Callum. Sally Wentworth
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fall for his charm and good looks? Which they probably did, she thought cynically. Well, that made him a male chauvinist of the first order, as far as Elaine was concerned. She had seen too much of that type, lived with one for too long, and now had no time for it. In her case, it was once bitten forever shy.
Inevitably, her thoughts drifted back to the time when she had met Neil, nearly ten years ago. She had been so young then, only eighteen, innocent, impressionable. But Neil had been over thirty, a success in his chosen career, fully adult in every sense of the word. He had literally swept her off her feet, knocking into her one day at the tennis club, when he had run from his court into the next to hit a lob, and cannoned into her. She had fallen, and Neil, she remembered, had hit the lob back and scored the point before he’d turned to help her up. An action that was typical of him, although she hadn’t realised it for quite some time.
He had been staying with friends while on leave, but spent the rest of the time pursuing her—there was no other word for it—determined to capture Elaine’s heart as quickly as possible. He had done so quite easily; she had been overwhelmed by him, had never before met anyone with his masterful assertiveness, his clean-cut good looks, his easy charm. They had been married only a few months after they met, and it had been quite a lot later before she’d found out that his masterfulness hid an iron determination always to have his own way. His good looks attracted other women of whom he took full advantage, and his charm was used to make the lies he told acceptable, even believable.
Since then she had become extremely wary of any man who had any one of those qualities—and Calum Brodey had all three, in abundance. Which gave her every reason to steer well clear of him, even if all he felt towards her was a sort of conscience-pricked pity.
Elaine turned restlessly on her pillow, cross with herself for having even thought of Calum. It was, she realised, going to be one of those nights. Switching on the bedside lamp, she sat up and leaned against a pillow, picked up a novel which she kept for nights like these. But tonight reading didn’t work, didn’t leave her with buzzing eyes and a mind so tired that nothing would keep her awake. Her mind drifted from the book to that almost peremptory invitation from her mother-in-law. Again resentment filled her. Neil’s mother had always known he was a womaniser. She might have expected, if not hoped, that marriage to an innocent teenager would change him, but hadn’t cared in the least when it hadn’t. Neil might have been faithful for a year or so, but Elaine strongly doubted if it had been more than that.
She hadn’t known at the time, of course; Neil had been away a lot, taking courses and things, and he had been so ardent when he came home that she had been completely fooled. It had only been towards the end, when he’d had a post near home but was forever making excuses to be away, that she had begun to suspect. She had been pregnant at the time.
Lonely one weekend, because Neil was away—at a conference, he’d said—she’d thought she would please him by taking a couple of his suits to the cleaners. Going through his pockets, she’d found a hotel bill made out to Mr and Mrs Beresford. A hotel in a well-known chain, situated in a suburban town not too far away; a hotel at which she had never stayed, the bill dated at a time when Neil was supposed to have been on a course nowhere near that town. The kind of outdoor training course for new recruits where he was never near a phone, definitely not available, so she had never tried to contact him.
Trying to convince herself that she was wrong, Elaine rang the hotel and asked if Mr and Mrs Beresford were staying there again. She was told they were. For hours she walked round the house, wondering, trying to convince herself that there was some mistake; it wasn’t true. In the end she got in the car and drove over to the hotel, knowing that she had to see for herself. Only when she reached it did it occur to Elaine that finding out might not be so easy. The receptionist might not give her Neil’s room number; he might have gone out. Even with this terrible suspicion in her mind, she couldn’t bring herself to think of their room, that they might have gone out.
In the end it was terribly easy. It was late evening and the hotel entrance was deserted, the guests either out or eating in the restaurant. Looking through the glass doors of the latter, Elaine saw Neil sitting with a blonde girl. Even as she watched they rose to leave. Quickly, her mind panicking, Elaine hid in a darkened telephone booth. They passed quite close to her as they came out into the lobby and she saw that the blonde was very curvacious, her breasts almost falling out of her tight red dress. Neil had his arm round her and kissed her neck lasciviously as they waited for a lift. The girl giggled—and reached out to stroke him! Neil’s head came up and he looked round, making Elaine shrink back in her hiding place. Seeing no one, he put his hand over the girl’s and pressed it against himself.
The lift came and they got into it, Neil pulling the girl close, his hands low on her hips, even before the doors had closed.
For several minutes Elaine couldn’t move, then she rushed into the ladies’ room and was horribly ill. Immediately afterwards she ran blindly back to the car and drove away as fast as she could, tears streaming down her face. So much for her perfect marriage; so much for trust and love; so much for the father of this child she was carrying, the baby she had longed for for so longyears. Sobbing wildly, wiping the tears from her eyes so that she could see, Elaine just kept going, not caring where she was heading, only knowing that she couldn’t go home, that it wasn’t her home any more, the place on which she had lavished such loving care. All for Neil! All for Neil! Now it was just the place he came back to when he wasn’t with that girl!
She didn’t feel anger, not then; she felt only shame and a terrible certainty that it must be her fault, that he would never have gone to bed with someone else unless she had failed him sexually. That side of their marriage had not been a success right from the start. Neil had been a selfish lover, always taking his own pleasure, any excitement she might feel being incidental. He had wanted her to do things that she found unnatural and which she’d resisted, but instead of persuading her Neil had forced her to do them. She’d become afraid of sex, unable to relax, and Neil had got angry and hurt her, accused her of being frigid. During the first few years of their marriage she had blamed herself entirely; she hadn’t known that not every man treated sex almost as an assault course and left their wives bruised and frustrated. But she still loved him because she thought that she had made him behave like it.
That terrible night, Elaine found herself driving down an unlit country road. A car rounded a bend towards her, going fast, its headlights dazzling her. It hooted at her angrily. Her eyes blurred by tears, she swerved to avoid it, and ended up in a ditch. The other driver didn’t stop. She wasn’t hurt but it took an effort to climb out of the car and back on to the road. She waited for some time, expecting another car to come by, but the road stayed dark, deserted. Soon it began to rain. She began to get cold and had to climb into the car again and get her jacket and handbag. Reaching to where it had fallen, she felt a pain in her stomach.
Having no idea where she was, Elaine grimly began to walk to the nearest house so that she could phone a garage. But there was no house for miles and she ended up in a phone box, dialling for an ambulance, curled up in pain and knowing that she was losing her baby.
She didn’t tell Neil the truth about what had happened; never told him. And he never found out. By the time he had been ‘traced’ at his so-called conference, she was in hospital, the car retrieved by the AA and brought home with only a dented wing to show for what had happened. She told him she’d skidded off the road to avoid a cat when she was going shopping, the morning after she’d seen him with the girl. He didn’t bother to check her story, blamed her for what happened, yelling that she was a bloody rotten driver, that she ought to have had more sense and driven over the cat rather than avoid it. His parents blamed her too, and left her in no doubt of their feelings.
Neil was genuinely upset over the loss of the baby, Elaine was sure of that; he accused her of killing it often enough. Not that he needed to: as it was she felt consumed by guilt. She tried to make it up to him by taking better care of him: his clothes were always beautifully laundered, his meals cooked to perfection, and when he wanted sex she forced herself to be especially warm, especially loving; she even tried to please him by doing some of the things she found so abhorrent. But it seemed that wasn’t what he wanted from her any more. He told her to stop acting