‘Yes,’ Garth insisted. ‘Look, take it from me—I’m a man, I know, and even now there’s still a tiny, ineradicable, deeply programmed part of us that says, Me man… me hunter… me winner…’
Deborah stared at him and then shook her head.
‘No,’ she insisted. ‘Mark isn’t like that——’
‘Balls,’ Garth interrupted her forcefully. ‘All men are like that. Look, I’m not saying that Mark is deliberately trying to offload his own sense of failure on you, to blame you for it, to punish you for being more successful than he is, but you can be damned sure that somewhere deep inside him, even if he doesn’t consciously recognise it, that’s exactly what’s going on.
‘It’s all down to the loss of face, you see, Dee. Boys… men… are geared, genetically programmed if you like, to view other men as their rivals and to compete with them; there’s nothing a man—any man, every man—fears more than the contempt of his male peers, of being seen to fall below the standard they set themselves. It starts from the moment we’re born and we learn that we can take our mother’s attention away from the other man in her life—our father. It takes a hold of us right there where it really hurts and it keeps the pressure up on us every day of our entire Me.’
‘But that’s ridiculous,’ Deborah protested. ‘Mark has always encouraged me.’
‘He loves you,’ Garth told her. ‘And anyway, knowing you’re ambitious is one thing; having to deal with the results of it is another. You’ve beaten him in his own field, Dee, and what’s more you’ve done it in front of other men… That’s a hard thing for any man to take, even one like Mark——’
‘You mean his own ego is more important to him than I am?’ Deborah asked quietly.
‘He can’t live without it, Dee,’ he told her gently. ‘No man can. All human beings need to have pride in themselves and self-respect, and we men, because we’re that much weaker and more mortal than you women—well, we need that little bit extra help as well.’
He grinned at the look Deborah gave him. ‘OK, well, maybe some of us need it more than others…
‘Mark’s no egotist, Dee,’ he added. ‘If you’d worked in different areas, or even different firms…’
‘Or if I’d played the traditional female role and put his ego before my career?’ Deborah suggested grimly.
Garth caught the note of anger in her voice.
‘It’s not as cut and dried as that, Dee, and you know it. Of course Mark wants you to succeed, of course he’s proud of you, but it’s a tough old world out there and when we’re among our own kind we men are still supposed to show that we’ve got what it takes to come out on top. Don’t give up on Mark, Dee…’
‘What else can I do?’ Deborah asked him, her eyes bright with tears. ‘Give up my job…’ She shook her head. ‘Oh, it might work in the short term, but that’s all.
‘I never thought Mark would do something like this, Garth… Not Mark.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
TIREDLY Sally surveyed her sister’s stripped dining-room walls. Her back ached, not just with the effort of removing the wallpaper, but with the tension of suppressed resentment and anger as well.
Joel should have been the one doing this, as her sister had already self-righteously told her—more than once—and since she did agree with her why was it that she was finding she had to grit her teeth and bite back a wave of irritation against her almost as strong as her anger against Joel?
Half an hour ago her sister had come in to see how she was getting on. She had just returned from the hairdressers, her hair a smooth, shiny, elegant bob, reminding Sally of how much she needed to get her own hair cut, her face, immaculately made-up, grimacing as she carefully avoided the damp shreds of wallpaper matting on the floor at Sally’s feet.
‘Will you be much longer?’ she had asked. ‘Only Clifford has just rung to say that he’s bringing a colleague home for drinks…’
‘No, I’ve almost finished,’ Sally had assured her tiredly, correctly interpreting the message hidden in her sister’s speech.
Daphne obviously didn’t want her around when Clifford and his colleague arrived… Sally knew her sister well enough to know how little she would relish having to introduce her as her sister, but she was still prepared to make use of her to get her dining-room wallpapered cheaply, Sally acknowledged.
Once she and Joel would have laughed together over her sister’s meanness and snobbery. Once nothing would have made her want to trade places with Daphne, to exchange her own world with Joel for Daphne’s far more affluent lifestyle. Once it had never occurred to her to envy Daphne a husband who had a secure, well-paid job.
Fiercely she squeezed back the tears of tiredness and selfpity burning in the back of her eyes.
‘Joel’s doing the best he can, working hard at the leisure centre,’ she had automatically defended her husband when Daphne had raised the subject earlier of Joel’s finding a job. ‘In fact the leisure centre manager has suggested that it might be worthwhile considering making coaching and training a full-time career… retraining to…’
Her sister’s exclamation of contempt had silenced her. ‘Joel, retrain? Oh, come on, Sally—you must know as well as I do that to make any kind of success in that field Joel will need proper academic qualifications. The country’s full of graduates who can’t get jobs, so how on earth someone like Joel, who left school without so much as a single qualification to his name, can even begin to think that he——’
She had broken off, shrugging disdainfully.
‘Of course he always could wind you round his little finger. Mark my words: if you’re not careful, ten years from now he’ll still be telling the same old tale, and you’ll still be working full-time to support him while he enjoys himself playing at earning a living.
‘I hear he’s been giving private coaching lessons to Carol Lucas’s little girl. I’d keep an eye on him if I were you, Sally… I’m not suggesting anything, of course,’ she had added hastily as she’d seen the look Sally was giving her, ‘but one hears such things and after all he has always been a very physical sort of man, hasn’t he…?’