Kitabı oku: «Now or Never», sayfa 6

Here, protected by Oliver’s love and desire, she could ignore the outside world, but she knew that Nicki wouldn’t be the only person to criticise her.

There had been an increasingly antagonistic reaction to pregnancies like hers in the press over recent months, a passionately attacked and defended debate on the moral implications of such situations.

The irony of what she was doing was not lost on Maggie. As a girl, her generation had made full use of the contraceptive pill to prevent and delay pregnancy, thus interfering with the cycle of nature. And now that same generation was interfering with nature once again, only this time …

She heard Oliver groan as he reached for her hand and placed it against his body.

His erection was hard, his penis bulging and full, the veins standing out against his skin—a young man’s erection. The sight of it made her shiver with sensuality. Slowly she caressed him with her fingers, fiercely barricading her mind, her memory against the intrusion of another life and another man.

Without releasing him she knelt down and took him slowly and skilfully into her mouth, caressing the head of his penis with her lips as she savoured the taste and feel of him before sliding her tongue along its stiff length.

Above her Oliver groaned out loud, burying his hands in her hair without constraining her, allowing her the freedom to dictate their intimacy.

Still holding him, Maggie licked teasingly around the distended head of his erection, using her lips and tongue to deliberately make him shudder with need before she took him back in her mouth. Holding him in its wet warmth, she caressed him with increasing intensity, taking him deeper and deeper, relishing the feel and taste of his flesh in this the most intimate of lover’s ways. As she had known he would, he withdrew from her before he came, finding her own wetness with gentle fingers before he eased himself carefully into her.

No matter how often they made love it always surprised her that she climaxed so quickly and easily with him. Somehow it was as though the deepest part of herself and her body refused to accept the shackles of inhibition imposed by a society that said that she ought to feel ashamed of the maturity of her body.

Oliver had gathered her up before he entered her, supporting her body, and now as he let her slide back down to the floor he paused for a moment before finally releasing her to kiss her mouth with deeply tender passion.

In the early days of their courtship when she had often refused to allow him to give her oral sex, he had demanded, ‘Why won’t you let me?’

Somehow she couldn’t explain to him that for her generation such an act from a man to a woman had been a much rarer pleasure than it was for his generation; a gift given on special days, at heightened moments of desire, rather than an accepted part of a familiar lovemaking ritual.

‘I love the taste of you, the feel of you, the desire of you,’ Oliver had told her passionately. ‘Please don’t deny those pleasures to me, Maggie.’

Hand in hand they went back to their bed, Oliver insisting on tucking her carefully beneath the duvet before joining her.

‘Forget about Nicki and the others,’ he whispered to her as he kissed her goodnight.

Forget? Maggie wished that were possible!

‘Stuart …’

In the darkness of their bedroom, Alice tried to reach for Stuart’s hand, but he pulled away from her, turning over, his back to her.

‘Leave it, will you, Alice?’ he demanded brusquely. ‘For God’s sake, let’s not have an in-depth inquest. So I lost a bloody erection! So what? It happens all the time. You making a drama out of it isn’t going to alter anything.’

Her making a drama out of it? Alice suppressed her desire to point out to him that she hadn’t particularly wanted to have sex in the first place and that he had been the one to suggest it.

But she could feel Stuart’s tension, and instinctively she wanted to comfort him. To reassure him, to reach out and hold him; but just as instinctively she knew he would not want her to. She could feel how shocked and disbelieving he was.

On his own side of the bed, Stuart lay staring into the darkness. Never once in all the years they had been married had he suffered an erection failure. Never. Ever.

His eyes burned as though they were filled with grit, his body gripped by tension and a sickening sense of powerlessness. He knew why it had happened, of course. Of course! How could he not? It didn’t need a series of expensive counselling sessions with a shrink to tell him. The miracle was perhaps that it hadn’t happened before!

From his childhood he could hear his father’s voice exhorting him, ‘Be a man, Stuart.’

Be a man! His father had been a man. A very special man. Stuart had known all the time he was growing up that he could never hope to rival him, that his father belonged to a rare and exclusive club whose doors would be for ever barred to him. His father was, after all, a hero and he had the medals to prove it; the medals, and the stories, the reminiscences and tales of comrades who had not possessed his own luck and who had perished.

Stuart could still vividly remember how different his father had been when he had got together with his ex-comrades. At home he had been a distant, commanding figure, constantly exhorting Stuart to live up to his maleness. He had died shortly after the twins had been born.

‘A man needs sons, Stuart,’ he had pronounced approvingly after their birth. Sons … another marker of a man’s maleness.

It was all rubbish, of course, and his views would be ridiculed now—Stuart knew that. Men and women were equal now. Equal …

Stuart closed his eyes against the burning pain seizing him. Just for a second he longed to bury himself against Alice’s sleepy warmth, to take comfort from her and be comforted by her, but how could he, when he knew …?

What was she going to say when she found out? Would she despise him? Reject him? Blame him for letting her down?

Could he blame her if she did? He had tried to prevent it happening, but all the time, from the first moment he had met Arlette Salcombe, he had known it was inevitable. That single look between them, that meeting of glances. He had known then. And now there was no way out and no way back!

5

‘What do you mean, a man telephoned asking for me?’ The anger in Laura’s voice made Joey cower away from her.

‘What man, Joey?’ Laura demanded. ‘What did he say?’ She could feel the heat in her face. Her heart was hammering against her chest, driven by anger. Anger and not excitement, no way was she going to allow it to be excitement.

Her fingers curled into her palms, making tight fists. It had to be Ryan. It couldn’t possibly be anyone else. He must have got the number from Human Resources. He had no right to ring her. No right to …

‘What did he say? Did he tell you his name?’ Her voice rose, sharpening with each word, frightening Joey even more. He had intuitively picked up on Laura’s antagonism towards his mother and that increased his fear of her.

‘Did he tell you his name?’ Laura was shouting now, too wrapped up in her own fear to be aware of Joey’s. Right now he was just an irritating child who, through either malice or stupidity, was refusing to give her the information she so desperately needed.

‘Joey?’ Laura exploded, grabbing hold of him and giving him an impatient little shake before she could stop herself. Almost immediately she released him, but it was too late. Just as she did so Nicki walked into the kitchen.

‘Let go of him! Let go of him, Laura!’

Furiously Nicki rushed to protect her son, kneeling down to gather him up in her arms as Laura released him.

‘How dare you? How dare you touch my child?’ she blazed. ‘Joey, it’s all right, it’s all right, you’re safe now,’ she comforted her son, rocking him in her arms as Laura looked on in a mixture of contempt and bitterness.

‘That’s right!’ she threw at Nicki. ‘You rush to protect your precious child—but you can’t always be here to protect him, Nicki. After all, I haven’t forgotten that there was no one to protect me from you!’ Instinctively Laura tried to defend herself and her actions.

‘What? I never did anything to hurt you!’ Nicki denied immediately.

‘You’re lying,’ Laura spat out, giving her a thin-lipped, acid smile. ‘But then you would, wouldn’t you? Anyway, for your information, I wasn’t hurting Joey. And if I were you, instead of treating him like a baby, I’d spend a bit more time making sure he knows how to take a telephone message properly.’

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Joey protested from the comfort of Nicki’s arms. ‘The man didn’t say any name. He just asked if you were here.’

Laura had been terrifying her son half to death simply because of a phone call? Nicki’s mouth compressed.

‘Whoever he is, Laura, if he wants to speak to you enough he will ring back.’

Laura’s face burned even hotter as Nicki made no attempt to conceal the smugly superior tone of her voice. Immediately she reacted to it, saying fiercely, ‘It’s typical of you to think what you’re obviously thinking, but you’re wrong. I don’t want him to ring back. In fact, I don’t want to speak to him at all. To speak to him or to see him. You see, unlike you, I have no intention of becoming involved in an affair with a married man or having sex with him behind his wife’s back.’

As she listened to Laura’s outburst Nicki’s face went white. Releasing Joey, she told him huskily, ‘Joey, go up to your room and watch your videos for a while before it’s time for school, will you, darling?’

Over Joey’s blond head their glances fought, neither of them allowing herself to give way. As soon as the door had closed behind Joey Nicki demanded, ‘What is it exactly that you’re trying to say, Laura?’

Laura shot her a bitterly cynical glare, hating what was happening but powerless to stop it. The words, the pain, the anguish had been dammed up inside her for too long to be controlled, now that she had released them.

‘What do you think I’m trying to say? You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. And don’t bother trying to lie about it. I was there! I heard you. They’d sent me home from school because I wasn’t feeling well. I tried to tell them that there wasn’t any point because there wasn’t anyone there to look after me.’ She gave a mirthless smile. ‘After all, my mother had only been taken into hospital a few days earlier. To give my father a rest, that’s what they’d said when I went to see her. But it wasn’t a rest he was getting, was it, Nicki? He wasn’t resting on the bed in the guest room at all, was he? No. He was lying there whilst you—’

‘Stop it.’ Appalled and sick with shock, Nicki covered her ears, her shock increasing as Laura flew at her, tearing her hands from her ears as she screamed.

‘No! You will listen, just as I had to listen to the pair of you! Have you any idea how disgusting it sounds hearing your own father sobbing with sickening lust whilst his whore relieves him? I heard every word. Every sound … every sound,’ Laura stressed savagely.

Tears of rage were pouring down her face—a face that was contorted into an expression of fury and loathing, the strength of the emotion emanating from her such that Nicki could almost feel it heating the air between them.

In contrast she felt icy cold with shock. She could feel herself shivering as the nausea churned unpleasantly in her stomach. She tried to defend herself, to stop the flood of obscenity pouring from Laura’s mouth, protesting, ‘Laura, it wasn’t like that! You don’t understand …’

‘No, I don’t!’ Laura agreed furiously. ‘I don’t understand how my father could have possibly wanted to take you to bed in my home, my mother’s home, whilst she was dying in a hospital bed. I don’t understand how he can ever have wanted to touch you, never mind do the things he did to you.

‘You couldn’t wait, could you, Nicki? You wanted to desecrate my home, my mother, so badly that you couldn’t even wait for him to undress you. I heard you begging him, screaming to him to take you, to fill you. I heard him … My mother was dying and the pair of you were shagging each other like animals. You couldn’t wait for her to die, could you, Nicki? You couldn’t wait to take her place. You didn’t wait, did you?’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Nicki protested, white-faced. ‘Laura, please listen to me.’

‘Listen to you?’ She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘That’s what he wants me to do! My boss … the reason I have had to come here, the one place where I know I’ll be able to resist the temptation to give in to him, because you’re here, Nicki, and every time I look at you I remember what you did and how much I hated you then and still hate you now for it.

‘A married man with a dying wife. Was it good for you, Nicki, knowing that she was dying? Did that add that extra bit of something to your enjoyment? Did you think of her when my father was—?’

Laura gasped in shock as Nicki slapped her face. The sound ricocheted through the kitchen as her head snapped back.

Her eyes glittering with contempt, Laura ran to the back door, pulling it open.

Unable to move, Nicki heard the sound of the BMW’s engine firing. Despite the fact that she was still shivering, sweat was now pouring off her, soaking through the shirt she was wearing. She could feel it gathering beneath her breasts. Just as it had done that day so very long ago.

Closing her eyes, she slumped against the kitchen wall.

It had taken her nearly two months to find a suitable housekeeper for Kit, and of course during those two months she had been obliged to speak to him both by telephone and in person on several occasions for professional reasons. And she had tried to keep things strictly professional. They both had.

She had tried to reassure herself, to tell herself that she had imagined, exaggerated that shockingly unexpected surge of awareness of him. After the experience of her marriage, the last thing she had been looking for was another relationship. Kit had been a married man, with a very sick wife. She’d had her professional position to consider. She was just not the kind of woman who went in for affairs. Oh, yes, she had been able to provide herself with any number of reasons for refusing to acknowledge what had been happening to her.

Kit had kept his own emotional distance from her, and she had actually begun to believe that the danger had been successfuly averted when he had arrived at her office late one afternoon, just as she’d been about to leave.

He’d explained emotionally to her that his daughter Laura had become very rebellious, in reaction, he’d suspected, to her mother’s illness, and he had come to Nicki to seek help and advice, not knowing who else he could turn to.

She had, Nicki remembered, felt both flattered and afraid. Kit had persuaded her to come up to the house and meet Laura. Reluctantly she had agreed.

Laura had been thirteen then, the worst possible time surely for a young girl to be losing her mother, Nicki could remember thinking. She could remember too how sympathetic she had felt towards Laura and how much she had wanted to help and comfort her. Not just for Kit’s sake but for Laura’s own. Her thick wheat-gold hair, so like her father’s, had made Nicki ache with protective pain, but she had determinedly refused to allow herself to swamp Laura with her own feelings, instead striving to treat her in as adult a way as possible.

She had introduced herself to her in her professional capacity and had asked her gently, ‘woman to woman’, how she considered Mrs Fulton the housekeeper had been getting on.

It had been the right kind of approach, and after an initial and natural hesitation Laura had begun to confide in her, so much so, in fact, that she had taken to calling in on Nicki at work on her way home from school.

Nicki had been happy to see her and to help her, but she had still determinedly kept a distance between Kit and herself—as he had done between himself and her. And so, foolishly perhaps, she had congratulated herself on having overcome any inappropriate feelings she might have had for him, until the first Christmas she had known him.

He had asked her to go shopping with him to buy a suitable present for Laura, and she had agreed.

They had been standing in the teenage clothes shop in the city, paying for the outfit she had told him she knew Laura wanted, when it had happened. The salesgirl had smiled at them both and said innocently, ‘Is it for your daughter?’

Nicki had looked at Kit and he had looked back at her. Her heart had started to hammer and her mouth had gone dry. She had known what he’d been feeling because she’d been feeling it herself. She remembered how she had pulled away from him and run blindly out of the shop, terrified of her own emotions. He had come after her, catching up with her in the street. It had been a cold, raw day with a sharp east wind that had whipped her hair across her face.

Kit had pushed it out of the way, she remembered, his fingers tender against her skin.

‘I wish more than you can know that things were different, that I was free to be yours and that you were mine, Nicki, and that we …’ he told her, and then before she could stop him he kissed her! And she kissed him back, hungrily, passionately, giving in helplessly to a need she had no right to feel.

She felt bitterly ashamed afterwards, wrenching herself out of his arms and standing there on the pavement trembling with shock and sick despair.

It would have been bad enough if he had merely been married, but the fact that his wife was so desperately ill of course made her feel even more shamed and distraught.

She told him she never wanted to see him again … could not afford to see him again, but he pleaded with her for Laura’s sake not to walk out of their lives.

Reluctantly she gave in, on the strict understanding that what had happened between them was never repeated.

Kit gave her his word that it would not be, and after that they were both meticulous about never knowingly being alone together.

At the back of both their minds but never actually admitted was the knowledge that ultimately they would have their chance to be together. But Nicki was determined not to taint either their own future or Kit’s memories by allowing either of them to give in to their feelings while Jennifer was still alive. And she fully intended to stick to that vow!

As winter gave way to spring that first year, and spring to summer, Jennifer’s health waxed and waned with the seasons. Her heart condition, initially caused by a severe bout of childhood rheumatic fever, had worsened after Laura’s birth and was now chronic and fatal. All the doctors could do was buy her time, brief respites, when she was well enough to return home for a pathetically few days.

Without wanting to, Nicki became drawn into their family circle. Mrs Fulton could not always be there, and Jennifer did not like strangers around her. She was very ill at that stage, with Kit her carer rather than her lover. Sometimes Nicki felt almost as though Jennifer sensed how she herself felt about Kit. She once said to her during her last summer that she hoped that Kit would remarry and be happy and that she didn’t want Laura to grow up without someone to mother her.

Nicki said nothing, but that weekend for the first time she admitted to Maggie just how she felt. Predictably, Maggie hugged her fiercely and cried with her. Afterwards, again typically, she announced that she had arranged for them both to go on holiday together, a luxurious continental spa where they could let their hair down and be spoilt.

It was only later that Nicki realised that at the time Maggie’s own marriage was in trouble and that Dan was having an affair!

The next winter she reluctantly agreed to spend Christmas Day with Laura and Kit, for Laura’s sake. Jennifer was back in hospital, her condition deteriorating. She and Kit, she remembered, behaved towards one another like two awkward strangers, so much so that at one point Laura asked her in private if she didn’t like her father!

The strain began to take its toll on her. She lost weight, and grew irritable and snappy, under the burden of her feelings of guilt and longing, but still she and Kit stuck rigidly to their agreement.

That spring Jennifer rallied—for the last time, the doctors warned Kit, and when he told Nicki in weary exhaustion of their verdict, she sensed the relief he wasn’t voicing. Instinctively she knew it was not for his own sake, and certainly not for hers, but purely in every sense for Jennifer, who had suffered so much and for so long, and for Laura too who had spent virtually all her life watching her mother die. But as though he felt he had to punish them both—him for his feelings and her for sensing them—he immediately become angry and almost hostile towards her.

Unbearably hurt that he should be pushing her away just when she most wanted to be there for him, she turned to Maggie, for comfort. ‘He feels guilty,’ Maggie told her, confirming her own feelings. ‘Let him go through this in his own way, Nicki,’ she advised her gently. ‘I know how much you want to be there for him, but perhaps in his eyes this is something he has to do alone for Jennifer and for their shared past.’

Their shared love, Maggie meant, Nicki knew that, and suddenly she was afraid that somehow Jennifer’s death might take Kit away from her.

She stayed away from the house and from him, even distancing herself a little from Laura, and she would have continued to do so if Mrs Fulton hadn’t had to give up her job to nurse her own sick mother.

It was Kit’s wish that Jennifer should be allowed to die peacefully at home in her own bed, as she always said she wanted to do, but a sudden crisis meant that she had to be taken into hospital.

Nicki heard the desperation in Kit’s voice when he telephoned her to ask her if she could possibly help him. The hospital agreed that Jennifer could return home for her final few days once her breathing was back to normal, and Kit naturally wanted to stay at the hospital with her, but because of her emergency admission there were domestic chores to do at the house.

Initially Nicki intended to find him a temporary substitute for Mrs Fulton, but no one was available, and in the end she went up to the house herself, using the key Kit had given her to let herself in.

Even the air inside the house felt heavy with grief and pain, and Nicki was instinctively affected by it. She felt for Jennifer as a woman. The last time she had seen her, Jennifer had shocked her by telling her that she was tired of her fight and that she longed for it to be over.

‘I need to be allowed to die, Nicki,’ she had said quietly. ‘And Kit and most of all Laura need to be allowed to live. This shadowy half world which is neither living nor dying, which all three of us are currently condemned to, is benefiting no one. It’s time for it to end.’

Nicki was upstairs, just finishing remaking the bed in the guest room, which Kit had taken to using leaving the main bedroom free for Jennifer, when Kit returned home. He had come upstairs before she realised he was there, standing in the open door way and simply looking at her.

‘Jennifer?’ she demanded anxiously.

‘The crisis is over for now, but …’ He paused and then said bleakly, ‘She’s coming home tomorrow. She’s always said she wanted to die here in her own bed.’

The look in his eyes tore her apart. Unable to stop herself, she went to him, intending only to offer him human comfort. She lifted her hand to touch his face, she remembered, and her palm was wet with his tears.

‘Nicki!’ He said her name in an explosive sound of raw agony, and then he reached for her, pulling her into his arms and kissing her with such furious need that she was not able to deny him, sensing that he was being driven by something that went way beyond mere sexual desire, and that it involved somehow a far more complex need; a form of grieving and losing himself and his pain that made her heart ache for him and for Jennifer herself.

Quite when that furious need to expiate his pain had turned to desire for her, she didn’t know. All she could remember was suddenly realising that something had changed; that they were kissing and touching as lovers.

‘Kit, no!’ she forced herself to protest at one point, even though her body was already screaming for his possession, but Kit overruled her, begging her thickly, ‘Nicki, don’t deny me. Not now … I need you so badly … Please, please, Nicki.’ And her will-power evaporated, burned away by desire.

All the months of denying themselves as well as Kit’s pain and anguish, his guilt and despair at Jennifer’s long decline, were exorcised in what followed. It was desire, need, hunger stripped down to its most basic components; rawly sexual, intensely tender, deeply emotional, the kind of intimacy that touched the soul and burned away inhibitions and conventions.

Afterwards Nicki felt both euphoric and shocked—the guilt came later when her body finally recovered from its satiated satisfaction.

For almost a week Jennifer lingered on the edge of death, brought home by Kit as he had always promised her he would do, and when Nicki finally managed to find the courage to visit Kit was distant and cold towards her.

She sensed instinctively that he felt guilty about what had happened and that he blamed her for it, even though he had been the instigator of their passion. His behaviour towards her fuelled her own resentment at being seduced into an act of betrayal she had begun to hate herself for committing. She hated knowing that their first time together had happened in such a way, and she came close to hating Kit for making it happen like that.

That it was the one and only occasion on which they were lovers until they were officially able to declare themselves as a dating couple made no difference; Nicki felt that she would carry the guilt of what had happened with her for ever.

Had Kit been prepared to talk about it, had they been able to find a way of exonerating themselves and allowing themselves to make a human mistake, things might have been different, but Nicki knew that secretly, despite their love for one another, both of them still felt uncomfortable about what they had done.

Initially, when both he and Laura withdrew from her, she thought it a natural consequence of Jennifer’s death and she respected their need to grieve together as father and daughter. It was the school holidays and Kit took Laura away. Days, weeks, months went by without any contact from him, whilst Nicki waited patiently.

‘Just give him time, Nicki,’ Maggie counselled her consolingly, and that was exactly what she did.

On the day of her birthday in October, she received a simple bouquet of creamy white roses with a note attached to them in Kit’s handwriting.

‘Thank you—for being you,’ was all it said, and she spent the whole day torn between elation and despair, wondering where he was and when—if—she was going to see him.

He telephoned her that evening to say that he had intended to be home to surprise her and take her out for dinner, but that Laura was not well enough for them to make the trip back.

Perhaps that was when she should have realised, guessed what was to lie ahead, but she hadn’t done. Why should she? She and Laura had always had such a good relationship, it had never even occurred to her that Laura would turn against her, begin to hate her … do everything within her considerable power to break up their relationship!

And now at last she knew why.

She felt sick remembering what Laura had said to her and even sicker remembering what she and Kit had done.

‘Where are you going?’

Maggie smiled ruefully at Oliver as she picked her car keys up off her desk.

‘To see Nicki.’ When she saw his expression she shook her head. ‘I can’t just leave things, Oliver. She’s my best friend. We’ve been through so much together. I have to …’

‘Placate her?’ Oliver suggested.

Maggie shook her head. ‘No!’ she denied firmly. ‘But if my friendship is as important to her as hers is to me we must be able to find a way to compromise, surely?’

‘And if you can’t?’

‘Don’t say that,’ she pleaded with him.

Nicki stared at the cold cup of tea on the table in front of her. She had no recollection of having made it. Joey had gone to school, having been picked up by another boy’s mother.

Nicki had no idea where Laura was, and she cared even less, she told herself savagely. And as for Kit! A bitter little smile twisted her mouth. Kit, lucky, lucky Kit, was away on business. She stiffened as she heard someone knocking on her kitchen door. Whoever it was, she didn’t want to see them. She did not want to see anyone. Could not bear to see anyone. But the handle was turning and the door was opening and she could hear Maggie’s voice calling out, ‘Nicki. It’s only me, Maggie …’

Maggie had been rehearsing what she was going to say all the way to Nicki’s, but her hesitantly prepared words, along with her wariness, disappeared the moment she saw Nicki’s white, tear-blotched face.

‘Nicki! What’s happened? What’s wrong?’

Helplessly Nicki closed her eyes. Of course! Of course, it would have to be Maggie who found her like this. Why was it that whenever there was a crisis in her life Maggie always seemed to be there to witness it?

Maggie had been there the day Carl had beaten her so badly that she could hardly crawl, never mind walk; she had been there when Nicki had made the gut-wrenching decision not to see Kit again; and she was here now!