‘Easier on him, easier on his pride… easier on the collective male psyche of his “friends”, but it certainly wasn’t easier on me.
‘I wonder if any man can really understand what a woman goes through when she loses someone to whom she has given her trust, her love… her life? It destroys something inside us that I don’t believe can ever be replaced.’
She pulled a wry face, and Mark saw that there was no trace of any mischief at all in her eyes now, only intense sadness.
‘His affair wasn’t the cause of our break-up, but the culmination of it. At first, in fact, he was proud of me, encouraged me… but then slowly he started distancing himself from me. Initially he blamed me for not having enough time for him, for making him feel that he wasn’t important to me any more… Then he stopped making love to me.’ She gave him a brief look. ‘Have you any idea what it does to a woman when a man, her man rejects her sexually… how demeaning it is to discover what you thought was a temporary incapacity on his part turns out to be a far more serious failure on yours? If a woman tells a man he’s failed to arouse her, he can always save his ego by telling himself that she’s lying. But when a woman fails to arouse a man…’ She shook her head.
‘That’s how it starts; and the way it ends… It wasn’t his sexual infidelity with another woman I couldn’t forgive, but his infidelity towards the bond which I believed existed between us. He was the rock on which I had built my whole life; it was the security of believing I had his love that gave me the self-confidence to become the woman that on my own I had hardly dared believe I could be.
‘He claimed that fulfilment and growth came at his expense, but that was his view of the situation, not mine. And the most ridiculous thing of all about it was that I never particularly wanted to be successful… initially it was just something for me to do while he forged ahead with his career… Just something to bring me in a little bit of pin-money so that he wouldn’t feel I was totally dependent on him.
‘Sometimes on a bad day I wake up in the morning feeling that I know how Midas must have felt… but do you know the worst thing of all?’
Mark shook his head. His muscles were tense, his heart thudding uncomfortably, his mind trying to close itself off from what his emotions were telling him.
‘Success is like a drug—once you’ve tasted it there’s no going back—for anyone. You become addicted to it… dependent on it, and very soon there isn’t room for anything else in your life. All your energy, all of you is given over to feeding its voracious appetite; you daren’t leave it or ignore it because it’s all you’ve got left.
‘Mark…’ she said suddenly. ‘What is it… what’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ he denied. ‘Nothing.’
* * *
‘Of course, it’s no wonder he left her. Everyone knows that the only reason she got that promotion in the first place is because…’
‘Shush…’
Deborah tensed as the two girls chatting by the coffee machine fell silent as she walked past. She pretended that she hadn’t heard them. What else could she do?
She knew, of course, that it had been her they had been gossiping about, putting two and two together and doing a bit of ‘creative accounting’ with it.
‘You look a bit down… Not still missing the boyfriend, I hope. You’re better off without him.’
Deborah froze as she felt Ryan moving close to her. Too close, she decided wearily as she moved back from him.
‘You’re doing a nice job with the Kilcoyne liquidation,’ he told her approvingly. ‘I had the bank on this morning full of praise for the way you’re handling things…’
Deborah said nothing. Three days ago he had been complaining that she wasn’t showing enough aggression towards the company’s debtors, and besides, Ryan never gave a compliment without demanding repayment for it—one way or another.
‘We got a new case in this morning… I’d like you to have a look at it,’ he added.
A new case… Had he forgotten that only last week he’d given her five case-files to work on, all of them involving an enormous amount of careful checking and crosschecking, dull, boring routine work… the kind of work she had thought she had left behind in her first junior job?
‘I’m not sure if I’ve got time,’ she began, but he overruled her, raising his eyebrows and telling her vigorously,
‘Then you must make time… Delegate…’
‘Delegate. To whom?’
When they had initially dis
cussed her promotion, the package he had described had included extra staff to work under her, but so far they had not been forthcoming. She pointed this out to him now, watching as he shrugged and gave her a charming, lazy smile.
‘I know… but there’s nothing I can do, I’m afraid. Not until the partners ratify your promotion officially…’
‘And when will that be?’ Deborah asked him, trying not to sound too anxious. She was tired of the looks and innuendoes she was constantly intercepting, implying that her promotion was still not ‘official’ and that there was therefore something suspect about it.
Ryan shrugged carelessly. ‘Not for a while yet. There isn’t another full partners’ meeting until the end of the month. But don’t worry,’ he told her, smiling at her. ‘There won’t be any problem.’