Penny Jordan - Lingering Shadows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sick at heart, he groaned helplessly to himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You’re going to see Christie?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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