TENSELY Fern checked her appearance in the bedroom mirror, already anticipating Nick’s criticism. She smoothed the matt black fabric of her evening dress over her hips, anxiously aware of how much weight she had lost since she had last worn it for the round of Christmas parties.
Her mother’s death had been partly responsible for that. It had been a strain taking care of her for those last weeks of her life, especially with Nick being so resentful of her absence.
She had tried to explain to him how she felt: that it was a mixture of love as well as duty and responsibility which made her feel that she had to be the one to nurse her mother; but Nick had demanded to know how he was supposed to manage in her absence. He had a business to run, he reminded her; she was his wife, and since she did not work, did not bring in any money herself, he felt he was not being unreasonable in expecting her to be there at home for him when he needed her.
She had tried to ignore the feelings of panic and misery his attitude caused her, smothering it beneath a thick blanket of anxious self-control, afraid of challenging him because she was afraid of where such a confrontation would lead.
With her mother so close to death, she had not been able to afford to provoke Nick because she had known she simply would not have either the physical or mental energy to cope with his reaction.
Her mother was dying and needed her, she had told Nick quietly.
‘I need you too,’ Nick had retaliated, and in the end she had compromised as best she could, spending the majority of her time with her mother, dashing home when she could, to ensure that Nick had clean shirts, a fridge and freezer full of food, and doing her best to placate him.
In the end her mother’s death had come almost as a relief to her. She still felt guilty about that. About that and about so many other things as well, but most especially about…
She glanced back towards the mirror, grimacing as she studied her reflection. She looked far too tired and drained for a woman of only twenty-seven; the heavy, rippling mass of her hair, tawny brown with rich gold natural highlights in its thick waves, was almost too great a burden for the taut slenderness of her neck. In fact her hair with its rich tumbling mass of curls presented an almost grotesque contrast to her face and body, she acknowledged wearily. She really ought to have it cut short. She was too old now for its careless abundance, a legacy from a childhood governed by the views of much older parents, a mother who believed that all little girls should have long, neatly plaited hair.
She had toyed with the idea of having it cut years ago when she was at university. She remembered mentioning it to Adam.
‘Don’t,’ he had told her in that strong but gently soft voice of his. And as he’d spoken, he had lifted his hand and slowly touched her, brushing the heaviness of her hair back from her face.
Trembling, she looked away from the mirror, her face flushing with guilty heat. What on earth was she doing? She had made a pact with herself years ago that she would never allow herself to give in to that kind of temptation. To do so was surely to break her marriage vows just as much as though she had…
The last thing she felt like doing tonight was going to a dinner party, especially this one.
For a start she barely knew Venice Dunstant. She was one of Nick’s clients, the widow of an extremely wealthy local entrepreneur who had been much older than she was.
There had been a lot of gossip locally about her when she had originally married Bill.
Venice. Was that really her name, or had she simply appropriated it in the same way she had appropriated Bill Dunstant?
They had met on holiday. Bill, a widower of just over sixty, had gone away on his doctor’s advice to recuperate after a heart attack. He had met Venice and married her within weeks of knowing her. They had been married just over two years when he had suffered his second and fatal heart attack, leaving Venice an extremely wealthy widow.
It had only been since his death that Nick had become involved with her. She had consulted him in his capacity as an insurance broker.
Prior to her husband’s death, she had not been seen very much locally, apparently preferring to spend most of her time in London, but she was now becoming much more active in local affairs.
It had been she who had persuaded Nick to join the exclusive and very expensive new leisure complex which had recently opened.
‘You ought to try exercising a bit more yourself,’ he had commented critically to Fern only the other evening, eyeing her too slender body with obvious disapproval. ‘Venice goes to classes almost every day, and she plays tennis as well.’
Fern had refrained from pointing out that, unlike Venice, she was not in a position to afford the kind of fees demanded by the leisure club, and that, even if she had been able to do so, her mother’s illness and Nick’s own insistence that in view of the fact that he supported her financially it was her duty to ensure that she put his wishes first meant that she wasn’t free to enjoy the luxury of so many hours of personal freedom and self-indulgence.
Nick talked a lot about Venice. Too much? She frowned, her stomach muscles tensing. Was she guilty of being overly suspicious… too untrusting, imagining things which didn’t exist… like another woman’s scent on his skin?
Physically Nick was a very attractive man; a man, moreover, who knew how to make himself appealing to women, as she well knew.
The soft thickness of his blond hair, the boyish charm of his smile, the deep blue of his eyes, all added to his air of masculine appeal. Of just slightly above average height rather than tall, his body lean and slim, unlike Adam who was both tall and broad, and who looked what he was—a maturely male man—Nick looked slightly younger than his age. A fact of which he was secretly proud and tended to subtly emphasise.
Her husband could be described as a vain man, Fern acknowledged, who at thirty still cultivated the same aura of boyish appeal he had had when she first met him.
Nick could be very persuasive when he chose, as she well knew.
She had lost count of the number of times she had given way beneath the weight of his coaxing, dreading the sullen accusations which would follow if she did not.
When had she first realised that she didn’t love him any longer; that she had in fact probably never really loved him, but had simply allowed him to persuade her that she did, flattered by his attention, aware of how anxious her parents were to see her happily and safely married, convinced by both Nick and them that marriage to him was the right thing for her?
She had genuinely believed she did love him then, she told herself miserably. Had genuinely believed that he needed and loved her. Why should she not have done? He had told her often enough how much he wanted her in his life…
And if, after their hurried courtship, she had bewilderedly discovered that his interpretation of loving and needing did not match hers, well, she had kept her thoughts to herself, reminding herself of the vows she had made, telling herself that she was expecting too much, hampered by the restrictions imposed on her by her upbringing from confiding in anyone else, much less seeking their help or advice.
The fact that she was not very sexually responsive to Nick she knew must be her fault, and she had struggled guiltily to overcome her lack of enthusiasm, miserably conscious of how much she must be disappointing Nick, of how he, as much as she, must dread the silent sexual intimacy they shared, which invariably resulted in her being left feeling tense and on edge, glad that it was over and yet guiltily unhappy at the same time as she lay there sleepless and dry-eyed, staring at the rejecting silence of Nick’s back.
No wonder he turned away from her the moment it was over, no wonder he complained that she didn’t know how to behave like a real woman. No wonder that eighteen months into their marriage he had had an affair with someone else.
What was a wonder was that she had been so shocked, so disbelieving when