An emergency call from one of his clients meant that Jon had to go out immediately after breakfast. His client’s offices were in London and he told Sophy before he left that he might not be back that night. She felt empty and very much alone when he had gone, almost as though a shadow had fallen across her day. If she had doubted that she loved him before, she didn’t do so any longer. It took a considerable effort to rouse herself enough to take the children to school and once she had done she found herself reluctant to go back to the empty house. Instead she drove into Cambridge and spent what was left of the morning glancing through cookery books in the library and trying to plan her dinner party menu.
Something simple, she decided...and something cool. In the end she decided on salmon and cucumber mousse followed by chicken and avocado salad with a cheese board and home-made ice cream to follow. She would have to consult Jon about the wine. Jon...it was ridiculous how even the inward sound of his name had the power to arouse and alarm her. Why should he want her? She had no way of knowing...she could only accept that he did and be thankful for it.
* * *
THE DINING AND DRAWING rooms were not rooms that they normally used as a family, and Sophy grimaced faintly over their unappealing appearance. Jon had given her a completely free hand with the renovation of the house, but the weather had been so hot that she had not been motivated into making any changes. Now, with the dinner party imminent, she wished that she had. There was nothing wrong with the rooms themselves but they were furnished with clumsy, sale-room oddments and badly needed decorating. The only real improvement she could make was to fill them with freshly cut flowers and keep the lighting dim, she decided wryly when she had finished dusting and vacuuming both rooms on Friday morning.
There had been no phone call yet from Jon and while she was missing him dreadfully she was also apprehensive about his return. They needed to talk he had said to her, but what did he intend to say? Now that she had admitted to herself that she loved him, it seemed impossible that she had not known the truth before; that fierce jealousy she had felt when Alex had innocently told her about Louise for instance...she ought to have known then. But she hadn’t wanted to know. She had felt safer simply liking him; safer thinking of him as a non-sexual being. She had never even tried to look beyond the façade he presented to the world, because she had been quite content with that façade.
When he still hadn’t returned by midnight on Friday evening Sophy went to bed. She knew where he was working and had she wanted to do so she could have put a call through to him at any time during the day, but pride had stopped her. In the past it had always been Jon who rang her to tell her when he was due to return, and she was not going to cause either of them embarrassment by being the one to ring him now. She was painfully aware of what both Roy and Andrea had told her; that in the past Jon had been blatantly pursued by her sex and had apparently not liked it. She had enough intelligence to guess that Lorraine’s virulent hatred was more likely to have sprung from Jon’s rejection of her than from the lack of skill in bed which she had accused him of—after all hadn’t she herself had proof positive that the latter simply was not true?
She shivered slightly beneath the duvet, her bed suddenly far too large and empty without Jon in it but she was not going to be like those others. She was not going to pursue and chase him. That was easy enough to say, she thought tiredly as she gave in to the urge to sleep, but it might be far harder than she envisaged to do.
* * *
‘WHEN’S UNCLE JON coming back?’
They were having breakfast in the kitchen—a leisurely, late breakfast as it was Saturday morning, and once it was over Sophy intended to devote the rest of the morning to preparing for the evening’s dinner party.
‘I’m not sure.’ She responded to Alex’s question as calmly as she could. She had been awake since seven o’clock, her ears straining for the sound of the telephone, but so far there had been no call.
Almost as though she had conjured the sound up by wishful thinking, the kitchen phone suddenly shrilled.
‘I’ll get it.’ Alex was out of her chair first, running to pick up the receiver.