The Garnett Marriage Pact

She offered him a drink and watched him shake his head, his mouth compressing, his voice harsh as he said, ‘No, thanks.’

He wouldn’t sit down, going instead to stand in front of the window, with his back to her, his hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans. His whole body betrayed his tension, and Jessica could easily imagine how difficult it was for him to see her when he despised her so much.

‘Why have you come to see me, Lyle?’ she asked him unevenly when several seconds had gone by without his saying a word. ‘Is it about the boys? Stuart was dreadfully upset last weekend.’ Her voice expressed her own pain, and he swung round, looking at her with hard eyes, his voice grim, as he said curtly, ‘I’ve decided to send them to boarding-school once the holidays are over. It seems the best solution all round.’ He saw her anguished expression and smiled mirthlessly. ‘You should have thought about that before, Jessica.’

His bitterness stung, making her want to lash out and hurt him as he had hurt her.

‘Just as you should have thought about them instead of giving all your love to Heather,’ she retaliated bitterly.

‘All my love?’ He laughed harshly. ‘My God, where did you get that idea? I stopped loving Heather, if I ever did, when I realised how different she was from my foolish adolescent image of her. And besides, you’re a fine one to talk. What about Chalmers?’

Driven to the point of explosion Jessica told him fiercely, ‘For the last time, David means nothing to me and never has done. I loathe him and always have done. That’s why I told him I was marrying you as an experiment. I wanted to get it through that impenetrable ego of his just how little he meant to me.’

‘Then you didn’t marry me simply to use our relationship as the basis for an experiment?’

‘No, of course not. I am human, you know, Lyle,’ she cried out, painfully tormented by his cross-questioning and not able to see what benefit it could be to either of them now. ‘I married you for the reason I gave you at the time. It did briefly cross my mind that in entering into such a marriage I would be in an ideal position to see how justified I was in claiming that a marriage could be successful and long-standing without being based on romantic love, but that wasn’t the reason I married you.

‘Why have you come to see me?’ she demanded wearily. ‘I really am very tired, and so far you haven’t said anything that you couldn’t have said over the telephone. I do wish, though, that you wouldn’t send the boys to boarding-school.’

‘There’s only one way I can avoid doing that.’

He had his back to her again, but his face was visible to her in profile and she watched in bemused misery as a tiny muscle flickered betrayingly against his jaw.

‘How?’

‘If you agree to come back.’

It was the very last thing she had expected to hear; and she could hardly take in the fact that after the way he had demanded that she leave, Lyle was now asking her to come back.

She had always known that he loved the boys, of course, but she had not realised to what extent, and she felt both pain and compassion for him as she stared at his rigid back.

‘Well, Jessica, what is it to be? Will you come back? If you do I’m prepared to overlook everything that’s happened, the fact that I discovered you in Chalmers’ arms…and you were, despite what you say about your feelings towards him.’

Suddenly something inside her snapped, releasing a flood of bitter emotion.

‘Oh, that’s very generous of you,’ she told him in a strained high voice, ‘but tell me this, Lyle, are you also able to overlook the fact that I’ve fallen in love with you? Because I’m afraid that I have, and if you can’t…’

She turned her back on him, knowing that he must leave now, that he would not want her back, living under the same roof with him now that she had told him the truth.

The shock of having his hands descend on her shoulders and turn her very ungently to face him, gripping her arms tightly as he looked down into her eyes, made the room swing dizzily around her.

Colour burned under his skin, his eyes so dark that they looked more black than blue. He was sweating slightly, his voice a hoarse cry of disbelief as he demanded rawly, ‘What are you saying, Jessica?’

She wasn’t going to back down now. Stubbornly refusing to give in to her own anguish, she said huskily, ‘I’m saying that if I come back to live with you, it must be without any pretence between us, Lyle. I love you. I admit love is an emotion I never expected to feel, hardly believed actually existed between adults. I’d convinced myself during my research and from my own observation of life that what we call love is more often merely physical lust, and as such doesn’t stand up to the test of time, but now I know I was wrong. I’m not asking you to love me in return—I know that’s impossible. But if I come back it must be in the knowledge that you are aware of my feelings. I can’t live a lie any longer.’

‘Neither can I.’ The harshness had gone from his voice, leaving it faintly raw as though he had scraped his throat. ‘I didn’t come here to ask you to come back because of the boys at all,’ he told her huskily. ‘I came because I couldn’t endure another day without you. You’ll never know how bitterly I’ve regretted giving in to my jealousy of Chalmers. I wanted you to deny that he meant anything to you, and I have done ever since that night we first made love. I knew then how important you were to me, but I tried to resist it. I told myself it was him you wanted not me, that you were just using me as a substitute.’

‘I can’t believe this,’ Jessica whispered, staring at him. ‘I can’t believe you love me.’

‘Can’t you?’ He made a thick, impassioned sound of anguish in his throat and then said, ‘Then what the hell am I supposed to call this?’ With such suppressed violence that Jessica actually shivered in response to it, he almost jerked off her feet as he took her in his arms.

She could feel him trembling, feel the emotion building up inside him, as he kissed her with a starving passion.

It could have been seconds or hours before he released her, her body so light and empty that she almost fell.

‘And if you dare to call that lust, or anger, I think I shall probably kill you,’ Lyle told her softly. ‘Jessica, Jessica…’ He took her back in his arms, kissing her eyelids, probing the trembling outline of her mouth with his thumb until she gasped and shivered with desire, turning her face up to his and abandoning herself to the heat of his mouth.

This time he released her slowly, savouring the sweetness of her mouth as he did so.