HELEN BROOKS - A Heartless Marriage

‘Oh, and I suppose if you’d come back to our home and found me in bed with another man you would have sat down with us in a reasonable manner and asked politely for an explanation?’ She glared at him. ‘There was only one possible interpretation. Admit it!’

‘You weary me.’ His face had hardened further at the note of undisguised disgust in her voice.

‘ I weary you ?’ She was aware in the far recesses of her mind that she kept repeating his remarks like a dozy parrot, but the haughty insolence was leaving her gasping for words. ‘Well, maybe I do at that. But I’m not stupid and I won’t pretend to be. Marion had been after you for weeks and you knew it. I suppose you only held out for as long as you did because she was your best friend’s wife and they were staying with us. You betrayed him and me and for what? A little—’ She stopped abruptly and took a long deep breath, settling back into the bed and pulling the covers more closely around her. She felt suddenly cold, cold and very tired. ‘Anyway, it’s over, finished; none of it matters any more. Maybe we can be friends one day.’ She missed the lightning flash of pain in his face.

‘I do not want friendship from you,’ he said savagely. ‘I want more, much more than that or nothing at all.’

‘Then it will be nothing,’ she said slowly as she

lifted her eyes to stare straight into the arctic blue of his.

‘You think so?’ His voice was soft now and with a chilling coldness that sent a tiny shiver sparking down her spine. She knew Raoul. He was always at his most dangerous when perfectly in control like now. ‘Tell me, my Leigh, what did you imagine would happen in the future? Did you seriously expect me to remain in the background like an emasculated stallion forever?’ She shivered at the crudity.

‘I didn’t expect anything,’ she said tightly, forcing her eyes not to fall before the piercing clarity of his. ‘I didn’t expect anything and I don’t want anything. Not from you. I thought you knew that after all this time.’

‘Then this is where you are wrong,’ he said calmly as he walked easily towards the door, his big shoulders proudly straight and his head held high. ‘Quite wrong.’

‘Can’t you just leave me alone, Raoul—?’

He spun round instantly with that smooth animal reflex she remembered from the past. She could tell he was angry, blazingly angry, but the big body was held in quiet restraint and his voice was perfectly contained when he next spoke.

‘No, I will not leave you alone any more.’ It was a statement rather than a threat but it had the same effect on her as the latter. She couldn’t understand any of this. What exactly did he want of her after all these years? ‘We have things to decide and arrangements to make but I refuse to discuss it now. Not with you in this mood.’

‘This “mood” is me,’ she said sharply, ‘and nothing you could say would convince me—’

He cut off her words with a vicious stab of his hand as he waved her to silence from the doorway. ‘I have given you the time you asked for that day when you left, the chance to follow your dream of becoming an artist, the opportunity to become your own person, but that doesn’t mean that I will allow anyone else to take my place. Do you understand me?’ He glared at her across the small room, his hands arrogantly splayed on his hips and his eyes flashing cold fire. ‘If I had kept you with me you would never have been sure of what you could have achieved, never sure if your love for me was a mirage that had chained you to my side.’

She stared at him silently as she tried to take in what he was saying. This was all nonsense. She hadn’t said—

‘I have never been more than a step behind you through the years. I have known exactly what you were doing, what you were involved with, who you were seeing and when. And this Jeff Capstone, I will not tolerate that you see him. Is that clear?’

She still couldn’t speak, couldn’t formulate what she was hearing’I shall return to see you tomorrow and I will tell you then how I expect you to behave. Goodbye, Leigh.’

‘Raoul!’ As she found her tongue the front door slammed with a violence that rocked the tiny flat and as she went to leap out of bed to follow him, her cheeks scarlet with anger, she caught her bare foot in the bedclothes and fell in a sprawling heap on to the floor. By the time she reached the front door the lift’s ancient whirring mechanism informed her she was too late. He had gone.

As she slowly stepped back in the flat, shutting the door, her rage grew in tune with her sense of injustice. It was as though they had been talking about a different marriage and two different people! She ground her teeth furiously. She had left him because she had found him in bed with another woman! End of story. What was all this rubbish about time and being her own person? And he had had her followed! She paced the small flat angrily. He had actually had the audacity to have her followed!

She made herself a cup of instant coffee in order to give her shaking hands something to do, wandering out on to the small balcony as she sipped the hot liquid and looking out over the rooftops into the clear blue sky.

If he contacted her again, when he contacted her again, she was going to insist on that divorce. She closed her eyes tightly. She had to sever all links, all ties; she should have done it years ago. Why hadn’t she? She opened her eyes to gaze unseeing into the warm summer air. Because she had been hanging on to a dream against all reason. She had pushed the divorce out of her mind, not because she didn’t want to think of Raoul but because she dared not!

She brushed back the heavy fall of hair from her face and took a big gulp of coffee, letting the burning liquid trace an avenue of fire into her chest. In those heady days of marriage she had dreamt of their life together as being for always, of their babies, their grandchildren. She smiled bitterly to herself. But it had just been part of the impossible dream and she’d had to let go of it before it destroyed her. It hadn’t been real. Their life together hadn’t been real.

She leant against the wrought iron, which was already slightly warm from the heat of the summer’s day, as dark misery gripped her mind. Raoul’s wealth had cocooned them in an endless honeymoon. First a few months at his beautiful house in the Caribbean, eight weeks at his villa in Greece and then a long, slow cruise on his private yacht to the house he called home in the South of France.

It had been miraculous and magical-but it hadn’t been real. Real life was working and caring and loving and taking the rough with the smooth. It had been all smoothness. And it was finished.

As she turned to go back into the room she noticed a tiny tentacled weed in a tub of wallflowers in the corner of the balcony and suddenly its intrusion seemed symbolic of Raoul’s reappearance in her life. As she pulled it, viciously, from the black earth she nodded to herself desperately as the flood of tears she could no longer restrain burnt hot on her face. It was finished. It had to be.

‘MRS DE CHEVNAIR?’ The young lad standing outside her door was almost buried under the huge bouquet of deep red roses he was holding. ‘Mrs Leigh de Chevnair?’

‘Yes?’ Leigh’s voice was grudging. To be woken up on a Monday morning at nine o’clock when she hadn’t slept all night and then asked to acknowledge her married status wasn’t her idea of a good start to the week.

‘I thought I’d got the address right but the card on the door says Leigh Wilson.’ The boy’s forehead was wrinkled. ‘Still, that’s your affair.’

‘Exactly.’ She wasn’t usually this snappy, she thought miserably as she reluctantly took charge of the flowers that could only be from one person as the boy left with a stiff nod. She had to get herself together! There was no card, just the picture of a small brown kitten fixed to the enormous silk bow at the base of the bouquet, its eyes enormous.