‘Jenneth, please…’ Louise wheedled, and as the spectre of Luke rose mockingly to taunt her with her own cowardice she took a deep breath and said huskily,
‘Yes, of course I will…’
They talked for another few minutes, or rather Louise talked and Jenneth listened, while she waited for her agitated heartbeat to slow down to normal and the tension to leave her body. As she listened, she wondered what she would have said had Luke been attending the wedding…and then, a little cynically, asked herself silently if Louise would have invited her had that been the case.
Of course she would, she told herself after they had said their goodbyes and she had replaced the receiver.
Although she had never been able to hide from her friend how much she dreaded the thought of being brought face to face with Luke, thankfully Louise had spent the six-month span of Jenneth’s engagement to him studying abroad, and, being Louise, had sought no other explanation for the ending of that engagement other than the one Jenneth gave her, which was simply that they had both realised it was a mistake.
In the early days, when self-hatred had burned her like acid, she had privately blamed herself for her parents’ death, knowing that their move to York had in part been prompted by their concern for her, but the years had eased that particular torment a little. There were other torments, though, that would never go away. It was useless telling herself that she was far too sensitive. The anguish of hearing from Luke’s own lips that, while professing to love her, he had been seeing someone else and that that someone else was now carrying his child, was something she could never eradicate.
It was burned into her as though by torture; and, like any victim of such cruelty, she carried the brand of Luke’s rejection of her in her soul—deep within her. Behind the calm, pleasant mask she wore for the world there lived a very different person indeed. Some people thought of her as aloof, claiming that her manner matched the coolness of her Nordic fall of wheat-blonde hair and the unfathomable greyness of her dark-lashed eyes.
In response she possessed an aura of calm which had been hard won and which she had learned to project to protect herself. When she moved it was with contained, controlled movements that made those who were baffled and infuriated by the distance at which she held them condemn her as withdrawn and emotionless, not realising that the reverse was the truth, and that it was to protect herself from her own acute vulnerability that she had had to learn the savagely painful lesson of concealing her real feelings.
Now what had at first been a disguise she had assumed for the sake of her pride had become an intrinsic part of her, to such an extent that it was only Louise and the twins who were still able to penetrate the façade of remoteness.
Over the years she had learned to temper her own feelings of rejection and grief with the received wisdom of experience and age, telling herself that the relationship between her and Luke would never have worked; that at twenty-one she had been far too immature, and that the engagement would have petered out anyway, given time.
What still did have the power to confuse her was why Luke had got engaged to her in the first place. Eight years her and Louise’s senior, he had seemed to her a god-like creature set on the heights, way, way above her touch. All through her teens she was in turn giddy, shy, self-conscious and finally spellbound in his presence, whenever school holidays threw the three of them together and Luke, who was away first at boarding-school, then at university, and finally lecturing abroad, came home.
His family, unlike hers, had been part of the village for several generations. His father was the local GP, and his mother, despite the fact that the crippling multiple sclerosis from which she suffered had weakened her health appallingly, took as active a role as she could in village affairs. Tender-hearted, and popular with everyone who knew her, she had gently approved of Luke’s engagement to Jenneth.
Luke had loved his mother very deeply, treating her with the same protective concern with which the twins were now trying to suffocate Jenneth, although in Luke’s mother’s case she had far more need of that protectiveness than Jenneth.
In looks, however, Luke took after his father; he had his tall, very male leanness, and his thick, dark hair.
Louise had once shocked her by telling her that her mother’s brother, Luke’s father, had had something of a reputation with their sex, before he’d met and married Luke’s mother. She had been a local heiress, and Luke’s father had fallen in love with her and married her despite the opposition of her family. Jenneth had always thought it a very romantic story.
Now Luke’s mother was dead. She had died several months after Luke had married…
Automatically Jenneth ducked her head, letting her hair swing forward to conceal her expression, even though there was no one there to see her. Even now, the thought of that agonising time when Luke had told her so clinically and coldly, as though every word he said to her had to be weighed and accounted for, that he was marrying someone else—a someone else who had already conceived his child—still had an overpowering and disturbing effect on her.
How often had she told herself that thousands of young women were rejected by men they thought loved them, and that they, unlike her, went on to form other, lasting, less destructive relationships without any difficulty at all? How often had she chided herself both verbally and mentally for behaving like a wilting Victorian heroine, falling into what used to euphemistically be called a ‘decline’ because her world had been turned upside-down by the discovery that the love she had thought its surest foundation had never really existed?
Oh, outwardly she had done all the right things: listened to Luke’s cruel revelations with a white face and burning eyes, breaking down only once, when he had told her about the coming baby. She had been stunned and reached for him disbelievingly, sick with shock and pain, but he had not responded. And in the months that followed she had put on as brave a face as she could, finishing her time at university, refusing to give in to the cowardly temptation not to go home for the holidays, prattling with mock sophistication to her friends about the life she was leading…the men she was dating…
Her parents had seen through her, though…and, aware of her anguish and, she suspected, of the deep wound Luke had dealt to the very essence of her womanhood, had announced that her father was taking semi-retirement and that they were all moving back to York, which had been her father’s childhood home.
It had been a measure of the depth of the love she had once felt for Luke that she had almost refused to go with them…hoping against hope for the miracle that would give Luke back to her, unable to believe even now that it was really over. And then she had seen him in the village, with his wife and their child…He had been holding the baby, while his wife was talking earnestly to another couple. She had stopped dead in the street, measuring the distance between them and ignominiously preparing for flight. The baby had had dark hair like Luke’s…A little girl, so Louise had told her apologetically, with embarrassment and compassion…And the girl who was his wife…younger than Jenneth, dark-haired, welldressed and almost shy, she had looked at Jenneth, obviously not realising who she was, and had then turned to Luke, saying quite clearly as she took the baby from him, ‘Come along, darling—I think it’s time we left.’
Sick at heart, Jenneth hadn’t gone home, but had gone instead down the path along the river, a favourite haunt from her early teens where she used to idle her way home from school after she’d left Louise, daydreaming about life and Luke with all the innocence of her extreme youth.
Now, with a cynicism that sat oddly on her slender shoulders, she wondered what would have happened if she too had conceived Luke’s child. And it had been a distinct possibility: right up to the very weekend before he had announced that he was ending their engagement and why, Luke had been trying to persuade her to allow them to become lovers.
She closed her eyes abruptly,