just after they had moved in. Giles had come to answer the door, his face flushed, his hair untidy, apologising for keeping her waiting, and then behind him on the landing Davina had seen Lucy, and she had known immediately that she had interrupted them making love.
She had felt so envious then, so alone.
And now she felt guilty, even though she told herself she had nothing to feel guilty about.
Davina parked her car on the Cheshire brick herringbone-patterned drive and walked up to the front door.
She remembered the first time she had visited the house and how stunned she had been by the way Lucy had decorated and furnished it. The whole house had seemed to sing with harmonious colour and warmth, soft peaches and terracottas which complemented Lucy’s dark red hair, cool blues and greens and creams, the colour of her eyes and skin; the house was Lucy, Davina had thought, right down to the femininity of the soft cushions and the voluptuous way in which she had used her fabrics. It was a house in which even on the greyest of days the sun always seemed to be shining.
Today the sun was shining, but when Lucy opened the door Davina was shocked to see how pale she looked, how withdrawn her manner was in stark contrast to her normal ebullience.
‘Lucy, it’s been ages since I saw you,’ Davina told her nervously. ‘It’s the company. It seems to eat into my time.’ As she followed Lucy into the kitchen Davina was aware that she was speaking too fast, gabbling almost.
‘Funny, that’s always Giles’s excuse,’ Lucy told her harshly. ‘The company. Odd that you never seemed very interested in it while Gregory was alive, isn’t it?’
There was outright hostility in her voice now and Davina’s heart sank. This was what she had been dreading; that Lucy would resent her for persuading Giles to stay on.
‘Lucy, I know how you must feel,’ she began awkwardly. ‘But——’
‘Do you? I don’t think so,’ Lucy interrupted her bitterly. ‘You aren’t the one who has to sit here alone all day waiting for your husband to come home, are you? Why are you so anxious to hold on to Carey’s, Davina? You never cared about it while Gregory was alive.’
‘I didn’t realise then the problems they were having,’ Davina told her. On that subject at least she could be totally honest with Lucy. She owed it to her to be totally honest with her. ‘I have to try to keep Carey’s going, Lucy. I can’t let the company close down.’
‘Why not? You’re financially secure, aren’t you?’
Davina winced at the accusation in her voice. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘It isn’t the money, Lucy. It isn’t for me …’
‘Then who is it for?’ Lucy asked sarcastically. ‘Giles?’
Davina winced again.
‘If Carey’s closes, over two hundred people will lose their jobs, and there are no other jobs for them to go to.’
‘Giles can get another job,’ Lucy told her stubbornly. ‘Giles isn’t free to throw his career chances away for Carey’s, Davina. Giles is my husband.’
‘I know that.’ Davina couldn’t look at her. She could see how angry Lucy was, how upset, but there was more than anger in her eyes; there was pain, as well as vulnerability. Davina wasn’t used to seeing Lucy vulnerable, and doing so now made her ache a little inside.
She had always envied Lucy slightly, envied her insouciance, her self-confidence, her brilliant, glowing sensuality, her way of living life to its fullest, and most of all, if she was honest, she had envied Lucy the love that existed between her and Giles. Not because she had wanted Giles for herself, never that … No, what she had envied Lucy was the state of being loved, of being wanted, needed, of being the centre of someone’s world.
Once she had known a little of what that was like, once and very, very briefly, but what she had known had merely been a shadow of the brilliance of the love that Lucy and Giles had seemed to share.
What had happened to them? What had happened to that love? She could understand why Lucy was resentful and angry that Giles was staying on at Carey’s, but surely she must know that it was Giles’s very nature to stick loyally to those to whom he believed he owed that loyalty?
‘I was wondering if you fancied a day in Chester, shopping?’ Davina asked her, trying to change the subject to something less painful.
‘Shopping? While Carey’s goes bankrupt and people lose their jobs?’ Lucy demanded gibingly.
Davina flushed, with irritation, not guilt. Lucy was being deliberately difficult … childish almost. For the first time Davina realised that there was still a lot of the child about Lucy, and that it was this combination of a child’s faroucheness and a woman’s sexuality that made her so powerfully appealing.
She tried again.
‘Lucy, I’m sorry if you’re angry because Giles has decided to stay on a little longer at Carey’s.’
‘So it was Giles’s decision, was it?’ Lucy demanded tauntingly.
Davina heard the bitterness in her voice and her own heart suddenly felt unbearably heavy. It had been wrong of her to persuade Giles to stay, but what alternative had she had? If he left, the company would collapse. There was literally no one else who could take over. She tried to explain as much to Lucy, but Lucy did not want to listen.
‘Giles isn’t doing this for Carey’s, Davina,’ Lucy interrupted her angrily at one point. ‘He’s doing it for you. You know it and I know it. Even Gregory knew it.’
Davina couldn’t hide her shock. It was reflected in her eyes, in the way her body tensed, her colour fluctuating as she demanded huskily, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, come on, Davina. Giles must have told you about the arguments he and Gregory had about the way Gregory was running the company. Giles didn’t approve of the way Gregory was playing with the firm’s money. He was concerned for your future … your security. He even threatened Gregory that he would tell you what was going on. If Gregory had lived he would have sacked Giles, and Giles knew it. Do you honestly think Giles did any of that because of Carey’s? It isn’t Carey’s Giles cares about, Davina. It’s you.’
‘No … no, that isn’t true,’ Davina denied, but she felt like Judas, not only denying Giles, but also denying Lucy the right to express her bitterness and pain.
When she left it was with the feeling that all she had done was to make things worse. The last thing she would do would be to have an affair with another woman’s husband, especially when that woman was a friend; surely Lucy knew that? She liked Giles, of course she did. And yes, she was flattered … comforted even by his obvious concern for her, but that was as far as it went.
Except that she had used Giles’s concern for her to persuade him to stay on at Carey’s. Except that, in being concerned for her, Giles was very obviously hurting Lucy. And hurting other people was the very last thing Davina wanted to be responsible for.
From an upstairs window Lucy watched Davina drive away. She ought to hate Davina, but she couldn’t. She felt too afraid. What would she do if Giles did leave her? She loved him, she had always loved him and she always would, but so much had changed between them, and she knew that she herself was sometimes guilty of almost deliberately trying to drive him away, but she hurt so much inside. The pain was unbearable, eating into her, driving her into a frenzy of despair so that she had to lash out at someone, and that someone was inevitably Giles.
No, she couldn’t blame him if he left her for Davina. Davina was older than her but she was still young enough to give him children … sons.
The scene beyond the window blurred as her eyes filled with tears. Sons. Men needed them … craved them. They were always more important to them than daughters. Lucy had learned that when she was six years old. The day her mother told her that her father had left them to go and live with someone else.
Lucy hadn’t understood at first when her mother had told her that she wasn’t her father’s only child. That she had half-brothers, two of them, five years younger than Lucy. Twins … two boys … two sons. How could one daughter ever be important enough to a man to hold him against competition like that?
‘When is Daddy coming home?’ she had asked her mother over and over again until at last she had turned on her and screamed,
‘Never! Do you understand? Never. He doesn’t want us any more. He doesn’t want you. He has other children now … two sons, and they’re more important to him than you and I could ever be.’
Lucy had been afraid then; afraid because she knew that somehow being a girl meant that she would never, ever be loved as much as if she had been a boy.
She was a rebellious child, difficult, her mother said. Her teachers complained about her wilfulness and blamed it on her red hair. Lucy didn’t care. When she was naughty people couldn’t ignore her. When she was naughty she was almost as important as if she had been a boy.
Tall for her age, thin and gawky, she was almost fifteen when suddenly, overnight almost, she was transformed from an ugly duckling of an overgrown schoolgirl into a stunningly sensual young woman.
Suddenly she had a figure, breasts, a waist, hips. Suddenly her legs, so thin and coltish, were enviably long and slender. Suddenly her eyes seemed to develop a mysterious slant, her mouth a soft pout. Suddenly Lucy discovered the power of her sexuality, and equally suddenly boys discovered her.
Now things were different. Now Lucy discovered that one look from her bewitching eyes, one toss of her red curls, one tantalising pout was enough to have every boy in the neighbourhood at her feet.
Suddenly she had something that others wanted, and because of it she was valued … loved … or so it seemed to the emotionally starved child who still lived inside the quickly developing body of the new Lucy.
For a while Lucy was happy. People … boys … wanted her and said they loved her, and then three months before her seventeenth birthday her mother announced that she was remarrying. The man she was marrying did not, it seemed, want a seventeen-year-old stepdaughter, and it had been decided that Lucy would go to live with an aunt of her mother’s in London.
Lucy told everyone at school that London was ‘quite definitely the place to be’, and she even pretended that she had actually persuaded her mother to let her go and live with her great-aunt.
Lucy had become very good at pretending, like when the boys who said they loved her fumbled clumsily with her clothing, their hands hot and sweaty on her body. She pretended to herself that she enjoyed what they were doing; that she liked the way they touched her … wanted her, when in fact what she really felt inside was very afraid and very alone. She would never admit that to anyone, though. Not to anyone.
At eighteen Lucy left school and then drifted casually from job to job. Jobs were plentiful in London and Lucy was too busy enjoying herself to think about things as dull and boring as the future.
She was no longer living with her great-aunt. Now she shared a flat with three other girls; and not always the same three other girls. Life was casual, careless; Lucy was popular and sought-after. By the time she was twenty-one she had been engaged three times and had turned down several other proposals.
But deep down inside, despite her popularity, Lucy was afraid … afraid that somehow she was not worthy of being loved, afraid that when men said they loved her they did not mean it. Her father had said he loved her but it had not been true. He had left her. And so had her mother.
Lucy was determined that if there was any more leaving to be done she would be the one to do it, and she did.
She had turned from a pretty girl into a stunningly beautiful and sensual young woman. Men were fascinated by her. She was more cautious now, though, more wary; less inclined to give anything of herself. She had learned that men valued best that which was the hardest to obtain. Lucy took care to make sure that she was very hard to obtain. Impossibly hard, in most cases.
And then she met Giles.
She was working for an upmarket London PR firm. Giles worked for a recruitment agency which was headhunting for a new advertising director for the company.
He came in one afternoon to see Lucy’s boss. And then he returned, the next day and the next, for the rest of the week in fact, until he finally plucked up the courage to ask her out.
He wasn’t Lucy’s type at all, too shy, too quiet, but he continued to besiege her until finally, out of a mixture of exasperation and amusement, she went out with him.
It was only after her fifth date with him that Lucy admitted to herself that, while he might not be her type, she was enjoying the way he treated her, the way he spoiled and pampered her. Not in the financial sense—Lucy wasn’t particularly impressed by money as money, although she had a love of rich things that made her sensually materialistic. No, it was the way Giles bathed her in his obvious love for her, the way he surrounded her with it, wrapped her in it; the way when they were out together he so patently never even thought of looking at anyone else.
Lucy was a beautiful young woman but her upbringing, her insecurities and the type of men she had dated before had taught her that, while she might be valued and wanted for her physical appearance, her escorts were constantly and sometimes not even very tactfully checking to make sure that she, their date, was the most attractive woman in the room; that the other men were aware who she was with, that they were envying them because she was with them.
With Giles there was none of that, and yet it was plain that he was totally bemused, totally head over heels in love with her. Lucy, starved all her life of such unquestioning love, responded to it.
The sharply clever manner she adopted with other men softened when she was with Giles. When they were together she started to shed the outer of her many layers of protective cynicism. When he kissed her and she felt his body tremble, instead of inwardly mocking him for his weakness she found that she wanted to cling to him and hold him.
She had assumed from his manner towards her that Giles would be a tentative, hesitant lover, but when he stumblingly invited her to spend a long weekend with him she discovered otherwise.
He did not, as others had, take her to an expensive, prestigious hotel where he could show her off during the day to the other envious male guests, and where at night he could make love to her in the anonymous surroundings of their hotel bedroom.
Instead Lucy discovered that he had rented what he hesitantly described as ‘a cottage’, though not some rough, ill-equipped and damp affair as she had dreaded. No, he had displayed far greater sensitivity than that, and what intrigued and tantalised her even more was that he had also displayed how keenly aware he was of what pleased her. Because the cottage was, in fact, a small country house, not very far from Bath, since, as he told her hesitantly when they arrived, he had thought she might like to visit Bath while they were staying in the area.
‘I believe there are some very good shops,’ he told her, clearing his throat a little uncertainly and looking hesitantly at her in the half-light of the evening.
Shops! Lucy smiled to herself. Giles was far more perceptive than she had realised. There was nothing she enjoyed more than shopping. She remembered for the first time with a faint touch of self-dislike the occasions in the past when she had subtly manoeuvred a previous unwilling escort into taking her shopping, and when she had normally also managed to inveigle him into buying her something.
Her machinations had never bothered her in the past, so why did she feel this unexpected dislike at the thought of cynically coaxing Giles into buying her something? She dismissed the thought, wondering if the ‘cottage’ would be as presentable inside as it was out.
It was set in its own large gardens, and, from what she could see of them in the dusk, they were softly pretty with flowers, climbing roses and clematis, a perfect complement for the softly washed pink-tinged front of the house.
She wasn’t disappointed.
Inside, the house smelled of polish and fresh flowers, which were everywhere, and in her favourite colours as well, she observed as she walked silently through the downstairs rooms and the hall, with its polished floor and rugs, its circular polished table with the huge display of delphiniums, and larkspurs in their lavender-blues and lilacs spiked with white.
The sitting-room was large and elegantly furnished, off-white settees with mounds of cushions, sofa tables with displays of flowers, this time in creams and soft pinks, huge overblown roses that looked as though they had come straight from some country garden.
She touched the petals of one of them. It was still slightly damp, as though it had actually just been picked.
A log fire, a real one, burned in the hearth, the faint smell of seasoned logs mingling with the scent of the roses.
Behind her she heard Giles saying roughly, ‘They reminded me of you, of the colour and texture of your skin, of the way you smell,’ and then he was holding her, burying his mouth in the nape of her neck and then the side of her throat, and she realised that he had actually chosen the flowers himself.
Something inside her, some hard, tight part of her which had never been breached, swelled and ached with the emotion she had locked away inside it. Astoundingly she felt her eyes prick with tears and her heart … her heart, not just her body, ache with feeling.
Giles was pressed up hard against her back. She could feel him trembling, knew how much he wanted her, and yet he still released her, apologising rawly, ‘I’m sorry. That was crass of me.’
Lucy looked at him. One of her flatmates had commented on how attractive he was, how solid and male-looking. She herself hadn’t really been aware of it before, but now suddenly she was.
Angry with herself and for some reason a little afraid, she reacted instinctively, adopting her normal manner of protective cynicism, shrugging as she flicked the petals of one of the roses with her polished fingertips and commenting, ‘Well, there certainly isn’t any need to rush, is there? I mean, we’ve got the whole long weekend. Four whole days.’
The look in Giles’s eyes stunned her.
‘A lifetime wouldn’t be enough for me, Lucy,’ he told her hoarsely.
After that, to be allowed to go upstairs on her own while he unpacked the car threw her a little.
The house had five bedrooms, two with their own bathrooms. She chose the smaller of these, oddly drawn by its softly pretty country décor. The ceiling sloped down to a pair of dormer windows, and it had been papered with a pretty cottagey paper. The bed was high and old-fashioned, with proper bedding instead of a duvet. The floor was carpeted in such a pale peach carpet that it made the whole room seem full of warmth and light.
The bathroom off the bedroom was simple and functional. The sanitary-ware was white and old-fashioned, the bath huge with enormous brass taps. As a concession to modern-day living, a wall of neat cupboards had been installed with, Lucy was pleased to see, mirrors set above them and decent lighting. The floor was polished and sealed, a proper door on the shower instead of the plastic curtain they had in the flat.
She heard Giles coming upstairs and opened the bedroom door.
‘I haven’t booked dinner anywhere for us this evening,’ he told her awkwardly. ‘I wasn’t sure what you’d feel like doing.’
It was obvious what he felt like doing, Lucy reflected to herself. She was torn between irritation and a sudden and sharply unexpected frisson of tension, of nervousness almost. Her, nervous … and of Giles? Impossible.
‘Well, what I feel like doing right now is having a shower,’ she told him coolly. ‘And what I shan’t feel like doing afterwards is …’ She hesitated deliberately, watching him, waiting for him to become either angry or hectoring, but instead he simply looked steadily back at her. ‘I’m hungry,’ she told him pettishly, suddenly unsure of herself, and afraid because of it. ‘And I certainly don’t intend to play the little woman and start cooking.’
She reached out, took her case from him, and then retreated, closing the bedroom door on him. She waited for several minutes, wondering what he would do, and then she heard him going back downstairs.
As she stripped off her clothes and showered she wasn’t sure whether she was pleased or disappointed that he had taken her dismissal so calmly. Most of the men she knew would have been demanding their pound of flesh by now and no mistake.
She eyed herself in the mirrors as she stepped out of the shower. She had a good body; her breasts were perhaps a little fuller than fashion dictated, but her waist was enviably narrow, her legs long and slender, her bone-structure that of an expensive, fragile racehorse. Her skin gleamed with health and with the scented moisturiser she was fanatical about using. She had the beginnings of a soft peachy tan.
There was a hectic flush along her cheekbones and her eyes looked huge, as though she had been on drugs, she recognised tensely. She dried her hair and then took her time dressing and reapplying her make-up.
There was no sign of Giles. The house was so quiet that she even wondered if he had perhaps gone and left her, but when she went to the window and looked out she could just about make out the outline of the car in the darkness.
She opened the bedroom door and walked out. She had been through this often enough before to know what it was all about, she reminded herself as she walked downstairs.
So why was she feeling so nervous … so on edge?
She had almost reached the bottom step when the kitchen door opened and Giles appeared. He had changed too, and his hair was damp as though he had showered. He must, she realised on a small spurt of shock, have used one of the other rooms.
‘Supper’s ready,’ he told her.
Supper was ready. Lucy stared at him. What had he done? Certainly he could not have sent out for a takeaway, not here.
‘I thought we’d eat in the sitting-room,’ he added a little uncertainly.
Lucy nodded, for once lost for words.
An hour later, greedily eating the last of her chocolate mousse, she admitted to herself that she was impressed.
The food, which, Giles had told her shyly, he had brought with him in a hamper from London, had been wildly delicious and, she suspected, wildly expensive. There had been champagne, pink champagne, which she knew others looked down on, but which she loved.
They had started the meal with tiny wild strawberries, and then there had been delicious cold salmon served with delicately flavoured salads, a sorbet laced with something alcoholic, and then proper, darkly bitter chocolate mousse, and she had greedily eaten both hers and Giles’s.
It had been food chosen not for a man but for a woman, and again she was confused by Giles’s sensitivity in so accurately gauging her tastes.
Now, curled up on the settee while Giles removed the remains of their meal, she felt relaxed and replete. She felt, she recognised on a sudden startled stab of awareness, happy.
The scented candles Giles had lit while they ate still burned, filled the room with their fragrance, warm and musky. She breathed it in sensuously.
She was wearing a simple shift dress, simple in design, that was. It had been perilously expensive, so soft and fragile that all she was able to wear underneath it was a tiny pair of briefs.
Now as she moved into a more comfortable position on the settee she was aware of the sudden sharp peaking of her nipples, and the slow unfolding ache of desire inside her.
When Giles came back she smiled languorously at him, her eyes narrowed and mysterious. He came across to her, leaning over her. His hand cupped her face. It felt good against her skin, cool and firm. His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, tentatively, hesitantly almost. She let her lips part, rubbing the tip of his thumb with her tongue, her eyes closing sensuously, but there was nothing calculated or deliberate about the gesture, she was genuinely aroused, and as she arched up towards Giles she heard him mutter thickly. ‘Oh, God, Lucy …’
He had never kissed her so fiercely before, so hungrily. She heard him telling her unsteadily that she tasted of chocolate, but then she teased him with her tongue and he stopped saying anything.
She had never, she realised breathlessly later, wanted to make love so much with any man. Suddenly she couldn’t wait to be rid of her clothes and for Giles to be rid of his. She could feel how aroused he was and that knowledge excited her.
She tugged impatiently at the buttons on his shirt, spreading her hands flat against his chest, licking and nuzzling his bare throat and then his chest, laughing softly as she heard him groan and felt the sweat springing up on his skin.
He fumbled with the zip on her dress the first time he tried to unfasten it, but instead of irritating her his hesitancy only seemed to sharpen the excitement coiling inside her. When he finally unfastened it and the dress slid to a silky heap at her feet, leaving her body virtually naked, gilded by the light of the candles, its sheen enhanced by the soft cream backdrop of the settee, the dark arousal of her nipples as perfect as the deepest of the velvet-petalled roses, Giles didn’t touch her. He simply looked at her.
Men had looked at Lucy before, but none of them had ever looked at her like this, as though they were beholding a miracle, a vision; none of them had ever looked at her with heaven in his eyes.
And then he started to touch her, to kiss her, not hesitantly or half clumsily, as she had expected, but with a true lover’s sensitive awareness of every minute response she made, so that when she quivered as his mouth touched the sensitive cord in her neck he kissed it again slowly and lingeringly. And when her nipple swelled tautly in the moist heat of his mouth he knew that she wanted him to caress her there, without her having to say or do anything to tell him so.
His knowledge of how to please her was something that shocked her almost as much as her own quick, almost avid sexual response to him. She found that she was piqued, jealous almost of where he might have gained that knowledge, of the woman or women with whom he had learned such unexpected skills.
But, as Giles told her later, his sexual experience was far less than hers, and what had guided him, motivated him had been his need to please her, to love her.
The climax that shook her body long before he entered her caught them both off guard, Lucy doubly so because it was an alien sensation to her to have her body so completely out of her own control.
Giles was not a selfish lover, nor a demanding one, and nor, she discovered to her astonishment, would he allow her to even the score with the quick, deft manipulation of her hand.
When she drew back from him, startled to have her hand gently but very definitely removed from his body, he told her quietly, ‘When it happens I want it to be when I’m inside you.’
She made a brief, automatic inviting movement, but he shook his head.
‘No,’ he told her huskily. ‘I want you to want it as well.’
Later she did, laughing a little at him when it was over so quickly, recovering the control she felt she had lost when her body had responded to him so completely earlier.
She fell asleep in his arms, something so alien to her that to wake up and discover that she was in bed with him, and to know that he must have carried her upstairs while she slept, sent a frisson of apprehension along her spine.
To quell it she woke him up and made love to him passionately, almost angrily, her anger dissolving into tears of release when her body was overwhelmed by the intensity of her orgasm.
When she woke up in the morning she was alone. She turned her head, glancing at where Giles had slept, the pillow smelling faintly of him. She moved, turning her face into it, her emotions torn between a helpless awareness of how different he was from anyone else she had known and an instinctive fear of that difference and what it was doing to her.
He came back while she was lying there. He had, she realised when she saw the tray he was carrying, brought her her breakfast … her breakfast, she noticed, and not his: orange juice, which looked as though it had been freshly squeezed, warm croissants, honey and tea—proper tea, not the insipid tea-bag variety they normally had in the flat, and all served on a tray with a cloth and proper china, and, instead of the too perfectly tightly furled hot-house-grown rosebud which always seemed de rigueur in the hotels in which she had stayed with previous lovers, Giles had picked from the garden a jugful of fully open, softly petalled roses.
She buried her face in them, breathing in their scent, not wanting him to see the stupid tears burning her eyes.
‘Where’s your breakfast?’ she asked him when she judged that her voice was steady enough for her to do so.
The smile he gave her was rueful, boyish almost. ‘I had bacon and eggs,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t think you’d appreciate the smell. I thought I’d walk down to the village and get some papers—let you eat in peace.’
It shocked her that he should know her so well already, that he should know that after the intimacy they had shared she now needed some time to herself, to distance herself a little from the intensity of that intimacy, to recover the emotional isolation that was so necessary to her.
She was a sensual woman, but she was also one who had absorbed too many of the sexual insecurities suffered by her mother when she was abandoned by Lucy’s father.
Although when making love she had no inhibitions at all about her body, she preferred to perform the ritual of cleansing her skin, of preparing herself for the world, on her own.
While she could enjoy the love-play that went with sharing a shower or a bath with her lover, she did not like to share what was to her the greater intimacy of preparing herself to face the outside world. No man had ever realised that so immediately and instinctively as Giles had known it.
After he had gone she pictured him making her breakfast, squeezing the oranges, picking the roses. So much care … so much planning must have gone into every fine detail of this weekend with her. She liked that. She liked knowing that he had gone to so much trouble. Where another woman might have disliked his lack of spontaneity, Lucy did not. To her spontaneity equalled fecklessness, the same restlessness which had driven her father to leave her mother. Giles wasn’t like that. Giles was careful, thoughtful. He made plans.
It was a magical weekend, extended by an extra two days because neither of them could bear to break the spell.
Once Giles could add knowledge to his love for her, his lovemaking took on a special quality that took it worlds beyond anything Lucy had known before.
And it wasn’t just in bed that he surprised and delighted her. He took her out, sightseeing, shopping, entrancing her with his determination to spoil and indulge her.
It was only when they were driving back to London that he confessed to her that he hadn’t hired the house at all, but that it belonged to his godmother.
Lucy already knew that both his parents were dead. He had been born to them late in their lives, an only child maybe, but one who had still had the love of both his parents.
When he said he loved her he meant it, Lucy recognised, and she was beginning to suspect that she loved him as well.
Strangely, that did not terrify her as it might once have done, and when three months later he proposed, she accepted.
They were idyllically happy. Secure for the first time in her memory, gradually Lucy let her defences down.
Children, he must want children. She had tested him before they were married, but he had shaken his head and told her roughly that she was all that he wanted.
‘Maybe one day, if you want them,’ he had told her. ‘But girls, Lucy, not boys, otherwise I shall be jealous of them.’
She had laughed then. His words seemed to set the final seal on her happiness.
And they had been happy, Lucy remembered achingly. Too happy perhaps. Perhaps the very quality and intensity of her happiness ought to have warned her.
She had never intended to become pregnant. It had been an accident; a brief bout of food poisoning which had nullified the effect of the contraceptive pill she was taking. By the time she realised she was pregnant it was too late for her to opt for an early termination.
She had been frantic at first, angry and resentful, with Giles as well as with the child she was carrying. She was thirty-three years old and the last thing she wanted was a baby.
Although she tried to suppress them, all the fears she had had before she fell in love with Giles resurfaced. She was alternately anxious and emotional, angry and depressed, but stubbornly she refused to explain to Giles what was wrong. He thought it was because she was pregnant without wanting to be and that she blamed him for it, when in fact she was suddenly terrified of turning into her mother; of producing a child which Giles would reject along with her.
She couldn’t analyse her fears and she certainly could not discuss them with anyone. Her doctor was old-fashioned and disapproved of mothers-to-be being anything other than docilely pleased with their condition.
The more her pregnancy developed, the more afraid Lucy became, the more trapped and angry she felt. And as the weeks went by she could almost feel Giles withdrawing from her. Where once he had always slept as close to her as he could, now he turned away from her in bed.
Her body was changing. She was carrying a lot of water with the baby, which made her seem huge. It was no wonder Giles didn’t want her any more. He denied it, though, and claimed that it was for her sake, because he could see how tired she was, how great her discomfort.
She couldn’t sleep at night, twisting and turning. She woke up one night and Giles wasn’t there. She found him sleeping peacefully in the spare room. She woke him up, furious with him, blaming him for everything, telling him how much she hated him … how much she hated the baby.
She felt more afraid and alone than she had ever felt in her life. She was so used to having Giles to lean on, having Giles to love her, and now suddenly it seemed as though he didn’t any more.
She couldn’t bear people asking her about the baby, and when they did her whole body would tense with rejection, but some instinct she hadn’t known she possessed drove her.
She found she was instinctively adjusting her diet; exercising her body less vigorously, sleeping for longer; it was as though some part of her outside her control was ensuring that, despite her conscious resentment and misery, her baby was being well looked after.
The first time she felt the baby kick she was in the garden picking flowers for a dinner party. She dropped them in shock and stood there, her eyes suddenly brilliant with tears, but when Giles came home she didn’t say anything to him.
A gulf seemed to have opened between them. He couldn’t even seem to look at her these days without wincing, and when he kissed her it was a chaste, dry peck on the cheek.
The people they were entertaining that evening were a local solicitor and his wife. Giles was well established at Carey’s now, even though he detested Gregory James. He was not the kind of man who enjoyed pushing his way up the corporate ladder, and as long as he was happy Lucy had been happy as well. He was a good husband financially, generous, giving her her own allowance. His godmother had died just after their marriage and the money he had inherited from her he had invested to bring them in an extra income so that they lived very comfortably.
The solicitor’s wife was a couple of years younger than Lucy but looked older. She had three young children, around whom her entire life revolved.
‘Has the baby kicked yet?’ she asked Lucy over dinner. ‘I remember the first time John did … I couldn’t wait to tell Alistair. We spent all evening with me with my turn exposed and Alistair’s hand on it just so that he wouldn’t miss it if it happened again. And it was the middle of winter.’
Lucy’s hand shook as she tried to eat her food. Giles couldn’t bear to look at her now, never mind touch her, or at least that was how it seemed.
When Lucy was just over six months pregnant she went into premature labour. Giles was away on business for Carey’s and so there was no one to accompany her when the ambulance screamed to a halt outside the house, summoned by the alert doctor’s receptionist’s response to her frightened telephone call.
The baby, a boy, was born before Giles arrived. She wasn’t allowed to hold him. He was taken away to be placed in an incubator. He was very frail, the hospital told them when Giles arrived two hours later, white and strained, having received a message relayed from the hospital via his secretary.
Lucy was too shocked and drugged to take in much of what was being said. It had all been so unexpected. There had been no warning signs, nothing she had felt or done.
It happened like that sometimes, the nurses soothed her, but Lucy couldn’t let it rest. She felt guilty that somehow she was the one responsible for the baby’s too early birth. She wanted desperately to see him, but had lost a lot of blood and they didn’t want her to move.
In the morning she could see her son, they told her, and Giles, who had been terrified when he walked into the ward and saw how pitifully small and frail she looked, tried awkwardly to describe their child to her.
His halting, terse description seemed to reinforce to Lucy that she had failed, and that he was angry with her because it was her fault that the baby had been born too soon, when in reality what Giles was trying to do was to blot out his mental image of the appalling fragility of the little figure he had seen through the screen that separated him from the premature-baby unit, and the wires and tubes that had been attached to his son’s minute body.
He hadn’t realised until he saw him just how much the sight of his own child would affect him. He had known that Lucy did not want children, and he loved her so much that he had been happy with that. He had seen how angry she was when she found out she was pregnant, and he had known that she blamed him.
All through her pregnancy his guilt had increased. He had seen the discomfort she was in. He had tried his best not to exacerbate things for her. He had even started sleeping in another room in case his need for her overwhelmed him. He ached so much to touch her, to explore and know the rounding contours of her body. He was amazed at how very sensual and arousing he found the visible signs of her pregnancy, at how much he wanted to make love to her, a reaffirmation of all that he felt for her and for the child they had made between them, and then he had been ashamed of his need, reminding himself that Lucy did not share the joy he was beginning to feel in the coming baby.
Now, in the hospital, trying to describe their son to her, he ached with the love the sight of him had stirred up inside him, and with the fear. He was so small … so fragile. He could feel the tears clogging his throat, burning his eyes, and he knew he mustn’t cry in front of Lucy. He turned away from her, unaware of the hand she had stretched out towards him as she tried to find the words to plead with him to tell her more about their child.
She ached inside with the loss of him. A feeling she had never known she could experience overwhelmed her. She wanted her child here with her, in her arms, at her breast, and that need was a physical pain that wrenched apart her whole body.
In the end, hours after Giles had gone home, they let her see him, afraid that if they didn’t she would work herself up into a fever anyway.
The nurse who wheeled her down to the prem unit warned her what to expect.
‘He’s very small,’ she told her quietly. ‘And very frail, I’m afraid.’
Lucy didn’t hear her. ‘My child … my son.’ Her body tensed, aching with love and fear.
The small room seemed so full of equipment that the five incubators were almost lost among the paraphernalia of monitors and tubes.
The nurse on duty stood up, frowning a little as Lucy was wheeled in, but Lucy was oblivious to her presence. All her attention was concentrated on the tiny baby in its incubator; the sole occupant of the small ward, her baby … her son. Without realising what she was doing she stood up, her body trembling as she left the wheelchair, ignoring the protests of the attendant nurse, the weakness of her own body forgotten as she stumbled across to the incubator.
The baby was lying on his back, his head turned towards her, his eyes open. She shuddered as she saw the mass of tubes attached to him and the way his tiny, fragile body fought to take in oxygen. His entire body from head to toe was only a little longer than a grown man’s hand, his limbs so delicate and fragile that his vulnerability made Lucy tremble with anguish and love.
Her impulse to reach into the incubator and pick him up was so strong that she could barely resist it. Her body ached with tenderness and despair. The intensity of the emotion that gripped her was like nothing she had ever experienced or imagined experiencing. Every other aspect of her life faded into oblivion as she looked at her baby and saw him look back at her. The pain of wanting to reach out and touch him, to hold him, and of knowing that for his sake she could not do so, that to even attempt to do so would be to endanger his life, filled her whole body.
As she watched him she prayed for his survival and knew that she would sacrifice anything, even her own life, for him, and the fact that she had once not wanted him or any other child was forgotten in the wave of love that swamped her. She stood motionlessly watching him, pleading silently.
Please God, let him live. Let him live. The sin, the guilt is mine. Please don’t punish him because I thought I didn’t want him.
But her prayers went unanswered. He was a strong baby, they told her compassionately later, but just not strong enough. He had been born too soon and his body was just not developed enough to sustain him outside the womb.
Lucy knew before they came to tell her that he had gone. She had spent every moment they allowed her in the unit, watching over him, afraid even to look away from him, silently, fiercely supporting him with her strength and her love, willing him to go on living, but finally the staff overruled her protests that she must stay with him, and she was wheeled back to her bed. She had lost a good deal of blood, they reminded her, and she was still far from fully recovered herself.
When Giles arrived she wept and begged him to make them let her stay with Nicholas, and when Giles told her that he agreed with the staff that she must recoup some of her own strength she turned away from him and refused to speak to him.
The rift that had developed between them while she was pregnant seemed to have deepened with Nicholas’s premature birth.
Although she did not know it, Giles blamed himself for not being there with her when she went into labour. At the back of his mind lay the feeling that somehow, if he had been, things might have been different.
It had shocked him when he arrived at the hospital to see how ill Lucy looked. He had been so desperately afraid then that he might lose her that for a moment he had actually forgotten their child.
Their child. His heart ached with the weight of his love for Nicholas. A love he couldn’t find the words to express, especially not to Lucy.
Nicholas’s birth had changed her completely. The girl who had so fiercely resented her pregnancy had become a sad-eyed, haunted woman who seemed barely aware that anyone other than her child existed. She seemed to have distanced herself from him completely. When he touched her she winced away from him. He could see in her eyes now her anger and bitterness.
‘Giles, please. I must be with him … I must.’
Her voice had started to rise, panic flooding her as the need inside her fought against her physical weakness, her inability to get up and go to her child.
Tears filled her eyes. She didn’t want to cry, she wanted to scream, to rage, to vent her anger and her fear, to somehow make them understand that she must be with her child, but already a nurse was hurrying towards her bed, holding her wrist, telling her firmly that she must not upset herself.
She tried to fight off the drug they gave her, forcing her weighted eyelids not to drop, focusing bitterly on Giles’s blurring face as she lost her battle.
She woke up abruptly hours later, her heart pounding, her mouth dry. It was just gone two o’clock, and she knew immediately why she was awake.
She heard the door to the ward open quietly and saw the nurse coming in, heading for the small curtained area at the end of the ward. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t; the pain was too great for that.
Giles. Where was Giles? Why wasn’t he here with her? Didn’t he care?
Outside the premature-baby unit, Giles leaned back in his chair, blinking his eyes rapidly. He couldn’t believe it was over. They had told him to go home after they had given Lucy the sleeping drug but he hadn’t been able to do so. He could still see the way she had pleaded with them to let her be with Nicholas.
Had she known? He shuddered, weighed down by his sense of guilt and failure, and the ache of loss. Their child, their son … his son. Born and now dead.
He stayed until a doctor gently insisted that he must leave; that he must go home and rest because Lucy would need him when she woke up and was told the news.
Giles wanted to tell her how much he wanted to hold his child … how much he wanted to lift him from his cradle of plastic and metal—after all, they could not save him now—and hold him against his body, flesh to flesh, father to child. That he wanted to pour out to him all the love he felt for him, but he just could not find the words, and so instead he nodded and stumbled out of the hospital into the cold of the pre-dawn summer morning.
They would not wake Lucy until nine, they told him kindly. That would give him time to have a brief rest and get back to be with her.
It was not his fault, nor the hospital’s, that Lucy did not need to be wakened.
She waited until the nurses changed shift. There was a new nurse, a trainee, the ward was busy, and it was easy for Lucy to convince the girl that she could manage to get to the bathroom unaided.
It took her a long time to make her way to the prem unit. She was still very weak. They hadn’t told her just how much blood she had lost or just how much danger she had actually been in, and Lucy assumed that it was the drug they had given her that made her feel so unsteady.
The nurse in charge of the unit didn’t see her until it was too late. The tubes had been removed from the incubator and Nicholas had been dressed in a set of minute doll’s clothes, a white knitted romper suit embroidered with teddy bears in pale blue and yellow.
The mother of another premature baby had given the clothes to the hospital, and the nurse, who knew that she should have the strength to detach herself from her emotions, had cried a little as she dressed him in them.
She saw Lucy and knew immediately that there was no need to tell her anything, and she marvelled, not for the first time, at the power of maternal love. Silently she settled Lucy with Nicholas in her arms and then went to her office to ring Lucy’s ward.
His body felt soft and warm so that it was almost possible for Lucy to believe that he was simply asleep. She touched his face. His skin felt so soft. He looked like Giles. She was sure of it. It was only when she kissed him that her control broke, her body racked by the shudders of pain that ached through her.
By the time Giles arrived they had sedated her, and, what with his concern over her and the arrangements for the funeral she insisted on holding, it never occurred to Giles to tell her how he had watched over Nicholas for her, or that he had been with him when he died.
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