For Better for Worse
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

EPILOGUE

Copyright

PROLOGUE

AS FERN saw Nick walk into the kitchen, her stomach muscles tensed.

She had heard him arrive from upstairs, had witnessed the impatience with which he had slewed the car to a halt and climbed out, slamming the door, and then glancing up at the house.

She had stepped back from the window then, an automatic and very betraying gesture, pausing as she caught sight of herself in her dressing-table mirror. She looked strained and tired, her eyes empty and lifeless… as empty and lifeless as her marriage to Nick?

Abruptly she had turned away from the mirror and hurried downstairs.

It was her own fault that Nick was in a bad mood, of course. She should not have raised the subject of how much time he was spending working last night. He had always hated her ‘interfering in his life’, as he called it. She had learned early on in her marriage that Nick loathed any form of restraint, even the mildest hint of criticism.

What was wrong with her? he had demanded to know last night. Didn’t she realise how fortunate she was, how many women would gladly change places with her?

‘You’re my wife,’ he had told her. ‘Nothing can change that.’

A promise, or a threat?

She tensed now, guiltily trying to suppress her rebellious thoughts. Nick was right. She was lucky to be married to him, especially after…

As he came towards her, her tension increased, her muscles locking. Automatically she looked away from him, pain a hard-edged lump in her throat. Nick was a very handsome man, and yet these days she found that sometimes she could hardly bear to look at him.

‘I love you… I need you, and I’m never, ever going to let you go,’ he had told her when he’d proposed to her, and she, swept off her feet, totally overwhelmed by his intensity, his insistence, dizzy and bemused by the speed with which he had taken over her life, had been unable to resist the pressure he had put on her.

Then she had been flattered; reassured; filled with gratitude and joy by his words.

Then…

Now, even with the width of the kitchen between them, she could smell the scent of another woman’s sex on him.

Fastidiously she increased the distance between them.

Was Nick having another affair? Last night he had denied it. And she had wanted him to deny it.

She had invested so much in this marriage, given so much to it. Too much?

How could she stay with him if he was having another affair, and yet how could she leave? Marriage was a lifetime commitment, and when problems arose within it they had to be worked at… or ignored? Her heart lurched. Was she really such a coward?

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Nick demanded sourly. ‘Not still sulking, are you?’

Protectively Fern turned to one side, reaching for the kettle, letting the straight swath of her hair swing across her face, obscuring her expression.

‘I’ve got a bit of news for you,’ Nick told her.

The surliness had gone from his voice now. It was lighter, triumphant… gloating almost. Her tension increased, but Fern suppressed it, concealing her reaction from him as instinctively as she had concealed her face. Inwardly her soul ached at what she was doing; for what their relationship had become.

‘It seems my saintly stepbrother is planning to buy Broughton House.’

Fern’s fingers tensed on the kettle-handle. She was glad she had her back to Nick.

‘Now I wonder what he wants with a place that size. All those bedrooms. A real family place…’

Fern could hear the ugly note of triumph quite clearly in his voice now. ‘Pity he hasn’t got a real family to put in it, isn’t it? Or maybe he’s thinking of acquiring one.

‘What is it, Fern? I haven’t said something to upset you, have I? Oh, I forgot—you’ve always been pretty keen on Broughton House yourself, haven’t you? You were always up there at one time… or so you claimed…’

‘I visited old Mrs Broughton occasionally, that’s all,’ Fern told him quietly.

Why did he insist on doing this to her? He knew as well as she did that there was no need… no point… He knew how bitterly she regretted what she had done.

‘Did you go to bed with him, Fern?’ he had asked her. ‘Did you?’ And she had wept silent tears which she knew had betrayed her.

‘He doesn’t want you, you know,’ he had told her, softly, gently almost, kinder to her now when he had the least reason to be than he had ever been. If he had shown her that kindness before, that compassion… would things have been any different?

How many men would still have wanted to remain married to her after that? Not many. A husband’s infidelity was one thing; a wife’s was something very different.

‘You’re my wife,’ he had told her when she had broken down and asked him why he wanted her to stay. ‘Marriage is forever, Fern. Isn’t that what your parents have always told you?’

She was his wife. He wanted their marriage… wanted her… needed her, so why was there this emptiness between them, this lack of harmony… this ugliness which eroded her pride and her self-respect?

‘I’m going up to have a shower,’ Nick told her.

To wash another woman’s scent off his body? Didn’t he realise that it was too late?

The kettle boiled and switched itself off.

So Adam was thinking of buying Broughton House… and of getting married.

Even though she was prepared for it—her body tensed against it—the pain was still sharp enough to make her catch her breath.

Adam was her brother-in-law; that was all, she reminded herself fiercely. Her stepbrother-in-law. Nothing more. Not now, not once… not ever.

Eleanor saw the advertisement while she was sitting in her dentist’s waiting-room flicking through a surprisingly current copy of Country Life.

It was the photograph that first caught her eye; the front of the house faced south and it had been photographed on a sunny day so that the stone walls were washed to a soft warm gold, the light glinting on the uneven leaded panes of the dormer attic windows.

The house looked settled, solid, permanent, safe and reassuring, offering a refuge from life’s turbulence… offering comfort.

She stared at the photograph for so long that at first she didn’t hear the receptionist call out her name.

Later, when she got home and discovered that in her haste to respond to the girl’s second clipped summons she had stuffed the magazine into her bag, she stifled her feelings of guilt and put the magazine down on her desk, intending to throw it away. But for some reason she didn’t… For some reason, later on in the day, taking a break from a particularly difficult translation of some Spanish documents for one of her clients, as she drank her cup of tea she found herself flicking through the magazine again, stopping when she reached the half-page ad featuring the house, reading the written details below the photograph briefly, her real attention focused on the photograph itself, on the warmth the house seemed to give off, the security… the sanctuary…

Sanctuary… The word dug into her conscience like a sharp thorn. What need did she have of any sanctuary? A happy second marriage, a successful career… two well-adjusted sons. She was one of the luckiest people she knew; everyone said so…

Everyone…

‘They want us… they want us… They want us!’ Zoe exulted, breaking free of Ben’s arm to perform a brief pirouette of triumph, laughing up at him as he caught hold of her, restraining her and shaking his head.

‘Don’t get too excited,’ he warned her. ‘This is only the first step. Now we’ve got to keep our fingers crossed that they can find the right place.’

He was frowning now with the seriousness which had initially attracted her to him and which sometimes she found heartachingly hard to fathom.

Why did he always seem to fear that life was waiting to deliver a blow? Why couldn’t he simply share her exultation? But she was being unfair; she knew that in his own way he did, and that, although he would die rather than admit it, this first step down the road they had plotted out for themselves was intensely important to him.

‘Benedict Fraser, Restaurateur of the Year,’ Zoe crowed, refusing to allow him to suppress her exhilaration. ‘I can see it now. “Benedict Fraser, ably aided by his ravishingly attractive and capable business manager, Ms Zoe Clinton, at their country house restaurant… quite definitely the success story of the year…"’

‘Hang on. We still have to find our country house,’ Benedict warned her. ‘Or at least our backer has to…’

‘Our backer… I still can’t believe it’s all happening. And all through you stepping in at the last minute and doing the catering for the Hargreaveses’ wedding.’

‘I’d never have done it if you hadn’t pushed me into it. Wedding breakfasts aren’t really my thing, and having to step in at the last minute like that… It’s all down to you.’

‘It’s not down to either of us,’ Zoe corrected him firmly. ‘We did it together. Both of us. We make a good team, Ben.’ She darted him a brief look and added softly, ‘In bed and out of it…’

As she had known it would, her reference to the sexual aspect of their relationship made him slightly embarrassed. For a man who was such a skilled and sensitive lover, he was oddly shy and uneasy about discussing sex. His upbringing, perhaps?

She shook her head, pushing the thought aside, not wanting it to spoil her own pleasure in their day.

‘How long do you think it will take Clive Hargreaves to find a suitable property?’

‘I don’t know. But he’s obviously already looking. I saw a pile of brochures on his desk when we were signing the contract.’

Zoe gave an ecstatic sigh. ‘We’re finally on our way. Nothing can stop us now… nothing. It’s all there waiting for us… everything we’ve wanted. Our own restaurant and the option of developing it into a small country hotel. You as the chef—the chef—and me managing the administration side of things. Just the way we dreamed.’

‘The way you dreamed. I would never have let myself imagine…’ He broke off, shaking his head. ‘I still can’t believe it’s all actually happening. This chance means so much to me, Zoe.’ He stopped walking and looked at her. ‘I don’t think you realise…’

‘Yes, I do,’ she interrupted him softly. ‘I know just what it means to you to have your own place, Ben. I know how important it is to you.’

‘Providing nothing goes wrong…’

‘Nothing will go wrong. What could go wrong? The contracts are signed, and we’re on our way. Stop worrying… Nothing will go wrong—I promise you.’

CHAPTER ONE

ELEANOR suppressed a small exclamation of impatience, glancing at her watch as the traffic came to another halt. London was impossible at this time in the morning. Especially when the streets were still grey and wet, the sky sullenly threatening and what blossom there was beginning to show on the trees battered by the sharp east wind.

The traffic moved—inches rather than yards, and she counted slowly to ten, trying to relax her tense muscles. She was going to be late arriving at her office, and she had an appointment at nine-thirty. A potential new client. She gnawed anxiously at her bottom lip, recalling the interview she had had recently with her accountant.

They were still making a profit, he had told her, but their costs were rising; the rent on their offices had doubled in the last eighteen months and was set to rise again. All over the city, peripheral businesses such as theirs were beginning to suffer from the cutbacks made by the conglomerates and multinationals which used them.

The tidal flood of extra and extremely profitable business she and Louise had seen in the last years of the Eighties was now ebbing away very fast and the anticipated upsurge in business they had expected from the new ties with Europe had been a trickle rather than a flood.

The office, which had been so convenient when she still lived in the flat, before she and Marcus had married and she and the boys had moved into his elegant Chelsea house, was now an increasingly tension-inducing drive across London.

Why was it that wet weather always made the traffic slower? she wondered irritably, frowning. She had intended to make an early start this morning, but then Tom had overslept and come down late to breakfast and Gavin had ‘lost’ his football kit, so that by the time she had actually managed to chivvy them plus their belongings into the car she had already been running behind schedule.

Marcus had already had his breakfast and started work in his study. He had frowned up at her as she opened the door, putting down the brief he had been working on. Even now, after three years of being together plus almost a year of marriage, her heart still turned over when she saw him. A ridiculous reaction in a woman of thirty-eight going on thirty-nine, surely? And to think that until she had met him she had been a woman who prided herself on her common-sense approach to life, on her awareness of the errors of judgements and the misplaced romantic ideals which had led to the break-up of her first marriage.

Until she had seen the brief in Marcus’s hand, she had almost been tempted to ask him if he could run the boys to school; the school was closer to his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn than it was to her office. But, despite the intensity of their love, a part of her remained brittly conscious that Tom and Gavin were her responsibility, just as Vanessa was his.

Vanessa… She could feel her stomach muscles tensing as she thought about Marcus’s daughter.

It troubled her that she was finding it so difficult to establish a good relationship with her. She was after all Marcus’s child… his daughter. Vanessa’s parents had been divorced for several years before she, Eleanor, had become involved in Marcus’s life. But whenever Vanessa came to stay with them Eleanor felt uncomfortable and on edge. She had even begun to feel ill-at-ease when she and Marcus made love when Vanessa was there.

Part of the trouble was that the Chelsea house had never been designed for two adults and three children. Marcus had bought it after his first marriage broke down; for a single or even a married couple without children it was the ideal London home, small but elegant with its downstairs kitchen-cum-living-room and Marcus’s study plus the dining-room, its first-floor drawing-room, which was spacious enough for the kind of parties a highly successful barrister might need to give. There was nothing wrong either with the two good-sized bedrooms, each with its own private bathroom, unless of course you happened to have three children to squash into that one spare double bedroom.

The bedroom which, Vanessa had told Eleanor coolly but very challengingly, had always been hers when she visited her father.

Which meant that her sons had to share the double room next to theirs and then be squashed up together in the small stuffy attic bedroom, which had never ever been intended to be anything other than a temporary emergency bedroom, whenever Vanessa came to stay.

She loved Marcus so much and she knew he loved her, but he had lived on his own for almost seven years before they met; he had been used to a quiet, well-ordered way of life, without the kind of tensions which now seemed to be disrupting their lives.

The obvious answer was to move, to find a larger house which would accommodate them all comfortably, give them all room to breathe… give all three children their all-important personal space.

The trouble was that, in London, the size of house they needed would be so exorbitantly expensive that it was pointless even thinking about moving.

Her business made a reasonable profit, and as a leading litigation barrister, a Q.C., Marcus earned good fees, but living in London was expensive. Her ex-husband had remarried almost immediately after their divorce and had a second young family, and was simply not in a position to continue to contribute to Gavin and Tom’s education—at eleven and thirteen respectively both of them still had several years of education ahead of them, especially if, as she hoped, they both went on to university.

Her tension eased as the traffic suddenly started to move.

It was just the miserable weather that was making her feel so on edge, she reassured herself. At this time of the year, everyone had had enough of cold and damp and was looking forward to some sun.

She and Marcus had hoped to spend a week with friends in Italy in May, but one of Marcus’s court cases had been brought forward and now it looked as though their week in Tuscany would have to be cancelled.

As she turned into the underground car park beneath the block that housed her office, the sleet started.

It was just gone half-past nine, she noted as she locked the car and headed quickly for the lift.

The office block was a modern one, centrally situated in the heart of the city and a good catchment area for their business. Eleanor and Louise had agonised for weeks on whether or not to take the lease. It had been expensive even then, and in those days neither of them had been sure of what volume of work they could expect.

That they had met at all had been pure chance. They had literally bumped into each other when Eleanor had been delivering some translations she had just completed for a large firm of importers.

Louise had been there on a similar errand and, once they had discovered that their language skills complemented rather than competed with one another, it hadn’t taken long for them to decide to pool those skills and set up business as a formal partnership.

It had been a decision which had paid off well; their reputation had spread by word of mouth and within four years of becoming partners they were successful and well known enough to feature in a rash of magazine and newspaper articles about the emergence of the successful businesswoman of the Eighties.

In those days both of them had been single, Eleanor with a bad marriage and an even worse divorce behind her and only too thankful to fling herself head-first into the demands of establishing a new career, not just because she needed the money, but because it also offered her a much needed solace for her wounded pride and battered self-esteem; and Louise, eight years her junior, just emerging from the trauma of ending an intense and destructive relationship with a married man.

Physically so very opposite—she tall and fair, quiet and restrained in both her thoughts and her actions, Louise small, brunette and impulsively vivacious—they had shared a common need to heal the wounds life had inflicted on them, which had bonded them together in their determination to make their partnership work.

And it had worked… Had worked? Eleanor frowned as the lift reached her floor, and then shrugged as the doors opened. Had worked and was still working, she assured herself firmly.

The office block had originally appealed to both of them because of the brightness of its new design. Built around an atrium, it had a spacious, open feel to it which was emphasised by the atrium itself.

Today, though, the marble and chrome seemed to give off a chilly air that made Eleanor shiver slightly.

They had probably turned down the heating again, she reflected as she headed for her office. All the tenants had been complaining about the rapid escalation not just in their rent but in their overheads as well. As she glanced down into the atrium itself she noticed that some of the plants looked over-green and slightly shiny, more as though they were artificial than real, she reflected with distaste, her attention caught by the sterile perfection of a white lily.

Such plants did not belong under London’s sleet-laden grey skies, or imprisoned here, forced into life beneath their covering of glass and heat.

Claire, their receptionist, looked up with a relieved smile as Eleanor walked into the foyer.

She and Louise had chosen the décor for their offices with great care, calling on an interior designer friend of Eleanor’s for confirmation of their choice, but what had seemed energetic and appropriate in the Eighties now looked brash and slightly harsh, as inappropriate for the grey skies of recession as the plants in the atrium were for the grey skies of London perhaps.

‘Monsieur Colbert has arrived,’ Claire told her. ‘I offered him coffee but he refused.’

Thanking her, Eleanor went through into her own office, removing her coat and checking her appearance quickly before hurrying through into the room she and Louise used for negotiating with clients.

Pierre Colbert was French, with business connections which brought him regularly to London and which took him just as regularly to all the other major European cities. He acted as an agent for several large clothing designers and wholesalers, the type who were two steps down from the ‘named’ designers and two up from the general run of high street suppliers.

His business, if they could secure it, would prove an extremely valuable addition to their portfolio. Eleanor had heard via another client that he was unhappy with his existing translators, and she had made a tentative approach to him suggesting that it might be worthwhile their getting together.

She had been warned that as well as liking to get his pound of flesh he was also rather difficult to deal with, and, as she walked into the office and saw the impatience with which he was regarding her, her heart sank a little.

She didn’t show her feelings, though, giving him a calm smile and extending her hand.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she apologised. ‘The traffic…’

‘The English do not know how to drive,’ he interrupted her brusquely. ‘In Paris we have traffic; here in London you have chaos…’

‘Perhaps you would like a cup of coffee,’ Eleanor offered, side-stepping his aggression.

‘Coffee?’ He smiled sourly. ‘I think not.’

Was he deliberately trying to goad her into a response, Eleanor wondered, or did he simply not realise how rude he was being? She had met other men like him, men who were plainly uncomfortable with and antagonistic towards women in business, and she had developed her own method of dealing with them.

Once, in the aftermath of a long, lazy afternoon of lovemaking, Marcus had told her with sleepy pleasure as he ran his hand lingeringly over her warm, relaxed flesh, pausing to cup her breast and slowly caress the still erect peak of her nipple, ‘I love this peace you always carry with you, Nell. It’s such a pleasure to be with a woman who is so calm and secure. It makes it so easy to love you.’

It had been shortly after that that he had proposed to her.

‘No, we don’t seem to have developed the skill of making really good coffee, do we?’ she agreed with a smile. Another woman might have balked at using such placatory tactics, Eleanor admitted, but for her they were almost a way of life… peace and calm, good relationships, concord and harmony were important to her. Too important?

‘Your coffee, like your bread, is uniquely irreplaceable,’ she added, ‘although I understand that Marks and Spencer are doing their best. Apparently they are actually importing the flour now from France for their croissants and French bread.’

‘They are among your clients?’ Pierre Colbert asked her with shrewd interest, dropping his earlier aggression.

Eleanor allowed herself a small surge of relief.

‘Some of their suppliers are,’ she told him, opening the file she had brought in with her. ‘I see from your own client list that you have dealings with design houses in several major European cities, and that they in turn deal with manufacturers in the Far East. The clothes from the design houses you represent will sell best in our small exclusive country-town boutiques.’

‘You have done your research well.’

Was that a hint of respect she could see overtaking his earlier churlishness? She hoped so!

Eleanor smiled gently at him, too wise in the ways of business to show her relief.

‘I understand that at the moment you use translators domiciled in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. We, of course, could supply all your translation needs here under one roof.’

‘As can the other companies I deal with,’ he pointed out, watching her.

‘True,’ Eleanor agreed with another smile. It was going to be hard work persuading him to give them his business, she recognised as she quietly and calmly started to point out to him the advantages of using them.

‘Additionally Louise, my partner, specialises in Middle Eastern languages. And Russian.’

‘Ah, but remember,’ he told her quickly, ‘with the break-up of the Soviet Union into various independent states, each will want to revert to its own language.’

‘A fact that we have taken into consideration,’ Eleanor assured him.

It was true. She and Louise were actively recruiting on to their freelance books experienced translators who were able to work in these newly re-emerging languages.

Quite how she was going to continue to fit this additional commitment to interview and test their freelancers into her existing busy life, Eleanor wasn’t sure, but somehow she would have to find a way.

She had tried to make a start on all the application forms this weekend, but it hadn’t been easy. For one thing, the only place she had to work was the bedroom she shared with Marcus, and with Vanessa next door, her radio playing at full volume, it had been impossible for her to summon the necessary concentration, even knowing that it was vitally important to the continued success of the business that she and Louise secure an all-important head-start on their rivals in what promised to be the only genuinely expanding field open to them.

They needed that business if they were to continue to generate good profits, and yet with the ever-increasing demands on her time that marriage to Marcus had brought, never mind her own desire to have more time to spend personally with him, the actual hours she had left for expanding the company were alarmingly small.

She had already given up her two evening gym sessions and the once-a-month, long, leisurely Sunday lunch she used to share with her oldest woman friend, Jade Fensham; that had had to go because it conflicted with the weekend when Marcus had access to his daughter.

His daughter. She could understand why it was difficult for Vanessa to accept her, but surely it should not be so hard for her to accept Vanessa; she was after all a part of Marcus, and she loved him.

Jade told her she was too idealistic, and she had countered by telling Jade that she was too cynical.

Jade had shrugged those elegant shoulders and narrowed her long green cat’s eyes.

‘After two marriages and two divorces what do you expect? Take my advice: never, ever expect anything but trouble from a man’s children, especially if they’re teenage girls.’

The weekend before last, white-faced with a tension-induced migraine, she had asked herself what it was she was doing wrong and why it was that Vanessa was so antagonistic towards her. After all, it wasn’t as though she was responsible for the break-up of her parents’ marriage.

Perhaps Marcus was right. Perhaps she ought to try to arrange things so that Tom and Gavin stayed with their father when Vanessa came to stay. At least it would stop the interminable quarrels that seemed to break out when they were all together. Was she being unfair in suspecting that it was Vanessa who deliberately provoked them? It was true that Tom, over-sensitive and too vulnerable, tended to over-react—a legacy of her divorce from his father? But Gavin had a far calmer temperament; phlegmatic and easygoing, he had been a placid baby and was now a placid, sturdily resilient child.

Yes, it would make life easier if they kept them apart, but it wasn’t what she had hoped for, what she had planned when she and Marcus had married. She had never assumed that merging their two families would be easy, but neither had she anticipated that her relationship with Vanessa would become so destructive. Her relationship? What relationship?

The last thing that Vanessa wanted was any kind of relationship with either Eleanor or her sons, but most especially with Eleanor. Sometimes she felt as though she and Vanessa were two rivals locked in a silent and deadly battle for Marcus. And yet the last thing she wanted was for Vanessa to feel that her marriage to Marcus in any way threatened his daughter’s position in his life.

In fact she had been the one who had suggested to Marcus that he see more of his daughter. It had disturbed her a little, when she and Marcus had first become lovers, to discover how little he saw of his child.

‘She’s happy with her mother,’ Marcus had told her.

‘But she needs you in her life as well,’ Eleanor had insisted gently.

‘You have a husband and children,’ she suddenly came out of her brief reverie to hear Pierre Colbert saying to her. ‘Does this not affect your work?’

Eleanor refused to react, to allow him to provoke her into becoming defensive.

‘I’m a woman, monsieur,’ she told him quietly. ‘And as such I am well used to balancing many demands upon my time.’

She saw from his expression that she had both surprised and amused him, and mentally congratulated herself for not falling into the trap of complaining that he would not have asked her such a question had she been a man. He was a Frenchman, undeniably chauvinistic and no doubt unashamedly proud to be. She would succeed far better with him by emphasising the virtues of her sex rather than by challenging him to accept her as the equal of any man.

She watched him thoughtfully as he smiled at her, and then said shrewdly, ‘My partner and I like to think that we offer a very skilled and competitive service, and I believe that you must think so too, monsieur, otherwise you would not be here. You are not, I think, a man who needlessly wastes his time.’

She watched the respect dawn in the clever brown eyes before he looked away from her.

‘You are one of several agencies recommended to me,’ he told her dismissively. ‘It is always wise to consider several options, even though some of them must always be more favourable than others.’

He was standing up, terminating the meeting. Eleanor rose too, still outwardly calm and relaxed, although inwardly she was wryly aware that he would probably prefer not to give them the business. Had she been a man… or French…

As she escorted him to the door, she tried not to dwell on how much they needed the extra income his work would have given them. She had known when he first contacted them that it was extremely unlikely they would get the business. It made her feel a little bit better knowing that she had subtly challenged his initial attitude towards her, drawing respect from him in place of his original hostility.

After she had seen him off the premises, she went back to her office and picked up his file. She needed to put Louise in the picture vis-à-vis her meeting with him.

She got up and walked into the foyer. ‘Is Louise in her office?’ she asked Claire.

‘Yes, she’s just come in,’ the receptionist told her.

Smiling her thanks at her, Eleanor walked across to her partner’s office.

Claire watched her enviously. Eleanor was everything she herself longed to be. Attractive, successful, married to a man who exuded an almost magical charisma of sex and power; a man who, although he might be well into his forties, still had such an aura of compelling masculinity about him that he made her go weak at the knees. Not that he ever gave her so much as a second look. And even if he had…

Eleanor was so… so nice that she couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt her.

Yes, they were an ideal couple, with an ideal relationship; an ideal lifestyle.

Marriage, career, motherhood—Eleanor had them all.

Although she had knocked on Louise’s door before going in, her partner obviously hadn’t heard her, Eleanor realised as she saw Louise’s dark head bent in absorbed concentration over some papers on her desk.

When Eleanor said her name she looked up, startled, quickly shuffling the papers out of sight, an embarrassed, almost furtive look crossing her face.

‘Nell, I didn’t hear you come in…’

‘So I see.’ Eleanor grinned at her. ‘Planning your summer holidays?’

She had noticed, as Louise shuffled the papers out of sight, the photograph on one of them of a pretty and obviously French château-style farmhouse.

To her surprise a faintly haunted, almost guilty expression flickered through Louise’s eyes before she turned her head and confirmed quickly, ‘Yes…’

‘I just wanted to bring you up to date on my interview with Pierre Colbert. Are you free for lunch?’

Once again Louise looked slightly uncomfortable.

‘Er—no, I’m sorry, I’m not. I’m having lunch with Paul…’

Eleanor smiled at her. ‘Lucky you,’ she told her ruefully. ‘I wish my husband could make time to have lunch with me. We’re lucky if we manage to share a sandwich together these days.’

She broke off as she realised that Louise wasn’t really listening to her.

‘Louise, is something wrong?’ she asked her quietly.

‘No,’ Louise assured her quickly.

Too quickly? Eleanor wondered, her intuition suddenly working overtime.

She knew that Louise and Paul had a very turbulent relationship, a relationship which had started while her then new business partner was still nursing wounds from her previous affair, and she was also uneasily aware of how much Paul tended to dominate her partner. He was that kind of man, needing to assert himself or perhaps to assure himself of the superiority of his masculinity by forcing the women in his life to assume an inferior position.

She had become increasingly aware of how often the words ‘Paul says’ or ‘Paul thinks’ had begun to preface Louise’s comments since the two of them had married, but she had firmly dismissed her own dislike of the man by reminding herself that he was Louise’s choice and not hers, and that it was after all just as well that different types of men appealed to different types of women. And besides, if she was honest with herself, didn’t her dislike of Paul stem partly from the fact that his manner towards Louise was a little too reminiscent of her own first husband’s domineering manner towards her?

Still, if there were problems with the relationship, she would hate to think that Louise did not feel she could confide in her.

She tried again. ‘Louise—–’

‘Look, I must go. I promised to call and see a client before I meet Paul. I really must go, Nell.’

Louise was an adult woman and there was no way she could force her into giving her her confidence if she did not want to, Eleanor reminded herself wryly as she went back to her own office.

The trouble with her was that she had a strong maternal instinct, or so Jade said.

‘What you need is to surround yourself with a large brood of children,’ Jade had informed her once.

A large brood of children. To compensate for the loneliness of her own solitary childhood. She grimaced. Thirty-eight was no age to start suffering those sort of urges, she told herself.

There were women of course who did have babies at thirty-eight and older. Second families to go with their second husbands.

She and Marcus had discussed having children of their own. She had heard that a new baby was often a successful way of linking together all the tenuous branches of an extended family relationship.

But they had agreed that they did not need to cement their love in that way. It was out of the question in any case. The house wasn’t big enough for them all as it was; and with the commitment she had made to the company, plus the extra demands made on her time as Marcus’s wife… There were a surprisingly large number of events he was obliged to attend, and of course as his wife she wanted to go with him… to be with him.

The trouble was, their lives were so busy, so fast-paced, that despite the fact that they were married, sometimes they had less time to spend together now than they had done in the days when they had first met.

She was discovering within herself an increasing need for more time, more space; for a slower, less frenetic pace of life, one that gave her a chance to appreciate things more. There never seemed to be enough time to enjoy anything any more, to savour life’s pleasures.

Even their lovemaking had increasingly become rushed and hurried; something they had to make a conscious effort to make time for.

Gone were the days when they could spend the whole afternoon, the whole evening, and even, luxuriously, the whole morning in bed, as they had done in the days before they had married. How much she had enjoyed them, those special intimate hours spent in the privacy of Marcus’s house or her flat, hours when they had been completely and blissfully alone.

Now it seemed as though they were never alone.

Did Marcus feel as uncomfortable making love to her with her children under the same roof as she sometimes did with his, or was that something that only women suffered? Or perhaps only women with almost adult teenage stepdaughters.

She hoped that there was nothing wrong in Louise and Paul’s relationship. She might not like him, but Louise loved him. He was a wonderful father, she had told Eleanor, almost doting on their two boys and fully involved in every aspect of their lives.

Yes, almost to the point where he was almost deliberately excluding Louise herself from the macho male world he was building around his sons, Eleanor reflected.

Marcus got on well enough with Tom and even better with Gavin, but he simply wasn’t the kind of man who enjoyed exclusively male pursuits, and of course he was not after all their father. As Louise herself had rather unnecessarily remarked the other day when she had been contrasting Paul’s almost excessive involvement in his sons’ lives to Marcus’s attitude towards Tom and Gavin.

Unnecessarily and tactlessly… Eleanor frowned, nibbling the nail of her index finger. As a child she had bitten her nails, and as a young adult… a young wife and mother. After her divorce she had told herself that she was going to stop biting her nails, and once she had done so she had told herself that if she could do that she could do anything; and yet here she was, happier and more fulfilled than she had ever been at any other time in her life, reverting to this destructive childhood habit.

What was the matter with her? In a month’s time she and Marcus would have been married for exactly one year. On the day of their wedding she had been filled with such happiness, such optimism… such confidence.

But then she hadn’t realised how difficult it was going to be to integrate their lives together fully, and not just their lives but those of their children as well.

Her phone rang and she reached out to pick up the receiver, her mouth curling into a delighted smile as she heard Marcus’s voice on the other end of the line.

‘Darling, what a lovely surprise.’

‘Eleanor, can you come home? The school’s been on the phone. Apparently Tom isn’t very well. I’m going to collect him now, but I suspect that it’s you he’s going to want.’

‘Tom? What’s wrong with him? Did they say?’

‘Don’t panic. I doubt that it can be anything very serious, otherwise they’d have rung the hospital, not me. They did try to get in touch with you, apparently, but they were told you were in conference…’

In conference. They must have telephoned while she was with Pierre Colbert, Eleanor recognised. Guilt overwhelmed her. Was she imagining it or had that been irritation she had heard in Marcus’s voice? She knew how much he hated being disturbed when he was working, and she was Tom’s mother, after all.

She got up, grabbing her coat and bag and hurrying into the outer office. Claire wasn’t there so she knocked briefly on Louise’s door and walked in.

Louise was on the telephone.

‘No, I haven’t told her yet. I haven’t—–’ When she looked up and saw her, Louise stared at her for a moment, her face flushing, and then she said quickly into the receiver, ‘Look, I must go.’

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ Eleanor apologised. ‘I’ve got to go home. Tom isn’t well. He’s been sent home from school. Luckily I don’t have any appointments…’

Louise wasn’t really listening to her, Eleanor realised. Her face was still flushed, and she seemed to be avoiding looking at her. She was uncomfortable with her, Eleanor recognised with a small stab of shock. At any other time she would have instantly queried that recognition, but her concern for Tom and her guilt over not being there, over perhaps even not having recognised earlier that he wasn’t well, overrode everything else.

As she drove home, she cursed the traffic, heavy and congested even at this time of day, the smell of petrol and stale air rising chokingly inside her car. The tension which never seemed to totally leave her these days became an insistent demanding tattoo of impatience inside her head.

Although the house possessed a garage it was only large enough for Marcus’s car, and irritatingly someone else was already parked outside their house, so that she had to drive halfway down the street before she could find anywhere to stop.

Her hand trembled as she unlocked the door. She hurried in, calling out to Marcus in a low voice.

‘In here,’ he told her, emerging from his study,

‘Tom—–?’ she demanded quickly, glancing towards the stairs.

‘He’s in the kitchen,’ Marcus told her.

‘The kitchen!’ Eleanor stared at him, tension and guilt exploding into a sudden surge of anger. Would he be taking this casual, laid-back attitude if it were his child who was sick?

Instantly she suppressed the thought, knowing it to be unfair and shaken that she could even have given birth to it.

Dropping her briefcase in the hall, she hurried into the kitchen. Tom was curled up in a chair in the living area, his attention focused on the flickering images on the television set.

‘Tom?’

When he made no response, Eleanor called his name a little louder.

Reluctantly he turned to look at her.

He did look pale, she acknowledged, her heart thumping sickeningly. Why hadn’t she noticed that this morning? She was his mother, after all.

‘How are you feeling, darling?’ she asked him as she hurried over to him and placed her hand against his forehead. He didn’t feel particularly hot.

‘Sick. I feel sick,’ he told her plaintively. ‘I told you that this morning…’

Eleanor winced as she heard the accusation in his voice. He had said something about not wanting to go to school but she had put that down to the fact that it was Monday morning and that he was grumpy because he had overslept.

‘I was sick after assembly,’ he told her. ‘In Mr Pringle’s class.’

Her heart sank even further.

‘I feel funny, Mum. My head hurts and my neck.’

Her stomach muscles tensed. The papers had recently been carrying details of several cases of meningitis.

‘What about your eyes?’ she asked him anxiously. ‘Do they hurt?’

‘Yes… a bit…’

Half an hour later, after she had got him into bed and telephoned the doctor, she asked Marcus anxiously, ‘Do you think it could be meningitis?’

‘I doubt it,’ Marcus told her wryly. ‘I suspect it’s much more likely to be Mondayitis, plus the illicit carton of ice-cream he had for supper last night.’

Eleanor stared at him. ‘What illicit carton of ice-cream?’

‘The one I found this morning.’

Eleanor shook her head. ‘I don’t know. He says his eyes are hurting him.’

‘He says, or you suggested?’ Marcus asked her.

‘I’m your wife, Marcus,’ she snapped at him. ‘Not an opposition witness.’ She saw him frowning, but before she could apologise the doorbell rang.

‘That will be the doctor. I’d better go and let her in.’

‘There’s no need to apologise,’ the doctor soothed her fifteen minutes later. ‘I’m a mother myself and I know what it’s like. Besides, it’s always better to be safe than sorry. Luckily this time it’s nothing more serious than an upset tummy and a bit of attention-seeking.’

She smiled at Eleanor reassuringly.

So Marcus had been right, Eleanor reflected bleakly as she saw her to the door, and she had panicked unnecessarily. A panic increased by guilt because she had not been there… because Marcus had had to disrupt his working day to go and collect Tom, because she had been too busy this morning to notice that Tom was feeling off colour and because she had been too busy last night to notice that he had eaten the ice-cream.

What was happening to her? Where was the pleasure in a life that left her with so little time for her children, for her husband… for herself?

‘You were right,’ she told Marcus wryly later. ‘It is just an upset tummy.’ He looked up from his desk and smiled at her.

‘I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier.’

‘That’s OK,’ Marcus told her easily, adding, ‘I should have remembered that mothers don’t like having their judgement questioned.’

For some reason his comment jarred. What did he mean? Was he referring to mothers in general or one mother in particular, the mother of his own child, perhaps?

Eleanor had been pleased when Marcus had once commented on how different she was from his first wife; she didn’t want to be a second Julia, a copy of another woman who had once been important in her husband’s life. She had been fiercely glad that he loved her as an individual… as herself. Unlike Allan, who, after the initial enthusiasm of being married, had ceased to see her as a woman—a person—and had seen her only as a mother. Sexually he had found it hard to relate to her once she had had the children, and besides, he had accused her, they meant more to her than he did.

‘By the way, the Lassiters want us there for eight. What time is the babysitter due?’ Marcus asked her.

Eleanor froze.

The Lassiters’ dinner party. She had forgotten all about it… forgotten to make any arrangements for someone to sit with the boys. How could she have forgotten? Harold Lassiter was the most senior barrister in Marcus’s chambers. There was a strong rumour that he was about to be called to the bench as a senior judge.

Marcus might not have the sharklike instinct and drive, the personal and professional ambition that her first husband had possessed, but as a product of the British public school system, reinforced by the discipline of an army father, he was meticulous about observing a code of good manners which to many people was now hopelessly old-fashioned.

In fact, that had been one of the first things about him which had appealed to her.

Typically, Jade had laughed in disbelief when she had told her this, rolling her eyes and demanding, ‘What? My God, trust you! You manage to find one of the most charismatic and sexy men I have ever set eyes on, and all you notice about him is that he held open the door for you. You realise that he probably only did that so that he could check out the view,’ Jade had teased her, explaining when she had frowned, ‘Your rear view, idiot. Men like a nice, well-shaped female behind, didn’t you know?’

Now, Eleanor’s expression gave her away.

‘You’d forgotten?’ Marcus exclaimed sharply.

‘Marcus, I’m so sorry. I meant to organise a babysitter last weekend and then Julia telephoned and asked if we could have Vanessa and somehow or other…’

‘Damn!’

‘I could ring Jade,’ Eleanor suggested. ‘She might be free.’

She had just picked up the receiver and started to dial Jade’s number when she heard Tom calling, ‘Mum… Mum… I don’t feel well.’

Anxiously she replaced the receiver and hurried upstairs, just in time to hear him being violently sick.

It might only be ice-cream-induced and perhaps a fitting punishment for his greed, but there was no doubt that he was feeling extremely sorry for himself, Eleanor acknowledged as she tucked him back into bed.

At thirteen he was already beginning to consider himself too old and grown-up for maternal cuddles and fussing, but now he clung to her.

‘Stay with me,’ he begged her as she started to get up.

‘I can’t, darling. I’ve got to go and telephone Aunt Jade to ask her if she can come round to sit with you tonight.’

Immediately his face flushed and he sat bolt upright in bed, clinging fiercely to her.

‘I don’t want her. I want you,’ he told her.

Dismayed, Eleanor put her arms round him. He normally never clung to her like this… perhaps the doctor had been wrong… perhaps he was more ill than any of them had recognised.

‘Tom, darling, I have to go…’

‘No, you don’t,’ he argued stubbornly. ‘You don’t want to be with us any more. You just want to be with him.’

Appalled, Eleanor hugged him tightly. ‘Tom, that isn’t true!’

There was no way she was going to be able to go to the Lassiters’ dinner party, she recognised. Not with Tom so upset and unlike himself.

Marcus wouldn’t be pleased. She could feel her heart growing heavy with despair mingled with anxiety and panic, a sense of somehow feeling as though her life was out of her own control…

What was happening to her? It shouldn’t be like this… after all, she had everything a woman could possibly want. Yes, everything…

And some things that no sane woman would want. Like an accountant who was beginning to issue warnings about dropping profits and rising costs; a partner who had problems which seemed to be putting a strain on their business relationship. A stepdaughter who was growing increasingly hostile to her and who seemed to see her as some sort of rival for her father’s affections; a son who had just destroyed her belief that she had finally slain her inner dragon of guilt about the effect her divorce from their father might have had on her children.

A house filled with antique furniture and carpets which might be the envy of her single friends, but which was no real home for two growing boys.

A growing feeling that there were too many things in her life over which she seemed not to have full control.

And a husband whom she loved and who loved her, and surely knowing that made up for everything else, didn’t it? Didn’t it?

CHAPTER TWO

TENSELY Fern checked her appearance in the bedroom mirror, already anticipating Nick’s criticism. She smoothed the matt black fabric of her evening dress over her hips, anxiously aware of how much weight she had lost since she had last worn it for the round of Christmas parties.

Her mother’s death had been partly responsible for that. It had been a strain taking care of her for those last weeks of her life, especially with Nick being so resentful of her absence.

She had tried to explain to him how she felt: that it was a mixture of love as well as duty and responsibility which made her feel that she had to be the one to nurse her mother; but Nick had demanded to know how he was supposed to manage in her absence. He had a business to run, he reminded her; she was his wife, and since she did not work, did not bring in any money herself, he felt he was not being unreasonable in expecting her to be there at home for him when he needed her.

She had tried to ignore the feelings of panic and misery his attitude caused her, smothering it beneath a thick blanket of anxious self-control, afraid of challenging him because she was afraid of where such a confrontation would lead.

With her mother so close to death, she had not been able to afford to provoke Nick because she had known she simply would not have either the physical or mental energy to cope with his reaction.

Her mother was dying and needed her, she had told Nick quietly.

‘I need you too,’ Nick had retaliated, and in the end she had compromised as best she could, spending the majority of her time with her mother, dashing home when she could, to ensure that Nick had clean shirts, a fridge and freezer full of food, and doing her best to placate him.

In the end her mother’s death had come almost as a relief to her. She still felt guilty about that. About that and about so many other things as well, but most especially about…

She glanced back towards the mirror, grimacing as she studied her reflection. She looked far too tired and drained for a woman of only twenty-seven; the heavy, rippling mass of her hair, tawny brown with rich gold natural highlights in its thick waves, was almost too great a burden for the taut slenderness of her neck. In fact her hair with its rich tumbling mass of curls presented an almost grotesque contrast to her face and body, she acknowledged wearily. She really ought to have it cut short. She was too old now for its careless abundance, a legacy from a childhood governed by the views of much older parents, a mother who believed that all little girls should have long, neatly plaited hair.

She had toyed with the idea of having it cut years ago when she was at university. She remembered mentioning it to Adam.

‘Don’t,’ he had told her in that strong but gently soft voice of his. And as he’d spoken, he had lifted his hand and slowly touched her, brushing the heaviness of her hair back from her face.

Trembling, she looked away from the mirror, her face flushing with guilty heat. What on earth was she doing? She had made a pact with herself years ago that she would never allow herself to give in to that kind of temptation. To do so was surely to break her marriage vows just as much as though she had…

The last thing she felt like doing tonight was going to a dinner party, especially this one.

For a start she barely knew Venice Dunstant. She was one of Nick’s clients, the widow of an extremely wealthy local entrepreneur who had been much older than she was.

There had been a lot of gossip locally about her when she had originally married Bill.

Venice. Was that really her name, or had she simply appropriated it in the same way she had appropriated Bill Dunstant?

They had met on holiday. Bill, a widower of just over sixty, had gone away on his doctor’s advice to recuperate after a heart attack. He had met Venice and married her within weeks of knowing her. They had been married just over two years when he had suffered his second and fatal heart attack, leaving Venice an extremely wealthy widow.

It had only been since his death that Nick had become involved with her. She had consulted him in his capacity as an insurance broker.

Prior to her husband’s death, she had not been seen very much locally, apparently preferring to spend most of her time in London, but she was now becoming much more active in local affairs.

It had been she who had persuaded Nick to join the exclusive and very expensive new leisure complex which had recently opened.

‘You ought to try exercising a bit more yourself,’ he had commented critically to Fern only the other evening, eyeing her too slender body with obvious disapproval. ‘Venice goes to classes almost every day, and she plays tennis as well.’

Fern had refrained from pointing out that, unlike Venice, she was not in a position to afford the kind of fees demanded by the leisure club, and that, even if she had been able to do so, her mother’s illness and Nick’s own insistence that in view of the fact that he supported her financially it was her duty to ensure that she put his wishes first meant that she wasn’t free to enjoy the luxury of so many hours of personal freedom and self-indulgence.

Nick talked a lot about Venice. Too much? She frowned, her stomach muscles tensing. Was she guilty of being overly suspicious… too untrusting, imagining things which didn’t exist… like another woman’s scent on his skin?

Physically Nick was a very attractive man; a man, moreover, who knew how to make himself appealing to women, as she well knew.

The soft thickness of his blond hair, the boyish charm of his smile, the deep blue of his eyes, all added to his air of masculine appeal. Of just slightly above average height rather than tall, his body lean and slim, unlike Adam who was both tall and broad, and who looked what he was—a maturely male man—Nick looked slightly younger than his age. A fact of which he was secretly proud and tended to subtly emphasise.

Her husband could be described as a vain man, Fern acknowledged, who at thirty still cultivated the same aura of boyish appeal he had had when she first met him.

Nick could be very persuasive when he chose, as she well knew.

She had lost count of the number of times she had given way beneath the weight of his coaxing, dreading the sullen accusations which would follow if she did not.

When had she first realised that she didn’t love him any longer; that she had in fact probably never really loved him, but had simply allowed him to persuade her that she did, flattered by his attention, aware of how anxious her parents were to see her happily and safely married, convinced by both Nick and them that marriage to him was the right thing for her?

She had genuinely believed she did love him then, she told herself miserably. Had genuinely believed that he needed and loved her. Why should she not have done? He had told her often enough how much he wanted her in his life…

And if, after their hurried courtship, she had bewilderedly discovered that his interpretation of loving and needing did not match hers, well, she had kept her thoughts to herself, reminding herself of the vows she had made, telling herself that she was expecting too much, hampered by the restrictions imposed on her by her upbringing from confiding in anyone else, much less seeking their help or advice.

The fact that she was not very sexually responsive to Nick she knew must be her fault, and she had struggled guiltily to overcome her lack of enthusiasm, miserably conscious of how much she must be disappointing Nick, of how he, as much as she, must dread the silent sexual intimacy they shared, which invariably resulted in her being left feeling tense and on edge, glad that it was over and yet guiltily unhappy at the same time as she lay there sleepless and dry-eyed, staring at the rejecting silence of Nick’s back.

No wonder he turned away from her the moment it was over, no wonder he complained that she didn’t know how to behave like a real woman. No wonder that eighteen months into their marriage he had had an affair with someone else.

What was a wonder was that she had been so shocked, so disbelieving when she had first found out. Nick was her husband… they were married… had exchanged vows! Other people’s marriages might involve a breaking of those vows, but not hers… And on top of her shock, underlining and heightening it, had been her awareness of how upset her parents would be if her marriage broke up… or how she had somehow let them down, broken faith with the standards they had set her.

It was over two years ago now and yet she could remember the events of that day as clearly as though it had only just happened. The arrival of the woman after Nick had gone to work, her own unsuspecting surprise at seeing her… the woman’s tension slowly communicating itself to her as she refused the cup of coffee Fern had offered, wheeling round to confront her, nervously smoking the cigarette she had just lit.

Fern remembered how afterwards she had been surprised at Nick’s choice, knowing how much he loathed people smoking—an odd, disconnected, sharply clear thought which had somehow lodged itself in her brain while other, far more important ones had been held tensely at bay.

She and Nick were lovers, the woman had told her, angrily claiming that she knew that Fern must be aware of the situation; that she, Fern, was deliberately holding on to Nick when she knew he no longer wanted her.

Shock and pride had prevented Fern from telling her the truth: that she had had no idea of what was going on.

Eventually the woman had left. Fern had watched her drive away, her body, her emotions, her mind almost completely numbed. She remembered walking upstairs and opening her wardrobe doors, removing a suitcase and starting to pack her things.

Then the phone had started to ring. She had gone downstairs intending to answer it, but instead she had walked right past it, through the back door which she had left unlocked and open, and out into the street.

She had no recollection of doing any of this… nor of how she had walked right into town… nor of what her purpose might have been in doing so.

It had been Adam who had found her, who had saved her from public humiliation, only to cause her to suffer later the most profound and intense personal humiliation—but that was something she could still not bear to think about, not now… not ever… He had taken her home—his home, not hers. She had started to cry, bewildered and shocked by the trauma which had overwhelmed her. She had started to tell him about Nick’s affair… her shock… things she would never normally have dreamed of confiding to him.

Her days of confiding in Adam had ended with her marriage to his stepbrother, no matter that once it had been Adam who she had thought was her friend. Adam… Adam she had known first, not Nick.

But, as she had discovered when she met Nick, the Adam she had thought she knew must have been a figment of her own imagination.

‘You didn’t really think Adam was interested in you sexually, did you?’ Nick had asked her incredulously. ‘Oh, Fern.’ He had laughed gently as he gave her a little shake. ‘Did you really think…? Adam already has a girlfriend… or rather a woman friend. It’s a very discreet relationship. Adam prefers it that way… it leaves his options open, if you know what I mean. I suppose I shouldn’t criticise. After all, a man in his position, reasonably well off and with the kind of reputation Adam’s built up for himself as a local do-gooder… he has to be seen to toe the moral line, even if what he does in private… He’s something of a secret stud, my stepbrother. But you’re quite safe from him, Fern. He likes his sexual partners to be women, not little girls… Little virgins…’

She could remember now how humiliated she had felt… how humiliated and self-conscious she had been from then on whenever she saw Adam. Had he actually discussed her with Nick… told Nick…? In fact, she had felt so uncomfortable, so betrayed almost, that she had deliberately started to avoid seeing him. And yet he had never given her any indication… done or said anything…

It had hurt her to know, though, as she now did know because of Nick’s revelations, that Adam had probably been quite aware of the silly crush she had had on him. Aware of it and no doubt amused by it, discussing it probably with the unknown woman who shared his bed, the woman who Nick had implied was a world away from her own silly immaturity.

In the trauma of her shock, though, she had not had the strength to erect her normal defences against Adam. She had simply let him take her home with him, sit her down and gently coax from her what had happened.

She had started to cry, she remembered. And that was when it had happened… when she had broken faith with all that her parents had taught her to respect and revere, when she had done something that was far, far worse than Nick’s merely sexual betrayal of her.

Even now she could not bear to think about it, pushing the memory fiercely out of sight, willing herself not to allow even a chink of light into that seething darkness of spirit and emotion into which she had locked the memories away.

She had known afterwards, of course, that there was no going back, that her marriage to Nick was over, but she hadn’t said anything to Adam.

How could she, when she knew that he had simply acted out of pity, had just reacted as any man would have done to what she had said… what she had done?

She had insisted on returning home, even though Adam had tried to dissuade her. ‘At least let me drive you,’ he had said, but she had shaken her head, unable to bear to look at him, backing away from him in her panic in case he reached out and touched her, so shocked and ashamed by her own behaviour, her own wantonness, that all she had wanted to do was to escape from him and from it, taking advantage of the quirk of fate that decreed that his phone should start to ring just as he reached out towards her, distracting him long enough for her to turn and run.

He had come after her, calling out her name, but it was too late, she was already outside in the street, knowing that with others to see them, others who knew who both of them were and what their relationship to one another was, Adam could hardly run after her and force her physically back into the house.

And besides, why should he really want to? Despite the concern he seemed to feel for her, secretly he must surely have been only too relieved that she was leaving, saving him the necessity of pointing out to her that she had misunderstood… that he had never intended…

The phone had been ringing as she got home, but she had ignored it, knowing that it would be Adam. Instead she had gone straight upstairs to where her suitcase still lay open on the bed.

Methodically she had started to remove her clothes from the wardrobe and pack them into it, rehearsing what she was going to say to Nick, how she was going to tell him that she knew about his affair, knew he loved someone else; knew that their marriage had to end.

He had arrived home ten minutes later, returning much earlier than usual, and she had seen immediately from his expression that he knew his lover had been to see her.

She had opened her mouth to tell him that she was leaving but he’d forestalled her, bursting into an impassioned speech, reaching out to take hold of her, scarcely seeming to notice the way she tensed and flinched back from his touch.

‘Fern… Fern… I’m so sorry. I never meant you to find out. She never meant anything to me, you must believe that,’ he told her huskily.

He went on to beg her not to leave him, to tell her how much he still loved and needed her, to plead and cajole, making her head ache with the voluble force of his arguments and insistence.

‘Think what this will do to your parents,’ he said as he looked at her half-packed suitcase. ‘You know how much it would hurt and upset them. Do you really want to do that to them, Fern, and all over a silly little fling that never meant anything important?

‘You’re so naïve… you see everything in black and white. How many marriages do you think would survive if every woman who learned that her husband had made a small mistake actually left him? I never intended it to happen, but, well, let’s be honest—sexually…’ He gave a small shrug. ‘She made me feel wanted,’ he told her, giving her his little-boy-lost smile. ‘She made me feel that I was important to her. She wanted me, Fern. Oh, I know it isn’t your fault that you aren’t very responsive sexually, and believe me I do understand, but I am a man with all the normal male urges, and she…’

She felt sick then, sick and too filled with loathing and disgust to say anything, to do anything other than merely stand there and listen to him, knowing that he was right, knowing how upset her parents would be, how shocked, how devastated… how difficult they would find it to understand.

‘I still need you,’ Nick insisted. ‘We can put things right… try again. Please, Fern. You must give me a second chance.’

In the end she gave in. What other option did she have? she asked herself bewilderedly. Nick loved her; he needed her; her parents would neither understand nor approve if she left him, and she herself was bitterly aware of her own guilt, her own betrayal of the vows she had made and had fully intended to keep.

Nick was right, she did owe it to him to give their marriage a second chance. But even as she was giving in, agreeing, aware of the huge weight of reasons why she ought to be pleased that he wanted to stay with her, she still felt an unfamiliar dangerous flare of panic and anger, a sense almost of being trapped and imprisoned.

She suppressed it, of course, quickly smothering it with the tight blanket of her parents’ teachings and her own awareness of what she owed it to them and to Nick to do.

But that night in bed, after he had made love to her and she had lain dry-eyed and tense beside him, she knew she had to tell him about Adam.

The next morning she tried to do so.

‘What do you mean, you can’t stay with me?’ he demanded angrily. ‘Look, Fern, I’ve already told you, it… she meant nothing. It was just sex, that’s all, just sex.’

‘It isn’t that,’ she whispered miserably. ‘It’s me. I…’

Something in her expression must have given her away, because she heard him curse and then demand aggressively, ‘It’s Adam, isn’t it? Well, if you think I’m going to let you leave me for him…’

‘It isn’t like that,’ she protested, horrified by what he was saying. ‘Adam isn’t… doesn’t…’

She wasn’t able to continue, her voice breaking under the strain of what she was feeling, but Nick grabbed hold of her arm, insisting fiercely, ‘Oh, no, you aren’t stopping there. Adam isn’t… doesn’t what, Fern? Adam doesn’t want to fuck you? Don’t lie to me, Fern. I know how much he…’

He stopped then, releasing her so roughly that she half fell against the kitchen table.

‘I’m not letting you go,’ he repeated flatly. ‘You’ve made a commitment to me, to our marriage, and if you think…’

He paused, watching her as she crouched against the table, her body shaking with shock and tension, tears slowly filling her eyes as her self-control started to splinter.

Suddenly his voice softened and became almost cajoling.

‘Think, Fern. Think of how your parents would feel if we broke up… if I had to tell them that you’ve been unfaithful to me with Adam. How long have you been seeing him? How often?’

She stopped him immediately, the words falling over one another as she tried to explain what had happened, how upset she had been, how Adam had found her. How…

‘You mean you did it just to pay me back… because of my affair,’ Nick interrupted her before she could finish what she was saying. For some reason he had started to smile, his voice and body relaxing. ‘Did you tell Adam that?’ he asked her softly. ‘Did he know you were coming back here to me?’

‘I didn’t tell him anything. Just that… just about her coming here…’

He was still smiling at her, almost crooning at her as he reached out to her, apparently unable to sense the tension and resistance in her body as he pulled her into his arms.

‘Fern, Fern, don’t you see? The only reason you went to Adam was because you wanted to get back at me. Of course I’m upset… jealous… hurt—what man wouldn’t be? But I do understand. You love me… and because of that you wanted to hurt me… to pay me back for hurting you. But it’s all over now and we’re still together. And we’re going to stay together. Let’s both put the past behind us and make a fresh start… give our marriage a second chance. I want to. Don’t you?’

What could she say? How could she refuse to accept the olive branch he was offering her? How many other husbands would be as generous… as forgiving? She owed it to him… to her parents… to the way they had brought her up and the standards they had inculcated in her, to do what he was suggesting.

‘Yes,’ she agreed listlessly. ‘Yes, I do.’ And yet somehow saying the words had hurt her throat, straining the muscles, making them ache with the same weary despair that had also invaded her body…

‘Fern, what the hell are you doing? Aren’t you ready yet?’

Guiltily Fern hurried towards the bedroom door, stepping back from it just in time as Nick thrust it open and walked in.

Formal clothes suited him, she acknowledged, as she studied the effect of his well-cut fair hair, and the healthy tan he had acquired since visiting the leisure centre, against the expensive fabric of his dinner suit and the crisp whiteness of his dress shirt.

Nick liked his dress shirts to be hand-laundered by her, and starched. It was a laborious job and one which she felt the local laundry could have performed far more efficiently, but she also knew that if she tried to point this out to Nick he would demand to know if she thought he was made of money, and what she did with her time. After all, she did not work.

Because Nick would not let her. Because every time she raised the subject of getting herself some sort of part-time paid work he told her furiously that he was not going to be humiliated in their local community by having his wife pretending that he kept her so short of money that she needed to earn the pathetically few pounds she would earn.

‘And besides, what would you do?’ he had taunted her. ‘You’ve never held down a proper job.’

‘I could train,’ she had retorted. ‘Some of the local shops…’

Nick had gone from contempt to fury, accusing her of deliberately trying to undermine him, his position.

Didn’t she at least owe it to him to at least try to behave as a loyal wife? he had demanded bitterly.

A loyal wife… Her eyes bleak with despair, she turned to look at him, watching the irritation and contempt hardening his face as he studied her.

‘Why the hell don’t you find something decent to wear?’ he demanded.

She could have retorted that she could not afford the luxury of anything other than the most basic of chain-store clothes, but to do so would reignite his grievance against her late parents, for using their modest wealth to purchase annuities which had died with them rather than investing their capital elsewhere so that it could have been passed on to her.

They must present a bizarre contrast, she admitted tiredly, Nick in his obviously expensive dinner suit, she in her shabby, well-worn, dull dress.

‘My God, you love playing the martyr, don’t you?’ Nick accused her as he glared at her. ‘Hurry up or we’re going to be late. I don’t know what the hell you’re doing up here anyway.’ He gave her another disparaging glance.

Comparing her with Venice, Fern wondered unhappily, or was she simply imagining things… looking for them, because…?

As she followed him downstairs, she wondered what Nick would say if she told him that she would rather stay at home.

Get even more angry with her than he already was, she imagined.

There had been a time when she had actually enjoyed going to dinner parties, had looked forward to the stimulation of conversation with other people, but that had been before Nick had pointed out to her on their way home one evening that she was boring people with her silly mundane conversation.

He had apologised to her later, but when she had refused to respond he had accused her of sulking and she had tried to tell him that she wasn’t; that she just felt so weighed down by the burden of realising what people had privately been thinking of her that she simply couldn’t raise the energy to respond to him.

‘Don’t he to me, Fern,’ he had told her bitterly. ‘You’re trying to punish me for telling you the truth. Just as you tried to punish me for having an affair by…’

She had run out of the room then, unable to bear to listen to him any more, knowing that she was behaving childishly and yet unable to trust herself to stay and hear him out.

It had been shortly after that that her father had died, and then her mother, who had suffered ill health for several years, had gradually started to grow worse, and she had had no energy left to do anything other than cope with her mother’s decline.

‘Fern, for heaven’s sake come on,’ Nick demanded irritably. Quietly she picked her bag up off the bed and walked towards the bedroom door.

Well, at least there was one thing she could be sure of about this evening’s dinner party, Fern reflected, trying to resurrect her sense of humour, and that was that Venice would not be dressed in an out-of-date, dowdy black dress.

She was wrong, on one point at least. Venice was wearing black, but that was the only thing her own dress had in common with the outfit Venice had on, Fern remarked wryly as Venice opened her front door to them.

At closer to thirty-five than thirty Venice was older than Fern; older than Nick too, a tiny, vivacious, fragile-boned creature with a small oval face and enormous eyes. Where another woman might have self-consciously tried to conceal her lack of height, seeing it as a fault rather than an asset, Venice seemed to take pleasure in deliberately underlining the fact that she couldn’t be much more than five feet tall, and Fern, who had in the past suffered several slighting comments from Nick about her own small frame and the fact that short women invariably lacked the elegant grace of their taller sisters, stifled a small pang of envy at Venice’s abundant self-confidence.

The black dress she was wearing might almost have been painted on to her body. For someone so small-boned she had disconcertingly voluptuous breasts. Fern had overheard a couple of other women discussing Venice and her figure, one of them wondering out loud if her breasts might possibly owe more to man than nature.

Whatever the case, they were certainly catching Nick’s eye, Fern recognised.

Had Venice deliberately chosen that trimming of black feathers for her dress, knowing that they not only provided an eye-catching contrast to her skin, but also that the sheen on the feathers reflected the pearly translucence of her bare skin?

The single pear-shaped diamond that nestled between her breasts was so large that it only just escaped being vulgar. When she moved, it blazed cold fire like the matching diamonds in her ears.

Tonight the almost white-blonde hair, which she normally wore in a perfectly shaped shoulder-length bob, was drawn up and back in a contemporary version of a Bardot-type beehive hairstyle, all careless, artful fronds of ‘escaping’ hair and tousled curls, half as though she had just come from her bed and the arms of her lover, piling her hair up carelessly on top of her head, more concerned with the pleasure of their lovemaking than her public appearance.

Only of course that particular type of artless sensuality could only be achieved with the aid of a very expensive hairdresser.

But even without the embellishments provided by her late husband’s wealth Venice would have been a very beautiful woman, Fern admitted.

That she was also a very sensual and provocative one as well and that she enjoyed being so Fern also had little doubt.

Venice was obviously very much a man’s woman and made no attempt to hide it, something that was reinforced by the cursory way she welcomed Fern, turning immediately and far more enthusiastically towards Nick, moving between Fern and her husband, her back almost but not quite turned towards Fern, almost deliberately excluding her from her welcome to Nick.

A welcome which was surely far more effusive than was warranted by the business relationship Nick claimed to have with her. Or was she being unfairly suspicious? Fern wondered, as she stood quietly to one side, politely waiting for Venice to finish her conversation with Nick.

‘That’s a beautiful diamond,’ Fern heard Nick saying softly to her.

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Venice agreed.

As she smiled up at him, her index finger stroked over the hollow between her breasts just above where the diamond lay, almost deliberately drawing Nick’s attention to her body.

Not that she needed to do so, Fern acknowledged. He had hardly taken his eyes off her since she opened the door to them.

The last time Nick had become involved with another woman, he had claimed that she, Fern, had driven him to it with her sexual coldness. If she, his wife, had been more responsive to him, if she had not forced him to find sexual solace in the arms of another woman, he would never have dreamed of being unfaithful to her.

It was her fault that he had had an affair.

And deep down inside herself Fern had believed him. After all, hadn’t her parents brought her up to be aware that it was her female role in life to please and appease, to be gently and femininely aware of the needs of others, and to minister to them before her own?

She had married Nick without giving much thought to whether or not they might be sexually compatible, naïvely assuming that her inability to find much pleasure in their initial lovemaking had been because of her lack of experience.

And besides, she had not been marrying Nick for sex. She had been marrying him because he loved her… because he needed and wanted her.

It hadn’t taken her very long to realise that the understanding with which Nick had appeared to treat her lack of sexuality before their marriage was an indulgence he might have been prepared to allow a fiancée but was most definitely not prepared to allow a wife.

She should never have stayed with him, she recognised now. Not once she realised she no longer loved him; but it had seemed more important then to put her parents’ feelings before her own, and Nick had been so persuasive, so contrite, so sure that this time they would be able to make a go of it, that she simply hadn’t had the heart to tell him that she no longer wanted to.

And then of course there had been the complication of Adam, and so she had given way.

Not just because she had wanted to protect her parents, not even because she was still torn between what she felt or rather did not feel for Nick, and what she firmly still believed—as she had been brought up to believe—that the sanctity of the state of marriage, of the commitment she had made, far, far outweighed the self-indulgence of giving way to her own feelings; but also, shamefully, she had given way because she could not face the thought of Adam knowing she had walked out on her marriage and suspecting why… feeling sorry for her that what had happened between them had in the end been at her instigation, and did not mean… could not mean that she could ever have any future with him…

No, she could not endure the humiliation of listening to Adam explaining in that careful, neutral voice of his that he did not really want her. As though she needed telling…

‘Stay with me,’ Nick had pleaded. ‘We can make it work. I know we can…’

And she had allowed herself to believe him… because she had so desperately needed to believe him.

And now?

She could feel the panic starting to flood through her, the aching, cold, terrifying sensation of somehow having been asleep, only to wake up and find herself trapped in a world, a life that was totally alien to her.

She was still suffering from the effects of her parents’ deaths, she told herself. That was why she was experiencing this sense of panic and loss… this sense of dislocation … of being not just a stranger to herself, but in some sense an outsider to her own life… someone who was dispossessed… alone… alien…

It was a relief when Venice finally turned to her, giving her a coolly appraising look as she commented with a feline smile, ‘Fern… do come into the drawing-room. You look cold… and so thin.’

So plain, so dowdy, so patently undesirable, Fern added mentally to herself as Venice ushered them into the drawing-room, having handed their coats to the uniformed maid who had been standing silently just behind her.

Fern tried to think of anyone other than Venice who would give a small weekday dinner party for less than a dozen people and employ uniformed temporary staff.

Not even Lord Stanton up at the Hall did that. But then Lord Stanton probably couldn’t afford to, and besides, he had the invaluable Phillips to take care of all his domestic arrangements. She had a feeling that Phillips would have been highly disdainful of Venice’s maid, uniformed or not.

Venice’s drawing-room, like the rest of Venice’s house, had been decorated and furnished with one object in mind, and that was to provide the perfect backdrop for Venice herself.

If, in the recessionary environment-conscious Nineties some people might have balked at such an obvious display of wealth and consumerism, such an unabashed love of luxury, Venice was plainly made of sterner stuff.

The drawing-room had, Fern recognised, been redecorated since she had last seen it, and she blinked a little at the effect of so many subtly different shades of peach, layer upon layer of them, so that the room almost seemed to pulsate with the soft colour.

If chiffon curtains were not exactly what one might have expected to find in a drawing-room, they certainly created a very sensual effect, and it certainly took very little imagination to picture Venice lying naked on the thick fleecy peach-hued rug, smiling that slant-eyed provocative smile of hers at her lover.

And her husband? Fern wondered dully.

‘I must show you my bathroom… It’s wonderful,’ she heard Venice saying. ‘I’ve had a mural done of the Grand Canal with the bath framed so that it looks as though I’m looking out through one of the windows of one of those enormous old palazzos. So clever… and so naughty. Sometimes I almost feel as though the gondoliers are real and can actually see me.’

She laughed, batting her eyelashes at Nick, and ignoring her, Fern recognised.

Some of their fellow dinner guests had arrived ahead of them: the local doctor and his wife, both of whom Fern knew reasonably well. She had no really close friends in the town.

She had looked forward to making new friends when they had first moved into their house after their marriage, but Nick had proved to be unexpectedly jealous and possessive; so much so, in fact, that she had found it easier simply to give in to the emotional pressure he put on her rather than endure the unpleasant confrontations her attempts to establish an independent life for herself provoked.

Although she knew a lot of people, some through Nick’s business and others through the work she did for a variety of local charities—Nick approved of this unpaid help she gave to others, not because it helped the charities she worked for, but because it increased his esteem within the area—she had no really close confidantes… no one to whom she could talk about the crisis she felt she was facing.

Was it her parents’ deaths—a final severing of the physical links with her childhood—which had prompted this agonising and soul-searching, this belief that her life had become an empty wasteland with nothing to look forward to; these traumatic feelings of panic which threatened to engulf her whenever she was forced to confront the reality of her marriage? Or was it because she was afraid of facing up to that reality; afraid of stripping back the fiction and the deceit and seeing her marriage for what it really was? Afraid of admitting that she did not love her husband?

And if he was having an affair with Venice… She could feel her heart starting to beat faster, her throat starting to close up.

Don’t think about it, she warned herself. Don’t think about it.

Why not? Because she was terrified that, if she did, she would have to do something about it… that, without the necessity of protecting her parents to hide behind, she would be forced to confront the truth and ask herself, not just why, but also how she could bear to stay in a marriage that was so plainly a mockery of everything that such a commitment could be.

A commitment… That was the crux of all her agonising. When she’d married Nick she had made a commitment… a commitment she had truly believed to be given for life; she had made promises, vows, which were meant to last for life, not to be pushed to one side the moment things went wrong. And surely, just so long as Nick continued to claim that he needed and wanted her, she had no right to walk away from that commitment?

‘Fern… how are you?’

Dizzily she broke free of her painful thoughts, smiling automatically, her tension tightening her face into an almost masklike rigidity as she turned towards the doctor’s wife.

‘I’m fine, Roberta… and you?’

‘Relieved that the winter flu season is almost over,’ Roberta Parkinson told her ruefully. ‘It’s been particularly bad this year, as well. John lost several of his older patients as an indirect result of it. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?’ she added with motherly concern. ‘You’re looking a bit pale.’

‘It’s just the heat in here,’ Fern fibbed. In actual fact she was enjoying the warmth of the room. It was such a contrast to the cold chilliness of their own sitting-room at home.

Because he himself was often working in the evenings, Nick refused to allow her to have the central heating or the gas fires on, claiming that she was extravagantly wasteful with heat.

If it weren’t for the Aga in the kitchen—not one of the brightly coloured modern ones, but the original old-fashioned dull cream type which had been in the house when they first moved in, and which Nick had claimed he was unable to afford to replace—Fern reflected that most evenings she would have been forced to go to bed at a ridiculously early hour just to keep warm.

Roberta excused herself, moving away to talk to the two other couples who had also arrived; Fern knew them both and smiled an acknowledgement of their greeting but remained where she was. One of the couples was a local entrepreneur and his wife, who had moved into the area in the last few years, and the other was their local MP and her husband.

Fern liked all four of them, but tonight she was feeling so on edge and tense that she wanted a few seconds to herself before going over to join them. Because she was afraid of what her expression might betray?

She could feel the panic welling up inside her again, and with it her increasing dread that she was losing all control, not just of her life, but of herself as well. Only yesterday, when Nick had ignored her request that they sit down and talk about their relationship, she had felt almost hysterically close to screaming her frustration out loud. Something… anything to make him listen to her instead of swamping her with his anger, his irritation, his indifference to what she was feeling.

‘Only one more couple to arrive now,’ she heard Venice saying from behind her. As she turned around, she noticed distantly that Nick was with her.

‘Oh, Fern, you don’t have a drink,’ Venice commented, all mock hostessly concern.

‘Fern’s driving,’ Nick announced before Fern herself could say anything. ‘And besides, she has no head for alcohol.’

Fern was uncomfortably aware of the briefly appraising look Jennifer Bowers was giving them from the other side of the room; a look which said quite plainly what the MP thought of Nick’s attitude towards her.

Hurt and humiliated, Fern could feel her colour rising as the anger and pain built up inside her, coupled with the knowledge that there was no way she could express what she was feeling; that even when they were back at home and on their own she would not be able to explain to Nick how his behaviour hurt her.

And that was surely her fault and not his, the result of her early upbringing and the loving but old-fashioned parents who had taught her with gentle insistence that little girls, especially nice, well-behaved little girls, did not behave aggressively, did not argue with others, did not express views which contradicted those of others, and always went out of their way to make life easier for others. Being polite and helpful, her parents had called it.

And since Nick insisted that he loved her, she must surely be the one at fault in feeling this frightening dislocation from life; this subversive awareness that she did not love him in return even though she knew she ought to.

In the distance she heard the doorbell ring, shifting her focus back from her introspective thoughts of the past and into the present.

‘Ah, here are our final couple. They haven’t been together for very long. I expect that’s why they’re late. They probably stopped on the way for…’ Venice gave a small expressive shrug as she went to welcome them.

Fern turned away, smiling at Roberta as she came over to her and announced, ‘I almost forgot… I wanted to have a word with you about the charity auction we’re organising. You’re still on to help sort out the jumble stuff, by the way?’

Fern was just about to answer when the drawing-room doors opened and Venice swept in, ushering the last arrivals inside.

Fern looked towards the doors automatically and then froze, paralysed with shock, her whole body going numb as she stared at the couple who had just walked in; or, rather, at the man who had just walked in.

Adam. She could feel the sound of his name pounding inside her skull, a silent, anguished protest of torment and pain that affected every single nerve-ending of her body; the sensation of her fear that it would be stronger than her self-control making her feel as physically sick as though she had actually let that silent private sound of torment become a physical nerve-jarring reality, revealing to everyone around her exactly what she was feeling… what she had been feeling for so long that suppressing those feelings had drained her energies to the point where there was simply nothing left over for anything else.

In those seconds of agonised confusion and fear it was as humiliating and terrifying as though she had been standing naked in front of them all… worse, in fact; but then she felt Nick’s hand on the small of her back, heard the surprised chagrin and envy in his voice as he commented disbelievingly to her, ‘Where the hell did Adam find her?’

And hard on the heels of the grateful realisation that somehow fate had been kind to her and that she had not betrayed her feelings came the sickening awareness, not just of the youth and prettiness of the girl who was with Adam, but also the way she stood uncertainly close to his side, and the way he moved closer, protectively towards her, smiling encouragingly down at her.

Fern could literally feel the knife-twist of jealousy and pain spearing inside her, the hot agony of longing and guilt that rose up so that she felt almost as though she was drowning in her own anguish.

‘Fern…’

She heard Adam say her name… saw him coming towards her.

‘Adam.’

Was that really her voice? It sounded so cool, so contained, so totally the opposite of all that she was feeling.

No one would ever guess, watching the wary way they greeted one another, that Adam was her brother-in-law, she recognised bleakly, or rather her stepbrother-in-law. There was after all no blood relationship between Nick and Adam; Nick’s mother had married Adam’s father when Nick had been in his early teens and Adam almost a young adult, and physically of course they could not have been more dissimilar.

Where Nick was all dapper blond elegance, Adam was…

She found she was having to swallow hard past the obstruction which had somehow lodged in her throat as her mind, her thoughts, her emotions, obviously resentful of the constrictions she had placed upon them, rebelled and relayed to her not the actual reality of Adam as he now stood before her, tall, distinguished in the formal evening clothes which subtly emphasised the essential maleness of him, his dark, normally slightly unruly thick hair firmly brushed—and newly cut—his eyes a calm, sober grey; but Adam as she had once seen him, his skin damp with sweat, tiny beads of it lodging in the hollow at the base of his throat, the scent of it, of him, filling her nostrils with a musky and body-trembling awareness of his masculinity, his eyes, so calm and steady now, burning with a molten silver heat, making her tremble, unleashing within her needs, desires, feelings she had never known she could possess.

For all his workouts at the gym, for all the obvious pride and self-satisfaction Nick took in his body and his sexuality, he had never, could never… She swallowed hard, forcing herself to ignore the taunting images filling her memory and to concentrate instead on the girl standing so shyly at Adam’s side.

She couldn’t have been a day over nineteen, Fern reflected, unable to stop herself from responding to the shy, hesitant smile she was giving her.

Enviably tall, with pretty dark hair, she had eyes which still held the doe-like innocence of extreme youth, her mouth its vulnerability and uncertainty.

The last time she had seen her, Fern remembered wryly, she had had a brace across those now perfect little white teeth and she had been wearing her school uniform.

‘Fern, you remember Lily James, don’t you?’ Adam queried, gently bringing the younger girl forward.

‘Yes… yes, of course I do. How are you, Lily? How are your parents?’

She sounded as though she was old enough to be Lily’s grandmother, Fern recognised ruefully, but there was not even a decade between them.

It was totally contrary to Fern’s own nature to be unkind to anyone, much less an obviously shy young girl like this, even if… when…

Even when what? Fern asked herself bitterly as she smiled warmly at the younger girl, gently trying to put her at her ease.

Even if Adam loved her…

Her heart seemed to jolt right up into her throat, its already nervous beating becoming a frantic distressed hammering.

The palms of her hands were damp with sweat, her nails curling painfully into their softness as she fought to suppress the cry of agony she could feel building in her throat.

What was wrong with her? She had always known that one day Adam would fall in love… that someone would eventually cause him to abandon the bachelor state which Nick had always claimed he would never voluntarily give up.

‘If you really want my stepbrother,’ he had told Fern once before they were married, ‘then the only way you’re likely to get him is by tricking him into getting you pregnant. Very keen on being seen to do the right thing, is our Adam. Do you want him, Fern?’ he had added slyly.

‘Adam is just a friend,’ she had responded tautly. After all, no nice, decent girl ever admitted even to herself that she could possibly want a man who did not want her… or at least that was the message she had picked up from her mother’s carefully protective teachings.

And she had believed it. And still believed it?

She could feel the pain stirring inside her again, tearing, wrenching, streaked with guilt and shame.

Adam was standing so close to her that she was actually conscious of the scent of him, not the faint cool hint of cologne he was wearing, but the basic personal male smell…

Despairingly she moved back from him, giving Lily a small apologetic smile as she started to excuse herself.

‘Fern.’

She could hear the tension in Adam’s voice and the anger, and her own stomach muscles clenched in response.

She couldn’t look at him. She dared not…

‘I think Venice wants us to go through into the dining-room,’ she told him distantly as she turned away and looked for Nick.

The meal they were served was superbly presented, an exotic combination of all that was luxurious and first rate, which must have cost Venice as much as she probably spent on food in a year, Fern reflected tiredly, unable to face the richness of her food, nor the smell that rose up from her plate.

They had almost finished their pudding when without warning Venice turned to John Parkinson and asked, ‘What do you think of this plan to bulldoze Broughton House and build shops and offices on the land?’

‘What plan?’ Roberta’s husband asked with some concern.

‘Oh, haven’t you heard?’ Venice queried. ‘It’s all over the town that someone local is planning to put in a bid for the place, ostensibly as a private home, but in reality because he… they have very different plans for it.

‘Of course it would have to be someone with the right kind of local contacts and influence so that they could get planning permission pushed through, wouldn’t you say so, Adam?’

Although she was smiling sweetly at Adam, no one could have been in any doubt that it was Adam to whom Venice was referring when she spoke of ‘someone local’ acquiring Broughton House. But surely Adam would never lend himself to that kind of scheme?

It was true that Adam, as an architect, was bound to be interested in anything which might lead to new commissions, and it was certainly no secret that he was part of a highly successful local conglomerate which had designed, built and now ran several small local shopping parades and housing schemes, but all of them had been completely above board and free from any taint of the kind of underhand usage of power and position which Venice was now none too subtly implying.

‘Perhaps we ought to organise a committee to oppose it,’ Venice continued without giving Adam any chance to reply. ‘I have actually heard that what’s being proposed isn’t just a small parade of shops, but a huge hypermarket. Of course you have to admire whoever it is for his chutzpah. If he can pull it off, it will make him very, very wealthy, and I suppose to be fair there will be those who will say that the town does need that kind of facility. What do you think, Adam?’

‘Broughton House is in an area of “outstanding natural beauty”,’ Adam told her quietly. ‘I should imagine it would be impossible to get planning permission for that kind of venture.’

‘Oh, but surely not if one had the right connections… knew whom to approach and how,’ Venice persisted, smiling sweetly at him.

There was a small, uneasy silence which Nick broke by turning to Adam and saying silkily, ‘You don’t seem particularly surprised, Adam, but then perhaps you know more about what’s going on than the rest of us. After all, as a member of the town council…’

‘Like Venice, I have heard the rumours,’ Adam countered, ‘but that seems to be all they are… rumours.’

‘But the house is up for sale and unliveable-in in its present state,’ Venice persisted. ‘And surely you, Adam, both as an architect and a councillor, must know something…’

‘Mrs Broughton lived in it…’

Fern froze as she heard the unsteady huskiness in her own voice, her words cutting right across Venice’s deliberate probing, deflecting attention away from Adam and towards herself, drawing not just an irritated little frown from Venice at her intervention, but an angry glare from Nick as well.

‘Fern has always had a ridiculously sentimental attachment to the place,’ Nick announced tersely, giving her a cold look.

‘Well, I for one would be very surprised to hear that anyone would be foolish enough to imagine they could get planning permission for that kind of venture,’ Jennifer Bowers announced briskly. ‘And if anyone tried, I should certainly oppose it. After all, we haven’t spent all these years protecting the character and history of the town only to go and have hypermarkets built on its unspoilt land.’

‘Adam’s the expert on the town’s history and preservation,’ Venice persisted. ‘And I still have a sneaking suspicion that he knows more about what’s going on than he wants to tell us.’

Because Adam himself was involved in some scheme or other to destroy the house? That was what Venice was implying, and Adam himself had done and said nothing that really contradicted her subtle accusations. Because he couldn’t?

As she glanced round the table, Fern suspected that she wasn’t the only one wishing that Adam would make a more definite and unequivocal rebuttal of Venice’s hints.

‘Have you heard anything about this supermarket business?’ Roberta asked her later as they waited for Venice’s maid to bring down their coats.

Fern shook her head.

Was what Venice had been suggesting true? Was Adam involved in some plan to secretly circumvent the planning controls operating locally? And what about Nick’s earlier thoughts that Adam wanted the house to raise a family?

The maid came back downstairs, apparently unable to find Fern’s jacket. Quietly she went upstairs to look for it herself.

The coats were all placed on a bed in one of the spare rooms. She had to move several before she could find her own thin jacket, and as she lifted one of them, a heavy, plain wool man’s coat, she knew immediately that it was Adam’s. Her fingers tightened into the fabric. She could feel the hot salt burn of the tears clogging her throat and for a moment the impulse, the need to bury her face in the soft black fabric and breathe in the scent of Adam from it was so strong that she had the coat halfway to her face, the fabric gripped tightly in her fingers, before she fully realised what she was doing.

Appalled, she dropped it, turning round quickly, her face flushed with guilt as she mechanically reached for her own jacket.

As she pulled it on, she realised that in dropping Adam’s coat she had dislodged a heavy folded brochure from an inside pocket. She bent to pick it up and replace it and then stiffened as she realised what it was.

Through the tears which blurred her vision she could see the photograph of Broughton House on the front cover of the sale brochure.

She was twenty-seven years old, still a relatively young woman, but suddenly she wished with almost savage intensity that she were older, her life closer to its end, and with it the end of all the pain, the misery, the guilt which daily became an even greater burden to her.

She was Nick’s wife, she reminded herself; she had no right to…

To what? To love another man?

‘Stay with me, Fern,’ Nick had begged her. And then later when she had told him about Adam he had said it again.

He must genuinely want and need her to overlook what she had done, mustn’t he? And surely in view of that she owed it to him to stay.

And besides, what was the point in her leaving? she had recognised numbly. Where else was there for her to go—now that she had been all the way to hell and back again? And to heaven as well?

Shakily she turned away, almost running towards the door and down the stairs.

CHAPTER THREE

‘MMM… nice,’ Zoe murmured teasingly against Ben’s mouth as she wrapped herself around him, curling her body into the sleepy morning warmth of his.

It hadn’t been easy getting their precious time off to coincide; Monday was the one morning of the week when neither of them had to get up early for work, the restaurant where Ben was currently working closed on Mondays and Zoe having begged, cajoled and bribed the others at the London airport hotel where she was working so that she could have Mondays off as well.

She loved it when they were together like this, she thought drowsily as she snuggled deeper into Ben’s naked warmth, rubbing her face against his skin and nuzzling him with lazy, appreciative sensuality.

Once, in their early days together, Ben had told her that she was just like a little cat with her soft fluid body and her habit of rubbing herself affectionately against him.

In truth there was something prettily feline about her small triangular face and the soft sinuous grace of her body.

But Zoe had an energy that had nothing catlike about it, an electric buzzing force that made her grey eyes sparkle with enthusiasm, and which seemed to crackle around her like a live force-field.

There was nothing kittenish about her either; she scorned such ploys and affectations. It was, Ben reflected wryly as he slid his fingers into the thick dark mass of curls haloing her face, only now, in these their most intimate moments, that her normal exuberance was calmed and tamed, to reveal her vulnerability and sensuality.

‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ he told her as he felt her hand slide downwards over his body.

Zoe laughed, turning her face into the curve of his throat and kissing him lovingly.

She laughed again as she heard him groan and felt him turn his body in towards her, his actions running directly counter to his words.

It had always been like this between them right from the very start, Ben, cautious, concerned, wanting to hold back; take time and to be sure; she…

She made a voluptuous sound of appreciation against his skin as her fingers closed gently round him.

…She impatient, impulsive, knowing almost from the first moment they had met that she wanted him.

She felt him move against her, his body aroused, hard; she caressed him slowly, enjoying her own body’s response to him, the taut, heavy feeling in her breasts; the sensitivity of her nipples especially when she rubbed herself rhythmically against his chest, the small betraying, knowing pulse that grew insistently urgent as she let herself absorb the hot silky texture of his skin, anticipating the pleasure that lay ahead, the pleasures they had already known.

Ben wrapped his arms around her, kissing the top of her head and then, when she lifted her face to look at him, her mouth.

His skin smelled of warmth and sleep and the faintly acrid scent of his sweat, and that special unmistakable scent that was his alone and which as always she found unbearably erotic. She wondered if her scent affected him in the same way. Ben didn’t like talking about sex. In the northern city in which he had grown up, boys… men grew up with an attitude towards sex which was very different from the ones she had absorbed from her own middle-class parents.

And yet Ben was an unbelievably tender and caring lover, almost as though, if he was unable to talk to her about this most intimate side of their lives together, then at least he could make up for his inhibitions by showing her all he felt.

They knew each other well enough now, had been together long enough to recognise without words each other’s signs of arousal, each other’s sexual needs, and yet each time they made love it was different… special… familiar and yet still, for Zoe, achingly pleasurable.

Now, when Ben kissed her, he did so lingeringly, slowly, taking his time, as though the intimate caresses of their mouths were a total act of physical communication and satisfaction on their own, and not merely a preliminary act to his physical possession of her.

No, if anything she was the one who was the more impatient.

Not that there was any doubt that Ben wanted her, she acknowledged in satisfaction as she stroked her thumb along the underside of the rigid shaft of his penis and felt him shudder against her, his muscles tensing as his teeth tugged on her bottom lip.

She felt his hand touch her breast, cupping it, and she moved against him, enjoying the delicate friction of his palm against her nipple. Soon he would bend his head and kiss her throat, her shoulder and then her breast itself, taking his time, lingering over each caress, while she felt the urgent thud of his heartbeat against her body and savoured the delicious tension of her own growing need to feel his mouth against her nipple, tugging on the small hard peak of flesh.

Languorously she stroked her hands over his stomach and hips, sliding them down over his buttocks, caressing him lazily until she felt the sharp pins and needles of pleasure exploding inside her as his tongue rubbed over her nipple. Her fingers tightened on his skin, his mouth opened over her nipple. She shuddered in pleasure as the hot fierce surge of her own arousal overwhelmed her.

‘Now, Ben,’ she told him thickly. ‘Now… now… now. I want you now…’

Half an hour later, when the sharp summons of the telephone broke into the luxurious pleasure of their shared post-coital relaxation, Zoe told Ben lazily, ‘It’s your turn.’

‘Why on earth can’t we get a telephone by the bed?’ Ben grumbled as he pushed back the duvet and reached for and pulled on a clean pair of underpants.

‘Because you said we couldn’t afford one,’ Zoe reminded him, watching him with unashamed pleasure.

He had a wonderful body, lean and powerfully male without being over-muscled. His arms and chest were taut with sinewy strength, his stomach flat and hard. She gave a small convulsive movement of sheer sensuality, remembering the sensation of the soft dark hair that grew on his body against her fingertips; fine and silky over his chest and stomach, it darkened and thickened into a heavier stomach-tensing line of more intense growth along the centre of his body, spreading wider and thicker above the base of his penis.

Idly she wondered if he derived as much pleasure in looking at her body, in thinking about it, in contrasting its femininity with his own masculinity, as she did his.

She was lucky in that, despite the exuberant thickness and wildness of the brunette curls that more than one envious friend had not been able to believe were actually natural and not the result of some expensive and enviable perm, the hair on her body was confined to a neatly demure triangle of soft hair that started just below the pretty mole where her body started to swell into sensual womanhood.

Thanks to her parents, she had no hang-ups about either her body or her sexuality. Unlike Ben.

She remembered how surprised she had been the first time they had made love and he had insisted on undressing in the dark, and even then on leaving on his underpants until they were actually in bed.

It had been many weeks before she had persuaded him to allow her to see him naked and in the daylight, and even more before she had ventured to tease him gently for his shyness.

What he had said in response to her then had for the first time in her life left her unable to make any verbal reply, unable to do anything other than smother back the anguish aching in her throat.

With five children, boys and girls, sharing one bedroom and two beds, such modesty was essential and necessary, especially when you were the eldest, especially when you were a particularly well developed teenage boy, especially when you had a gut-deep protective instinct towards your younger siblings which you had never been able to put into words but which led you to be fiercely protective, not so much of your own privacy, but of their innocence.

She had never teased him about his need for modesty again, just as she had never retaliated on those occasions when she’d grimaced in disgust over the tacky grubbiness of their rented flat with its damp patches on the walls, its bath which no matter how often she cleaned it never really seemed to her as though it was clean, and he turned on her and told her grimly that where he came from and to his family the privacy of the flat they shared would be considered a real luxury.

Most of the time, because there was just the two of them, because Ben had done his early training under one of the best chefs in the world and because that training had encompassed far, far more than the art of buying, preparing and serving good food, she was not conscious of any social differences between them and she was certainly not concerned about them. But Ben was.

She heard him pick up the receiver and say their number, and then, when he didn’t call out to her, she snuggled back under the duvet.

They still had the whole day ahead of them and it would be fun to coax him into coming back to bed. She rolled over on to her stomach, smiling in reminiscent pleasure as she felt the soft pulsing echo of her orgasm.

It was five minutes before Ben came back. When he did and she saw his face, all thoughts of teasing him back into bed vanished. She sat up immediately, the duvet sliding unregarded off her body.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

‘I don’t know. That was Ma on the phone. She wants me to go up there.’

‘To Manchester?’

‘There’s a train every hour.’ He paused and looked at her. Immediately Zoe shook her head and told him quickly,

‘No, it’s all right. You go. I owe Mum and Dad a visit anyway.’ She pulled a face. ‘I haven’t really seen them since Christmas… I haven’t even told them our good news yet. I wonder when we’re going to hear something definite about the hotel.

‘Don’t worry,’ she told him softly, reaching out and taking hold of his hand. ‘It can’t be anything too catastrophic. Your mother would have told you over the phone if it had been.’

She didn’t question his decision to go north. She knew him well enough by now to realise how seriously he took his role as the eldest in the family; substitute father-figure to his younger siblings in many ways since his parents’ divorce. She had observed the way not just they but also his mother depended on him and, although her heart ached protectively for him when she saw how much he worried about them, she couldn’t blame them for their dependence on him.

She had only met his family once. He hadn’t really wanted her to… had argued angrily against her decision to accompany him on one of his visits home; but she had insisted, knowing intuitively that, if she gave in, his family and his openly ambivalent feelings towards them and the life he had left behind would act as a barrier between them.

He might have prepared her for their poverty, for the vast gulf that lay between him, with his energy for life, his ambition, his determination, his awareness and control over his life, and their poverty and apathy; but what he had not prepared her for, obviously because it had not occurred to him to do so, had been the shock of discovering that his mother could more easily have passed for his older sister.

He had been nearly twenty then and had looked older. His mother, who had given birth to him days after her sixteenth birthday, was still, amazingly after having five children, small and almost fragilely slender, her anxious eyes turning to her eldest son not just for his support, but for his approval as well, Zoe had recognised on a welling tide of her own emotion.

Ben had only told her the bare facts of his early upbringing, and then half reluctantly. His parents had divorced when he was in his early teens, his father disappearing, leaving the family completely without his emotional and financial support.

Reading between the lines, she had guessed that Ben had taken on to his own shoulders the role abandoned by his father, and then, without knowing her, she had resented Ben’s mother on Ben’s own behalf for her selfishness in allowing such a young child to take such an appalling burden.

Now that resentment had gone, but in its place had been born a determination never to treat Ben as his family did, using him as an emotional and financial support, taking from him instead of giving.

And with that in mind she smiled generously at him now and swallowed her own disappointment at the disruption of their precious shared time.

‘You can have the bathroom first,’ she told him. ‘I’ll go and make the coffee.’

On their days off breakfast together was normally a special leisurely ritual. She made the coffee while Ben went down to the small bakery a couple of streets away to buy fresh croissants still warm and buttery from the ovens.

Zoe acknowledged that she was lucky in never seeming to put on any extra weight no matter what she ate, but then her job was very physically demanding, with long hours and missed mealtimes.

She hadn’t said anything at work yet about their plans. It had been hard enough getting her job as it was. Like everyone else, the large hotel chains were cutting back on expenses and staff. Only the fact that she had among the best exam results in her year had secured her a coveted job as a very junior trainee.

She had been with the company several years now, had completed their training scheme and had been lucky enough to be offered her present job as junior undermanager of their Heathrow hotel.

A plum job with a minute salary and the ferocious expense of travelling by car to work from the flat she and Ben shared. Silly perhaps, when she could have lived in or even at home with her parents, but it was worth all the hassle… all the time, all the travelling… all the hours she spent alone while Ben was still working… worth it for the precious wonderful time they did get to spend together.

Once Ben had gone, she rang her parents’ number. Her mother answered the phone, pleasure quickening her voice when Zoe announced her plans.

‘Darling, I’d love to see you. Will Ben be coming as well?’

‘No. Not this time.’

‘Oh, dear, what a shame. Never mind.’

Zoe grinned to herself as she heard the note of relief underlying her mother’s pretended disappointment. As products of the Sixties, with all that the decade’s culture had embraced, her parents had been determined to bring her up free of the shibboleths, the petty tyrannies and restrictions, the prejudices from whose shackles they and their whole generation had so enthusiastically and gloriously cut themselves free, and she knew how it both astonished and appalled them that they should have suffered such an extraordinary sea-change, such a reversion to the middle-class mores of their own parents, which they had assumed they had successfully thrown off where her own relationship with Ben was concerned.

Valiantly they battled to keep this horribly unegalitarian backsliding into middle-class morality hidden from their daughter, but Zoe was as much a product of her own decade as they were of theirs; she knew them too well, had lived with them too long, had grown to maturity alternately caught between amusement and disbelief at their naïveté and lack of awareness of what the real world, her world comprised to suffer any sense of ill-usage at their reaction to Ben.

As she had laughingly confided to one of her oldest friends, a girl like herself, born to the same kind of free-thinking, liberal if somewhat woolly-minded parents, ‘I think the parents are more shocked at the way they’re reacting to Ben than I am. Mummy said to me after the first time she’d met him, “Poor Ben… He’s been so financially and socially disadvantaged.” She can’t even bring herself to say that he’s working-class, poor darling. She still lives in a world where class differences aren’t supposed to exist. I think she sees my relationship with Ben as some sort of physical desire for some rough manual worker type that will probably pass. She believes I’m oblivious to the class differences between us when of course I’m not. Neither of us is. Poor Mummy, she doesn’t really understand that it’s different now. Ben and I don’t live in some dream-world where we think that love can conquer everything. We know it’s going to be hard… that we’re going to have to work at it. It’s not like it was for our parents, going through life doped up to the eyeballs on pot and sex.’

‘No,’ Ann had agreed wryly. ‘My mother seems to think that because Matthew and I live together we spend our entire lives in bed having sex. She actually apologised for disturbing me the other day when she rang me up at eight in the evening. I nearly told her I’d only just come in from work; that I had a file of balance sheets I’d brought home with me to work on; that Matthew had gone to the supermarket to do the shopping and that we’d be lucky if either of us got to bed before midnight, and that once we did the last thing either of us would feel like doing would be making love. But you can’t disillusion the poor darlings, can you?’ Ann had added, wrinkling her nose.

Zoe’s parents had a house in Hampstead, the fashionable part, bought just before the first of the big property booms with the help of a cash wedding present from both sets of parents who had been delighted and fervently relieved to discover that their offspring were finally legalising their union.

They had met at university; had taken the hippy trail to India together, returning with matching flowing locks and caftans. They had got married in them; scarlet ones. Zoe had seen the photographs, which were not among those now displayed in the plain tasteful heavy silver frames which decorated the pretty antique tables in her mother’s sitting-room.

As an investment banker, her father had done well in the Seventies and Eighties. Zoe had gone to St Paul’s, where she had worked hard enough to get a very satisfactory nine O levels. Her parents had confidently expected her to go on to university and had been shocked when she had told them what she wanted to do instead.

‘Hotel management… but why, darling?’ her mother had asked, obviously perplexed.

‘Because I like looking after people,’ Zoe had told her calmly. ‘I enjoy organising them… being bossy and managing.’ She had given them a wide laughing smile. ‘Of course I won’t always be working for someone else,’ she had assured them. ‘One day I shall have a hotel of my own. Perhaps somewhere abroad… Spain… Benidorm,’ she added teasingly.

Of course they had been disappointed, but eventually they had given way, as she had known they would. They knew nothing of discipline or coercion and had no defences against her stubborn insistence that she knew what she wanted to do.

Against all the odds, Ben liked them, although he considered they were no match for her.

She knew that if she had wished it her father would gladly have financed her, giving her an allowance, buying her a better car than the ten-year-old Mini which took her to and from work… even paying the rent on a decent flat; but once she had made up her mind to move in with Ben she had decided that she would live on what she earned. Not that Ben resented her parents’ wealth. To do so, he had once told her, would harm him much more than it could harm them.

Her mother picked her up from the station. At forty-six she still showed traces of the pretty girl she had been, the prettiness now softened and transmuted into a polished elegance.

As she kissed her affectionately, Zoe said, ‘You look good! I like the new hairstyle, it suits you.’

Heather Clinton smiled. ‘I wore it like this in the Sixties, straight and bobbed.’

‘Only then it was the same colour as mine,’ Zoe teased. ‘Not blonde.’

And then she had gone braless, and worn skimpy little shift dresses that showed more of her body than they concealed, and in those days her body had been worth showing, her skin glowing with health and youth, honey-tanned, sleek and firm.

Now, despite her aerobics classes, despite the expensive body preparation she used, she was beginning to be aware of the first beginnings of an unflattering loss of tone, an awareness that, no matter how hard she tried, it was impossible for her to recapture that golden, silky-skinned glow which David had loved so much.

Had he noticed its loss too? Did he, as she did herself, compare her to younger, fresher-skinned women and find her wanting?

She glanced at her daughter, half anxiously, half enviously. Zoe was all the things she had once been; so like her and yet so very different from her.

‘Daddy’s had to fly to Jersey,’ she told Zoe. ‘So I’m afraid it will just be the two of us.’

‘Never mind,’ Zoe told her. ‘We’ll be able to have a good gossip. How about having lunch somewhere together? That Italian place… I’m starving.’

She grinned to herself as she saw the uncertain sideways look her mother was giving her clothes: black leggings, black lace-up boots, a silk turtleneck sweater which she had swooped on with glee in a second-hand shop and, over the top of it, a thick bulky cotton-knit sweater which was really Ben’s.

In contrast her mother was wearing a casual but very obviously expensive cream linen skirt and jacket, teamed with the plainest of plain ivory silk shirts, her nails elegantly buffed and free of polish, just as her hair was free of lacquer and her face of heavy clogging make-up. Her only jewellery was her wedding and engagement rings, and the pretty trio of gold Cartier bracelets Zoe’s father had bought her for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Over lunch it was Zoe who skilfully controlled the conversation and who then, as a penance for not confiding in her mother about her own and Ben’s hopes for the new restaurant-cum-hotel, allowed Heather to take her into her favourite dress shop and buy her a new outfit.

Her mother had pulled a slight face over her choice of brilliantly patterned Lycra cycling shorts and a top which she claimed clashed appallingly with it, but Zoe had smiled indulgently, refraining from pointing out that her generation had its own fashions and its own tastes and kissing her mother affectionately as they waited for her purchases to be wrapped up.

When her mother announced uncertainly that it was her evening for her bridge lesson, Zoe heroically concealed her amusement and gravely assured her that no, she did not mind at all.

‘Ben will probably be home by the time I get back,’ she assured her mother, hugging her warmly.

Only when she got back, Ben had not returned, and after the warmth of her parents’ home, with its unpretentious and unfussy but oh, so discreetly expensive décor, the flat seemed even more unwelcoming than ever.

Here on the tatty basic furniture there were no carefully treasured silver-framed photographs, no pretty pieces of Chelseaware… no cleverly chosen objets d’art… no paintings. No, there were none of those things, but there was love, Zoe reminded herself, and then she stood still, frowning, the forefinger halting that she had been dragging lazily through the permanent film of dust on the black ash table which Ben had assembled and which had joints which were nothing like true.

There was love in her parents’ home as well, wasn’t there? Of course there was, she reassured herself. All through her childhood and then her teenage years she had been aware of that love, and had taken it for granted. Too much for granted? After all, among their generation her parents were unusual in remaining together.

On her way up the stairs she had collected the post. Two bills, a bank statement and a thick white typed envelope which she was dying to open.

It was addressed to both of them, and she was nearly sure it was something from their backer. What did it contain? News about the property he intended to purchase? She could feel the excitement starting to uncoil and fizz up inside her.

Hurry up, Ben, she pleaded silently. Hurry up. She could have opened the letter, of course, it was after all addressed to both of them, but like a little girl she wanted to share the surprise with him… to share the pleasure… or the disappointment.

It wasn’t going to be a disappointment, she assured herself firmly. Ben was the one who was the pessimist, not she…

It was almost midnight before he came back, and she knew immediately when she saw his face that whatever his mother had wanted to tell him could not have been good news.

‘Ben!’ she cried out in sympathetic alarm. ‘What’s wrong? Is someone ill? Is…?’

There were dark shadows under his eyes, and his skin looked drained and sallow, his blue eyes which could glow warmly with love and tenderness bleak and empty.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked him gently.

He sat down heavily on the old sofa they had inherited with the flat. Zoe’s mother had wanted to have it re-covered for them, grimacing at the unknown identity of its many stains, but Zoe had firmly refused, flinging over it instead a richly patterned rug she had picked up from one of the street markets.

Now she sat down next to him, not touching him… waiting…

‘It’s Sharon,’ he told her emptily. ‘She’s pregnant.’ He turned his head and looked at her, but he wasn’t seeing her, Zoe recognised, not really; his expression was too controlled, too hard and full of starkly bitter bleak despair.

Uncertainly Zoe waited, instinct telling her not to speak… not to touch… not to do anything; and then abruptly he seemed to focus properly on her, the blood surging into his face, burning it with a heat that left stains like bruises against his cheekbones.

‘She’s sixteen years old, for God’s sake, and she’s pregnant.

‘Mum thought she was on the Pill, but apparently she forgot to take it and Sharon, of course, like the little fool that she is, didn’t say a word to Mum about anything until she was just about bursting out of her school uniform.

‘My God… hasn’t she learned anything? Hasn’t she seen from Mum? Doesn’t she realise?’

Zoe swallowed painfully, knowing that his anguish was something private, something beyond the bonds that the two of them shared, caused by his knowledge and experience of a way of life that was totally alien to her.

Even so, she tried to reach out to him, asking hesitantly, ‘And the father… the boy?’

‘The boy…’ The face he turned towards her was white now… not with exhaustion but with a bitter savage fury, the expression in his eyes one that made her shiver; one which she thought would always haunt her.

‘The boys, not the boy,’ he corrected her thickly. ‘Sharon told me that she isn’t sure just who is the father. And of course the stupid bitch has left it far, far too late to have an abortion. Mum can look after it, she told me. Either that or the council can rehouse her.’

Not knowing what to say, Zoe reached out and touched his arm gently.

‘It might all work out for the best,’ she began unsteadily, only to recoil in shock as Ben threw her hand off his arm so violently that she fell back against the settee. His eyes blazed fury and, even worse, contempt.

‘What the hell do you know about it?’ he demanded savagely. ‘It might all work out for the best.’ She winced at the hatred in his voice as he mimicked her voice, her accent. ‘How? Like it did for my mother, with three kids under five by the time she was twenty, an unfaithful husband… no income, no home, and no hope of ever doing anything but watching your life slide away from you, with no hope of ever getting out of the mess you’re in; with no hope of anything, just the sickening reality of snotty-nosed kids dressed in other kids’ cast-offs, and perhaps the odd few days of sex from some man you might happen to meet in the pub, who if you’re lucky won’t leave you with another unwanted and unsupported brat on your hands when he walks out on you. Is that what you call things working out for the best?’

‘She… she could have the baby adopted,’ Zoe suggested shakily, trying not to let him see how much his reaction had hurt her, how much it had excluded her… how much the starkness of the picture he had drawn for her contrasted with the home she had just left, the life and world her parents inhabited.

‘She could, but she won’t… girls like “our Sharon” don’t. They haven’t got that much sense… they love them, you see, the poor bitches, or at least they believe they do, and they can’t even see that by loving them they’re destroying them, submitting them to empty, wasted, dragged-out lifetimes of sterility and apathy. If they really loved them, they’d have them aborted.’

The ugliness of his comment took Zoe’s breath away.

‘And if they really loved themselves they wouldn’t get pregnant in the first place. And who’s to blame for that, do you think, Zoe…? The stupid little tarts for whom sex is about the only pleasure, the only excitement they’ll ever have in their lives, if in fact it does give them any pleasure, or the middle-class liberals like your parents whose liberality took away the only things that used to protect them.

‘Before your parents and their destruction of “the rules”, girls like Sharon got married when they fell pregnant, or at least most of them did.’

‘And was that any better for them?’ Zoe asked him in a low voice. ‘To be married at sixteen to someone they probably didn’t love and to have to stay in that marriage for the rest of their lives? Were they really any happier?’

‘Happier?’ He looked at her in disgust. ‘People like us, like me… like Sharon… like my mother… all my family… happiness doesn’t come into our lives, Zoe. It isn’t an option or a choice. No, Sharon might not have been “happier”, but she’d have been a darn sight better off. She’d have a husband to support her, her child would have had a father… her children would all have had the same father. She wouldn’t have been living alone in some grotty tower block isolated from her friends and family, driven to drink or depression, to drugs and sex… driven perhaps to abusing her children as much as she would be abusing herself.’

‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ Zoe cried out, horrified.

‘No, it doesn’t have to be,’ Ben agreed. ‘Maybe some fairy prince will ride up on a white charger and sweep her off to happy-ever-after land. Is that what you think?’ he asked her in disgust.

There was nothing Zoe could say, no comfort she could offer.

‘Do you know that when she was eleven Sharon was the top of her class… a clever girl, her teachers said, capable of going far, doing things; and then came puberty and suddenly Sharon wasn’t clever any longer. Clever girls don’t get pregnant and ruin their lives and the lives of everyone around them with unwanted babies. Only stupid, selfish girls do that.’

‘And boys,’ Zoe pointed out huskily to him without looking at him. ‘It does take two, you know.’

He gave her a thin, bitter smile. ‘She was supposed to be on the Pill, remember…’ He got up abruptly, turning his back on her. ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed.’

As he walked into the bathroom, Zoe realised that she hadn’t shown him the letter. She picked it up and stared at it and then slowly put it down again.

Perhaps tomorrow, when he felt a bit better. Tomorrow, when she had had time to forget how suddenly and frighteningly he had become a stranger to her, a stranger who it seemed almost hated and despised her.

But Ben didn’t hate her and he didn’t despise her. He loved her. She knew that.

Right now he was upset and shocked. She looked at the letter again and sighed quietly, blinking back the tears threatening to fill her eyes.

CHAPTER FOUR

ELEANOR frowned as she thought she heard a sound coming from the boys’ room. She put down the text she had been studying and got out of bed, reaching for her robe. The Vivaldi tape she had been playing in the background as she worked was not on loud enough to have disturbed her sons, and, still concerned about Tom’s bout of sickness, she hurried into their room.

Both of them were fast asleep and when she leaned over to place the back of her hand against Tom’s forehead it felt reassuringly cool.

Straightening up, she watched them both for several seconds.

Both of them had been much wanted and dearly loved, by her at least. Allan, her first husband, had not really snared her joy in their conception, and had certainly never wanted her to have a second child. He had deeply resented their claims on her time and attention, half wanting to be mothered himself.

Things were very different now, and he was a far more responsible and participating father to his daughter with his second wife than he had ever been with his sons. But then, when they had married, he had been very young, and very ambitious, and with hindsight, and the calm detachment that came from recognising that both of them in their separate ways had been victims of their totally different perceptions of what marriage should be, she acknowledged that he had perhaps been justified in claiming that she had put the children before him, had loved them more intensely and more exclusively than she had him.

He still kept in touch with them, and she had been scrupulous about ensuring that they saw as much of him as was feasible. His new wife, Karen, was a maternal woman who made it clear she had enough love for everyone, and she and Eleanor got on very well, surprisingly. In fact, it had been Karen’s idea that Tom and Gavin come to them during the day in the school holidays now that she was at home with her young baby, instead of rather impersonal childcare arrangements. Eleanor had even begun to pride herself a little on the way things had worked out, on the way both her sons had adapted so easily and contentedly to her marriage to Marcus.

But today, with his one brief sentence of accusation and unhappiness, Tom had totally destroyed that complacency.

‘You don’t want to be with us any more,’ he had told her. ‘You just want to be with him.’

And even allowing for a certain amount of childish exaggeration; even allowing for the fact that he had been feeling extremely sorry for himself, and possibly subconsciously trying to offload his own share of responsibility for his sickness, there had still been enough real despair and fear in his voice to unleash the spectres of guilt and anxiety which were tormenting her now.

Marcus had been less than pleased when she had announced that she could not go to the Lassiters’ with him, but he had accepted her decision without trying to pressure her into changing her mind.

That was one of the things about him which had first broken down her reserve, her doubts about the wisdom of embarking on a second attempt at marriage.

Allan had been inclined to behave petulantly and manipulatively when he couldn’t get his own way, forcing her to make choices between him and their children, putting such an unbearable burden of pressure on her that in the end his announcement that there was someone else and that he wanted a divorce had come almost as a welcome relief.

Marcus wasn’t like that, though. He respected her rights as an individual, even while he cherished her as a woman. In contrast to most other men, he seemed to know instinctively when she needed the reassurance of a certain amount of male possessiveness, a certain degree of proprietorial but wholly adult determination to have her undivided attention focused on their own very personal relationship, and when their relationship had to take a back seat to her maternal and professional duties.

Tonight, though, she had been aware that, beneath his outwardly relaxed calm acceptance of her decision to stay at home with Tom, inwardly he was irritated and annoyed.

‘There is nothing really wrong with Tom,’ he had pointed out coolly to her, and that, in giving in to his demands that she remain at home, she was potentially making a rod for her own back.

Logically he was quite right, Eleanor had admitted, but a small maggoty worm of resentment at his lack of understanding had made her wonder if he would have been quite so logical had it been his own child. Now, having satisfied herself that Tom was comfortably and healthily asleep, she acknowledged that at least part of her resentment had also been caused by her own totally illogical feelings of hurt because he had not recognised that it was more than Tom’s sickness which had made her feel she must stay with her son.

Men were not like women, she reminded herself as she went back to their own bedroom and got back into bed. They did not possess a woman’s understanding and intuition of emotions and needs that were not directly voiced.

Marcus was a pragmatist and it was surely unfair of her to expect him to read her mind, to know what she was thinking and feeling. After all, she had not known what was on Tom’s mind, had she?

She frowned, pausing in the act of returning to her abandoned work. She found it easier to read like this, cocooned in the warm comfort of their bed.

Just as she liked feeling that she was cocooned in Marcus’s love? But surely that kind of need belonged to someone lacking in maturity; someone who could not accept a genuinely equal partnership… someone who expected her partner to meet all her emotional needs?

Her frown deepened. She had been increasingly aware lately of a growing imbalance in the way she believed she ought to feel and react and the way she actually was doing. This unexpected chasm of self-doubt and insecurity which seemed to have opened up within her worried and confused her.

Of course there had been other times in her life when she had suffered from insecurity and lack of self-worth, but those times were behind her now. So why had Tom’s unexpected accusation overset her so much? Why had it filled her with such panic and tension? Why, whenever she was confronted by Marcus’s daughter’s obvious aversion to her, did she feel she had to somehow conceal both the girl’s behaviour and her own reaction to it from Marcus himself?

The Vivaldi tape had come to an end. She was not, she recognised, going to get any more work done now. She had too many other things on her mind.

After Marcus had gone out she tried to talk to Tom, to reassure him that he was wrong to believe that Marcus was any kind of threat to his relationship with her, but when she had gently tried to draw him out, to question him about why he should believe that she no longer loved him, he had clammed up on her, refusing to discuss the subject.

The antique grandfather clock in the hallway chimed midnight. Marcus should not be much longer, she comforted herself.

The clock reminded her of the one her grandparents had owned. They had lived in the country and every summer she had spent two weeks of her holidays with them, before flying out to join her parents in whichever part of the world her father happened to be stationed. As a career diplomat, he had been constantly on the move, and as their only child Eleanor had never felt particularly close to her parents. Her father’s career had necessitated her spending most of her childhood at boarding-school, and, while she loved her parents and knew they loved her, they had never had the closeness she had promised herself she would share with her own children… a closeness she had genuinely believed they did have. Until this evening… How could they be close when she had not even known what Tom thought… when it had been Marcus who had correctly diagnosed the cause of his sickness and not her?

As a child she had looked forward all year to those holidays with her grandparents, to the unchanging security of their pretty house in its sleepy country setting.

Perhaps because of those childhood memories, she had been determined to maintain her own children’s contact with Allan’s parents. After all, they were their only set of grandparents; her own parents had died in an air crash before she and Allan married. But the last time they had visited, Tom had complained that things weren’t the same.

She frowned now, remembering how upset he had been to discover that the room at his grandparents’ which he had always thought of as his own was also the one Allan’s new baby from his second marriage slept in when they were there.

At the time she had dismissed his complaint as mere childish possessiveness and jealousy, but now, aware of how disruptive she herself was finding it every time Marcus’s daughter visited and she had to move her own sons out of their room, it suddenly struck her ominously that something more than mere childish resentment might have underlain Tom’s complaint.

Children needed security… needed to feel that they had their own special and protected place in adults’ lives, especially those children who had gone through the trauma of seeing their parents split up.

Now, when she thought seriously about it, she recognised that Tom had been increasingly truculent and withdrawn recently, especially when Vanessa visited, and it was unfair to expect him to give up his room to Vanessa… Just as it was unfair to expect Vanessa to be happy with the discovery that the room she had always thought of as her own was now someone else’s.

The answer was of course to buy a larger house, but she and Marcus had already discussed this and agreed that it was financially impossible.

She glanced at her watch. Marcus should be home soon. Their large bed seemed empty without him. She smiled wryly to herself, acknowledging the direction her thoughts were taking.

When she and Allan had married she had been sexually naïve, and they had never really been sexually compatible. This had been another source of friction between them. Secretly she had always blamed herself for her inability to respond as fully and passionately to his lovemaking as Allan had wanted her to, and then, after the birth of the boys, he had become less and less interested in making love to her.

After their divorce she had been cautious about allowing herself to get involved with other men. Sex had been something she had pushed to the back of her mind and out of her life. She had the boys, and the excitement of a burgeoning career to keep her fulfilled and busy.

And then she had met Marcus. He had patiently encouraged her to put aside her wariness and caution and to learn to celebrate and enjoy her sexuality. He was a very sensual lover. And a very experienced one?

She frowned as she felt the tiny tremor of anxiety touch her spine. What was she worrying about now? Marcus had always been open and honest with her, making no secret of the fact that there had been other women in his life before they had met. He was not a promiscuous man but it would have been naïve of her to believe that he had lived a celibate life in the years between the break-up of his first marriage and their first meeting.

Her frown deepened as she remembered how, the last time she had visited them, Vanessa had asked her if she ever got jealous or worried that Marcus might leave her for someone younger.

‘Most men Dad’s age marry someone a lot younger,’ Vanessa had commented. ‘Women aren’t attractive to men once they’re middle-aged.’

‘That’s not true, Vanessa,’ she had countered as firmly as she could, trying to dismiss her own personal feelings and to concentrate instead on her concern that already, while still only in her teens, Vanessa was being dragged into the female trap of perceiving her own sex as only being able to have a valid sense of self-worth when rated by their desirability to men; but Vanessa had shrugged her shoulders and walked away from her, telling her unkindly over her shoulder, ‘You’re only saying that because you’re old.’

Old… at thirty-eight?

Marcus arrived home just after one. She had been asleep but she woke up when he walked into the bedroom, smiling sleepily at him as she asked, ‘Did you have a good time?’

‘Yes, but not as enjoyable as it would have been if you had been there,’ he told her, coming over to the bed and bending his head to kiss her briefly.

‘Did the Lassiters understand?’

‘Yes. As luck would have it, they’d had an extra unexpected guest, a young American lawyer, who’s over here on a year’s sabbatical. She came with Paul Ferrar and his wife. Her parents are friends of theirs.’

‘Pretty, was she?’ Eleanor asked him, and then immediately wondered what on earth was wrong with her as she caught the acerbic, almost hostile note in her own voice.

No wonder Marcus was looking at her like that.

‘Not exactly pretty,’ he told her judiciously. ‘She was very fresh and enthusiastic in the particularly American way. She seemed to find our legal system outdated and old-fashioned. When she returns home, she plans to specialise in international law.’

‘Like you?’

Marcus gave her another thoughtful look. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘How’s Tom?’

‘He’s fine,’ Eleanor responded. Suddenly she wanted to talk to him about her concern for her son; about the doubts and guilt his accusation to her had aroused, but as she started to speak Marcus turned away from her. Her sons were not his problem, she reminded herself, and he had already hinted once today that he thought she was fussing too much; being over-protective.

‘Hang on,’ he told her. ‘I’ll just go and have a shower.’

She lay where she was for several seconds, and then, suddenly restless and wanting to be with him, she got up and followed him.

From the open bathroom door, she asked him, ‘Marcus, this American girl. What was her name?’

‘What?’ He stepped out of the shower, shaking his head, smoothing his wet hair back from his face.

‘The American girl—what was her name?’

He looked surprised. ‘Oh, her… I… Sondra something. Cabot. Yes, that’s it… Sondra Cabot.’

‘Very WASP.’

His eyebrows rose slightly as he smiled at her. Silently Eleanor watched him, wondering if she would ever cease to be slightly astonished by the intensity of her own desire for him. When she and Allan had married, Allan’s body had still had some of the thin gawkiness of youth, and in those days of course people had not been as aware of the importance of physical exercise… the fitness boom had not yet swept the country and she had assumed it was quite normal for a woman not to be particularly aroused by the sight of a man’s naked body, that it was in fact necessary for the man to arouse the woman by touching her.

Of course she had learned long before she had met Marcus that this was not the case, but it was not until she had actually met him that she first experienced for herself her own arousal caused not by Marcus touching her, but simply by her own awareness of him and her desire for him.

They had been lovers for almost two months before he had told her how much it had turned him on to look at her and see in her eyes that she wanted him, and to know that she was doing her best to pretend that she didn’t.

Marcus’s body was nothing like Allan’s. Once, when she had told him dreamily that for her, physically, he embodied all the sensuality and masculinity so admired by the ancient Greek sculptors, he had laughed gently at her, saying that no mere mortal man could hope to rival that sort of perfection, reminding her that he was forty-two years old.

Now he was forty-five and his body still had the power to make her hold her breath at the build-up of a slow, sweet tide of desire he caused to flow through her.

When he got into bed and turned to take her in his arms, she told herself that they could talk about Tom later.

‘Mmm…’ he told her softly as his hand cupped her breast and he started to feather small kisses along her throat. ‘Have I told you lately how very sexy you are?’

Smiling, Eleanor moved closer to him.

‘No,’ she whispered back. ‘But you can tell me now if you like.’ She paused, her voice thickening a little as she added huskily, ‘Tell me and show me…’

Eleanor bit off a sharp little sound of pleasure, voluptuously abandoning herself to the delightful sensations Marcus was giving her as his mouth slowly caressed her clitoris, his tongue stroking delicately over and over her receptive flesh in the way he knew she most liked. In another few seconds, her pleasure would become almost too intense for her to bear and then she would cry out to him that she wanted him; that she needed him; that she couldn’t wait any longer to be a part of him.

She felt the orgasmic tension seize her and trembled deliciously.

‘Marcus…’

She shuddered deeply and opened her eyes, and then froze as she saw their bedroom door opening, wrenching herself away from Marcus’s embrace and pulling up the duvet in one quick automatic reflex action as Tom came into their room.

At her side, she heard Marcus groan. Her own body was reacting rebelliously and angrily to Tom’s interruption, but emotionally she was already responding to Tom’s entrance, pulling on her robe as she slid out of bed and hurried towards her son.

‘What is it, Tom? Are you feeling sick again?’ she asked him anxiously, guiding him back to his own room.

By the time she was able to leave Tom, Marcus had fallen asleep. He was lying on his side facing away from her side of the bed.

Quietly she slid in beside him and tiredly closed her own eyes.

‘Nell, could you spare half an hour? There’s something I need to discuss with you.’

‘Louise—yes, of course.’ Eleanor smiled warmly at her partner. ‘If you want to ask me how I’m getting on with narrowing down the job application lists for the freelancers, I’m afraid I’m going to have to admit that I’m not making very much progress. What with Tom not being very well and one thing and another…’

‘No… no, it isn’t that,’ Louise told her curtly. ‘Well, that does sort of come into it, but…’

Eleanor could see how unhappy and ill-at-ease Louise looked as she sat down, and a feeling of disquiet began to ice up her own spine.

‘Louise, what is it? What’s wrong? Everything’s all right at home, isn’t it… with you and Paul… ?’

‘Yes, of course it is,’ Louise told her almost snappily.

Her question had offended her partner, Eleanor recognised with concern as she saw the angry red flush staining Louise’s skin.

She was on the point of apologising, but Louise didn’t give her the chance.

‘Why shouldn’t everything be all right?’ she demanded almost aggressively. ‘Just because you’ve never liked Paul… Well, he’s my husband, Eleanor, and I think he’s right when he says that your antagonism towards him is bound to affect our business relationship. That’s why I wanted to talk to you, as a matter of fact.’

Eleanor stared at her. It was true that she didn’t particularly like Louise’s husband, but she had certainly never said anything against him, not even when he had tried to interfere in the business.

‘I’m sorry if you think that I’m antagonistic towards Paul,’ she began quietly, ‘and I guess that it’s something we ought to have discussed before—–’

‘That’s not what I want to talk about,’ Louise interrupted her quickly. ‘It’s the business itself.’

A presentiment iced warningly down Eleanor’s spine, her anxiety escalating as she waited for Louise to continue.

‘Paul and I are moving to France.’

Louise couldn’t quite meet her eyes, Eleanor noticed absently as her body absorbed the shock of what Louise was saying to her.

‘It’s something we’ve both wanted to do for a long time. Paul already has business connections there, several of our friends have moved there, and, as Paul says, with 1992 and the effects of the Common Market we owe it to ourselves and to the boys to do anything we can to make ourselves financially secure.

‘I can work just as easily from France as I can from London—more easily really. We’ll be so much more conveniently situated for Brussels, Paul says, than London. This whole country really will become a total backwater. And you’ve only got to think of our overheads here.’ Louise was speaking much more quickly now as her words gathered momentum, her eyes sharp and defiant when she finally raised them to Eleanor’s face.

So this was why Louise had been so on edge with her recently; so sensitive… Eleanor felt as though her brain had gone into slow motion as she tried to deal simultaneously with both the emotional shock and the practical aspects of the bombshell Louise had just dropped on her.

‘But Louise, we’re a partnership,’ she protested quietly. ‘We’d made plans… You never said anything…’

‘We hadn’t made up our minds then.’ Louise flushed defensively. ‘Besides, Paul feels that my Russian will have more commercial value than… after all, most European countries already speak English.’

Eleanor winced. What was Louise trying to say to her; that her language skills were of more value to the partnership than Eleanor’s own?

She was tempted to point out what Pierre Colbert had said: that with the break-up of the Soviet Union no one as yet had any real idea of what language the re-emerging independent states would eventually choose to do business in, but what was the point in getting embroiled in a pointless battle of scoring off against one another?

If only she had recognised what was happening earlier; before Louise had made so many plans. If only Louise had had the consideration to tell her… give her some warning, she realised bleakly.

And she had thought they were such good friends… such good working partners. She had believed that they trusted one another… that she could rely on Louise to deal honestly with her.

‘You do understand, don’t you, Nell?’

Louise’s voice had taken on a pleading note now, and Eleanor tensed, resenting her familiar use of her shortened name, the name by which those closest to her—her friends—knew her.

‘It will be so much better for the children. London is no place for them to grow up. Paul and I have found the most marvellous château… it’s unbelievably cheap.’ Louise was starting to gabble nervously now, Eleanor recognised numbly. No doubt with relief that she had discharged the task Paul had undoubtedly set her.

‘You must all come out and see us once we’re settled out there. I’ve enjoyed working with you, but you can, I’m sure, understand how it is… and with our rent due to go up again…’ Louise gave a small shrug. ‘As Paul says, we would be fools to pass up on this kind of opportunity.’

‘Yes… Well, I hope it all works out for you, Louise.’

Try as she might, Eleanor knew her voice lacked warmth and pleasure. Her face felt stiff and cold, her body wooden.

As Louise came towards her she found herself automatically stepping back from her, physically rejecting her, not wanting her anywhere near her.

It wasn’t so much Louise’s desire to end their partnership that was responsible for her feelings, Eleanor acknowledged, it was the feeling that Louise had been dishonest with her, that she had in fact betrayed her… betrayed the relationship Eleanor had believed they shared.

She could remember so clearly now, when Louise and Paul had first married, Louise telling her vehemently, ‘Of course our marriage won’t make any difference to the business, Nell. Paul knows how important our partnership, our friendship is to me!’

Eleanor had sensed then that, whatever he might have said to Louise, Paul was the kind of man who liked to feel that he was in control of every aspect of his life and the people in it.

‘You know, I’m surprised that you and Marcus haven’t thought of moving to France,’ Louise burbled on. ‘The financial benefits alone are just too good to ignore and when I think of the freedom the boys will be able to have… It isn’t just that the French education system is far superior to ours… The boys have been having extra French coaching and Paul has become amazingly fluent. We all speak French every evening during supper now and—–’

‘I’m sorry, Louise, but I have to go out,’ Eleanor lied.

Her head was beginning to ache and her body still felt cold with shock. How long had Louise known that she was going to do this? Why couldn’t she have said something earlier?

You know why, a small cynical inner voice told her. She… Paul wanted to make sure, to secure their own future first.

A telephone call to their accountants later in the afternoon confirmed, as Eleanor had already suspected, that it was simply not financially viable for her to continue to work from their existing premises on her own, and that without a partner to share the load it was impossible for her to generate enough income on her own to service the costs involved.

Which meant… which meant what? she asked herself tiredly after she had replaced the receiver. She had a small amount of capital of her own, thriftily garnered over the years, a small bulwark to protect her and the boys, but nowhere near enough to cover all her existing expenses for any real length of time.

When she and Marcus had married she had been determinedly insistent that she wanted to be financially self-sufficient, at least as far as the boys were concerned. She knew from odd comments which Marcus had made that his first wife had been recklessly extravagant, using whatever income she earned as an actress for maintaining the kind of wardrobe and polished appearance she insisted was essential to her career.

And, while it was true that Marcus commanded high fees, he also had considerable expenses to meet. Vanessa attended an exclusive private school and Eleanor knew and applauded the fact that after the divorce he had assumed full financial responsibility for her.

Then there was also the Chelsea house which was expensive to run and maintain, and, while Eleanor knew that Marcus would willingly support both her and the boys, she did not want him to have to do so.

They had discussed her career before their marriage and she had told him that not only did she enjoy her work but she felt she needed the sense of self-worth and satisfaction she got from being financially self-sufficient; that she was proud of the fact that she was able to support both herself and her sons, that she did not want to go back to being financially dependent on someone else, no matter how generously that support might be given.

But how was she going to be able to maintain that financial independence now? As their accountant had pointed out, their expenses had risen uncomfortably high, and the number of commissions they were receiving was less than it had been; the recession meant that everyone was cutting back. Some of their smaller clients had even gone out of business altogether; everyone was having to fight hard just to survive.

The thought of working for someone else, even if she could have found a job, held no appeal for her; she was too used to being her own boss. And looking for another partner? The way the thought made her flinch was its own answer. Louise’s defection was too new and raw for her to even think of risking entering another partnership. The reason she and Louise had worked so well together was because they operated in different but complementary fields. To find another partner like that would be time-consuming and probably impossible. No, she would be better off working alone.

Louise had disappeared after making her announcement. No doubt to inform Paul that she had broken the bad news, Eleanor reflected bitterly.

Why hadn’t she realised what was happening… guessed what lay behind Louise’s recent odd behaviour? It had never occurred to her that Louise might want to end their partnership. Nor had she realised that Louise felt resentful because she thought her languages were of more benefit, contributed more to the partnership than did Eleanor’s own. Paul’s handiwork, no doubt. But she couldn’t put all the blame for Louise’s perfidy on Paul’s shoulders; Louise herself must bear some of the responsibility, and so perhaps must she.

She was uncomfortably aware of how blind she had been to what was happening. As blind as she had been to Tom’s fear that somehow her relationship with Marcus threatened his place in her life; as blind as she had been to the fact that, with her marriage to Marcus, Vanessa would turn against her.

What was happening to her?

Had she been guilty of being over-confident of successfully handling all her diverse roles? Twice in the space of a few short days she had been forced to confront the knowledge that she had been completely unaware of what those whom she had thought of as being closest to her were really thinking.

Her heart thumped uncomfortably. She was beginning to feel as though she was losing control of her life and what was happening to it. The problem was that she had so little time and so many demands to meet.

How long was it, for instance, since she and Louise had shared an evening or even a lunchtime together, excitedly discussing their plans and their business? And yet once those occasions had been so much a part of the fabric of her life.

And how long had it been since she had been able to spend any real amount of time alone with her sons, concentrating on them exclusively?

These days her weekends seemed to flash past in a blur of frantic organisation for the following week, her conversations with her sons seemed to be limited to terse discussions about the need for football kits and enquiries about the whereabouts of the partners of the four or five odd socks disgorged from the washing-machine with monotonous regularity. And that was on a good week.

Take this evening, for instance… She would be working until six and then she would have to drive across the city to the boys’ school to collect them and take them home for supper. She was lucky in that their school ran after-lessons sports and activities groups every evening, but it was not perhaps an ideal situation… Not like the one Louise had described so lyrically and which her children would enjoy.

Fresh air. The space to run free in proper open countryside, the security of a small close-knit community.

Only last week she had had to refuse Gavin’s request that he be allowed to have some school friends over on Saturday because Marcus’s daughter had been coming and there would have been nowhere for them all to play. Things were difficult enough with Vanessa as it was. Eleanor could imagine her reaction all too well had she arrived to find ‘her’ bedroom full of eleven-year-old boys.

Suddenly she ached almost physically for Marcus, and then guiltily she reminded herself that she had promised herself when they married that theirs would be an equal partnership and that she would never fall into the trap of using him as an emotional prop.

Tiredly she pushed her hair back off her face. Only another hour and she would have to leave to pick up the boys, and she still had this translation to finish.

‘Marcus, what is it? What’s wrong?’

Eleanor had just come downstairs from putting the boys to bed and had found Marcus standing in front of the window, staring into space.

He had been slightly withdrawn all evening, speaking curtly to Gavin when he and Tom had started arguing during supper.

‘You aren’t annoyed about last night, are you?’

‘Last night?’ He turned round to look at her, frowning.

‘The dinner party, and then Tom.’

He shook his head.

‘No, of course not. No… I had a phone call from Julia this afternoon. She’s been offered a part in a film which necessitates her spending a month or so in Hollywood during the summer holidays. She wants me to have Vanessa.’

‘Oh, no. How can we?’ Eleanor protested. ‘We haven’t got the room, Marcus!’

‘No, I know,’ he agreed. He was frowning again, Eleanor noticed.

‘Unfortunately, though, there isn’t anywhere else for her to go. And after all, she is my child.’

Eleanor winced, sensitively aware of the slight edge of defensive irritation creeping into his voice. Was he privately thinking that had it not been for Tom and Gavin there would be room for Vanessa?

‘Did you explain to Julia how difficult it would be for us to have her?’

‘I tried,’ he told her drily. ‘But Julia has the gift of hearing only what she wants to hear. And it seems that she’s already announced to Vanessa that she’ll be coming here.’

Eleanor closed her eyes in helpless dismay. She felt no personal animosity towards Marcus’s ex-wife, nor any deep jealousy of the relationship they had once shared-after all, she knew enough from what Marcus had told her about his first marriage to accept that he meant it when he said that the marriage had been a disaster from start to finish and that they had been so wildly incompatible that they should never have married in the first place. In a different moral climate they would probably have contented themselves with a brief affair, he had told Eleanor, but in those days such things were not as permissible or acceptable.

However, she was bitterly aware that when it suited her to do so Julia was inclined to feed Vanessa’s suspicion and resentment by casting her in the traditional role of wicked stepmother, and if they refused to have Vanessa now, no doubt she would be blamed for that refusal.

‘Oh, Marcus…’ she protested helplessly, and then to her horror she did something she couldn’t remember doing in years. She burst into tears.

‘Hey, come on,’ Marcus told her gently as he took her in his arms. ‘Things aren’t that bad…’

‘No,’ Eleanor contradicted him, as she looked up with a small sniff. ‘They’re worse than you think. Louise told me today that she wants to end our partnership. She and Paul are going to live in France. In a château…’

Half an hour later, having calmed down enough to have told Marcus the full story, she sipped the glass of wine he had poured her and asked him quietly, ‘Marcus, what am I going to do? I can’t afford to keep on the office and I can’t work from here. There simply isn’t room.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘We don’t really have much option, do we? We’re going to have to find somewhere bigger, and soon. We’d better start making a trawl of the estate agents and arrange to have this place valued.’

‘Oh, Marcus… I’m so sorry. I know how much you love this house.’

‘Not as much as I love you,’ he told her firmly, coming over to her and removing her wine glass from her hands as he took her in his arms.

‘What do you think of our chances of remaining uninterrupted?’ he murmured against her mouth as he kissed her. ‘These days whenever we make love, I feel as though I’m holding my breath, wondering if we’re going to make it. A race against the all too likely arrival of one or other of our offspring. When we do find a another house, I intend to ensure that our bedroom is fitted with an early warning system, and a lock.’

Later, lying in bed next to Marcus, Eleanor told him sadly, ‘It isn’t just the break-up of our partnership that bothers me. It’s the fact that Louise so obviously didn’t feel she could talk to me. The fact that she waited until virtually the very last minute to say anything to me. I feel such a fool for not realising… for not suspecting…’

‘She deceived you,’ Marcus told her quietly. ‘And discovering any kind of deception on the part of someone we believe we know and trust is always hurtful. It hurts us where we’re most vulnerable. In our emotions and in our pride…’

‘Pride?’ Eleanor questioned him, lifting her head to look at him.

‘Mmm… Because it shows us that we’ve made an error of judgement… that our trust has been misplaced.’

‘Yes,’ Eleanor agreed, adding, ‘At first I just wanted to blame Paul and then I realised that Louise must have wanted to end the partnership as well. If only she’d said something to me sooner…

‘What’s happening to me, Marcus? I feel as though my whole life is falling apart. First Tom and now this…’

‘Tom?’

‘I didn’t even know he’d eaten the ice-cream,’ she told him sadly. ‘You knew, but I didn’t. And I didn’t…’ She stopped abruptly, not wanting to burden Marcus with the rest of her problems. ‘What kind of mother am I? What kind of wife when I can forget to organise a babysitter for a dinner party? What kind of partner when I don’t know, can’t see what’s going on under my nose?’

‘Hey, come on… You must accept that you can’t take on the responsibility for everyone else around you. You’re only human, Nell. Just like the rest of us… and, just like the rest of us, sometimes you get things wrong. You can’t be perfect, you know. After all, perfection is often a very sterile and empty concept. It’s our imperfections that make us human… loveable… and loving…’

He kissed her slowly and asked softly, ‘Do you know how much I want to make love to you?’

‘Again?’ Eleanor asked him, smiling at him.

‘Again,’ he confirmed as he reached for her. ‘Very, very definitely again.’

Three days later, when Eleanor was searching through her briefcase for something else and she inadvertently came across the advertisement she had torn from the magazine, it seemed almost like fate.

She told herself as she dialled the number of the estate agent that she was wasting her time, that the house was almost bound to have been sold.

When she discovered that the bids were still to come in, a feeling of unfamiliar and almost childlike excitement filled her.

She stared at the photograph again. It was the kind of house—the kind of home she had longed for so often as a child; solid, permanent, it offered the kind of security she had yearned for so desperately.

It would be a perfect home for them, close enough to London for Marcus to commute, rural enough to give Tom and Gavin the benefits of growing up in a country environment. More than enough room to accommodate them all comfortably, including Vanessa.

With a bit of careful planning there was no reason why she should not be able to work from there. Of course it would mean regular visits to London to collect and deliver translations, but the benefits of moving to the country far outweighed the disadvantages. She would have more time to spend with the children for one thing. More time to share with Marcus.

This would be a shared home, a new start for all of them, somewhere they could all have a stake in, feel a part of.

Vanessa would be able to choose her own room and its décor. Tom would feel secure in the knowledge that his room was solely his.

Surely with so much space at their disposal, with so much security, they would all be able to integrate far better. Life would be easier, free of the small but potentially very destructive tensions which now seemed to infuse it.

She couldn’t wait to share her excitement with Marcus. It was the ideal solution to all their problems and she was surprised that she hadn’t thought of it before.

She smiled to herself. Perhaps Louise had after all done her a favour in announcing that she intended to terminate their partnership.

She hummed happily under her breath, her face alight with happiness, and new purpose.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘FERN?’

Anxiety prickled down Fern’s spine as she heard Nick’s voice. He walked into the kitchen, frowning when he saw that she was dressed for going out.

‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.

‘I promised I’d help Roberta sort through the stuff she’s collected for her jumble sale.’

‘What time will you be back? I’m leaving for London this afternoon. You’ll have to pack a case for me. I’ll need my dinner suit. Did you remember to take it to the cleaners?’

‘Yes,’ she told him quietly. There had been lipstick on the collar of his dress shirt; bright scarlet lipstick, the colour Venice had been wearing the night of her dinner party.

People, even the most casual of acquaintances, did kiss these days, she reminded herself as she looked away from him.

Why didn’t she just ask Nick if he was involved with Venice?

What was she so afraid of? Not the ending of their marriage, surely?

What was it, then? Having to confront the fact that all the effort she had put into holding their marriage together over these last two years had just been so much wasted time… Having to admit that she should never have married Nick in the first place… having to face up to the fact that her parents had not been omnipotent; that their way of living their lives was not necessarily right for her. Having to admit that she was married to a man who, despite the fact that he claimed to love and need her, increasingly behaved towards her in a way that suggested his feelings towards her held more contempt than love; that his need was more for a housekeeper than a wife.

Was it the realities of her marriage she was so afraid of confronting, or was it herself?

What was it she really wanted to do? Stay true to the way her parents had believed their daughter’s life should be lived, or be true to herself, accepting herself with all her fallibilities; accepting that staying within her relationship with Nick as it was now was slowly destroying her, killing her self-respect, filling her with loathing for the woman she saw she had become.

‘How long will you be away?’ she asked Nick now before she opened the back door.

‘I don’t know!’ His mouth tightened impatiently. ‘Is my grey suit pressed? I’m taking a client out to lunch.’

‘Venice?’ Fern asked him.

She could see the angry colour seeping up under his skin.

‘Yes, as a matter of fact it is.’

‘You seem to be seeing rather a lot of her lately.’

‘What the hell are you trying to say?’ Nick exploded angrily. ‘She’s a client, that’s all. A very rich client, I might add, and with business the way it is right now…

‘My grey suit, Fern,’ he added impatiently. ‘Is it pressed?’

‘Yes,’ she told him.

They couldn’t go on like this, she told herself as she left the house. They had to sit down and talk honestly with one another.

She smiled grimly to herself. Sit down and talk… The last time they had done that had been two years ago after she had found out about Nick’s affair. She had thought then that he was being honest with her, had allowed him to convince her that their marriage could still work, and for a little while she had actually thought that it might; but then he had started to revert to his earlier behaviour, only this time it had been even worse, because this time, every time he was angry with her, he would taunt her with some viciously cruel remark about Adam.

Oh, afterwards he had always apologised, explained how difficult it was for a man… any man to come to terms with the fact that his wife had been unfaithful to him, told her how generous and heroic he was being in trying to forget what she had done… reminded her of how shocked and distressed her parents would be if they ever discovered the truth… pleaded with her to forgive him, promising that it wouldn’t happen again; and because of the burden of her own guilt she had accepted what he had said, feeling in her heart that she deserved to suffer… to be punished for what she had done.

She was trembling so much she could scarcely see what she was doing, struggling with the latch on the front gate as she opened it.

One brief moment out of time, one careless action, one small error of judgement. Who would have thought that she… that Adam… ?

Fiercely she blocked off the thought, denying it life. She must not think of that now. Not allow herself to remember…

That was, after all, part of her penance, part of the punishment she had inflicted on herself for what she had done.

The morning air was clear and sharp, the wind tempered by the promise of warmth in the spring sunshine.

The wind tugged at her hair, reminding her that she had intended to tie it back. Adam had liked her hair… he had once…

She stopped walking, her body freezing into immobility as she tried to reject her thoughts, pushing them fiercely to the back of her mind, trying not to acknowledge how afraid she was of their power.

It was quite a long walk into town, and she quickened her step a little. She had promised Roberta that she would meet her at the surgery at eleven.

The road where she and Nick lived was on the outskirts of the small market town, a pleasant cul-de-sac of Victorian villas built around the time the railway had first come to the area.

Theirs was one of a pair of good-sized semis which could have been turned into a very attractive and comfortable family home had Nick been willing to spend some money on it. It had the benefit of a large garden and an extra upper storey, and its previous owners had converted the small maze of kitchen, larder and scullery at the back of the property into a large kitchen.

Nick however had pointed out to her shortly after their marriage, when she had tentatively suggested that it might be nice to add a conservatory to the house, that since he was the only one of them working she must realise that he simply could not afford that sort of luxury.

She had done her best to update the décor, and had been quite proud of the dragged and stippled paint effects with which she had transformed the old-fashioned décor of the rooms, and of the curtains and loose covers she had painstakingly made from factory remnants of fabric bought as ‘seconds’, until Nick had commented to her how amateurish her skills were.

He had done it quite kindly and gently, but she could still remember how humiliated she had felt when, flushed with success and proud of what she had done, she had suggested they give a small dinner party to show off their home.

‘Darling, it’s impossible,’ Nick had told her. ‘Don’t you see… anyone we invite could be a potential client? One look at what you’ve done to this place and they’re going to wonder if my professional skills are as amateurish as your homemaking ones.’

His criticism, although perhaps justified, had taken from her all the pleasure and sense of achievement she had felt in what she had done, and when three weeks later Nick had suddenly announced that he had booked a firm of decorators to come and repaint the whole house she had quietly kept to herself her disappointment over the effect of the no doubt practical but very plain woodchip paper with which every internal wall had been covered.

It was obviously Nick’s choice and no doubt he was right when he explained that it looked far better than what she had done.

After that it had never seemed to Fern that the house was really her home; only the kitchen was her domain, and she had tried to make it as cheerful and warm as she could, even though she could tell from Nick’s face that he did not approve of the bowls of spring bulbs; the flowers from the garden, the soft yellow paint and the pretty curtains and chair covers she had made for the room.

From the outside the house looked neat and well cared for, just like all the others in the cul-de-sac, but inside it was empty and desolate of all that made a house a proper home, Fern reflected sadly as she turned into the road into town, her footsteps automatically slowing down slightly as she studied the view in front of her.

It didn’t matter how many times she walked down here, or how familiar the view before her was; she always felt a fresh surge of pleasure at what she saw.

The town had originally been an important stopping-off point for stage-coaches and other carriage traffic, a vital link with the main arterial routes of the day, and although now modern roads and motorways had turned the town into a quiet backwater, bypassing it, the signs of its thriving, bustling past were clearly visible in its architecture.

One side of the town square was still dominated by the coaching inn which was said to date back to the fifteenth century, although its present exterior was that of a late Tudor building, herringbone-patterned brick insets between the beams replacing the original wattle and daub. Adjacent to it ran a line of similar buildings, once private homes, now mainly shops and offices. Next to them was the church crafted in local stone, its spire reaching up dizzyingly towards the sky.

There was a local legend that the original bells had been melted down at the time of the Civil War to make weapons and armour, but as far as Fern knew this had never actually been substantiated.

Like looking at the rings of a tree to discover its age, the various stages of the town’s growth could be seen in the different styles of its architecture.

The third side of the square was lined with handsome Georgian town houses, originally the property of the wealthy tradesmen who had made their homes in the town, drawn there by the business generated from the coaching traffic.

Adam’s office was in one of those buildings, beautifully renovated and lovingly restored to all its original elegance.

When it came to his work, no detail was too small to escape Adam’s careful attention. Even the paint for the walls had had to be specially mixed to an old-fashioned recipe.

It had been Lord Stanton who had unearthed in his library an estimate and recipe for paint originally supplied for the new wing of the hall which had been built at the same time as the houses and by the same builder who had been responsible for the pretty Nash-type terrace of houses in Avondale.

As she crossed the square, heading for the church, and the surgery, Fern deliberately took the longer way round so that she wouldn’t have to walk past Adam’s office. The sun glinted on the leaded windows of the coaching inn, highlighting the uneven thickness of the old-fashioned glass, and picking out the detail on the pargeting decorating the upper storey of the building next to it.

In the centre of the square stood an open-arched two-storey stone building, a relic of the days when the town had marked one of the stopping-off places for drovers taking their flocks from one part of the country to another.

On a clear day from the top of the church tower it was possible to see out over the Bristol Channel to the west and to the spire of Salisbury cathedral to the southeast.

It had been Adam’s gentle coercion of the local authorities, supported by Lord Stanton, that had been responsible for the removal of the square’s tarmac road surface and the uncovering and restoration of the original cobbles which lay beneath it.

Adam’s family had lived in the town since the late sixteenth century. Wheelwrights originally, they had prospered during the days of coach travel.

Fern had never met either Nick’s mother or Adam’s father, both of whom had been killed in a road accident a couple of years prior to her knowing the stepbrothers. However, while Adam had always spoken warmly of both Nick’s mother as well as his own parents, Nick rarely mentioned his family at all.

Fern knew that Nick’s father had deserted his wife and small son when Nick was barely three years old—Adam had told her that—but when she had once gently tried to sympathise with Nick over his father’s defection he had rounded angrily on her.

Fern also knew from comments other people had made that Adam’s father, like Adam himself, had been very highly thought of locally, and had been a very generous benefactor to local charities.

He had also been very good to Nick, treating him if anything more indulgently than he had his own son.

Fern remembered how surprised she had been when she first met Nick to discover that the expensive car he had been driving—far more expensive than the car Adam drove—had been a present to him from Adam’s father.

The money Nick had used to set himself up in business had also come from Adam’s father, via a legacy left to him in the older man’s will, but despite this Nick seemed to begrudge the fact that Adam had inherited a far larger proportion of his father’s wealth than Nick himself had done.

Fern remembered how shocked she had been the first time she had heard Nick voice this resentment, but then she had reminded herself that, bearing in mind the defection of his own father, it was perhaps understandable that Nick should react so badly, perhaps super-sensitively and totally erroneously seeing in Adam’s father’s willing of the larger part of his fortune to his natural son a rejection of Nick, his stepson.

And yet Fern had also heard Nick saying disarmingly how uncomfortable he had sometimes felt about the fact that Adam’s father had seemed to relate far better to him than he had done to Adam himself.

‘I think he felt more in tune with me than he did with Adam. Adam, worthy though he is, can be a bit lacking in humour at times.’

Fern had been surprised by this comment, since she had thought that Adam had an excellent sense of humour, rather dry and subtle perhaps, but he was an extremely perceptive and aware man, who made generous allowances for the vulnerability and frailties of others.

Was it perhaps because Nick had felt he was closer to Adam’s father than Adam was himself that he had been so resentful of the fact that Adam had been left the larger portion of his wealth?

Nick had, after all, been the sole beneficiary of his mother’s admittedly much more modest estate.

Fern carefully kept as much distance between herself and Adam’s office as she could; was it really necessary for her heart to start thumping so furiously fast just at the mere thought that she might see him? Miserably she deliberately looked in the opposite direction, refusing to give in to the temptation to turn her head and see if that faint shadow she could see at one of the windows really was Adam.

Adam… She shivered convulsively, acknowledging how stupidly weak she was. Just mentally saying his name had such a powerful effect on her senses that she was half afraid she had said it out loud.

It was a relief to walk into the surgery and escape.

‘Ah, good, there you are,’ Roberta announced as she saw her. ‘The stuff’s already across at the church hall. I was just beginning to wonder if you weren’t going to make it.’

‘I left a little bit later than I planned,’ Fern apologised as they crossed the narrow cobbled street separating the surgery from the church hall.

‘Just look at all this stuff,’ Roberta groaned after they had let themselves in and were standing surveying the bagged bundles heaped in the middle of the room. ‘Heavens, these don’t even look as though they’ve been worn,’ she commented as she tackled the nearest of the bags, holding up a couple of dresses for Fern’s inspection. ‘These came from Amanda Bryant and they probably cost more than I spend on my wardrobe in a whole year… much more,’ she added ruefully as Fern leaned forward to inspect the labels. ‘I think I remember Amanda wearing this one for last year’s vicarage garden party.’

‘It is very striking,’ Fern acknowledged.

Amanda Bryant and her husband Edward had been their fellow guests at Venice’s dinner party, a very wealthy and flamboyant local couple who had made a good deal of money from a variety of shrewd investments. There were certain staid members of the local community who tended to disapprove of them, but Fern liked them both. Amanda made her laugh with her robust good-natured humour, and her very genuine and down-to-earth enjoyment of their new-found wealth. They were not in the least pretentious and their annual summer barbecue was one of the best attended and most popular local events, probably second only in popularity to Lord Stanton’s New Year’s Eve ball, ranking there with the river race which Adam organised each year to raise money for charity.

‘Venice has given us masses of stuff as well. All of it designer-label by the looks of it and hardly worn. I only wish I were a smaller size,’ Roberta added wistfully. ‘There’s a suit here that would fit you perfectly, Fern,’ she added, eyeing her own plump figure with resignation. ‘It’s just your colouring.’

Fern could feel the tension crawling down her spine; revulsion at the thought of wearing something that Venice herself might have worn when she was with Nick… In her mind’s eye, Fern could see Nick removing it from the other woman’s body… touching her… caressing her…

She felt no sexual or emotional jealousy at the scene she had mentally conjured up, only a deadening sense of futility and despair.

Was it for this that she had spent the last two years of her life desperately trying to piece together her marriage… to convince herself that in staying in it she had made the right, the only decision… that ultimately what she was enduring would prove worthwhile once she and Nick were through the turbulence of these painful years; that ultimately the need he said he had for her would… must conjure up an answering spark within her, that would allow her to cease searching hopelessly for whatever it was that had drawn her to him in the first place and make her believe that she loved him?

Without turning round to see what Roberta was showing her, she said quietly, ‘I’m afraid I’m not really the type for drop-dead glamour outfits. They’re not really my style.’

As she watched her, Roberta repressed a small sigh. Fern might not have Venice’s extrovert vibrant personality, but she had a marvellously slender and supple figure, a femininity which shone through the dullness of her clothes, a serenity and tranquillity which drew others to her in need of the gentle warmth of her personality.

She had a very pretty face as well, and as for her hair!

Roberta’s own husband, a pragmatic and very down-to-earth Scot, had once confessed to Roberta that he was never able to look at Fern’s hair without wondering if it felt as sensually warm and silkily luxurious to touch as it did to look at.

‘It’s the kind of hair that makes a man want to reach out and…’

He had stopped there looking slightly shame-faced and sheepish, while Roberta raised her eyebrows and commanded drily, ‘Go on!’

He had not done so, of course; there had been no need, and neither had Roberta been annoyed or jealous. She knew him far too well, and Fern as well. Now, if it had been Venice they had been discussing… There was a woman who would enjoy nothing more than the challenge of taking another woman’s man. Fern, on the other hand…

‘There are one or two children’s outfits here,’ Fern commented, interrupting her train of thought.

‘We’ll keep them separate from the rest,’ Roberta told her, ‘although I don’t think there will be very many. Most mothers these days seem to operate their own exchange system.’

‘Well, it does make sense,’ Fern pointed out. ‘Children’s things are very expensive and often they’re not in them long enough to wear them out.’

‘Mmm… it’s all very different from when mine were young,’ Roberta agreed. ‘These days it’s all designer trainers and the right kind of jeans virtually from the moment they can speak.’

Even with only a very short break for a sandwich and a cup of coffee, it took them until well into the afternoon to work their way through all the clothes which had been donated.

Fern’s knees ached from the draught coming in under the church hall’s ill-fitting doors when she eventually got to her feet. Outside the sun was still shining although it was chilly now inside the hall.

Nick had said that he wanted to leave at five, which meant that he would arrive at his London hotel in good time for dinner.

He hadn’t told her where he would be staying, though. Fern frowned as she remembered how tense and on edge he had been earlier… how irritable with her.

After she had left Roberta and started to walk home, she wondered tiredly why it was that she and Nick just could not seem to grow closer to one another. It was after all what they both wanted.

Was it? a small bitter voice demanded. If it was, why was Nick paying so much attention to Venice?

She was one of his clients, Fern reminded herself firmly, and Nick was after all human and a man. It was only natural that he should be aware of Venice as a woman. What man would not be?

But Adam had not looked at Venice with the same barely concealed sexual interest that she had seen in Nick’s eyes…

She tensed briefly, fighting off the wave of emotion she could feel threatening her.

As she had done on her arrival, she carefully skirted Adam’s office, keeping her head averted as she hurried past it on the opposite side of the square, increasing her walking pace as she left the town behind her.

If she didn’t linger too long, she just about had enough time to take in one of her favourite detours, to enjoy a special piece of self-indulgence. After all, if Nick was right, she wasn’t going to be able to do so for much longer, she reflected.

Broughton House lay on the outskirts of the town, close enough to her own house for her to be able to turn off into the quiet lane which led to it.

The railway which had led to the erection of their own small cul-de-sac had also heralded the end of the town’s busy prosperity, preserving it as it had been in the middle of the nineteenth century virtually so that it remained compact and neat, without the urban sprawl which had overtaken so many other towns.

Although it was less than a mile from the town, Broughton House was still surrounded by fields, with an outlook over open countryside, the builder having cleverly sited it so that the side overlooking the town had the least number of windows.

It had originally been built by a wealthy merchant, a ‘nabob’ returning from India, who, disdaining the existing properties, had commissioned himself a new one in the countryside surrounding the place which had been his original birthplace.

The grounds, which covered an area of almost four acres, had become overgrown during the last eighteen months or so of Mrs Broughton’s life, but Fern liked the soft wildness of the over-long grass with its sprinkling of spring bulbs; the moss which coated the paths and the general air of what to others might be neglect but to her gave the place more a sense of somehow sleeping mysteriously, waiting for the magical touch of an owner who would love it to restore it to its original splendour, but these were thoughts she kept to herself, knowing how derisive Nick would be were she to voice them to him.

As she walked through the formal rose garden, bare now at this time of year, she paused to watch the young heron standing on the mossy edge of the round goldfish pond.

Somewhere within its depths lurked a dozen or more fat lazy goldfish, but Fern suspected they were far too wise and knowing to risk surfacing in such cool weather, and that the young marauder for all his bravura would have a disappointing wait for his dinner.

Through the rhododendron bushes now gone wild and desperately in need of some attention Fern could see the house itself, but today the house wasn’t her destination.

Instead she turned away from it, finding her way through what had once been an attractively planted shrubbery.

Alongside the neglected path there flowered remnants of what must once have been a two- to three-foot-deep ribbon of spring bulbs naturalised in grass.

Today these survived only in broken patches and clumps.

It took Fern almost ten minutes to force her way through the tangled undergrowth obscuring the pathway to the small bowl-shaped enclosure at the centre of the shrubbery.

The stone seat set back from its rim was encrusted with lichen, the lion masks of the seat pedestals and arms badly weathered.

Today, at this time of the year, all that could be seen in the bowl were the emergent shoots of the lilies which when in flower filled the bowl with band after band of massed drifts of flowers in rings of colour from palest cream to deepest gold and from lightest blue to almost purple.

It was Mrs Broughton herself who had first brought her to this spot and told her its history, explaining to her how her husband’s grandmother had had the bowl made and planted, having fallen in love with the same design but on a much grander scale on a visit to America.

The lilies had been in flower then and Fern remembered how the sight of them had made her catch her breath in wonder, tears stinging her eyes, her senses totally overwhelmed by their beauty.

If Nick was right and Adam was part of a consortium planning to buy the house and use the land, this would be the last year she would be able to witness the small miracle of the lilies blossoming.

As she sat down on the stone seat, tears blurred her eyes.

Tears for the destruction of this small oasis of beauty or tears for herself? she wondered cynically as she blinked them away.

‘Fern!’

She tensed, automatically controlling and absorbing her shock, and, even more importantly, concealing it, knowing without having to turn her head to whom the quiet male voice belonged.

Why pretend to be shocked? an inner voice taunted her. You must have known that he might be here. That’s really why you came, isn’t it? Not to mourn the passing of the garden but because…

She got up quickly, her face tight with tension as she turned to face him.

‘Adam!’

Her voice betrayed nothing of what she was feeling; of the unending destructive war within her that was so much a part of her life that the wounds it inflicted on her had long ago ceased consciously to hurt and were something she simply accepted as part of the price she had to pay for her own culpability.

Automatically she retreated into the shadows of the shrubbery, carefully distancing herself from him, protectively concealing her expression, her eyes from him just in case…

‘So Venice was right,’ she said lightly. ‘You are planning to buy this place. What will you build here, Adam? Is it going to be a supermarket as she suggested?’

She could hear the brittle tension in her voice, feel the way her body was starting to tremble as she faced him across the distance which separated them.

It had been almost two years now and yet her senses, her emotions, her flesh could remember with devastating accuracy how it had felt to be held by him, to touch him, not with the knowingness which had come later and for which she must eternally pay the price of her own guilt and searing, suffocating loathing, but with the innocence of loving someone for that first precious and very special time; the wonder of experiencing that love, the joy, the tremulous seesawing between awed delight and disbelief.

He had been so tender with her, so caring… so protective… so careful not to hurry or rush her.

Had he really cared about her at all, or had she simply imagined that he had, out of her own need? Was it merely pity which had motivated him? Whatever he might have felt for her then in that moment of intimacy, she knew what he must feel for her now… how much he must despise her. After all, what man could feel anything other than contempt for a woman who…

Who what? Who went to him and begged him, pleaded with him to make love to her, even after he had already tried to put her to one side, to end what had accidentally and inadvertently begun. Only she hadn’t let him… She had…

She shuddered tensely, desperately trying to block off her self-destructive thoughts, to channel the threatening power of what she was feeling in less lethal directions, to remind herself that she was Nick’s wife.

And the only way she had of reinforcing the view the outside world had to hold of her relationship with Adam, of reinforcing to Adam that he need never ever fear that she would seek to humiliate herself in such a way again, by repeating that idiotic, crazy behaviour of the past, was to treat him with the coldness and distance behind which she had learned to hide her true feelings.

Even when they did not have an audience. After all, it was even more important that Adam did not guess the truth than it was that no one else did.

What was left of her pride, a poor thin-skinned affair, she had somehow managed to patch together, but it could never be wholly mended or trusted, and would certainly never be strong enough to sustain any real blows against it.

‘Is that really what you think I would do, Fern?’

The harshness in his voice hurt her almost physically. She wanted to flinch back from it, to cry out in protest, but stoically she refused to let herself.

Physically Adam might not have that charmed, almost boyish look of youth which made Nick so attractive, but there was something about him in his maturity which appealed even more strongly to her feminine senses now than it had done when they had been younger.

There was a sensuality, a sexuality about Adam which, although covert and subtle rather than something which he himself was aware of and deliberately flaunted, had an effect on her that made her so aware of herself as a woman—aware of herself and aware of her need for him—that just standing here, what should have been a perfectly ludicrously safe distance away from him, was enough to raise the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck and send a frisson of aching desire twisting painfully through her body.

Adam had a masculinity, a maleness which no woman could possibly ignore, she acknowledged tautly. Even now, with her brain and her body screaming warnings of danger to her, she was intensely aware of it and of him.

Aware of it and achingly, desperately envious of the woman, the girl on whom it was bestowed.

Once she had thought she had been that girl, but Nick had questioned her, laughing at her as he asked her almost incredulously if she had really believed that Adam was attracted to her.

‘Has he ever made love to you?’ he had asked her, and she had shaken her head, wincing as Nick had shrugged and announced bluntly, ‘Well, there you are, then. If he had wanted you… really wanted you, he would have done so. I want you, Fern,’ he had added huskily. ‘I want you very, very much.’

She shivered slightly, forcing herself back to the present and to Adam’s question.

‘You’re a businessman,’ she responded tiredly.

‘I’m an architect,’ he contradicted her flatly.

‘But you are here,’ Fern pointed out, flushing slightly as she heard the anger edging up under his voice. ‘Something must have brought you.’

‘You’re here too,’ Adam retaliated coolly. ‘What brought you?’

Somehow Fern managed to swallow down the hard, hurting ball of tears which had locked in her throat. It was always like this when they met, their voices full of painful anger, her body stiff and tense with the effort of rejecting and controlling what she was really feeling, the indifference, the distance she forced herself to display taking so much out of her that she already knew that the moment he had gone she would be reduced to a trembling, shivering wreck, totally unable to do so much as put one foot properly in front of the other; that she would spend hours and not minutes trying to stop herself from reliving the past, from wishing… wanting…

‘You’re here,’ he had said. Tension crawled along her spine and into her nerve-endings. Did he think she had known he would be here… that she had followed him here… that she might… ?

‘I wanted to see the garden, before you destroy it…’

Try as she might, she could not keep the pain out of her voice. She turned to face him, her chin tilting, the sunlight catching her hair so that for a moment she seemed so ethereally a part of her surroundings that Adam found himself holding his breath, afraid almost to breathe as he watched her, mentally reclothing her in soft greens and yellows, the colours, the fabrics flowing and harmonious, enhancing the feminine suppleness of her body, highlighting the almost fawnlike quality of her features, so delicate that they were cruelly swamped by the dullness of the clothes she was actually wearing. Only her hair… Her hair…

Abruptly he looked away from her. She was Nick’s wife and she loved him, although how she…

As she watched him, Fern wondered what he would say if she told him that she had seen the brochure he had been carrying.

Pain flooded through her. It seemed unfairly cruel of fate that it should be Adam of all people who threatened the existence of somewhere that had come to mean so much to her… a solace… a refuge… a sanctuary…

From what? From life? From herself? From her marriage? Tiredly she knew that she wouldn’t challenge him… just as she couldn’t challenge Nick about Venice?

‘I… I must go. Nick… Nick is… will be expecting me. He… he’s leaving for London and…’

Without finishing her sentence she ducked her head to one side and hurriedly started to skirt a wide circle around him, heading back towards the path, sensing that he was watching her but knowing that she dared not look back at him.

Adam! She could feel the heavy, dreary feeling of despair starting to settle over her as she half ran and half stumbled back down the path. Her body was trembling and she felt icy cold even though at the same time her face felt as though it was burningly hot, and her heart was beating so fast that she was finding it difficult to breathe properly.

Too late now to wish she had gone straight home… to wish she had not given in to the temptation to go to Broughton House and in doing so inadvertently and so very, very dangerously and painfully she now risked opening the Pandora’s box into which she had tried to lock away all her memories and thoughts of Adam.

CHAPTER SIX

ZOE woke up slowly and reluctantly, subconsciously aware of something unpleasant waiting for her, something she didn’t really want to recognise. It hovered threateningly, oppressing her, making her want to resort to the childhood tactic of squeezing her eyes closed and refusing to acknowledge that she was actually awake.

She rolled over in the bed, instinctively seeking the empty space which had held Ben’s body.

The bed felt cold and empty. It was gone ten o’clock. Ben would have been up at four to get to the markets early.

His original training had encompassed not only the preparation and cooking of food, but also the importance of its purchase; of knowing the difference between good fresh food and that which was sub-standard.

Her shift didn’t start until two, and after their late night the previous evening she would have been grateful to Ben for not disturbing her had it not been for the row they had had last night.

Or, rather, the row she had tried to have.

She had known that he was still awake when she got into bed—his body had been too rigid, too tense for sleep—but he had kept his back to her, refusing to turn round, refusing even to acknowledge that she was justified in her anger against him.

It wasn’t so much his attitude towards his sister’s pregnancy, although that had shocked her. What had hurt her most of all had been his emotional rejection of her, his refusal to acknowledge that she might possibly be able to understand how he was feeling; his use against her of the barrier of ‘class’, which they had always promised one another they would never allow to come between them.

It had almost been as though he had wanted to reject her, to shock and even disgust her by what he was saying.

And yet at the same time she had been aware of his pain and despair; of his love for his family, and for his sister, even though he had tried desperately hard to conceal it.

But why should she, just because she was female, a woman, be the one to make allowances… to understand… to forgive?

Why should he, just because he was male, a man, be allowed to offload the pain of what he was experiencing on her by attacking her?

His sister’s pregnancy and his reaction to it was something they should have been able to share, to talk about. Ben should have been able to accept that, even though she lacked his experience, his perception of what that pregnancy could mean, she was nevertheless capable of listening, comprehending… that she might even have a viable viewpoint to put, and one which, although different from his, was still worthy of being heard and discussed.

His final comment to her last night before he had flung away from her had been an acid, ‘You don’t really understand even now, do you? You just don’t have a clue. Outwardly you’re sympathetic, sorry; but inwardly you’re recoiling from what I’ve just told you, just like a healthy man recoiling from a leper!

‘Nothing’s really changed in two thousand or more years of civilisation, has it, Zoe? You in your nice, clean, sanitised, privileged world—and it is a privileged world no matter how much you might want to deny it—you just don’t have any conception of what life’s really like for people like my sister.’

Hurt, and close to tears, she had tried to defend herself, and it was then that she had made her worst mistake of all.

‘She could come here and stay with us,’ she had

suggested eagerly. ‘I could find her a job. The hotel is always looking for—–’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Ben had interrupted her in disgust. ‘Have her here? She’s damn near seven months pregnant, Zoe, and all she wants to do is sit watching television all day long. She doesn’t want a job. She doesn’t want anything other than this damned baby which she thinks is going to miraculously transform her life.

‘And so it bloody well will, but not in the way she imagines, the little fool.

‘Are all you women the same, so blindly prejudiced that you can’t see what having a baby really means?’

She had tried hard to stand her ground, inviting him shakily, ‘What does it mean, Ben? Tell me.’

He had given her a bitter, cynical look.

‘It means an extra mouth to feed, and less money coming in; it means endless nights without any sleep, and the stink of sour milk and worse pervading everything. It means the total destruction of the relationship you thought you had with one another; that’s if you’re still together when the child arrives.

‘It means… Oh, God, what the hell is the point in trying to explain to you, Zoe? Children, pregnancy… to you they mean giving birth in some fashionable private ward of a hospital and then going home with a clean cooing bundle wrapped in something expensive and impractical bought by Mummy. It means agonising endlessly over finding a nanny, and then agonising even more over finding the right school. You don’t have any real idea.’

She had wanted to tell him that he was wrong, totally and utterly wrong, but instead she had asked him quietly, ‘And what does parenthood, fatherhood mean to you, Ben?’ But as she waited for his answer, she suspected she already knew.

Even so, his reply had shocked her.

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ he had told her harshly. ‘Because I don’t intend to ever be a father.’

And with that he had got into bed, put out the light and pointedly turned away from her.

Later, lying silently in bed beside him, she had waited for him to relent and turn to her; to take her in his arms and hold her.

Only he hadn’t done, and now this morning she was alone in their flat with anger as well as misery, a cold, hard lump of indigestible solidity wedged firmly inside her.

She got out of bed reluctantly and headed for the bathroom.

She pushed open the door and then stopped, staring at the paper images pinned, taped to almost every surface.

Eyes widening, she went into the living-room. It was full of them as well, huge hearts cut from newspapers and magazines, with the words ‘I love you’ scrawled across them in red felt-tip pen, tiny smaller ones cut from silver kitchen foil and strung together like the tail of a kite, and hung from the doorframes so that they danced in the draught, big fat pigs with drawn-in tiny mean little eyes and droopy would-be-curly tails made from wrapping ribbons that made her laugh as the tears filled her eyes.

He must have spent hours doing this, hours when he should have been asleep. Hours when she had been asleep.

Across the largest pig of all, propped up against the kitchen taps, he had written the words, ‘I’m sorry’.

Oh, Ben!

As she carefully collected every single heart, and every single pig, smoothing out the paper before gently folding it and then searching for a large envelope to put them in, she was still crying, her heart aching, not for herself but for him.

She knew how much his family meant to him, how fiercely protective of them he was. And she knew as well how much Sharon’s pregnancy and all that it would mean to her life must hurt him. She had been a clever girl, he had told her, and in those words she had heard all his frustration and disappointment.

‘It will be another mouth to feed,’ he had told her and no doubt he had been thinking that he would be the one who would have to help to feed it.

Neither of them ever discussed the financial help he gave his mother. They didn’t need to. Zoe felt no resentment of his loyalty towards his family.

‘That’s because you’ve never needed to worry about money,’ he had told her cynically, and then she had smiled sunnily, refusing to allow him to aggravate her.

It wasn’t until she had finished tidying away all the scraps of paper that she noticed the envelope on the table.

She had forgotten to mention it to Ben last night, and he obviously had not noticed it when he got up.

She picked it up, scanning it uncertainly. When she had seen it yesterday she had been so excited; now, like an opened forgotten bottle of champagne, her excitement had gone flat, superseded by other emotions.

For the first time she felt, if not resentment, then certainly a sudden awareness of irritation with Ben’s family. She wriggled uncomfortably, frowning as she refocused on the envelope.

This was their future here in front of her. Hers and Ben’s… The exciting, enticing, challenging future they had worked so hard together for. It belonged to them. They had worked for it… planned for it, and Ben… Ben deserved it; and yet now, because of his family, because of last night, somehow its promise was shadowed, her excitement doused, their right to share and anticipate the pleasure of taking their first major step into the future and success dulled by the sharp contrast between their future and that of Ben’s sister and her child.

And if she was so aware of the discrepancies in those futures, then how much more so must Ben be?

She gave a small shiver of distress and guilt. Was she really so selfish, so shallow that she resented Sharon for inadvertently casting a shadow over their lives? By rights what she ought to be feeling was sympathy and concern, not wishing that Ben’s sister had not spoiled this special moment in their lives by inflicting her problems on her brother.

She picked up the envelope and then put it down again.

She was not normally given to self-analysis or questioning her feelings—her life was too busy, her responses too immediate and instinctive. It was Ben who measured his reactions, who monitored everything he said and felt, measuring them against some personal and, to her, bewildering measuring stick of personal standards.

But now, forced to deal with her own shock at what she was feeling, she had to question whether Ben might be right when he accused her of not being able to really comprehend or understand, of not wanting to accept the reality of his family’s lives.

How would she feel if she were in Sharon’s shoes, for instance?

She gave a small cold shiver. It could never have happened to her, of course.

There had been girls at school who had disappeared for a brief period of time and who it was rumoured had been discreetly hustled off by their parents to some expensive private clinic to remove the evidence of their unplanned and unwanted conception long before their bodies showed any signs of it, and rumours were all there had been.

Parenthood out of wedlock and children born to middle-aged fathers with almost grown-up families and second wives, often as young as their own daughters, were a familiar pattern of life to her, of course, but her friends’ unmarried parenthood was nothing like that so graphically described by Ben.

Her friends’ babies were always ‘desperately wanted’ or ‘an accident really, darling, but now both of us are thrilled and Mummy is simply over the moon’, or the product of serious committed relationships between couples who shuddered in distaste at the thought of their commitment to one another needing anything so proletarian as a marriage ceremony to cement it.

No, there were no Sharons in her world, or, if there were, no one talked about them.

Ben was her friend and her lover; the differences in their upbringing gave her no qualms at all. She was proud of him, fiercely proud… of the person he was and the things he had achieved. She felt no sense of being his superior, nor of being his inferior; they were equals, true partners.

And normally she did not allow herself to brood on the fact that there was a part of Ben’s life from which he seemed to want to exclude her.

Now she was angry with herself for the small-mindedness of her feelings, for her selfishness in her irritation at the way Sharon’s problems had overshadowed their own happiness. And angry with Ben for letting them?

What would she have preferred him to do—come back from Manchester pretending that everything was all right, keep the truth from her so that it need not spoil her pleasure, shield her from his own pain?

No, of course not. She loved him. She wanted to share his pain as well as his pleasure; the bad things as well as the good.

Before she left for work, Zoe propped the letter up against the kettle and scrawled a note, which she put beside it, saying, ‘I love you too,’ and then drew a heart which she filled with tiny kisses.

Poor Sharon. Did she lie awake in bed at night with her hands on her swollen belly, dreaming of a man who would love her—and her baby? She was so lucky, Zoe admitted. If she were in Sharon’s shoes…

Ben had made no secret of the fact that he felt that Sharon should have had her pregnancy terminated, and Zoe couldn’t help agreeing with him. It would surely have been the best solution for everyone. But Sharon had not taken that option and now it was too late.

Another mouth to feed, Ben had said bitterly, and Zoe had sensed his anger, his frustration, his refusal to see the coming baby as anything other than an extra financial burden he did not want to have to shoulder.

‘I don’t want children,’ he had told her, but then neither did she. Not at this stage in her life. Maybe later, much, much later, when she had done all the things she wanted to do.

Her shift started at two and finished officially at ten, but it was gone half-past eleven before she was finally able to leave the hotel and almost one before her battered but reliable Mini brought her back to the flat.

She had expected Ben to be in bed; after all, he had to be up at four. But as she searched for her key he surprised her by opening the door for her.

‘Ben!’ She smiled her happiness up at him.

‘I’m sorry… About last night,’ he told her gruffly as he opened his arms to her, kicking the door shut behind her.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she whispered back. ‘You were upset. Did you see the letter?’

‘What letter?’ he murmured, lazily nuzzling the delicate vulnerable flesh just behind her ear, but his casual tone did not deceive Zoe. She knew him too well.

‘You know which one,’ she told him. ‘Have you opened it?’

His tongue was slowly exploring the shape of her ear, sending small frissons of sensation racing down her spine, making her want to move her body against his, to stretch languorously and sensually against him like a cat being stroked.

‘Of course I haven’t.’ Ben smiled at her as he released her. ‘You didn’t really think I’d open it without you, did you? Come on, let’s open it now…’

‘No,’ Zoe told him, watching him frown. ‘Let’s open it in bed instead,’ she suggested, her eyes narrowing with laughter and warmth as she added, ‘Then we can really celebrate if it’s good news.’

‘And if it’s not?’ Ben cautioned.

She smiled lovingly at him.

‘If it’s not, then we’ll be in the right place to commiserate with each other, won’t we? But it won’t be bad news,’ she told him firmly.

She insisted that he should be the one to open it and then closed her eyes, urging him to hurry because she couldn’t bear the suspense any longer, crossing her fingers behind her back as she listened to the sounds of him tearing open the envelope.

She could feel his tension and stillness as he read whatever was inside and then, unable to bear it any longer, she opened her eyes and begged.

‘What does it say?’

Silently Ben handed her the contents of the envelope. She scanned the letter quickly before dropping it on to the bed to scrutinise the thick glossy brochure which it had been attached to.

‘Oh, Ben! Look… it’s perfect!’

‘You haven’t read it properly yet,’ he derided her, but he was smiling and she could tell, although he was struggling hard to conceal it, that he was almost as excited as she was herself.

‘Don’t start getting your hopes too high,’ Ben warned her later when the brochure had been read and re-read at least a dozen times. ‘As Clive points out in his letter, there’s a long way to go. We’ll need planning permission to convert the stable block for one thing, and then…’

‘But it’s so perfect,’ Zoe interrupted him excitedly. ‘All that land…’

‘Which will have to be maintained. Gardens are all very well, but they don’t look after themselves, you know.’

‘No. No, of course not, but that walled vegetable garden… You said yourself that with people becoming more aware of the importance of how their food is grown as well as prepared…’ she began impatiently, but Ben shook his head.

‘We’re a long way from growing our own produce, Zoe. That’s something that will be way, way ahead in the future.’

‘But with a house like this at least we’ll have the potential for that kind of future development, won’t we?’

‘We don’t know that Clive will be able to buy the place yet,’ Ben reminded her. ‘He only says in his letter that the property is suitable and that, because of its situation, it won’t be overpriced.’

‘No, but he says that the surrounding area is reasonably prosperous, and that he believes that there will be a demand for a first-class restaurant, and then there’ll be weddings and other functions. Oh, Ben… it’s perfect. We’ll be able to use the gardens for marquees, and it says here that there’s a large pond…’

‘Which we’ll probably have to fill in, if we don’t want to spend half our time fishing drunken wedding guests out of it,’ Ben supplied drily.

Zoe made a small moue and flung her pillow at him.

‘You don’t fool me,’ she told him. ‘I know that you’re just as excited about it all as I am. When shall we go and see it? Clive says he’ll make arrangements for us to view it with him, if we can give him a date. Ben… Ben, what are you doing?’ she protested as he took hold of her and started kissing her.

‘Didn’t you say something about us celebrating?’ he asked her, his voice muffled as he kissed the soft curve of her breast.

‘It’s two o’clock in the morning and you’ve got to be up at four.’

‘Who needs to wait until four?’ he told her. ‘I’m “up” right now; come and feel for yourself.’

Zoe laughed, enjoying his unusual mock-macho display. It wasn’t like him to either talk or behave so playfully, and she felt her own spirits lift as she responded to his ebullience.

She repaid him for it later though, laughing as he protested at the delicate friction of her teeth against his skin.

‘What are you doing?’ he demanded as she released him, craning his head over his shoulder suspiciously as he saw her face.

‘Nothing,’ she fibbed innocently, her eyes full of laughter as she surveyed the results of her handiwork, the small neat heart-shaped outline of lovebites she had drawn quite deliberately across his buttocks.

‘Will you be playing rugby on Sunday?’ she asked him sleepily as she curled up next to him.

Whenever he could, he played in a small team made up in the main of fellow chefs, and when she could Zoe went along with him to cheer him on. This Sunday, though, she would be working. Which was probably just as well, she reflected, smiling to herself as she visualised the results of her ardent handiwork.

‘Have you any days’ holiday left?’

Sleepily Zoe opened her eyes, lifting her head off the pillow to stare through the darkness at Ben. She had thought he was already asleep.

‘Yes, I think so. Why?’

‘I was just thinking. When we go down to see the house, it might be a good idea to take a few days off, have a good look round and weigh up the competition.’

‘A holiday?’ Zoe was sitting bolt upright now, her eyes bright with enthusiasm. ‘Oh, Ben, could we?’

She knew how careful he was with his budget. Careful but not mean—never that. She earned more than he did, and she also had her parents to turn to should she need to do so. Because of that she was careful not to offend his pride by offering to pay for too many extra ‘treats’. She also knew how much he would be worrying about Sharon’s coming baby—the extra mouth he would insist on helping to feed, no matter how much he might rail now against the child’s conception.

‘I don’t see why not. We could always put it down to business expenses,’ he added drily. ‘Isn’t that the way it’s done? Mind you, why should I knock it? It will be all those executives with their hefty expense accounts that we’ll need to attract if we’re going to make this thing pay. Running a hotel isn’t like running a restaurant.’

Zoe caught the underlying note of tension in his voice and frowned. She was fully awake now and so obviously was he.

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