Crescendo

He ran a hand over his face as if trying to pull himself together. She saw the long fingers trembling as they moved.

'Don't hate me, darling,' he groaned. 'I know I deserve it, but don't, because I've paid for it all.' His hand came down and he caught at her, pulled her into his arms, kissing her hair, her eyes, her cheeks. 'I realise now how you've suffered and I wish I could have been the only one to go through hell, but I did suffer, Marina. When I saw you lying in that road and I thought you were dead I went out of my mind. And this last year without you has been the worst year of my life.' His lips moved down the curve of her cheek to reach her mouth and she pushed him away violently.

'Don't touch me!'

'Marina,' he muttered hoarsely, trying to take her back into his arms.

'I mean it!' Her white face was acid, 'You don't love me—you never have. You wouldn't know how to love. Frustrated desire was all you ever felt for me, and it's all you feel now.' She looked him up and down, her eyes contemptuous. 'And I don't love you. If anything I despise you. You're a selfish, contemp­tible swine! '

Gideon's face hardened and whitened until the black eyes were a slash of lightless intensity.

Marina turned and walked out of the room. The room was so" still and quiet that she could hear the muted violence of his breathing, the smothered drag of his lungs as they functioned in a painful physical necessity. It had given her a tortured pleasure to say that to him, to be aware that she had finally hurt him as deeply as he had ever hurt her.

She sat in her room and listened to the slow whis­per of the sea. No human being has the right to put his own desires in front of the happiness of anyone else. Gideon's brilliance did not give him that right.

She stared at her own hands, seeing the surface tension of her skin, the outline of the bones beneath that, the shaping supporting flesh which one could not see. One took so much for granted. The daily miracle of life aroused little amazement and wonder in most people until they had to face the threat of losing it. When she walked out of the flat that day she had not even seen that car because the whole of her being was concentrated on the agony of what she had just seen, the realisation that Gideon did not love her, had never lo

ved her, because if he had he would not have been making love to Diana Grenoby.

She had not cared if she lost her life. Perhaps she had even subconsciously but deliberately walked under that car, knowing what she was doing. Acci­dents are not always so very accidental. People take crazy risks because they do not care what happens to them.

Gideon had driven her to the very edge of despair. Now he imagined that by telling her he loved her he was wiping the slate clean. He was wrong. Even if he was telling the truth and had not had a secret affair with Diana during their marriage, his silence on the subject of his feelings indicated all too clearly that Gideon still put his own needs in front of those of anybody else. That wasn't love.

It had not been merely that her own life had al­most been thrown away. She had lost her baby and she knew she carried the scar of guilt for that—guilt and resentment because it had been Gideon's fault that she walked under that car. He had killed the baby and he had killed something vital inside her­self; a trust, a warmth she would never feel again.

Gideon had never been prepared to risk admit­ting his feelings because he had half expected that one day he would stop feeling the way he did. He had admitted it. He had believed that once he had satisfied his desire for her he would lose interest. And maybe he had been right. One day he might well have stopped wanting her, and then she would have found herself being thrust out of his life with­out compunction. Gideon had known that, expected it, and yet he had married her, without stopping to think what damage it would do to her when he grew tired of her.

A deep flush grew on her cheekbones as she re­membered the argument he had had with Diana. She had watched and known that some violent emotion was churning inside the other woman. She had watched as Gideon coldly, angrily, pushed the other woman aside, irritated boredom in his hard face. She had seen all that and had not known that she was seeing just how ruthless Gideon could be in such personal relationships. That had been herself she had been watching without knowing it. He would have walked away from her with just that look of icy indifference and she would have been left like a broken doll with no hope and no comfort.

'Aren't you coming to lunch?' he asked from the door, and she turned her pale head to look at him with undisguised hatred and contempt. Her eyes were alive with the imagined agony of what Gideon could do to her, might have done, had in a sense done.

He saw that look and his whiteness deepened, the lines around eye and mouth bitten into his taut flesh.

'Don't look at me like that,' he cried harshly.

'If you don't like the way I look at you, you have an option. Go and don't come back.'

'I can't,' he groaned, his hands hanging loosely by his side and that pain in his dark eyes. 'I love you.'

He had refused to commit himself to her once and now she read the total capitulation in his face. She had doubted if he loved her once, but she did not doubt it now. Gideon turned the force of his feeling on her and it shrivelled her like fire, the pain and heat of it making her shrink. She turned her head away because now she did not want to know. She was empty. Pain had made her so sensitive that a finger laid on her skin could make her wince. She did not want to face or accept Gideon's love or his pain. He had no right to either.

'I don't care,' Marina said flatly. 'Just go. You're boring me.'

CHAPTER NINE

GIDEON turned and walked away without answering, but she did not need to see his face to know that she had got another dart home. She had heard the bitter intake of his breath, felt the protest he had not spoken but which had hovered on his pale lips.

So short a time ago she had been a trustful, con­fiding child who had felt no fear of the dark stranger crashing into her life. Now she sat on the edge of the bed, listening as Gideon walked heavily down the stairs, and felt a savage pleasure in having hurt him again.

When one is innocent of pain, of the havoc it can wreak, one is. never cruel. Cruelty is born of pain, of a need to hurt in turn. Marina looked at her own reflection in the mirror and did not much like what she saw. She had liked the self she had thought she saw a few days ago. Now she looked at the taut-faced woman staring at her and shivered in rejection.

The lines of maturity she could now see had been etched in her face by experiences she only wanted to forget. She was still young, a girl more than a woman. That was why she had never seen any dis­turbing signs to warn her that she was not the eighteen-year-old she believed herself to be. At just twenty-two there was little difference in her looks. It was the eyes, the expression, which was now changed. With memory pain had come back and with pain had come those carved lines which Gideon had given her.

She went downstairs and Grandie was in the kit­chen alone. He looked round searchingly. 'All right?'

She smiled and touched her forehead to his shoul­der, nodding. He patted her back clumsily.

'Hungry?' he asked.