There had been no anger in him then. And there was none now.
‘Well,’ he said suddenly, ‘that’s it then.’ He turned her face so that he could brush a kiss across her mouth. ‘We’ll have to buy a bigger house now. No bedrooms left in this one!’
With the twins—only they hadn’t known then that she was having twins of course; that little shock had come much later, when she was more than five months pregnant—but with the twins, he had used a similar statement to announce his acceptance of his fate. ‘We’ll just have to get married,’ he had said then. Same difference, Rachel thought with a mental shrug. Daniel had this capacity for accepting the inevitable.
She didn’t go back to her art class. It was a decision reached entirely on her own. Drawing she had come to love again, but common sense told her that she would be doing herself no favours walking back into that class while Zac was still there. And although it was never mentioned by either of them, Daniel began taking her out on a Wednesday night—as if he wanted to compensate for what she had lost. But she did not stop drawing, and her sketch-pads could be found all over the house with their hurriedly drawn comical sketches scrawled in black on white paper.
They went house-hunting. And it took ages to find something which suited everyone. ‘A case of too many cooks spoiling the broth!’ she said drily to Daniel, after a weekend spent trailing around the local countryside viewing properties which did not suit one or the other’s specific requirements.
‘Why do you want something so big?’ she complained once, when they’d arrived back home after viewing a huge mausoleum of a place that was just too grand for comfort. ‘We may need something bigger, but not that big! It isn’t as though we have to have all those extra rooms to entertain your business colleagues, is it?’ He still kept a definite line between his home and his workplace and it still hurt her—hence the comment.
‘We would have a damned hard job trying to entertain anyone here,’ was his deriding reply. ‘And I think, Rachel, that after all the hard work I’ve put in, making it possible for us to have virtually anything we want, you might allow me the pleasure of seeing something special for it!’
Then they found the ideal thing: an old manor-house built in warm red brick with long sash windows which let the natural light flood into the high-ceilinged rooms. It had its own acreage of land hemmed in by a six-foothigh brick wall lined with tall trees to keep the grounds very private. It suited Daniel’s idea of prestige, and Rachel’s idea of a home. The twins liked it because it had its own swimming-pool under glass at the rear, and stables. And, to clinch things, it had a small lodge-house by the electronically controlled gates which was ideal for Daniel’s mother, who fell in love with the tiny cottage the moment she saw it.
It also had a ready-made live-in couple, who had been taking care of the house for over twenty years and were worried sick about what they were going to do once the manor-house was sold. Rachel’s soft heart took them in and Daniel was happy to keep them because it meant fulfilling a couple more of his own requirements. They were getting a housekeeper to take some of the load off Rachel, and a gardener who was to double up as chauffeur and ferry the children to school and back every day instead of him and Rachel and the local taxi service doing it between them.
Rachel threw herself into the delights of completely redecorating and refurbishing their new home, and found to her surprise that she possessed quite a flair for it. She was carrying this new baby better than she had Michael, and, as winter fell away to spring, the new house began to take shape enough for them to consider moving in.
Daniel was up to his neck in yet another take-over— a small Manchester-based engineering company he had once worked for himself but which was now in deep financial difficulties—so he was spending more time up north than he was at home, while Rachel busied herself trying to complete the house-move before her pregnancy became too advanced for her to do it comfortably.
Lydia had faded into the background over the past months. She no longer haunted their lovemaking, though Rachel still needed the darkness to hide in if she was to respond to Daniel at all. But at least she seemed to be coming to terms with a betrayal that had almost wrecked their marriage.
Daniel’s seven-year itch, she cynically referred to it in the privacy of her own mind. If the same thing did not occur for another seven years, then maybe she could cope with that. For she knew for certain that she could never leave him now. Her life was too much bound to him by their mutual love of their children and this latest addition soon to come. But love for herself? She dismissed that ideal as a dream which belonged to Rachel the romantic child and not this older, far more awakened Rachel, who had learned to temper her emotions to suit their new relationship.
She was in their bedroom one afternoon when Daniel arrived home unexpectedly early from one of his quick trips to Manchester. He found her sitting on the floor surrounded by heaps of old clothes she was sorting out for jumble.
He looked tired out, and the way he glanced irritably at the mess told her that the never-ending sorting and packing was beginning to get him down. ‘Why can’t you employ someone to do all this for you?’ he snapped out impatiently, shrugging out of his jacket and tie as he stepped carefully over the mess on his way to the bathroom.
‘I’m not having strangers going through our personal belongings!’ she protested. ‘And how would they know what to throw out and what to keep?’ she added sensibly. ‘I have to do it myself!’
He didn’t bother to reply, but the bathroom door shut with an expressive slam. A moment later and she was on her feet and rummaging for her sketch-pad. By the time Daniel returned to the bedroom, freshly showered and with just a towel slung around his hips, Rachel was sprawled across the bed with her pencil, busily drawing.
‘What are you doing?’ He came to lie beside her, receiving a scolding frown when he jolted her pencil.
‘You cheeky witch!’ he exclaimed when he saw what she’d drawn. Laughing, though, despite the fact that he could clearly recognise himself in the naked devil with horns and a forked tail taking a shower. But instead of water washing down over him, flames licked upwards while he stood there, wearing an expression of evil bliss. ‘You cheeky witch,’ he repeated ruefully—and filched the sketch-pad from her.
Rachel made a lurching dive to retrieve it, but he rolled on to his back, hooking his arm around her swollen waist to hold her still while he closed the pad, then began flicking slowly through the busy pages.
Rachel went very still, her heart thumping anxiously in her breast, watching his face intently as he studied each new sketch in turn. He wasn’t laughing, but then he wasn’t meant to. This was not one of Rachel’s cartoon pads. And the only funny drawing in it was the one she had just done of him. No, this was her more serious work, until now kept right away from curious eyes.
The head and shoulders of Sam looked solemnly out on them from beneath faintly frowning brows, his hair ruthlessly flattened to his head as he insisted on its being. His chin was stubborn. He looked like Daniel—so much like Daniel that Rachel’s heart contracted as she stared at him.
Kate looked pleased with herself, her golden hair a shimmering halo around her pretty face. She looked like the cat who had just stolen the cream—which she had, in a way, beca
use that was how she had looked when she had just talked Daniel into letting her have a small pony when they moved into the new house. Kate had a mind of her own—stubborn, extrovert. She looked like Rachel, but she was not Rachel. She was too much her father’s daughter for that.
Michael. There were more of him because he was the one Rachel spent more time with. There was one of him sleeping, with his padded bottom stuck up the air and poor old tattered teddy cushioned by his plump cheek. And one of him laughing, his small teeth standing out in his beaming round face. Then a serious one of him, face dark with concentration as he took that first wobbly step on his own.
‘They’re good,’ Daniel said quietly.
Rachel took in a deep breath, her heart thudding now because she knew what was coming next. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and made a casual grab for the pad before he could turn to the next page. ‘It gave me pleasure to do them.’ She tugged, but Daniel was not letting go. Her nerve-ends began to tingle. He turned the next pagethen went very still.
He had expected to see himself, she realised later. It seemed the logical conclusion to make when the pad was filled with drawings of the family. But it wasn’t him.
It was her own face which gazed back at them. Rachel, with her hair a golden bob of fine-spun silk around a face that showed few lines of living. A young Rachel. A Rachel who had changed little over the years. Her mouth was small and soft, her nose delicately straight. But her eyes—those wide-spaced expressive eyes—looked out on them with a sadness in their gentle depths which tugged at the soul. To her it was like looking at a stranger. She had hated it when she’d finished it, could not see how accurately she had caught the sad, wistful creature everyone else saw when they looked at her these days. And she had shown her distaste of the drawing by scoring a cross through it from corner to corner.
‘Why did you do that?’ Daniel asked sombrely, following one of the negative lines with a gentle finger which paused at the corner of her mouth.