Force of Feeling

‘Do they? What?’

Now, when it was too late, she wished she hadn’t been so quick to challenge him. Instead of responding, she shrugged her shoulders and turned her attention back to the kettle.

‘If you’re making breakfast, I’ll have bacon, eggs and toast. But first I need a shower. I’ve just been out to check on the generator. If we have another power cut like last night’s we’ll need it.’

So he was staying. The relief that filled her also humiliated her. She had to turn away from him so that he wouldn’t see it in her eyes. She wanted to tell him that he could make his own breakfast but, after all, yesterday he had made hers.

He was a very confusing man, she acknowledged as he went upstairs. Before, if she had given any thought to the matter, she would have considered him to be the type of man who expected the woman in his life to be subservient to him, to put him first in everything and to wait on him hand and foot. And yet, already he had demonstrated to her how wrong those preconceived ideas of hers were. He had tackled the household chores willingly, cheerfully and very ably, more ably than she had herself, she acknowledged fifteen minutes later, as she battled with the Rayburn’s hotplates, so different from her own modern gas cooker.

Guy came down as she was staring miserably at the congealing and hard eggs she had just tried to cook.

She didn’t hear him come in, and the unexpected weight of his hand on her shoulder as he leaned over to look into the pan made her jump. She turned quickly and saw him frown as his fingers investigated the narrowness of her bones beneath the thick padding of her clothes.

‘You don’t look after yourself properly,’ he stunned her by saying. ‘You’re too thin.’

‘I’m not thin, I’m slender,’ she snapped at him. ‘Not all men like women with curves like—like Marilyn Monroe.’

As she spoke, she had a vivid mental picture of the woman she had seen waiting for him in reception the last time she had visited the offices. She had been a stunningly curvaceous brunette, her figure encased in a clinging jersey outfit.

Her words had been purely defensive, and so she was surprised to see the anger flash suddenly and dangerously into Guy’s eyes. His grip on her shoulder tightened, and irrationally she began to feel acutely vulnerable and frail. He wasn’t a heavy man, but he was tall and broad and, from the pressure those fingers were exerting, a very fit man.

‘What are you trying to say to me, Campion?’ he asked bitingly. ‘That I don’t have the intelligence to respect a woman for what she is? Do you really think I’m the kind of man who looks for Barbie doll measurements in a woman and nothing else? Or don’t you credit me with the sensitivity to see your insult for what it was? For your information, I like women—all kinds of women, but what I find most attractive and exciting about them is their personalities.’

He was lying to her. She had seen the women he dated.

He was looking away from her now and into the pan.

‘Mind you,’ he added with a grin, ‘it does help if they can cook… What is this?’

He prodded her cast-iron eggs with the fork, and Campion glared up at him.

‘Mmm…not exactly easy-over, are they?’

To her horror, instead of snapping back at him, Campion felt tears begin to sting her eyes.

It was years since she had cried, aeons ago… She never gave way to feminine emotion, and yet here she was, ready to burst into tears simply because a man criticised her cooking.

Even as she derided herself for her weakness, she acknowledged that it wasn’t really the eggs; they were simply the thing on which her emotions had focused.

What she wanted to cry for was the destruction of her womanliness, for the fates that had been so cruel in forming her as a woman who ached and yearned to form a loving bond with a man she could want and respect, and yet whose outward physical appearance made it impossible.

Through a blur of tears, she saw Guy move away from her. Her body felt cold, as though it had enjoyed the warmth of the proximity of his. She was humiliating herself, dissolving into tears in front of him like this. He would be embarrassed and uncomfortable. Men always were when women cried.

She remembered how her mother had cautioned her not to give in to her tears after Craig had told her what he really felt for her. It would upset her father, her mother had told her. Men did not like tears. Tears were a weapon that women used to get their own way, and which men quite rightly resented.

Campion had turned

her head away the moment she felt the betraying prickle at the back of her eyes, but she couldn’t see anything. The kitchen was a watery blur. All her concentrating went into trying to control her emotions.

‘Hey, it’s all right. Come and sit down.’

She froze as she felt Guy’s hands on her shoulders, gently propelling her to the table and pushing her down into a chair.

‘Come on, have a good howl, and then you’ll feel better.’

A soft white handkerchief was pressed expertly against her face, and it took her several seconds to overcome her shock and take hold of it for herself.

‘I never cry.’