‘You had your parents to help you.’
‘That’s not the same! Plus I’d left for my gap year thinking that I was at the start of living my own life. Do you know what it felt like to go back home? Yes, they helped me, and I couldn’t have managed at all without them, but it still felt like a retrograde step. I never, ever considered having an abortion, and I was thrilled to bits when Oliver was born, but I was having to cope with seeing all my dreams fly through the window. No university, no degree, no teaching qualification. You must have been laughing your head off when you saw me cleaning floors in that bank.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘No? Then what was going through your head when you looked down at me? With a damp cloth in one hand and a cleaning bottle in the other, dressed in my overalls?’
‘Okay. I was stunned. But then I started remembering how damned sexy you were, and thinking how damned sexy you still were—never mind the headscarf and the overalls …’
His words hovered in the air between them, a spark of conflagration just waiting to find tinder. To her horror, Sarah realised that she wanted him to repeat what he had just said so she could savour his words and roll them round and round in her head.
How could she have forgotten the way he had treated her? He might justify walking out on her as doing her a favour, but that was just another way of saying that he hadn’t cared for her the way she had cared for him, and he hadn’t been about to let a meaningless holiday romance spoil his big plans.
‘I’ve come to realise that sex is very overrated,’ Sarah said scornfully, and then flushed as a slow smile curved his beautiful mouth.
‘Really?’
‘I don’t want to talk about this.’ But she heard the telltale tremor in her voice and wanted to scream in frustration. ‘It certainly has nothing to do with what’s … what’s happening now. If you follow me, I’ll show you to Oliver’s room.’
Raoul let the conversation drop. He was as astounded as she had been by his own genuine admission to her, and he was busily trying to work out how a woman he hadn’t seen in years—a woman who, in the great scheme of things, had not really been in his life for very long—could still exercise such a powerful physical hold over him. It was as though the years between them had collapsed and disappeared.
But of course they hadn’t, he reminded himself forcefully. Proof of that was currently asleep in a bedroom, just metres away from where they had been standing.
Upstairs, if anything, seemed more cramped than downstairs, with two small bedrooms huddled around a tiny bathroom which he glimpsed on his way to the box room on the landing.
She pushed open the door to the only room he had seen so far that bore the hallmark of recent decoration. A night-light revealed wallpaper with some sort of kiddy theme and basic furniture. A small bed, thin patterned curtains, a circular rug tucked half under the bed, a white chest of drawers, snap-together furniture, cheap but functional.
Raoul unfroze himself from where he was standing like a sentinel by the doorway and took a couple of steps towards the bed.
Oliver had kicked off the duvet and was curled around a stuffed toy.
Raoul could make out black curly hair, soft chubby arms. Even in the dim light he could see that his colouring was a shade darker than his mother’s—a pale olive tone that was all his.
In the grip of a powerful curiosity, he took a step closer to the bed and peered at the small sleeping figure. When it shifted, Raoul instantly took a step back.
‘We should go—just in case we wake him,’ Sarah whispered, tiptoeing out of the bedroom.
Raoul followed her. The palms of his hands felt clammy.
She had been right. He had a son. There had been no mistaking those small, familiar signs of a likeness that was purely inherited. He wondered how he could ever have sat in his office and concluded that he would deal with the problem with the cold detachment of a mathematician completing a tricky equation. He had a child. A living, breathing son.
The cramped condition of the house in which he was living now seemed grossly offensive. He would have to do something about that. He would have to do something about pretty much everything. Life as he knew it was about to change. One minute he had been riding the crest of a wave, stupidly imagining that he had the world in the palm of his hand, and the next minute the wave had crashed and the world he had thought netted was spinning out of control.
It was a ground-breaking notion for someone whose only driving goal throughout his life had been to remedy the lack of control he had had as a child by conquering the world. A tiny human being, barely three feet tall, had put paid to that.
‘You’re very quiet,’ Sarah said nervously, as soon as they were out of earshot.
‘I need a drink—and something stronger than a cup of coffee.’
The remnants of a bottle of wine were produced and poured into a glass. Sarah looked at him, trying to gauge his mood and trying to forget that moment of mad longing that had torn through her only a short while before on the staircase.
‘You were right,’ he said heavily, having drunk most of the glass in one go. ‘I see the resemblance.’
‘I knew you would. It’ll be even more noticeable when you see him in the light. He’s got your dark eyes as well. In fact, there’s not much of me at all in him! That was the first thing Mum said when he was born … Would you like to see some of the drawings he’s made? He goes to a playgroup two mornings a week … I get help with that …’
‘Help? What kind of help?’ Raoul dragged his attention away from the swirling wine in his glass and looked at her.
‘From the government, of course,’ Sarah said, surprised. How on earth could she afford childcare otherwise, when she worked as a cleaner? On the mornings when Oliver was at nursery, she helped out at the school at which she was due to start work, but that was unpaid.
Raoul controlled his temper with difficulty. ‘From the government?’ he repeated with deadly cool, and Sarah nodded uneasily. ‘Do you know what my aim in life was? My only aim in life? To escape the clutches of government aid and own my future. Now you sit here and tell me that you’re reliant on government aid to get you through life.’
‘You make it sound like a crime, Raoul.’
‘For me, it’s obscene!’
The force of his personality hit her like a freight train travelling at full speed, but she squared her shoulders and glared at him defiantly. If she allowed him to take control just this once then she would be dancing to his tune as and when he wanted her to. Hadn’t she done enough of that years ago? And look where it had got her!
‘And I can understand that,’ Sarah told him evenly. ‘I really can. But your past has nothing to do with my present circumstances. I couldn’t afford to put Oliver into a private nursery,’ she informed him bluntly. ‘You’d be shocked at how little I earn. Mum and Dad supplement me, but every day’s a struggle. It’s all very well for you to sit there and preach to me about pride and ambition, but pride and ambition aren’t very high up in the pecking order when you barely have enough money to put food on the table. So if I can get help with the nursery, then I’ll take it.’ She wished that she had had some wine as well, because she was in dire need of fortification. ‘You were never such a crashing snob before, Raoul,’ she continued bitterly. ‘I can see that you’ve changed in more ways than one.’
‘Snob? I think you’ll find that that’s the last thing I am!’ He was outraged that she could hurl that accusation at him in view of his past.
‘You’ve moved away from your struggling days of when we first met! I’ll bet you can’t even remember what it was like, darning those shorts of yours when they got ripped because you couldn’t afford to