Force of Feeling

And now she had to do them. But her way, and not his—and without a secretary.

All this burning of adrenalin had left her feeling oddly tired. She looked at her watch. An hour’s sleep before she left would do her good. Sleep was something that often evaded her during the night, and she had to take brief catnaps during the day whenever she could.

She went into her bedroom and closed the curtains.

Her flat was as drab as her clothes, furnished mainly in beiges and browns, colours bordering on nothingness.

She undressed, wrapped herself in a towelling robe and lay on her bed but, irritatingly, exhausted though she was, sleep would not come. Instead a multitude of jumbled images flashed repeatedly across her brain.

Guy French, tall, and dark-haired; a man she had heard other women describe admiringly as sexually devastating. Perhaps, but not to her, never to her…

Her mind switched to Lucy. How long had they known one another? They had started at boarding-school together, two small, pigtailed girls in brand new uniforms, both wanting desperately to cry and neither feeling they should.

They had been friends a long time. Lucy’s new circle of friends, those she had made through Howard, looked askance at Campion, probably wondering what she and pretty, glamorous Lucy had in common.

She wondered if Lucy had told Howard about her. Probably, they had that sort of relationship, and Howard was the kind of man who invited one’s trust. How lucky Lucy had been in her marriage! How wise to wait a little while and not to allow herself to be swept off her feet in the first rapture of physical desire, as she had been…

As she had been… How impossible that seemed now! Now, she could no more imagine the deep frozen heart of hers being melted than she could imagine flying to the moon. Both were impossible.

Once, a long time ago, things had been different, she had been different.

Once, she had known what it felt like to have her whole body surge with joy at a man’s touch, almost at the sound of his voice, but that had been before…

She gave a deep sigh and opened her eyes, but it was no use, for some reason, the past was crowding in on her today.

For some reason? She knew the reason well enough: it had been the look in Guy’s eyes when he had asked her in that even, calm voice of his if she actually knew what it was like to feel emotion. She had felt as though her very soul had been raked with red-hot irons, but she had kept her expression cool and unrevealing. Let him think what he liked, just as long as he never guessed the truth.

The truth. Her mouth twisted bitterly. How melodramatic that sounded now! And what was it, really?

She closed her eyes again and tried to focus her concentration on her book, on Lynsey, but it was virtually impossible. Guy’s dark face surfaced through the barriers of her will, and then another male face, equally dark-haired, equally good-looking, but younger, shallower…weaker, she recognised.

She had been nineteen when she’d met Craig, and a rather naïve nineteen at that. Her girls’ school had been sheltered; she was an only child, with wealthy parents who spent a good deal of their time out of the country, and consequently she had spent very little time with them until she left school. And in that long, hot summer before she started at Oxford she had felt uncomfortable with them, alien and alone, and had wished that she had given in to Lucy’s plea to accept an invitation from her parents to spend the summer with them in the South of France.

Instead she had mooned about at home, sensing her parents’ inability to understand her, feeling unacceptable to her local peers, with whom she seemed to have little in common. And then she had met Craig.

He had come to the house to see her father about something, she couldn’t remember what. Her parents had been out and she had been sunbathing in the garden. She had been flattered by the admiring way he had looked at her bikini-clad body. He had remarked on that and she had offered him a drink.

One drink had turned into two, and in the end he had spent most of the afternoon in the garden with her.

Even then she had sensed a restlessness about him, a yearning—a desperation almost, but she had put it down to the same malaise she suffered herself, too naïve to recognise then their basic differences.

He had asked her out, to a local tennis-club dance. At first her parents had been pleased that she was making friends, and then her father had cautioned her against getting too involved.

She had known by then about Craig’s background: about the father who drank and the mother who struggled to bring up her five children. She had also learned about Craig’s bitterness at not being able to take up the free scholarship he had won, because of lack of money. Her father had told her bluntly that Craig had a chip on his shoulder, but she had refused to listen to him. By this time, she was in love.

Or so she thought.

Her mouth twisted bitterly. She ought to have listened to her father, but she had thought she knew better. She had thought that Craig loved her, when in reality what he had loved was her parents’ wealth and social standing.

As the summer had deepened, so had her feelings. He had known exactly how to arouse her, how to make her ache and yearn for the final act of possession. Even now, remembering, her flesh remained cold and unmoving, her mind unable to really comprehend how she could have felt that way; but she had.

They had made love for the first time in an idyllic setting: a small, enclosed glade in a local wood, a privately owned lane, in actual fact, but with an absentee landlord. Ostensibly, they had gone on a picnic. Craig had brought a blanket, plaid and soft, and very new. Where had he got the money from to buy it? she wondered now. Certainly not from the job he had told her he had, working for a local accountant as a trainee.

He had made love to her with need and passion, or so she had thought, but there had been none of the rapture she had imagined in the ultimate act of possession, and she had rather disliked the heavy sensation of him lying over her afterwards. She had gone home feeling faintly disappointed, until she remembered girls at school saying that the first time was not always very good.

It had been Craig who had first brought up the subject of marriage. What if she were to be pregnant? he had asked her. It could have happened. And because she was genuinely afraid, and because in her innocence she thought that, since they had been lovers, they must love one another, and because she was lonely and desperately in need of someone of her own, she had listened.

No, she had done more than listen. She had married him. Quietly and secretly, one month after he had first made love to her. Her parents were away at the time.