Force of Feeling

The newly-weds had been waiting for them when they returned.

Campion struggled to sit up, her throat suddenly tight with tension, her breathing shallow.

She would never forget the scene that followed, nor Craig’s fury when he realised that her father was not prepared to either settle a large sum of money on her, or to support them.

To see him change in front of her eyes, from someone she thought loved her to someone who had married her purely and simply for financial gain, had been too much of a shock for her to take in. She had tried to plead with him, to remind him that even without money they still had one another, and he had turned on her then, his face livid with rage.

‘For Christ’s sake!’ he had said. ‘Do you think I would have married you if it hadn’t been for who you are?’

‘You—you said you loved me,’ she had stammered, unable to understand his abrupt change of character.

‘And you fell for it, didn’t you, you stupid little bitch!’ he had snarled at her. ‘Like taking candy from a baby—only it seems that your daddy isn’t going to play along. Well, I’d better get something out of this, otherwise the whole village is going to hear about how easily I got little Miss Goody-two-shoes here into bed, Mr Roberts,’ he had challenged her father.

She had cried out then, but he had turned on her, his expression vicious, quite definitely not good-looking anymore.

‘I should have made sure that you were pregnant, shouldn’t I?’

And he had gone on to make such derogatory remarks about her sexuality that she hadn’t been able to take in all the insults he was hurling at her—not then.

* * *

The marriage had been annulled—her father had seen to that, but somehow Campion had felt as though she were encased in ice. She had gone on to Oxford, but she had gone there a changed person. Lucy noticed it and asked her what was wrong, and she had broken down and confided in her friend. That had been the last time she cried. The shock of what had happened wore off, but the humiliation remained. Whenever a man approached her, she froze him off, and gradually she got the reputation of being withdrawn and sexually frigid. She hadn’t cared. She was never going to let a man get emotionally or physically close to her ever again. Craig had held up for her such an image of herself that it had destroyed totally her awakening sexuality. Whenever she remembered how innocently and joyously she had abandoned herself to him, her skin crawled with self-loathing; gradually, she withdrew further and further into herself.

Then her parents were killed in an outbreak of hostilities in Beirut when they were there on business. She had sold the house and bought herself her small flat. The rest of the money she had donated to various charities.

No man would ever again be tempted to make love to her because he thought she could be his ticket to rich living.

Over the years, Lucy had tried to coax her to change, to dress more attractively, to meet other men, but she had always refused. What was the point? She didn’t want a man in her life in any capacity, a

nd what man would want her?

As Craig had already told her, her only attraction lay in her father’s wealth; he had wanted her for that alone. Making love to her had been a necessity, a means to an end, and he had let her know in no uncertain terms just how lacking in pleasure he had found their coming together.

She actually flinched now as she remembered his insults. Her father had tried to stop him, she remembered tiredly. And, afterwards, her parents had both tried to offer her some comfort. They had never criticised or condemned her; she had done that for herself. They had tried to reach her, but the gap between them was too deep. They had never been a close family, and now she was too hurt and bitter to accept their pity, and so she had buried her pain away deep down inside herself where no one could see it.

Why couldn’t she use those memories of how Craig had made her feel to flesh out the character of Lynsey?

She knew why. It was because they had been so false, so dangerously deceptive, and as for the physical pleasure of Craig’s lovemaking… There had been none in his possession, and she cringed from the memory of it, knowing that here again the lack had been hers.

She flinched again as she recalled Guy French’s last words to her this morning.

‘Perhaps you’d have been better off casting your heroine as a nun, Campion,’ he had drawled mockingly. ‘Because it seems that that’s the way you want her to live.’

She had left the office while she still had some measure of control. She had been tempted to tear up her manuscript in front of his eyes; in fact, when she thought about it now, she was surprised by the violence of her reaction. She shivered slightly and got up. She wasn’t going to sleep, so there was no point in lying here thinking about things that could not be changed.

It was almost six o’clock, and she still had to go to the supermarket. It was a long drive to Pembroke… She almost decided to delay her departure until the morning but, if she did, Guy French would probably be on the telephone, telling her he had already found her a secretary. He was that kind of man. No, she needed to leave now, while there was still time.

While there was still time… She frowned a little at her own mental choice of words. It was almost as though she was frightened of the man; almost as though, in some way, she found him threatening. She shrugged the thought aside. Guy French was a bully; she had never liked him and she never would.

The media considered him to be the glamour boy of publishing, although at thirty-five he hardly qualified for the term ‘boy’, she told herself scathingly. He represented everything male that she detested: good looks, charm, and that appallingly apparent raw sexuality that other women seemed to find so attractive, and which she found physically repellant.

She had seen his eyes narrow slightly this morning as he came to greet her, and she had instinctively stepped back from him. He hadn’t touched her, letting his hand fall to his side, but she had still flushed darkly, all too conscious of his amusement and contempt.

No doubt to a man like him she was just a joke: a physically unattractive woman with whom he was forced to deal because it was part of his job. She had seen too many men look at her and then look away to be under any illusions. She wasn’t like Lucy—pretty, confident. Craig had destroyed for her for ever any belief she might once have had that she had any claim to feminine beauty. Ugly, sexless—that was how he had described her in the cruel, taunting voice of his, and that was how she saw herself, and how she believed others saw her as well.

But there were other things in life that brought pleasure, apart from love. She had found that pleasure in her work. Had found… Until Guy French had started tearing her novel apart, and with it her self-confidence.

That was what really hurt, she admitted—knowing that he was right when he described her characters as unanimated and without depth. But she had been commissioned to write a historical novel with a factual background, not a love story dressed up in period costume.