Kenneth stopped the car. ‘Then tell me when I can see you again.’
Sally thought frantically; her brain felt like cotton wool, overloaded with confusion and guilt.
She knew she ought to tell Kenneth that it was impossible for her to see him; that she was married; that she loved Joel; but somehow those words wouldn’t come and instead she heard herself saying breathlessly, ‘I… Sister did say I could work an extra shift on Monday and I haven’t said yet whether or not I will.’
Her mouth had gone dry with the enormity of the deception she was… planning. She had never lied to Joel about anything, nor ever dreamed she would want to, and a part of her was already regretting what she had said, urging her to call back the words, but it was too late—Kenneth was already leaning towards her, touching her face softly.
‘Monday it is, then,’ he whispered to her before he kissed her with gentle tenderness.
Hot tears stung her closed lids. How long was it since Joel had treated her so gently, with such caring restraint?
Shakily she disengaged herself from him. The kiss they had just exchanged made her feel as though she had crossed an invisible boundary, stepped into a frightening no-man’s land.
‘Don’t worry,’ Kenneth told her softly, taking hold of her hand and wrapping it inside his own before carefully opening her palm and depositing a kiss there. ‘Everything’s going to be all right…’
Later, hurrying home on trembling legs, her heart aching with the weight of her guilt, she felt desperately afraid. She knew other women who had affairs, broke their marriage vows, but she had always believed that she could never be one of them, and yet here she was…
She stopped, swallowing hard and blinking back the tears threatening her, fighting to control the conflicting emotions. She was in sight of the house, one half of her wanting to run quickly towards its familiarity and security, to hide herself away inside it, from what had just happened, while the other half…
She closed her eyes, her mouth trembling, appalled by her own awareness of how much the other half of her wanted to turn round and run to Kenneth.
She had never known such confusion, such pain, such a racking mixture of guilt, despair and resentment, all mixed up with a helpless longing for all that Kenneth wanted to give her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PHILIPPA sank back wearily on her heels, pushing her hand into her hair. Her fingers, she noticed, were shaking slightly. Susie had obviously noticed too, because she was watching her with sympathetic compassion.
‘It’s all right,’ she assured her friend huskily. ‘I’m OK… It’s just that… doing this…’ she waved towards the neat piles of men’s clothes stacked on the floor and the empty wardrobes beyond them… ‘seems so final somehow… you forget just how much… Andrew was such a hoarder. There are clothes here which——’ She broke off, biting down hard on her bottom lip.
‘I feel as though I shouldn’t really be doing this,’ she confessed, ‘going through his clothes, emptying his pockets. It makes me feel as-though… as though I’m breaking some kind of taboo. It would be different if we’d been closer. As it is…’ She shook her head and summoned a crooked smile.
‘You do realise, don’t you, that if you hadn’t come round here this morning and insisted on our doing this these things would still probably have been here when the house is sold?’
‘Have you heard yet from the bank?’ Susie asked her quietly.
Philippa shook her head. ‘No, not yet.’ She smoothed her hand down over a jumper she had just picked up. Pale yellow with a motif embroidered on the front, the delicate cashmere felt incredibly soft to her touch. She had bought this for Andrew herself, for his birthday last year, saving the money from her family allowance and the housekeeping. He had worn it once; a token gesture, she suspected, because she had never seen him wear it a second time.
‘What is it?’ Susie asked her softly.
‘I was just thinking how little I actually knew Andrew,’ Philippa told her tiredly.
‘Some men are secretive,’ Susie told her. ‘They think that it’s soft… unmasculine… giving in to a weakness to confide in anyone or betray what they’re feeling.’
‘It’s not just that… I don’t just mean… I didn’t even really know the little things about him, Susie… Like the kind of clothes he preferred… I didn’t try to know him,’ she confided, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I just turned away and let him drift away from me. I never cared enough to make an effort to stop him. He must have known that, mustn’t he? He must…’
‘Stop blaming yourself,’ Susie told her firmly. ‘It takes two to break a relationship as well as make one… If Andrew had wanted to be closer to you and the boys he could have told you… shown you…’
‘Maybe, but even these days isn’t the onus always on the woman to nurture the emotional side of a relationship? I’m sorry,’ she apologised to her friend, shaking her head. ‘I am rather wallowing in self-pity this morning, aren’t I? Come on, let’s get these things packed up and then I can clean out the wardrobes. Are you sure you don’t mind taking them down to the refuge for me?’
‘Of course not, but I still think you could probably have sold some of them.’
Philippa gave an involuntary shudder. ‘No… no, I couldn’t do that.’ Selling her own clothes was one thing; selling Andrew’s was another. ‘Besides,’ she added wryly, ‘I’m not sure if I have any right to sell them; for all I know they probably belong to the bank.’
Susie watched her sympathetically. As she had said to Jim, her own husband, the previous night, she didn’t think she would have the courage or strength to cope with such a situation as well as Philippa was doing.
Now, as she and Philippa packed up the clothes into plastic bags and carried them out to her car, she suggested gently, ‘Look, why don’t you come home with me this afternoon? We could…’
Quickly Philippa shook her head. ‘No… no. It’s kind of you, but I