CHAPTER SIXTEEN

AT FIRST when Giles woke up he couldn’t even remember where he was. The angle of the light falling through the thin curtains fell harshly into his eyes, making him wince with pain. His mouth felt dry, sour, and the smell of the half-full tumbler of whisky beside his bed made his stomach churn with nausea.

Where the hell was he?

And then he remembered. He looked at the glass next to the bed and the bottle beside it, a thin film of colour darkening his skin.

What was happening to him? Was he really so weak, so lacking in self-control, so unable to focus himself on a goal and to reach it that he had to turn to drink to escape from his own sense of failure? No wonder Davina had refused to let him stay with her. He had never been a heavy drinker, not even really a social drinker, but just recently …

He remembered his row with Lucy, the things she had said to him. He groaned, leaning forward in bed. He had the most God-awful headache. It was probably just as well Davina had refused to let him stay last night. His mouth twisted bitterly. Even before he had demolished the better part of that bottle of whisky sitting on the bedside table, he had hardly been in a fit state to perform well as a lover.

Lucy had once told him that he was the most perfect lover she had ever had or had ever been able to imagine having. And he had told her truthfully that giving her pleasure, watching her face as he loved her, had been his pleasure. When she had started to turn away from him, to reject him, he had known that he had lost that ability to please her. The damage that knowledge had done to his sexual self-confidence had made him reluctant to touch her, afraid of disappointing, or, even worse, disgusting her.

Lucy … What had happened to the love they had once shared? As he now thirsted for the cool solace of Davina’s calm orderliness, a part of him knew that he would never attain with her the heights he had reached with Lucy. Lucy, turbulent, temperamental, impossible to understand, impossible sometimes even to talk to, generating within him such a complexity of emotions that just thinking about them sometimes exhausted him.

A relationship with Lucy demanded one hundred and fifty per cent of a man and he simply didn’t have that to give, especially not now, with Carey’s and his job both so precarious.

Even before Gregory’s death Lucy had been urging him to leave Carey’s, to find a job that wasn’t so demanding. He had agreed with her then, but after Gregory’s death, when Davina had needed him so much …

Couldn’t she see how selfish she was being? he had asked Lucy angrily one evening when she had barely let him get inside the door before launching an avalanche of bitter invective and complaints against him. He was the one who was being selfish, she had countered. More than selfish. She wasn’t deceived; she knew it was Davina who was keeping him at Carey’s, even if he refused to admit it.

He winced now, the brief denying movement of his body making his stomach heave. He pushed back the bedclothes and stood up slowly. His head swam with pain and nausea.

Half an hour later, showered and dressed, he studied his reflection in the mirror with grim distaste.

‘Go to Davina and don’t come back,’ Lucy had told him, and in the heat of the moment he had done exactly what she had said. But of course he had to go back. He was an adult, not a child to run from his responsibilities.

If he and Lucy were to separate … divorce … there were arrangements that would have to be made. He winced again. Divorce. The word tasted bitter, its consonants harsh and jagged like the emotions it aroused within him.

Divorce. He hated everything that the word implied, but what alternative did he have?

An hour later Giles let himself into the house and stood for a moment in the hall. Empty silence greeted him and his heart started to race in panic and fear. The house was empty … Lucy had left. Gone. Why should that thought fill him with such despair?

He walked into the kitchen, unfamiliarly tidy, its surfaces and floor gleaming.

Lucy was the kind of woman who liked clutter, things around her; every room always seemed to have a jug of flowers somewhere in it, a collection of photographs; a display of china Lucy had collected from rummaging among the stalls of street markets and antique fairs.

In the kitchen, the billboard was normally covered in brightly penned notes, postcards, invitations, messages Lucy had written to herself. Once, a long, long time ago, or so it seemed now, she had written messages on it for him, sometimes huge scrawly ones, sometimes tiny hidden ones in the shape of a cut-out heart, sometimes more sexually explicit ones that employed a secret language of their own.

Today the billboard was empty.

Like the house. Like their lives together.

He went upstairs slowly and mechanically. He needed a change of clothes and another shower—the smell of the whisky was still on his skin, in his mouth, and he wanted to purge himself of it. As a divorce would purge him of the pain of their marriage?

The bedroom, like the kitchen, was immaculate and empty. In their adjoining bathroom the air carried a faint trace of Lucy’s perfume. Giles closed his eyes in denial of a sudden image of Lucy’s body, of the scent and feel of it, its warmth and femininity; of the way she moved when she was aroused; the way she touched and held him; the sharp staccato cries she made as she approached her climax.

He had started to shake, his body cold with sweat, beads of it formed on his skin as the desire to be violently sick overwhelmed him.

Fifteen minutes later, showered and dressed in clean clothes, he closed the bedroom door behind him.

Wherever Lucy was, she hadn’t left permanently. Her clothes were still in their bedroom.

Perhaps she had gone to a friend.

He frowned, one foot on the top stair as he realised that the door to the room that had once been her child’s nursery was half open. He went back and stood outside it. He had come back from the hospital after Nicholas’s death and had systematically stripped the room of everything, everything … even down to the wallpaper, releasing the violence of his grief and pain in the destruction of the room’s pretty aqua and cream colour scheme, in removing that border with its gambolling animals, its message that a child’s world was a secure, happy one without clouds or pain.

His child’s world had not been like that. His child’s world had been filled with pain and death.

He pushed the door open and went inside, and then stopped abruptly. Lucy was curled up asleep in the rocking-chair he had bought for the nursery and which had escaped his destruction as it was away being restored and cleaned.

Her face free of make-up, her curls tangled, she looked more like a teenager than a woman, and he had to resist the urge to push the heavy weight of her curls out of her eyes; to straighten the arms and legs she had curled around herself as she huddled asleep in a small cramped ball. Her face was pale, the skin milk-white without its normal covering of make-up, her lashes thick and dark, matted together slightly, her mouth red and full.

In her hand she was clutching a piece of paper, and other pieces of paper littered the floor at her feet. Frowning, he bent down to pick one of them up. His heart raced as he realised that it was a piece of their marriage certificate.

Slowly he picked up every piece, carefully rearranging them on the chest below the window, carefully smoothing out the ones she had screwed up until, like doing a jigsaw, he had remade the whole.

He looked at her hand and gently removed the paper she was holding. It was their baby’s death certificate.

He could feel the tears burning his own eyes. He ached to reach out to her, to hold her; to confess to her the burden of his own guilt and pain.

Why had they never talked about losing their son? He hadn’t done so because he had been afraid of distressing her; because he had simply not known how to do so.

And she had behaved as though nothing had happened; as though there had never been a child … a life … a death.

Yesterday had been the anniversary of the day he died. An anniversary he and Lucy should have marked together. Instead they had both ignored it. And now it was too late. Or was it?

Quietly he walked out of the room and went downstairs, letting himself out of the house and getting into his car.

The garden centre was busy and it took him a long time to find a parking spot.

Of the two of them, Lucy was the gardener, but he knew exactly what he wanted.

Did he know exactly how large it would grow? the assistant asked him doubtfully. Giles felt the anger and grief welling up inside him.

‘It’s a large strong tree,’ the youth persisted. ‘A proper tree, not a pretty ornament for a suburban garden.’

‘It’s exactly what I want,’ Giles informed him tersely. The tree would put down roots, it would grow and mature. It would live throughout his lifetime and well beyond it. It would thrive as their child had not been able to do. It would be steadfast and enduring … as he had failed to be for Lucy.

He couldn’t get it in the car, of course. It would have to be delivered and planted. He paid for it, having given them their delivery instructions. And then he went back to the main part of the garden centre.

The girl inside the flower shop blinked a little as he gave his order. She had to help him carry the flowers out to his car.

‘What do you suppose he means to do with them?’ she asked her colleague. ‘I mean, he bought enough to cover a whole room with them.’

‘Or a whole body,’ the other girl pointed out with a sigh. ‘I have a fantasy about that, you know. Imagine making love on a bed covered in flowers, the scent of them on your skin as you crush them.’

‘Some of them can leave awful stains on things,’ her companion pointed out dubiously. ‘I mean, those lily things. I ruined my black T-shirt with the pollen off them, and what if some of them were roses? Some of those thorns …’

Her companion sighed a little impatiently, only half listening as the other continued, ‘Do you suppose that’s why he bought them? He did have a bit of a wild look about him, didn’t he?’

Giles had to hunt through several cupboards before he found enough jugs. An urgency, an anger, an emotion so powerful that it controlled him, rather than the other way around, directed him.

Quickly, roughly almost, he thrust handfuls of flowers into the jugs, oblivious to any discordance of colour or shape, a need driving him, obliterating everything else. Soon every downstairs room had its quota of jugs, deposited haphazardly on every conceivable surface.

As he worked there was only one image in his mind. That of his infant son. ‘These are for you, Nicholas,’ he whispered fiercely beneath his breath. ‘For you; because you did exist … you did live … you were here, a part of us, and you always will be.’ And, running through his heart in a silent refrain, were the words, Forgive me … forgive me.

He had tried to deny his son’s existence, to deny him his right to remain a part of his life, but not any more.

‘Giles … what are you doing?’

He turned round. Lucy was standing just inside the door. She had obviously heard him moving about and come down to see what was going on. She had evidently showered and dressed and there was no sign now of the vulnerability of the woman he had seen curled up asleep in the chair.

‘These flowers …’

Was she remembering that once he had bought flowers for her … roses … a symbol of his love and joy? His heart ached with the weight of the burden of his thoughts.

‘They’re for Nicholas,’ he told her quietly.

Lucy stared at him. ‘It was yesterday,’ she told him mechanically. All the colour had left her face. She seemed to be looking at them rather than him.

‘Yes, I know,’ he told her, but she scarcely seemed to have heard him.

‘I knew. I knew he had gone,’ she went on. She was speaking slowly, more to herself than to him, Giles recognised as he watched the emotions pass painfully across her face. ‘I wanted to be with him, but they wouldn’t let me. I wanted him to know I loved him … I wanted to hold him … I wanted him to have love. He shouldn’t have died like that, alone …’ Tears had filled her eyes and Giles felt the pain wrench at his guts as he listened to her. ‘It was my fault, all of it. I said I didn’t want him, but I did, and I let him die alone when he should have been in my arms. When he should have been with me. He should have had someone …’

‘He did,’ Giles told her thickly. ‘He had me. I was with him.’

Now for the first time, she focused on him.

‘No!’ she told him fiercely. ‘Don’t lie to me, Giles. You left—’

‘I went back,’ he told her. ‘I couldn’t sleep … couldn’t get what you’d said out of my mind, so I went back. He was looking at me when it happened. I think … I think somehow he knew. All the knowledge of the world seemed to be in his eyes as he looked at me. I felt so helpless, so angry. He was my child and yet I couldn’t help him. I’d let him down and I’d let you down. If I’d let you stay with him as you wanted …’

‘No,’ Lucy told him. ‘We couldn’t have kept him alive, no one could.’ She touched the petals of one of the flowers. Her hand trembled violently. ‘I thought you’d forgotten,’ she told him huskily. ‘That you wanted to forget him; to pretend he’d never been born. I thought you wanted to push him out of your life, the way you do me.’

‘Lucy …’

She trembled violently as he took her in his arms; an instinctive reaction to her pain, a physical denial of what she had said, and once she was there he marvelled that he could ever have forgotten just how it felt to hold her like this.

‘Why haven’t we talked like this before?’ he demanded helplessly.

‘I thought you didn’t want to … that you were angry with me … that you blamed me for …’

‘Blamed you? No! How could you ever think that?’

‘I know I said I didn’t want him. But I did love him, Giles … I didn’t want him to die. I never wanted that.’

‘No … no, of course you didn’t.’ He was holding her, rocking her, aching with grief and pain as he listened to the words pouring from her.

Quite when grief and compassion turned to desire he never really knew; one moment he was holding her, stroking her, sharing with her the aching loss they were acknowledging together for the first time, the next, or so it seemed, her mouth was trembling beneath his in much the same way as her body had trembled in his arms.

The feel of her, the warmth of her body in his arms, the scent of her and his senses’ familiarity with their sensuality hit him like a flash flood, one moment nothing, the next a sudden seizure of desire so acute, so powerful that it totally swamped everything else.

Somehow he must have undressed her, undressed them both, but he had no knowledge of having done so, only of the soft flesh of her breasts beneath his hands, the dark allure of her nipples, the sharp high sounds of pleasure she made as he suckled on them, using his tongue and then his teeth as he responded to the demand of the nails digging into his flesh and the movement of her body against him.

It was a fierce, frantic coming together, full of sharp sounds and almost violent movements, a physical expression of anger and pain, their bodies straining together.

It could have been a soulless physical exchange of greed, but oddly it was not. It was as though some tiny part of each of them managed to remain so deeply aware of the other that beneath the anger, the despair, the unleavened physical ache there remained a recognition of each other’s needs and pleasures, a faint echo of the loving harmony they had once shared.

As Lucy’s orgasm jerked her body in fierce spasms against his own it brought his own release. Her body had never felt hotter, tighter, quicker, and he knew as his erection subsided that physically he still wanted her, his desire an itch still needing to be scratched.

He had never felt like that before; never known that raw ache of lust and need, and both it and the fierce surge of unfamiliar male triumph and power it had brought him left him feeling shaken and disturbed by this new vision of himself.

He looked down at Lucy. Her eyes were closed, her face wet with tears, her breathing shallow and erratic. Her skin had always marked easily and now he could see the faint beginnings of the bruises he had made in the heat of his need. The sight of her body naked, vulnerable, still caught in the after-shock of orgasm, touched a nerve within him.

‘Lucy …’

Her eyes opened as he groaned her name and lowered his head to pillow it against her breasts, his arms holding her.

She hadn’t meant anything like that to happen; it had been like a summer storm, all thunder and lightning, all quick, raw heat and atavistic passion. Now her body ached, inside and out; that unmistakable ache produced only by intense sex. She could smell the scent of the flowers Giles had bought. They made her head swim slightly, or was that because she had not had anything to eat? Not since yesterday morning … not since …

She felt Giles turn his head and start to nuzzle her breast. He had always been a considerate lover, a loving lover, never greedy and demanding. His mouth opened over her nipple, still tender and swollen so that his eager, fierce suckling caused her to cry out and protest.

‘Not that … what, then?’ he muttered thickly as he released her. ‘What is it you want, then, Lucy? Is it this?’

As his hand moved between her legs she saw that he was erect again, wanting her as he hadn’t wanted her in months, but his desire did nothing to melt the core of misery deep inside her; his physical intimacy could not breach the moat of loneliness that surrounded her.

This wasn’t the Giles she knew, her lover … her husband … this was a different Giles, a Giles who might be able to make her body ache with shocked arousal with the skilled touch of fingers that rubbed so persuasively, so determinedly against her.

She tried to hold on to that thought, to remind herself that they were two people whose marriage was virtually over, but her love-starved body refused to listen.

This wasn’t love. It was just sex, but her body refused to acknowledge the difference.

He was holding her now, stroking her, his tongue quickly parting the heavily swollen lips that protected her sex. She shuddered as she felt his mouth move on her, his tongue rubbing fiercely against her clitoris.

She cried out to him to stop and at the same time reached down to twist her fingers into his hair and hold him against her body, her breath panting from her lungs as her acutely sensitive flesh responded to the rhythmic roughness of his tongue. It was a caress, an intimacy to which she had always been vulnerably responsive, but never more so than now, her cries of denial harsh, guttural almost as his mouth opened on her, drawing her down into the inescapable darkness of her own pleasure.

Later, when it was over and he had exhausted both himself and her, he looked into her white, set face and asked hoarsely, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

‘You used me,’ she told him tautly. ‘You used me as a substitute for Davina.’

Davina. He had completely forgotten about her, Giles realised guiltily. He had thought Lucy was going to accuse him of a lack of tenderness, a lack of consideration for her, and now his face flushed as he recognised exactly what he had done.

‘No, Lucy, that isn’t true,’ he protested.

‘You mean, now that you’ve had us both, you prefer me?’ she demanded acidly. The Lucy who had cried in his arms for the loss of their son was gone, he recognised grimly.

‘I haven’t slept with Davina,’ he told her angrily.

‘So you were using me as a substitute.’ She said it slowly, almost as though she was in pain, but as he reached out to touch her, to try to tell her that he had never even given Davina a thought, that his need, his desire, his urgency had been hers and hers alone, she pushed him off, temper burning bright patches of colour on her pale face as she reached for her clothes, holding them protectively against her.

‘Well, now that you’ve had what you wanted, you’d better go, hadn’t you?’

‘Lucy …’ He cursed as he stood up and tried to pull on his clothes. No man could reason effectively with a woman while he was stark naked and at the wrong side of a physically exhausting sexual encounter, he decided irritably. ‘Lucy … listen … it wasn’t—’

‘What? Important?’ She gave him a thin, curling non-smile. ‘I wonder if Davina will share that opinion. Or aren’t you going to bother telling her?’

Helpless and angry and all too well aware that his behaviour had been less than justifiable, and still shaken by his awareness of how quickly, how easily the woman he believed he loved had been forgotten, he felt powerless to make Lucy listen to any kind of reason and judged it wiser and safer simply to leave. Besides, he needed time to think. Time to understand himself what had happened and why.

As he pulled on his clothes he made one final stand. ‘This is still my home, Lucy, and I intend to go on living here.’

‘Refusing to let you share her house as well as her bed, is she?’ Lucy glared at him.

He heard her slamming the bedroom door and stared round the room tiredly. He had never known she had felt such grief, such pain, such guilt at Nicholas’s death. He had not known either that it would mean so much to her that he had been with him … The doctors had advised him not to raise the subject unless she did so first and yet, crying in his arms, she had told him how much she had wanted him to speak of their baby, how much she had wanted to talk about him and keep his memory alive.

It hurt him that he had never known any of these things. It hurt him and it made him feel guilty, just as remembering the way he had possessed her, needed her made him feel guilty as well.

Davina. He could never imagine her in that kind of sexual context. With Davina sex would be calm, restrained, conducted in the bedroom at night, discreetly, with control and tenderness. It would not invoke in him that hot, unbridled intensity he had experienced here with Lucy; it would not make him question himself or doubt his motives, his civilisation, his ability to be wholly in control of his sexuality.

Tiredly he shrugged on his jacket. How was he going to be able to face Davina after what he had done? How could he even face himself?

He walked into the hall and stood for a moment looking towards the stairs, unable to stop himself visualising Lucy as he had found her when he first walked in, curled up in that small foetal ball in the room that should have been their son’s.

His thoughts, his emotions, his needs confused and bewildered him. Less than twenty-four hours ago he had told Davina that his marriage was over; that it could not be saved or resurrected. And yet he had still had sex with Lucy, had still desired her … wanted her, and had still felt joined to her as they shared their grief over their son.

Emotions caused by the final dying convulsions of his love, or … Or what? Was he going insane, turning into two different, separate men who loved two completely different and separate women?

His brain ached with the exhaustion of trying to think clearly. Last night he had gone to the motel knowing that he loved and wanted Davina.

Now …

Why hadn’t he realised how Lucy felt about Nicholas’s death? Why hadn’t he seen … guessed? Why hadn’t she felt able to tell him, to turn to him?

Had he really failed so badly, and, if he had, had he any right to ask another woman to risk that kind of failure?

He needed time, he decided tiredly. Time to get his thoughts, his emotions in order—but how could he have any time for himself with the full weight of the company’s problems pressing down on him?