Penny Jordan - Lingering Shadows

Gregory came back just in time to change for dinner, and Davina, who, after her shower, had dithered over whether or not to change into the ultra-feminine and frilly broderie anglaise trousseau shortie robe she had bought for herself, was glad that she had put on a dress instead when Gregory disappeared into the bathroom, firmly locking the door behind him.

When he came out fifteen minutes later his skin gleamed; he smelled of soap, and, even slicked back off his head, his hair still made her want to reach out and stroke her fingers through it.

The sight of him, the smell of him, the reality of him banished her earlier panic, and she ached to throw herself into his arms, to have the confidence, the experience to tease him with kisses and caresses until he growled that what he wanted was not dinner but her, but she knew awkwardly that she just wasn’t that kind of girl, that she did not have that kind of self-confidence, and so instead she sat miserably through the dinner she had not wanted, her throat closing up with a misery she could not explain as the blonde courier hovered over their table, chatting animatedly with Gregory while ignoring her.

It was late, almost midnight, when they finally went up to their room. Gregory had been drinking steadily all evening. He swayed slightly as he unlocked their bedroom door.

The atmosphere inside the bedroom hit them like a muggy hot wall. The room had no air-conditioning, and the windows were screwed down so that they could not be opened.

Davina showered quickly, trying to ignore the headache tensing her scalp.

When she came out of the bathroom wearing her new robe and its matching shortie nightdress, the broderie anglaise threaded with pale blue satin ribbon, Gregory was lying on one of the twin beds.

He looked up at her and pronounced, ‘Very virginal. What are you going to do? Take it home complete with appropriate bloodstain to show Daddy?’

Davina stared at him in disbelief. She started to tremble a little, aware that something was wrong, but not knowing what.

After all her dreams, the reality of Gregory’s lovemaking shocked her into a silence that prevented everything other than one brief, sharp sound of pain leaving her lips as he possessed her.

She didn’t even cry. Not then, not until she was alone in her own single bed and Gregory was safely asleep, snoring in the other bed.

Was this what she had waited for … wanted … ached for … dreamed about? Was this, then, sex? Where was the exquisite build-up of sensation, the aching, consuming urgency of need, the quick, fierce pangs of sensation that exploded into that rhythmic starburst of pleasure she had known in her dreams and in waking from them? If this was sex, then what had they been?

When Davina returned from her honeymoon she felt immeasurably older—and wiser; the scales had not so much fallen from her eyes as been ripped from them.

After the fourth night of enduring Gregory’s increasingly uncomfortable penetration of her now painful body, on the fifth night she turned quietly and sadly away from him.

Gregory made no attempt to coax or persuade her, simply returning to his own bed with a small shrug.

Feeling shocked, distressed, and most of all guilty because she was not able to enjoy his lovemaking, not able to respond to him since at times she almost wished she were here on her own rather than here with him, she was relieved to return home and to escape into the familiar routine of her life there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gregory had told her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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