privately thought that these only narrowly masked an inner vulnerability and fragility, a soft femininity which made Margaret despise Ian Saunders even more for his lack of concern and compassion for her friend.
‘Yes, I think you should go home,’ she said firmly now. ‘Even though I know I’m going to miss you desperately, especially when I’m looking for someone to look after those two awful brats of mine.’
Sara laughed shakily. ‘You know you adore them,’ she countered.
‘Mmm…but I try not to let them guess it. It’s hard work at times being the only woman in a household of three males.’ She paused and then said quietly, ‘I know this probably isn’t the time to raise this particular subject, but I’m going to say something to you that I’ve wanted to say for a long time. I’m older than you, Sara, and I’ve seen a lot more of life. I know how you feel about Ian Saunders, or at least how you think you feel, but in all honesty you’ve never allowed yourself to discover whether you could allow yourself to love or care for any other man, have you?’ she asked gently.
‘Allow myself—’ Sara began, but Margaret refused to let her speak.
‘Falling in love is easy, loving someone is a lot harder; and going on loving them, through the nitty-gritty of mundane everyday life, is even harder, and even more worthwhile.
‘I know from the things you’ve told me, from watching you with my own two, that you want children. You know what you should do now, don’t you? You should put Ian Saunders right out of your mind and look round for a nice man to marry and have those children with.’
Sara couldn’t help it. She flushed defensively. ‘I can’t switch off my feelings just like that, marry a man I don’t love, no matter how much I might want a family.’
Of course Margaret was right. Of course she wanted children. Sometimes, in fact, that wanting was so sharp, so acutely painful that it made her ache inside, made her wake up at night…but what Margaret was telling her to do was impossible.
‘I wasn’t in love with Ben when I married him,’ Margaret told her softly, astounding Sara. She had never met anyone apart from her own parents who were as devoted and as obviously content and happy together as their neighbours, and she had always assumed that they had been deeply in love when they married. ‘And, what’s more, he wasn’t in love with me. In fact, we were both on the rebound from other relationships. We’d known each other some time in a casual, friendly sort of way. One evening we got talking…we discovered how many interests we had in common, including a desire to settle down and raise a family, and that those needs had not been shared by our previous partners, the ones with whom we were so much in love. So we talked about it, started going out together, to see if it…if we could work, and then, when we found that we were getting on as well together as we had hoped, we got married. Not because we were in love, but because we both genuinely and honestly thought we could make our relationship work. I’ve never for one minute regretted that decision, and I don’t think Ben has either—and do you know something else?’ She gave Sara a shining, almost defensive smile. ‘I don’t know quite how it has happened, but somehow there’s been a small miracle for both of us, and now we love one another very much indeed.’
‘I envy you, Margaret, but I don’t think…’
‘Listen to me. You and I are very much alike in many ways. Stop wasting your life on a man who you can’t have and who would hurt you badly if you could. Don’t spend the rest of your life weeping tears of regret. Decide what it is you really want. Use this time with your parents at home to think about the things which are really important to you. All right, so you may decide that I’m wrong, that a husband, a home, a family aren’t the things you want enough to put aside your dreams of falling in love, of being in love for. But on the other hand you might find you make some surprising discoveries about yourself and about your true needs.’
As Sara turned off the motorway and took the familiar route homewards, she found herself turning over in her mind what Margaret had said to her. A home…children… Yes, these were things she had always wanted. Despite her decision to move to London, to carve a life for herself as a career woman in the big city, at heart she had remained the small-town girl she had been born. She had enjoyed her years in London, but in her heart of hearts she had never believed they would be anything other than a busy interlude between her childhood and her eventual role as a wife and mother.
Every time she saw her parents, every time she saw her sister, she was reminded of her most basic needs and how her life was stifling them. How it was stifling her. But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to break away from Ian… She had refused to make herself face up to the truth: that there never was going to come a day when he would turn to her, look at her…take her in his arms. She was twenty-nine years old. Not old by any means, but no longer young enough to deceive herself with such silly daydreams. She thought of the men who had asked her out over the years, kind, pleasant men, but just men when compared with Ian, with her love, her adoration…her compulsive worship of him. Men whom she had refused, ignored, forgotten… Men with whom, according to Margaret, she could easily have been happy and fulfilled…men with whom she could have had children. Children who would have given her so much joy—children who would have made her forget Ian? Impossible, surely…or was it simply that she did not want to allow herself to forget him; that she was so conscious of the fact that she had wasted so much of her life, given up so much, to maintain her devotion to him, that her pride, her stubbornness, would not allow her to admit that she had made a mistake, had behaved in a stupid blinkered fashion? But now that she was being forced into separating her life from his…now that she…
She moved restlessly in her seat. Her back was beginning to ache from the long drive. She was glad that it was almost summer and the evenings light enough to allow her to complete her journey before it grew dark.
Her expression softened into one of warm affection as she thought about her parents. Her father was retired now. He and her mother still lived in the house where she and her sister had grown up, though. Two miles outside the village, it stood alone, halfway down a lane which led eventually to the Jacobean manor house whose home farm it had once been.
The manor house had been empty for several years, the old man who had owned it having died and there being no direct heir, nor apparently anyone interested in purchasing such a rambling and derelict property so far off the beaten track. But when she had last been home at Christmas—Ian had booked a skiing holiday in Colorado for Christmas and the New Year, and so there had been nothing to tempt her to stay in London, even if she could have brought herself to disappoint her parents and break with family tradition by doing so—her mother had told her excitedly that the house had at last been sold. The man who had bought it was some sort of tree expert with the Forestry Commission who had now decided to branch out into a business of his own, growing and selling not only rare specimen trees, but also many native broadleaved trees, for which apparently there was a growing market both at home and abroad in these environmentally aware days.
Her parents had only met their new neighbour briefly, but Sara had gained the impression that her mother had rather taken him to her heart.
‘All on his own living in that great draughty place,’ was what she had said at Christmas, adding that she had invited him to join them for Christmas Day, but that he had apparently already made arrangements to spend the holiday with friends in the north-east of the country.
‘He’s not married, and has no family to speak of. Both his parents are dead, and his brother lives in Australia.’
How like her mother to wheedle so much information out of a stranger so very quickly, Sara reflected fondly. Not out of nosiness; her mother wasn’t like that. She was one of those people who was naturally concerned for and caring about her fellow man.
What would she have made of Ian had Sara ever taken him home? It came to her with a small unpleasant jolt of surprise that she knew without even having to consider the matter that her parents would not have taken to Ian; that he in turn would have treated them with that slightly disdainful contempt she had seen him use to such effect with anyone he considered neither important enough nor interesting enough