HELEN BROOKS - A Heartless Marriage

I hate you, Raoul, she said silently as the car purred its way through the traffic, I hate you, I do! So why was it that for the first time in five years she felt alive again?

‘I’LL see you to your door.’ Leigh’s heart was still

pounding with disgust at her own weakness as they drew up outside the block of flats where she lived, and as his cool expressionless voice cut into her whirling thoughts she stiffened instinctively, her eyes widening in protest.

‘No!’ She lowered her voice a few decibels and tried again. ‘No, Raoul, please don’t.’

‘As you wish.’ He was sitting very still, an intense watchfulness colouring his eyes ice-blue. ‘Goodnight, Leigh.’

‘What? Oh, goodnight.’ This was it, then? After five years? A macabre anticlimax was making her knees weak.

As she climbed out of the car it was gone in an instant, roaring down the street to the blaring of horns and screaming brakes from the other traffic, the sound of its engine soon lost in the general mêlée.

As the lift took her upwards she really felt as though she was going to collapse. Her legs felt like jelly and there was a strange blackness that was most peculiar coming and going in front of her eyes. She suddenly realised she was leaning against the wall of the lift, which was unsavoury at the best of times, and on a Saturday evening, after the revelry and beer-swilling carousal of a Friday night, definitely suspect.

It brought her back to earth abruptly and she even found herself smiling at the irony of leaving Raoul’s fabulously expensive car to step into such a paradoxical little box. She shrugged wearily. Such was life. If only Raoul were as easy to shrug away.

The little flat was cool and welcoming as she opened her front door. One of the advantages of being on the sixth floor was that she could leave the large French doors that took up almost one wall of the tiny lounge open in the summer, letting the cool night air and rich scents from the tiny balcony crammed full with potted plants and sweet-smelling tubs of bright flowers stream into the room. She used this room as a small studio; the light was excellent all year round, and the minute tiled bathroom leading off the small box bedroom and even tinier kitchen kept housework to a minimum.

She owned one comfortable old easy-chair parked at one side of the windows, one bed and a small wardrobe, and that was all the furniture she possessed, having ploughed all her money into the hundreds of pounds’ worth of canvases, paints and brushes that roamed across every inch of available space, cluttering the walls in untidy harmony and filling the flat with the smell of turpentine and paint. And she loved it. She stood for a moment feasting her eyes on her little domain, willing the hard-won peace and quiet contentment back into her heart. But it was no good. She grimaced to herself helplessly. Raoul had destroyed it, at least for tonight. She wouldn’t let it be any longer than that!

She was standing under the shower, letting the cool water annihilate the last flush of humiliation still staining her skin pink, when the telephone called stridently from its hook on the kitchen wall. ‘You can just ring,’ she told it loudly, reaching for the bottle of shampoo and pouring a large amount of the thick creamy mixture into her hair, working up a lather determinedly.

She couldn’t speak to anyone tonight, she just couldn’t. Her head was swimming with a thousand and one images, her mind was aching and she still didn’t know why Raoul had exploded back into her life! The phone rang again as she was towelling herself dry and once more as she lay in bed sipping a hot mug of cocoa and flicking through a magazine article on life drawing by one of her old lecturers at college. It had become a matter of principle not to answer it now, a kind of rebellion against having the frame of her carefully built screen of fragile self-sufficiency broken by Raoul’s easy intrusion.

Sleep was too long in coming and she didn’t have the patience to wait for it, preferring paint and canvas after an hour of tossing and turning and forcing her mind away from paths that it dared not follow. Delectable, forbidden paths where Raoul’s magnificent body was exposed in all its flagrant manhood and her shape was moulded into his in a manner as old as time. The phone was now off the hook; that, at least, she could control! She had another cool shower before she started work at two o’clock. The night was excessively warm, she told herself aggressively—that was absolutely all it was!

At six she fell into bed just as she was, paintsmeared and somewhat grubby, and at eight o’clock she was woken by a furious pounding at her front door that she was sure could be heard on the tenth floor.

She stumbled bleary-eyed to the door, still in her tattered old painting smock, her hair tangled and hanging limply on her shoulders and her eyes cloudy with lack of sleep.

‘And just where the hell have you been?’

‘What?’ Raoul’s face was a picture of injured outrage and for a moment she wondered if she was in the middle of some inexplicable nightmare. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Answer me, damn you!’ He seemed very angry, she reflected weakly as she tried to spark her mind into ignition. ‘I’ve been ringing this number most of the night. First there was no answer and then it was engaged. What are you playing at? Who have you got here?’ His voice was bitingly sharp.

‘Who have I…?’ He brushed past her into the flat, stalking into each tiny room before coming to a halt in front of her stained easel, the paint on the canvas still tacky.

‘You’ve been working all night, haven’t you? You took the phone off the hook because you were working. You stupid girl!’ He glared at her angrily. ‘What about an emergency? What if someone was trying to get you urgently?’

‘Stop shouting at me!’ She had found her tongue along with the burning resentment that was filling her small body from head to foot. ‘And what did that gibe mean, incidentally? “Who have I got here?” You cheeky hound! We aren’t all like you, Raoul. Some of us consider that there are more important things than procreational pursuits!’

‘What?’ In a more conventional situation the look of sheer amazement on Raoul’s face would have been food for her soul, but just at the moment she couldn’t appreciate that for once she had totally and completely surprised him.

‘You burst into my home, you accuse me of goodness knows what and then you criticise my lifestyle! How dare you? How dare you? You haven’t bothered with me for five years and now you think you can tell me what to do. Get out! Get out!’

‘“Procreational pursuits”?’ He didn’t even seem to have heard the rest of her tirade. ‘“Procreational pursuits”!’ The great peal of unbridled raucous laughter took her completely by surprise. Raoul laughed the way he did everything else, with unrestrained frankness and wholehearted participation, and in spite of the fact that it was eight o’clock on a Sunday morning and the neighbours would be thinking-well, she didn’t dare to imagine what they would be thinking-she found herself infected by his appreciation of the moment. Unfortunately they had always had the same slightly off-beat sense of humour. It had seemed good when they were together but as Mrs Billett next door banged ferociously on the wall and Mr Silver overhead nearly brought the ceiling down with his walking-stick, she tried to restrain the paroxysms of laughter that recurred every time she thought she had control. It was nerves, it had to be.

‘Oh, Leigh.’ Raoul had collapsed on the one and only chair and was looking at her through streaming eyes. ‘Only you could come out with a phrase like that. “Procreational pursuits”!’ His head went back in another burst of laughter. ‘You’re priceless, kitten, you really are.’